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Originally Posted by Grey
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Originally Posted by Ken G
But what's a photon? What's a "path"? These are all human constructions, and we're just smart apes.
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Yes and no. Certainly these are concepts that we've created, but the question is, do they have some kind of corresponding elements in whatever reality is? |
In one sense, they most certainly do ... that's one way of interpreting the agreement between theory and experiment/observation.
But then, what's "space"? "time"? "energy"?
And couldn't one have made a strong case, back then, that "phlogiston" (a concept) also had some kind of correspondence with whatever reality is?
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When I get thoughts like these, I put on my 'history hat'.
That there were really, really smart people in ancient Greece, Rome, China, India, ... is where I start from. Sadly, much of what these really smart people worked out is lost to us - no written records survive.
However, from what does survive, we can get a sense of just how reasonable it seemed to those folk that 'air, water, fire, earth' was pretty close to what real reality is.
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It is sad that we've lost so much of that. And I wouldn't suggest that we're intrinsically smarter than any of those people (actually, on average we're probably not nearly as smart as the ones whose writings have actually survived, since their ideas were the ones later people thought were worth copying down). On the other hand, they hadn't really come up with the idea of actually testing their ideas to see if they worked. The ideas seemed "reasonable", but as we've discovered, being reasonable isn't a good way to tell if that's the way things actually work.
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I think that this 'they didn't really develop a good scientific method' is partly bad press.
For example, I read (in one of Robin Dunbar's books?) that Archimedes gets high marks ... for the things which we now know he could have tested (i.e. where he could test, he did - that's how he got it right). His mistake lay more in providing 'answers' in cases where he should have said 'I don't know'.
Another example: the 'applied science' results of the ancient Chinese are astonishing; the shortcoming (from our 'scientific method' perspective) is more to do with a lack of writing down the methods (and some apparent reluctance to engage in theory building and testing).
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Or, to take a more recent example, phlogiston.
From ancient Greece to today is a mere ~2500 years (and ~500 from phlogiston); did the universe change so dramatically in such a short time? Or did we?
If we could fast forward 500, or 2500, years, how much like phlogiston, or earth/air/water/fire, would 'photons' and 'Feynman diagrams' seem?
An easier way to see this: between the proton and the top quark is what, ~2 OOM (in mass)? Add in the electron, and it's ~5 OOM. When the LHC comes on stream, we will get up to ~10 TeV, which will be another ~2 OOM.
Look at all the richness of the universe, in those ~6 OOM!
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Let's look closely at some of these more recent examples, though. Once we thought atoms were the smallest components of matter, and that they came in a large number of varieties. Later we realized that in fact, they have internal structure. Many of the properties of various types of atoms (that up until then could only be determined experimentally) could actually be deduced from theory. But even though we now know that atoms are composite entities, does that mean taht it no longer makes sense to talk about atoms? Or that many of the things that we had figured out about how atoms behave wer suddenly no longer true? No, that's not the case. So then we discover that the protons and neutrons in the nucleus aren't fundamental either. But even with the existence of quantum chromodynamics, is it meaningless now to talk about protons? Again, no. For that matter, with the development of quark theory, that changed what we (think we) know about protons quite a bit, but atoms, not so much. Moreover, I'd be willing to make a Hawking-like bet that any new theory we develop will still have elements in it that correspond to protons, electrons, and so forth. So, unless you want to deny the existence of objective reality altogether, I'd actualyl say that protons are real things. To be precise, there is an element of reality that corresponds to what we call protons. Of course it's almost certain that we don't understand them fully. But I don't think it's realistic to think that in 500 years our descendents might be laughing, "can you believe it, they believed in protons!" in the same way we might laugh about phlogiston.
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IIRC, we had a discussion like this earlier, here in BAUT (I couldn't find it quickly though).
That there will be elements which remain recognisable, across some centuries (and maybe even a millenium or two) is, I'm sure, nearly certain.
What's not, surely, is
which elements? And, how important will those elements be? (Back in the 21st century, there was the concept of "protons" and "electrons". We can see a trace of those concepts in our modern 33rd century {insert nearest equivalent of physics here}, as follows {insert explication of correspondence here}. Of course, with {insert 33rd century concept here}, it's obvious that these "proton" and "electron" concepts are, while not outright wrong, quite misleading).
Anyway, there was another sense in which I intended my 'history hat' - the nature of science itself.
If you look hard enough, you can see unmistakable sign of (proto-)science in even ancient hunter-gatherers, and a good correspondence to many key elements of modern science in many pre-industrial revolution societies.
What will 'science' look like, 500 or 2500 years from now? Perhaps the 'mutual incompatibility between GR and QM' will be a classic example in 33rd century textbooks, used to show the precursors of a key change in the nature of science (which didn't occur for another 100 years)?