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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: How do we know that the "laws" of physics are really laws, i.e. true everywhere?

« on: 31/03/2008 12:49:13 »

I am going to make this my last post, because I can see the big guns are coming out and I am beginning to get the 'you have no right to talk about science because you are not qualified' ....well it so happens that I am.  Nothing I have said about my past is a lie ... other than by omission.  I omitted to say that before I became an artist I was a physicist, and have all the publications, patents, lettere after my name etc to prove myself.  But I do not like to stand on my qualifications (I find it intimidates people) and the question I have been raising here are precisely the things that troubled me enough to make me quit and go elsewhere to look for a life.

And let me be more specific.  Back in the 1970's, for my doctorate, I was trying to create what is known as a 'number state beam', that is a beam of light that is in a 'number state'.  What is intersting about that?  That it would have been the first time anyone had created anything that was purely a quantum state, that is, a state that is DISALLOWED by classical theory.  Do you see what I am saying.... that after half a century, no-one could justify having adopted the horrendously difficult quantum theory in preference to the much simpler classical theory ... quantum theory became orthodoxy on a vote, in the 1930's .... it was politics .... guess who was on the voting committee.... yes, you've guessed, the very people who had derived quantum theory and had a vested interest in making it the orthodoxy.

And that leads on to what I did later, which was go into the real world and work with optical communications, including optical computers.  And do you know what i found?  In the world of technology, in the real world, PHYSICS IS  NO DAMN GOOD.  It is just not up to the job of dealing whith the real world.  The real world is much to complex, and one has to derive the appropriate maths to deal with each situation.  so what are we spending so much time and money on physics for? 

Prediction... is it desirable?  Actually, no.  It is inhuman and a nightmare to know the future.  And don't give me global warming and all that .... that game, of raising up the monster and then defeating it as an age old trick use by religions to gain converts!  And, if you really think scientists can make predictions about climate change.... no, they can't.  That is MUCH MUCH too complicated.  It cannot be done.

And, as for simplicity etc and other ways of doing things .... yes, as a  matter of fact, there is .... it is called EVOLUTION.  That is how nature deals with complexity.  That is how complexity should be dealt with.  That is how you can create and deal with computers and fast cars WITHOUT RECOURSE TO OVERSIMPLIFIED AND BLINKERING theories such as current physics offers.  And it is how you can get past the inhuman practice of divining the future!

Well, i guess if I had not worn out my welcome before, I will have thoroughly done so now.  So, goodbye all. 

PS truth really does matter, not for the sake of fast cars or the future of the world, but for your individual mental health ....  but that is a whole other issue concerning the effect of good and bad behaviour on your mental health.

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: How do we know that the "laws" of physics are really laws, i.e. true everywhere?

« on: 30/03/2008 13:52:35 »

Thank you soul surfer for that very lucid description of how spectrum lines work.

I'm sorry, techmind, but what you seem to be saying is that it is not just that one thing looks like another, but that it looks VERY like another, and that makes no difference that I can see.

And, Supercryptid, that is a very interesting question, and it has had me thinking, and I think I have to say, yes, I do have reason to think that things at the other end of the universe are different from here!  This is quite hard to explain, but in a word: intuition.  What do I mean by that?  I mean a feeling that comes from my experience of the world.  I have travelled a lot, done a lot of things, etc etc, and all my acrued experience leads me to have a sense that the world is not as simple as that.  I would say, that all me experience leads me to have a feeling that things MUST be different billions and billions of miles away across all this black space.  It is simply counter-intuitive.

I think this leads to some interesting thoughts.... I mean, the more I think about it the more I think how very counter-intuitive science is at almost every turn.

Lets go right back to the beginning of science!  I have usually heard it said, (I watch programmes like COSMOS by Carl Sagan and the like) that the roots of modern science go back to the ancient Greeks.

As an artist, i am well acquainted with the ancient Greeks.  They had a preoccupation with 'reality'.  It is often claimed that they took art forwards by discarding the kind of thing the Egyptians were doing .... representing people or gods as having heads of animals and so on .... and concentrating on creating images that 'looked' real.  Well, actually, what the Greeks were doing was throwing out INSIGHT in favour of surface look-a-like.  When the older cultures represented people and gods as having animal heads and so on, they were using METAPHOR to reveal insights into how those gods and people BEHAVED.  So, when we talk of someone as 'bullish', or as predatory, we are saying things about how they think and behave, and if we represent these people as having the appropriate animal parts, we are communicating our insights about their true natures.  That insight is what the Greeks threw out!  So they left us with a much shallower art, that concerns itself only with what is on the surface.  I wonder, did they do the same with science?

In the days of the ancient Egyptians, people dreamed at night, and then they got up in the day, and it seemed to them that there was little difference between what they experienced in their dreams and what they experienced when awake.  So it was commomplace for them to think that 'life is just a dream', or, in our modern terms, a virtual reality.  That is to say, an ancient Egyptian would have said it was INTUITIVELY OBVIOUS that life is a dream.

What I am getting at is this: that somehow, starting with the ancient Greeks it seems to me we have been persuaded to discard what is intuitively obvious in favour of .... what? 

If you say something to someone often enough (and coca cola advertisers among others are very well aware of this effect) they will come to accept it.  So, has science brain-washed us into accepting things that are not at all reasonable? 

So, you ask me, have I a reason to think that things might be different at the other side of the universe?  I say, intuitively, yes. 

On the other hand, I could turn round and say, do you have any reason to suppose things are the same at the other end of the universe?  And what?  You put the onus on me to justify what I am saying and say that if you do not KNOW things are different, then you have to think they are the same?  No to that.

And that brings up something else!  What about the simplest answer of all, and the REALLY correct one: I DO NOT KNOW.  Is it not better to say 'I do not know' that to grab hold of some idea that might be totally wrong?  I mean, there could be very serious repercussions in deciding that a bad idea is better than no idea!  It is like building your house on sand, or faulty foundations ... in the end you will pay the price!

I do hope scientists are as robust as they seem.  I am poking and proding, but then, they do actually profess to hold a defensible position, and to welcome scrutiny!

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: How do we know that the "laws" of physics are really laws, i.e. true everywhere?

« on: 29/03/2008 13:14:29 »

I'm still thinking, and trying hard to understand.  I am an artist(words and images) by profession, but i took science to a higher level than most artists.  The trouble was that I always felt like a trained parrot, that is to say, that i was just learning stuff by rote and then regurgitating without understanding anything.  So now I am revisiting and trying to put that right.

So, right now I'm battling with a couple of things that were touched on above;
first, what is made of observations of light from distant stars and galaxies (as an artist I certainly love the pictures that come from this!)
If I get this correctly, scientists look at light coming from sources in the sky, and they, as it were, draw a picture of what they see, and then they look at what they have here on earth, and they say that the light from the stars looks just the same as the light from atoms or whatever, that we have on earth, and therefore they must be the same thing.  Well, that is too simplistic, and the can't be right.

I have a friend who is working on a book about, among other things, Freud and Jung, and she has been telling me about some of the methods Freud used to come to his conclusions about what dreams meant.  So, for example, in one dream a snake approaches the dreamer, grows bigger, bites the dreamer, and then shrivells.  Well, says Freud, this is a sex dream, because something that burgeons and then shrivells must be a phallus!  Of course that is nonsense.  The flowers in my garden burgeon and then wither; a balloon being blown up burgeons and then withers when the air is released; a little boy boasting swells with pride and then can be withered by a withering glance ... and so on and so on. 

So, just because two things look alike, one can conclude nothing.  So what is the difference between what scientists are doing with the things they see in the night sky and what Freud (and numerous pseudo-scientist)were doing with the things they were looking at?


Another point, which is not really pertinent, I think, to the understanding of how science works, but has been mentioned above, is the PEER REVIEW SYSTEM.  To me, that is iniquitous, but is politics, not science.  Peer review is the church fathers deciding what is and is not acceptable.  If Einstein(honest its nothing personal, but if you become famous then you have to take the flack) got onto a peer review board, then he could make sure that it was his name that got remembered, and his theories that won out over the competition.

What peer review makes me think of is another famous name: Plato.  One of Plato's major works was THE REPUBLIC.  Now, in that work of philosophy, Plato draws a picture for us of what he has 'reasoned' would be the ideal and best society, and guess who's in charge of this utopia ... that's right, philosophers!  so don't tell me Plato was a philosopher, interested in truth and capable of detached reasoning.  He was not.  he was a poltician making a case for why he and his party should be in charge!  Now I have a lot of trouble with peer review on the same basis.  It smacks of the rule of politics at the expense of detached reasoning and loyalty to personal interest over loyalty to truth.

However, as I said, it is the thing about spectra that really bothers me.

Maybe someone can explain.

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: How do we know that the "laws" of physics are really laws, i.e. true everywhere?

« on: 28/03/2008 13:59:09 »

OK, someone has been kind enough to play devil's advocate, and the conclusion is that we cannot be sure about physical theories.  Then someone else agreed, and then justified our going with the current theories on the basis of the difficulties of looking for and establishing others. 

Two things about that: in the first place, I thought science was about TRUTH, and if it is, then difficulty is neither here nor there.  This thing about difficulty and cost in time and effort is putting expediency before TRUTH, and surely that cannot be right or healthy?  And talking of health, physics is surely just the base science upon which most others build, and if that is so, then if physics is uncertain, then so too must be all the others, and if that is true, then it applies to medical sciences, and that has my hair standing on end, because I need to be able to trust the medical professionals!


Soul Surfer says my brain is doing the same thing as scientists ... I disagree.  If I fall down, my brain concludes that there is something that makes me go downwards with a bump, as it were, but it would not go off and make work out that it was an inverse square law, and then use that to make predictions about projectiles and planets in orbit and so on.  And if at some later time I was to lose my footing and NOT fall down, it would take that on board and modify my view of the world and my bahaviour accordingly .... in fact, something is just occuring to me as i write, and it is to do with competition:  it seems to me that my brain id fundamentally different in that is ACCUMULATES from experience, takes EVERYTHING on board, which is different from science, where one theory has to COMPETE with another.

And then I am thinking, perhaps the problem is not which theory might be correct, and that we might not have the best one, perhaps the problem is that we only have one theory, whereas the truth is that they are ALL correct, and the prblem might be that we need to BROADEN our way of looking at the world.  Rather than thinking in terms of one theory being correct and the others wrong, we should be thinking in terms of how to reconcile them all.

Well, this is certainly getting me thinking!

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: How do we know that the "laws" of physics are really laws, i.e. true everywhere?

« on: 27/03/2008 12:22:59 »

I,m afraid the talk of 'models' does not allay my fears. In fact, quite the opposite, because it makes physics sound like a game of 'fit the image to the stars', you know, looking at the stars and seeing pictures in them, and, really, you can see any picture you like, and especially if you select which stars to include!

It seems to me that the world we live in is incredibly complex, and you could probably make any number of different models to fit it, especially if you select the bits you choose to include.  And now I start thinking to myself (and I should say here that I happen to have heard that the Einstein model of the universe was not the only one on offer at the time, but the others have been forgotten because, well, to be blunt, Einstein had the right friends!)... so, to get back to what I am thinking to myself, is the science that we have today the only model that we could be using?  If there are others, why are we using the one we are using?  Is it because say, Newton or Faraday or Maxwell, had enough clout that they could have their theories oust all the competition?  And then, if we are saying that it is a matter of 'whose' theory it was, rather than which theory might be best, then what are the consequences?  Are we in fact left with a model of the universe which is very inferior to what we might have had if truth had mattered more than vested interest?

The more I go down this road the more uneasy I become.....

Again I have to say... help!!!

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / How do we know that the "laws" of physics are really laws, i.e. true everywhere?

« on: 26/03/2008 22:56:04 »

something that has aways puzzled me, so maybe someone can help....
It is of fundamental importance to the theories of physics that the laws if physics are the same everywhere in the universe.  Also, that space is the same everywhere.  How can we possibly know this? 

If someone can explain to me how we can know this, then fine, but it seems to me almost absurd to say that we KNOW that space and the laws of physics are just the same at the other end of the universe as they are here, yet, if we cannot say that, then none of the grand theories of how the universe was made and stars evolve and so on can be true!!!

oh dear!  Anyone help?