A PHYSICIST LAMENTS CRACKPOT AMATEURS
( and an epistemologist explains. š )
A Slightly Different Take:
I work in epistemology, particularly human error, bias, and deceit, applied to economics and law. I recieve crackpot emails every day. And yes they are, as expected, absurd, chilish, and overconfident. But I learn from them, if only because it teaches me how the common folk see a problem, so that I can improve my means of communication of ideas. (And if you think physics is controversial, try juridical decidability given variation in human moral bias.)
That said I understand where this ‘crackpot’ incentive is coming from and there is something to be learnd from the incentive if not from the crackpot ideas:
(a) In economics we learn the limits of mathematics, and we falsify mathematical claims by operational construction precisely because explanation by intuitionism is possible. Math is descriptive not causal and at the extreme is and must be statistcal (correlative) not causa. Not all phenomena are mathematically reducible. Only operationally (computationally). So by using mathematical theory instead of operational theory bottom up whose observatios are later tested by math, we exclude ideas just as in the opposite top down direction statistics is constrained or even useless without subsequent causal explanation. Best living example is the prohibiton on the concept of the ether vs the continuous flux of the quantum background and treating it as analogous to a liquid.
(b) Cantor Bohr Einstein and Feynman all rely on pictures and analogies not causal operations – this is platonism or idealism, and not causal. And is the primary candidate for the reason for the stagnation in physics
(c) There is no evidence that we can’t produce a classical (intuitionistic) model of the universe only that we are not producing a series of theories that are causal (operational) from which additional ideation is possible.
So the public is correct in that physics has stagnated since the seventies, that the Michio, Sean, Brian, et al pop physicists are essentially speaking woo woo, and that the ‘mathiness’ of string theory has been a heat sink on research, and that physics is just as afraid of prior mistakes and envious of the progress of past mathiness made possible by prior generations of operational explanations as anthropologists are timid and overcompensating because of the genetic discovery of pre homo sapien hybridization.
In other words: one of the other lessons we learn in economics is that the man on the street is often a better predictor than the professional economist even if the professional economist is a better explainer of past phenomena.
The same is true here: the public is suggesting in their most ignorant and often dysfunctional way, that it sure appears that the physics community is engaged in a distracting side-trip trying to imitate Einstein-Bohr’s pragmatic verbal and pictoral half-truths without producing the generation of operational causality that makes such oversimplified pictoral and verbal (non causal) representations possible.
What those of us who study human error in the sciences are most worried about, is that science often progresses with tombstones and that we won’t correct the Einstein-Bohr error because physicists appear to be afraid of proposing operational models that would provide candidate research where present candidate research appears to be exhausted at the scales of energy and means of observation at our disposal.
Wisdom of crowds isn’t always *entirely* wrong. š
Cheers
Curt Doolittle
The Natural Law Institute
link to original video
https://t.co/npAEQuvir4