You could at least acknowledge the divergence between some classic views of recent decades, and ideas like decoherence and MW, and even the way you talk about it, that are not orthodox in terms of those previous views.

That there are disagreements among genuine quantum physicists about the interpretation of QM is old news. This might well last another thousand years. But when you spam this blog with endlessly regurgitated comments about the “stupidity” and “hypocrisy” and “repellent emperor’s new clothes” of anyone who believes that decoherence can look like a collapse, you’re just showing your ignorance; every quantum physicist, whatever interpretation they favour, understands and accepts that this is the case. I’m actually entirely agnostic about the MWI, but I’ve studied enough QM to know what decoherence is. (There was a time when I did not understand what it was. At that time, I did not rush around telling everyone who did that they were fools and hypocrites.) Instead of dismissing my example as irrelevant, you might want to contemplate this: whenever those “hits” you are so enamoured with take place, the particle in question is interacting with a great many other particles in the screen or detector, none of which are accessible to detailed quantum experiments by the observer. Having seen what happens in the simplest case — when a particle is correlated with one other particle, to which we temporarily deny ourselves access — and noting that that gives the appearance of a collapse, you shouldn’t be surprised that having no access to billions of particles correlated with the one of interest has the same kind of effect. But to actually reason about this in detail, you need to go and learn about density matrices and observations on sub-systems, not just wave your hands and waffle about the philosophical issues that you imagine somehow trump everything else.

You flatter yourself with the notion that you are engaged in some kind of Socratic dialogue here. The reason almost nobody responds to your thought experiments in GR is because they’re so steeped in misconceptions and misapplied concepts that it’s obviously going to be a massive, thankless job trying to disentangle your delusions about the subject. Yes, it’s obvious that you’ve glanced at some academic papers, textbooks and Wikipedia articles on GR, but the result of you nibbling around the edges is that you’ve acquired some buzz-words and a formula or two, but none of the fundamentals of the subject: you just keeping trying to jam Newtonian, or at best special-relativistic, pegs into GR-shaped holes. If you actually had an interest in gravitomagnetism, why is it that you hadn’t even read the warning at the start of the Wikipedia article you cited on the subject that stated that this model only applied to slow-moving particles? That kind of oversight and misapplication isn’t the exception with your comments on this blog, it’s the pattern shared by almost all of them.

I know it’s a daunting prospect to study GR systematically outside an academic setting. Nobody’s blaming you for not knowing the subject. What’s exhausting and offensive about reading your comments is that you either don’t grasp that there are basic things you simply don’t know, or you expect people here to fill in all the gaps for you by responding to an endless stream of really dumb questions — many of which are posed as “Hey, looks like you experts don’t really understand anything, because I can come up with this scenario that shows that your theory means black equals white!” Like a customer complaining that the screwdriver you bought is really bad for opening cans of soup, there’s only so much of that kind of thing that anyone’s patience is going to bear. As a newby to this blog, I’ve done my stint of pointing out to you what screwdrivers are good for, and how much a can-opener will set you back. I’ll leave it to other newbies, and the occasional saint or masochist, to keep trying to hammer that message home.

I get the clear impression that what I’ve said about collapse for example really was the orthodox way to talk about it until a recent sort of revisionism (based on not *wanting* to accept the apparent intractability of the collapse problem>) You could at least acknowledge the divergence between some classic views of recent decades, and ideas like decoherence and MW, and even the way you talk about it, that are not orthodox in terms of those previous views. Remember finally that I am making Socratic digs more than final arguments. Sometimes, as per the planar field question, you make a clear specific response, and other times, as per collapse issues, I don’t think you do. As for issues like multiple universes and the anthropic principle, you should realize that everyone, amateur gadfly or real physicist, are blind men poking at an elephant.

I should have singled out Feynman as the exception, of course. I re-read QED recently, and it’s just stunning the way he manages to make it all accessible, but he keeps a conscientious list of all the simplifications, keeps reminding the audience when he’s cutting corners, and comes back to dot most of the i’s later.

it also cripples the ability to connect statements via reasoning

Absolutely. All the user-friendly maths-free metaphors are provided with the best of intentions, but unless some substantial aspect of the reality is isomorphic to some non-trivial degrees of freedom of the metaphor, you don’t have a tool for deducing anything — but you might believe you do. The science blogosphere is clogged with the consequent frustration and delusions.

Nice job on comment #58.

Even a lot of pop science written by good physicists is full of misleading statements that will confuse lay people who try to pursue the subject further. It’s a pity — but get over it, and recognise that if you want to learn real science, you’re going to have to throw away half of what you’ve convinced yourself you know.

Have you seen Feynman’s comments on this problem in The Character of Physical Law? He argues the point quite well, I think, emphasizing the problems which happen because popularizations leave out the mathematics. This makes the statements of individual ideas vague, of course, but it also cripples the ability to connect statements via reasoning. (The lectures on which that book was based used to be on Google Video, until a lawyer noticed — more’s the pity, really.)

As I have told many of you before, you don’t always get the semantics issues. (I still think you don’t appreciate how we should *talk* about the fall of bodies relative to “floors” in falling reference standards, and the implications thereof.) Studying lots of science won’t ensure that you do.

And studying absolutely no science ensures that you mistake your notions of “correct semantics” for some kind of insight into actual phenomena. Once you’ve learned the mathematics that unambiguously describes the predictions of GR and QM, then you can start sensibly debating how those predictions should best be discussed in plain English. At present, you just take a drizzle of pop-science factoids, combine it with what you imagine is philosophical and linguistic rigour, and generate a half-baked “critique” of ideas you don’t actually understand at all.

I was hoping you at least had the high-school level trigonometry and calculus to analyse the geodesics on a sphere and come to grips first-hand with the consequences of non-Cartesian coordinates that are causing you so much angst in GR, but apparently hell will freeze over before you actually test your intuitions against even the simplest real examples.

The very existence of “a pattern” [of little “hits”] instead of eternal continuous waves is just what I and basically everyone else mean by “collapse”

“Everyone else”? That there are more people who have learnt to emit cocktail-party-level bluff about QM from crappy popularisations than people who’ve actually studied the theory is beside the point.

I’ve only been reading this blog a short time, but in that time virtually all your hundreds of remarks about scientific matters have derived from the fact that you’ve read some half-baked version of a theory, found it wanting (a good thing), but then decided that you’re wedded immutably to the misconceptions you’ve already acquired, and that all the discrepancies are really down to lack of what you so charmingly call “linguistic hygiene” by professional scientists.

Yes, pop science books are full of crap. Even a lot of pop science written by good physicists is full of misleading statements that will confuse lay people who try to pursue the subject further. It’s a pity — but get over it, and recognise that if you want to learn real science, you’re going to have to throw away half of what you’ve convinced yourself you know.

Just look at this sentence of yours:

In other words, you get exactly the pattern you’d expect from photons only passing through a single slit at a time.

The very existence of “a pattern” [of little "hits"] instead of eternal continuous waves is just what I and basically everyone else mean by “collapse” of the wave of each photon - ending up in a certain place, regardless of higher-level interpretations. BTW what do you think of the Afshar experiment? It raises issues similar to what you bring up.

As I have told many of you before, you don’t always get the semantics issues. (I still think you don’t appreciate how we should *talk* about the fall of bodies relative to “floors” in falling reference standards, and the implications thereof.) Studying lots of science won’t ensure that you do.

And please, don’t indulge in the hypocritical practice of woo-pooing God etc, but evading scientific problems by the pretense that specific real empirical observations like collapse events are “illusions” etc.

Since you seem to have no idea why people who understand quantum theory talk about illusory collapse events, I’ll give you a simple example.

Consider a standard double-slit experiment: a single coherent monochromatic light source illuminates two slits in a barrier, and the pattern of photon counts on a screen behind the slits shows constructive and destructive interference. This sinusoidal pattern is maintained even when the luminosity of the source is so low that only one photon will be present in the apparatus at a time, suggesting that each photon passes through both slits simultaneously.

Now replace the standard photon source with one that emits pairs of photons with total linear momentum zero, in a quantum state:

sum over theta of |photon 1 at angle theta, photon 2 at angle pi+theta>

for some set of values of theta. The precise values don’t matter, and it could be an integral over theta if you prefer; what matters is that the two photons have correlated momenta, but neither momentum is fixed at a single value.

Add a second pair of slits and a second detector screen on the opposite side of the source to the original apparatus, so that the second photon gets to pass through a double-slit set-up of its own.

What happens? Instead of the sinusoidal interference pattern of the original experiment, you just get peaks on the screens directly in front of all four slits, with the intensity dying off — without oscillating — as you move away from those peaks. In other words, you get exactly the pattern you’d expect from photons only passing through a single slit at a time.

This certainly looks like a collapse: the photons now appear to be passing through single slits, rather than both at once. The correlation of their momenta seems to be “measuring” which slit they went through, and forcing a single choice.

This “collapse” is, however, demonstrably an illusion. If you call the location where a photon is seen on one screen x_1, and the location where the other photon is seen on the other screen x_2, then a plot of counts versus (x_1 * x_2) will show a sinusoidal interference pattern. The photons are still going through both slits simultaneously, just as in the classic single-photon experiment (and if you block one of the slits, the interference pattern will go away). The only difference is, you need to collect more information — information from the entire system — to reveal the interference effects. A lack of complete information (i.e. looking at the counts for just one screen) is indistinguishable from a “collapse”.

As for the rest, Neil, the problem isn’t so much people who are agnostic. It’s people who strongly believe in the existence of a particular deity. Whether you like it or not, this is what comprises the vast majority of self-proclaimed religious people at least in the Americas and Europe.

I based my reply on what you said: “The belief that some truths need not, should not, or cannot be investigated is to be found nowhere in science. Everything is open to investigation.” Well, if you meant science at least believes anything is “open” to investigation, even if not discoverable due to intrinsic reasons, OK I dig that. But you go astray with an implied comparison to “religion,” which I keep saying is not the real point. A good *philosopher* doesn’t claim to “know” whether God exists *or not* either, only to have looked at the problem and come up with good arguments either way. As I have reminded you and others (over and over again to little effect), philosophy is neither religion nor science. Everyone who argues pro or con about God questions or anything else (as opposed to claims based on authority, human or otherwise) is “doing philosophy” while so arguing, neither science nor religion, whether they admit it or not.

PS: I find the glibness of your list above of “irrational beliefs” to be very disappointing. Really, have you *investigated* for example whether acupuncture really works (as per the appropriate empirical studies, not the intuitive rationalism “sniff-test” that I suspect you are applying to all these)?

Actually, you are specifically wrong per the “cannot” part. Physics has for example literally given up on being able to know just when a muon will decay, or where an emitted photon will hit on a screen (and rightly calling it “random” only characterizes that situation, it does not answer the question or negate its implications.)

The difference is that the scientist doesn’t claim to be able to know these things. The problem I was attempting to highlight is the problem that people claim to know certain things that either need not, should not, or cannot be investigated. In the example you gave, our knowledge of quantum mechanics tells us that we should never claim to know where the particle will hit the screen, for example. But we can claim knowledge of the probability distribution.

Actually, you are specifically wrong per the “cannot” part. Physics has for example literally given up on being able to know just when a muon will decay, or where an emitted photon will hit on a screen (and rightly calling it “random” only characterizes that situation, it does not answer the question or negate its implications.) If you meant, it’s OK to try, sure, I concur, so go ahead and try to find anything you want then including God, or other universes, or the actual events of the past (not just their present results), or even all knowledge of same such as the unrecorded things said by people even yesterday, etc.) Remember too that “philosophy” (which is what ultimately matters, not religion or science - science is just a subset of applied philosophy) can argue about anything whether “evidence” (not as clearly defined a concept as you think) can be found or not.

Note that it is up to Reality as to whether some truths *can* be investigated effectively by the methods we want to use, not our desire for them all to be accessible thereby. To claim otherwise is, ironically, a logical fallacy of proof by convenience or proof by desire (and this is put out by “anti-religious” thinkers! What a hoot.) Again, we even have examples of such, or nearly such, already: the wave function, other universes, and even banalities like what people said at a picnic ten years ago - all their words lost *in principle* to uncertainties in the universe, in their brains, etc. And please, don’t indulge in the hypocritical practice of woo-pooing God etc, but evading scientific problems by the pretense that specific real empirical observations like collapse events are “illusions” etc. If that isn’t a repulsive Emperor-has-no-clothes moment, I don’t know what is.

Over and over again, you and others keep comparing “religion” to “science/rationality” and refer to how religion takes assumptions “from on high” but science actually finds out, etc. This is the wrong way to frame the most important issues - the question of God is best handled by philosophical investigation, not either science nor religion. Philosophy takes everything “we know” and applies *arguments* to it, not either experiments or teachings from an authority. I get tired of having to explain this, and tired of it not being framed that way in popularizations etc.

BTW you are indeed wrong about PZ Meyers. He is not just out to get creationists, who are wrong because of what they think happened in the world and not because they think “someone” is behind it all per se. Meyers defends Dawkins’ attacks on religion against those who say, Dawkins don’t take into account more sophisticated versions of theology with his idiotic “Courtier’s complaint” argument - the pretense that those who want a higher study are like those complaining someone should have read essays about the Emperor ’s (imaginary) hat or boots etc. But this is one of those arguments that only works if you assume that what you are defending (that the Emperor has *no* clothes) is right to begin with. It is as idiotic as if a classical physicist ridiculed the notion of matter waves or relative length standards in the same way instead of actually entertaining arguments or evidence.

The whole point is, the more advanced philosophical methods are the very thing that sheds light on whether the Emperor is really naked, and therefore cannot be dismissed in that way. In advanced theology God is not an entity “in” the world but of some other nature like spirit ectoplasm, but the fundamental ground of existence and not a content in any reasonable sense. Of course, all this argument pro and con and even about its very intelligibility, is unprovable either way. You can really believe what you want with a good conscience, that does not *contradict* what we know - which is not to be confused with having to have proof, in order to rightly believe.

I have noticed the irony, that so many of the scientism hacks use the shabbiest arguments per se despite their pretensions to the highest rationality, and are seen to be disingenuous or perhaps nearly philosophically illiterate to those who know how the honest practice works. For example, consider the execrable “celestial teapot” argument. It is “based” on the pretense that any given unproven entity X is just as ridiculous as any other that can be picked as a straw-man silly example, or deserves the presumptive default assumption of non-existence, even though the only way to evaluate the likelihood of unproven or even unprovable X (whether likely, such as life elsewhere; unknown and difficult like God, other universes, multiple worlds in QM etc, or unlikely like a perpetual motion machine) is to consider the particular pros and cons of whether X is likely to exist. It is clear, that those who bring up the CT or lists including tooth fairy etc., are trying to work off the psychological effect of guilt by association and their point has no relation to the existence of some other thing.

In further irony, I note that so many scientists are quite willing to indulge in unproven and likely unprovable ideas of other universes etc., showing the hypocrisy of many of them in indulging such a double standard (yes, it is, since even if such ideas are extensions of what we already know, they still violate classic standards of empirical verifiability etc.)

Terri,

Isn’t that dependent upon what your perception of a “problem with religion” is?

Well, in this context, it is when politicians let their beliefs make them do something inimacable to the well being of the people they are meant to serve.

Those beliefs could be religious or some philosophy pushed to the extreme.

I just read an article about Tony Blair feeling that he had to sort of “hide” his religious beliefs so that others wouldn’t think he was wacky.

Now Tony Blair is wacky, however I am not sure that this is down to the religion he follows. Never could understand why my fellow subjects re-elected the man.

Should people have to completely obscure their beliefs?

I think that politicians should be open about their beliefs. If they aren’t then they are hiding the truth from the electorate. Lying in fact as they are claiming to be what they aren’t

I do agree that an atheist could be elected president of the USA; but they would have to a tad less snide and derogatory to those they disagree with.
Maybe not this time around but until one stands how will we know?

While I certainly understand you position that beliefs of religion and beliefs of science do often conflict, you seemingly are assuming that religion is the only place where “irrational beliefs” exist.

Nope, not making that assumption at all. Religion is but one area of our lives where irrational beliefs persist. Other prominent examples are UFO’s, ghosts, various superstitions, acupuncture, holistic medicine, among many others. There are also many wonderful examples of irrational behaviors, such as appreciation of art and music, love, the joy we feel from helping others.

The fundamental problem, the reason why religion and science come into conflict, is the belief that some truths can, often should, be accepted without investigation. Religion is by no means the only sphere where this belief exists, and, as I stated, there are some people who call themselves religious while not believing this at all (Einstein would be a prominent example, and you should note that Einstein explicitly stated that he believed in no personal deity, but rather used “god” and “religion” to describe the awe and wonder of the universe). But this is a difference in definition of what it means to be religious. I claim it means adherence to a system that is composed of supernatural beliefs, rituals, and to which adherents ascribe a sense of identity, and when I am arguing against religion, it is that definition against which I am arguing, not any definition that others may use.

If your religion includes no supernatural entities, doesn’t involve a set of rituals (e.g. communion, marriage, confirmation, baptism), or it doesn’t have followers who consider the religion to determine at least a part of their sense of identity, then we aren’t talking about the same thing. If this is the case, then clearly my statement that religion is bad and irrational does not necessarily apply. But if you claim to be Christian, and you believe in the existence of the Christian God, then it most definitely applies. If not, then it applies if and only if you believe some truths can, should, or must be accepted without any verifiable supporting evidence.

In modern times I have not seen nor heard of any persecution of scientists for questioning anything.

It is debatable whether or not there is persecution of scientists today. But regardless, persecution isn’t the primary issue today where science is concerned. The primary issue is people explicitly denying scientific discoveries, and making poor, frequently damaging decisions as a result. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this today is the Intelligent Design movement where promotion of ignorance is concerned, and the most prominent examples of poor decision making are probably the opposition to stem cell research and the opposition to combating global warming.

You seem to be the same type of Atheist I am used to dealing with. The “You have to believe everything in the Bible or nothing” type.

Nonsense. I think I was pretty clear as to the specific sorts of beliefs to which it seems nearly all self-identified religious people seem to adhere that are patently irrational, none of which require a belief that the Bible is the literal word of God, or even belief in Christianity at all.

Have you ever thought that maybe the truth is somewhere in between? Or did you simply reject it because it was “irrational”? Shall we do that with super massive black holes? Or Higg’s Boson? Or any number of scientific theories we have no data to prove but can only conjecture? It is all just thought and faith until you have data. Some data is just easier to gather and interpret than others.

This is the typical religious canard. I’m sorry, but testable hypotheses that are being tested have no relation whatsoever to the superstitious nonsense that the religious so frequently promote as absolute truth that is immune to investigation, whether that nonsense is as insane as Young Earth Creationism, as pleasant-sounding as a benevolent god that is so vaguely defined as to prevent any investigation, or as dangerous as belief in a literal hell and heaven.

The belief that some truths need not, should not, or cannot be investigated is to be found nowhere in science. Everything is open to investigation. That scientists are always testing multiple possible explanations for the same observations, and remain tentative as to their conclusions in relation to the strength of the evidence is a fundamentally different approach to that of religion.

While I certainly understand you position that beliefs of religion and beliefs of science do often conflict, you seemingly are assuming that religion is the only place where “irrational beliefs” exist. It also seems that you are stuck in the Dark Ages where “The Church” feared their power being taken away by that blasphemous science. In modern times I have not seen nor heard of any persecution of scientists for questioning anything. Last I checked, scientists have not been rounded up and jailed or executed for investigating whatever they choose. You being stuck in such an archaic time mentally seems rather irrational to me. But even science is not without conflicts in its’ theories. That is not a bad thing, it is simply the way things are. A rather famous German Patent clerk once said “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.”

Our country has been based on religious freedom since it was formed (note: this does not include the various colonies prior to the Revolutionary War) and also has had a staple of religious intolerance. Atheists have been no different in this respect, in my experience, intolerant of people that do not share their beliefs. Atheism itself has become a religion and is as dogmatic as any Christian belief.

You seem to be the same type of Atheist I am used to dealing with. The “You have to believe everything in the Bible or nothing” type. Unable to resolve conflicts in 5000 years of handed down stories and translations, having to believe every word of a text in it’s literal meaning. The exact polar opposite of the Young Earth Creationists. Have you ever thought that maybe the truth is somewhere in between? Or did you simply reject it because it was “irrational”? Shall we do that with super massive black holes? Or Higg’s Boson? Or any number of scientific theories we have no data to prove but can only conjecture? It is all just thought and faith until you have data. Some data is just easier to gather and interpret than others.