Very interesting point! I feel that there is a lot to say about the ontology in quantum physics; (and I’m interested in that myself).
I’ve adopted a few views that helped me cope with the practically non-existent explanation of what is really going on:
Our brains are meat computers. Theories talk about the following: What does a computer measure after they have performed an experiment? In other words, theory isn’t supposed to be emotionally fulfilling. It is merely making predictions for the computer.
Truth is a lot like the stars. There’s one big one, and a lot of small ones. Maybe we just have to accept that quantum physics is all about the many small ones.
I’ve adopted a few views that helped me cope with the practically non-existent explanation of what is really going on:
The thing is, I’ve been obsessed with this topic for so long that I do not really agree. The purpose of me being interested in the topic is to research and find reasonable explanations, and there is only so many years you can do that before you actually start coming to some conclusions.
These days I am a strong supporter of the contextual realist approach, which the philosopher-physicist Francois Igor Pris has some good books on the subject, but sadly he does not write in English if you only speak English, but mostly in Russian. It is based on the writings of the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist, which you can read his book Towards a Contextual Realism which has a good English translation, it is more philosophy than physics, although it does touch a little bit on quantum mechanics towards the end. Pris’s books are more specifically about the application of Benoist’s philosophical framework to quantum theory.
Our brains are meat computers. Theories talk about the following: What does a computer measure after they have performed an experiment? In other words, theory isn’t supposed to be emotionally fulfilling. It is merely making predictions for the computer.
I see the purpose of theories as ultimately to be able to predict how things change. If I drop a ball, it falls to the ground, if I drop it again, it falls again, and so I can assume through inductive reasoning that if I drop a third time, it will probably fall again. I could then create a mathematical model which describes this behavior, and so anyone can plug into the model the ball when lifted up, and then run a computation and see what it spits out is a prediction of the ball having fallen to the ground.
I am by no means a utilitarian when it comes to scientific theories, as if I think they are just “useful tools for making predictions and tell us nothing about reality.” Rather, my view is that these “useful tools for making predictions” are useful precisely because they tell us something about reality: they capture how reality changes over time. If they did not, they could not be used to make predictions about it.
I think a lot of the difficulty in interpreting quantum theory is that a lot of people see ontology somewhat differently. They think that the ontology is not merely how reality that we can experimentally observe changes over time, but that it must also tell us about some alternative realm beyond all possibilities to ever observe. People for some reason have a desire to introduce additional and unnecessary metaphysics to the ontology of the system, to add things to it we cannot actually ever verify is actually there, and it’s my view that if you abandon this temptation then you avoid much of the conceptual difficulties of the theory.
Truth is a lot like the stars. There’s one big one, and a lot of small ones. Maybe we just have to accept that quantum physics is all about the many small ones.
Truth is a lot like the stars. There’s one big one, and a lot of small ones. Maybe we just have to accept that quantum physics is all about the many small ones.
To be honest, I’m not sure what you mean by this.
I will try to explain, but it might be a bit difficult for me to put it into proper formulation.
I will try to explain it with a picture, if I can. You start with a base condition called x(0). It represents some physical quantity in time. As the system evolves, the quantity becomes x(t). Now, you can draw this graphically with “trajectories”, which are lines that draw out the curve that x(t) is making over time.
What happens, due to randomness, is that this trajectory splits up into many smaller ones. This is what I meant with “small truths”. Then they unify again, when the randomness becomes irrelevant again, and that is what i meant with a “big truth”. Maybe I just put it badly at words before, English is not my native language either.
Schrodinger makes a good argument in the book “Nature and the Greek and Science and Humanism” that we should actually just abandon the idea that there even is a trajectory.
Our sciences are derived from inductive reasoning. You drop a ball, it falls to the ground, you repeat it, it falls again, and eventually, you come up with a mathematical law to describe this. You assume from that point if you drop it an infinite number of times, it will always fall to the ground, but this is just an assumption that cannot be proven.
When the members of the Frontiers of Science discussed physics, they often used the abbreviation “SF.” They didn’t mean “science fiction,” but the two words “shooter” and “farmer.” This was a reference to two hypotheses, both involving the fundamental nature of the laws of the universe. In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the result of the marksman’s momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe. The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock.
— Cixin Liu
We also do this to derive our concept of trajectories. We can measure something a x(0) and x(t), then repeat the experiment and measure it at x(0.5t), then repeat it again and measure it at x(0.25t) and x(0.75t), so on and so forth, measuring many many in-between points. From that, we assume that if we continue to cut the intervals in half and measuring in between, our predictions will continue to hold, making us conclude that there is a completely continuous transition between x(0) and x(t) exactly as described by our mathematics, which we can fit to unambiguous mathematical equations.
Yet, this is just an assumption. We cannot actually know that this continuous transition exists, and what Schrodinger argued is that there is in fact good reason to think it doesn’t. This is because, in various particle experiments, you cannot actually try to reconstruct this path in a way that is unambiguous and would be consistent with every experiment. It is much simpler just to treat it as if the particle was over there at x(0), and now it is over here at x(t), with a time delay of t. Rovelli describes it as nature evolving through succession of events, rather than nature being made up of “stones bouncing around,” nature flows according to these succession of events whereby things manifest their properties to one another during an interaction, but there is no trajectory the particle actually took in between interactions.
These trajectories are entirely metaphysical and could never actually be experimentally verified, since verification requires observation, and observation is an interaction, so to posit that there is any path in between interactions is to posit that there exists something in between observations, and by definition you could not observe that. It would always have to be something assumed a priori. This is what I meant when I said most people approach quantum mechanical interpretation seem to have a desire to assume quantum theory can tell us about things beyond what is even possible to observe, and much of the confusion around the theory is trying to philosophically understand this unobservable realm of what is going on in between observations.
I tend to agree with physicists like Schrodinger, Rovelli, and Francois Igor Pris that what makes the most sense is to just abandon this because it is entirely metaphysical and ultimately faith-based and cannot actually be experimentally verified. We should just stick to what we can actually confirm through observational evidence, and observations are discrete, so any continuity we assume about nature is ultimately metaphysical and could not be derived from observation. That is why it makes more sense to consider reality not as autonomous stones bouncing around, but as a succession of discrete events, and the physical sciences allows us to predict what properties of systems will be realized during those events.
Very interesting point! I feel that there is a lot to say about the ontology in quantum physics; (and I’m interested in that myself).
I’ve adopted a few views that helped me cope with the practically non-existent explanation of what is really going on:
Our brains are meat computers. Theories talk about the following: What does a computer measure after they have performed an experiment? In other words, theory isn’t supposed to be emotionally fulfilling. It is merely making predictions for the computer.
Truth is a lot like the stars. There’s one big one, and a lot of small ones. Maybe we just have to accept that quantum physics is all about the many small ones.
The thing is, I’ve been obsessed with this topic for so long that I do not really agree. The purpose of me being interested in the topic is to research and find reasonable explanations, and there is only so many years you can do that before you actually start coming to some conclusions.
These days I am a strong supporter of the contextual realist approach, which the philosopher-physicist Francois Igor Pris has some good books on the subject, but sadly he does not write in English if you only speak English, but mostly in Russian. It is based on the writings of the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist, which you can read his book Towards a Contextual Realism which has a good English translation, it is more philosophy than physics, although it does touch a little bit on quantum mechanics towards the end. Pris’s books are more specifically about the application of Benoist’s philosophical framework to quantum theory.
I see the purpose of theories as ultimately to be able to predict how things change. If I drop a ball, it falls to the ground, if I drop it again, it falls again, and so I can assume through inductive reasoning that if I drop a third time, it will probably fall again. I could then create a mathematical model which describes this behavior, and so anyone can plug into the model the ball when lifted up, and then run a computation and see what it spits out is a prediction of the ball having fallen to the ground.
I am by no means a utilitarian when it comes to scientific theories, as if I think they are just “useful tools for making predictions and tell us nothing about reality.” Rather, my view is that these “useful tools for making predictions” are useful precisely because they tell us something about reality: they capture how reality changes over time. If they did not, they could not be used to make predictions about it.
I think a lot of the difficulty in interpreting quantum theory is that a lot of people see ontology somewhat differently. They think that the ontology is not merely how reality that we can experimentally observe changes over time, but that it must also tell us about some alternative realm beyond all possibilities to ever observe. People for some reason have a desire to introduce additional and unnecessary metaphysics to the ontology of the system, to add things to it we cannot actually ever verify is actually there, and it’s my view that if you abandon this temptation then you avoid much of the conceptual difficulties of the theory.
To be honest, I’m not sure what you mean by this.
I will try to explain, but it might be a bit difficult for me to put it into proper formulation.
I will try to explain it with a picture, if I can. You start with a base condition called x(0). It represents some physical quantity in time. As the system evolves, the quantity becomes x(t). Now, you can draw this graphically with “trajectories”, which are lines that draw out the curve that x(t) is making over time.
What happens, due to randomness, is that this trajectory splits up into many smaller ones. This is what I meant with “small truths”. Then they unify again, when the randomness becomes irrelevant again, and that is what i meant with a “big truth”. Maybe I just put it badly at words before, English is not my native language either.
Schrodinger makes a good argument in the book “Nature and the Greek and Science and Humanism” that we should actually just abandon the idea that there even is a trajectory.
Our sciences are derived from inductive reasoning. You drop a ball, it falls to the ground, you repeat it, it falls again, and eventually, you come up with a mathematical law to describe this. You assume from that point if you drop it an infinite number of times, it will always fall to the ground, but this is just an assumption that cannot be proven.
We also do this to derive our concept of trajectories. We can measure something a x(0) and x(t), then repeat the experiment and measure it at x(0.5t), then repeat it again and measure it at x(0.25t) and x(0.75t), so on and so forth, measuring many many in-between points. From that, we assume that if we continue to cut the intervals in half and measuring in between, our predictions will continue to hold, making us conclude that there is a completely continuous transition between x(0) and x(t) exactly as described by our mathematics, which we can fit to unambiguous mathematical equations.
Yet, this is just an assumption. We cannot actually know that this continuous transition exists, and what Schrodinger argued is that there is in fact good reason to think it doesn’t. This is because, in various particle experiments, you cannot actually try to reconstruct this path in a way that is unambiguous and would be consistent with every experiment. It is much simpler just to treat it as if the particle was over there at x(0), and now it is over here at x(t), with a time delay of t. Rovelli describes it as nature evolving through succession of events, rather than nature being made up of “stones bouncing around,” nature flows according to these succession of events whereby things manifest their properties to one another during an interaction, but there is no trajectory the particle actually took in between interactions.
These trajectories are entirely metaphysical and could never actually be experimentally verified, since verification requires observation, and observation is an interaction, so to posit that there is any path in between interactions is to posit that there exists something in between observations, and by definition you could not observe that. It would always have to be something assumed a priori. This is what I meant when I said most people approach quantum mechanical interpretation seem to have a desire to assume quantum theory can tell us about things beyond what is even possible to observe, and much of the confusion around the theory is trying to philosophically understand this unobservable realm of what is going on in between observations.
I tend to agree with physicists like Schrodinger, Rovelli, and Francois Igor Pris that what makes the most sense is to just abandon this because it is entirely metaphysical and ultimately faith-based and cannot actually be experimentally verified. We should just stick to what we can actually confirm through observational evidence, and observations are discrete, so any continuity we assume about nature is ultimately metaphysical and could not be derived from observation. That is why it makes more sense to consider reality not as autonomous stones bouncing around, but as a succession of discrete events, and the physical sciences allows us to predict what properties of systems will be realized during those events.