I did mean you, specifically. Learning QM has been compared to learning to ride a bicycle. You don’t do that by first defining your terms, you just get out there and do it, and it’s hard to reduce the knowledge of how to ride a bike to definitions. When people learn QM, they slide past some difficulties of logic, and are “rewarded” with the ability to quantitatively describe and predict atomic behavior.
There is a huge spectrum of attitudes among physicists towards the logical or conceptual basis of QM. On this site, they want to make sense of QM by adopting a radical new picture of reality in which there are “flows” of “amplitude-stuff” through the hyperspace of parallel universes. This is a genuine faction of opinion among physicists. But then you have the more down-to-earth people who tell you that quantum physics is just like classical physics, except that everything is a little “fuzzy” or “uncertain”. This view is something of a philosophical placebo which allows its adherents to feel that there is no conceptual problem in QM.
Regarding even more basic matters, like what’s going on in the very first steps towards the mathematization of physical concepts, that is a discussion that interests me, but we would first need to agree on exactly what the “issues” are, which might take a while. So I think we should have it privately, and then report back to the site, rather than flailing around in public. My mail is mporter at gmail.com, please contact me there if you want to continue this dialogue.
Learning QM has been compared to learning to ride a bicycle. You don’t do that by first defining your terms, you just get out there and do it, and it’s hard to reduce the knowledge of how to ride a bike to definitions.
This may indeed be the case, but taking the outside view—if I didn’t know you were talking about QM, but knew it was about some purported scientific theory—giving a free pass to the usual strict rationalist requirement to “define your terms clearly” would seem pretty dubious. There are a lot of ways to build whole systems out of equivocations and other such semantic fudging, a lot of religious argument operates that way, and so on.
I did mean you, specifically. Learning QM has been compared to learning to ride a bicycle. You don’t do that by first defining your terms, you just get out there and do it, and it’s hard to reduce the knowledge of how to ride a bike to definitions. When people learn QM, they slide past some difficulties of logic, and are “rewarded” with the ability to quantitatively describe and predict atomic behavior.
There is a huge spectrum of attitudes among physicists towards the logical or conceptual basis of QM. On this site, they want to make sense of QM by adopting a radical new picture of reality in which there are “flows” of “amplitude-stuff” through the hyperspace of parallel universes. This is a genuine faction of opinion among physicists. But then you have the more down-to-earth people who tell you that quantum physics is just like classical physics, except that everything is a little “fuzzy” or “uncertain”. This view is something of a philosophical placebo which allows its adherents to feel that there is no conceptual problem in QM.
Regarding even more basic matters, like what’s going on in the very first steps towards the mathematization of physical concepts, that is a discussion that interests me, but we would first need to agree on exactly what the “issues” are, which might take a while. So I think we should have it privately, and then report back to the site, rather than flailing around in public. My mail is mporter at gmail.com, please contact me there if you want to continue this dialogue.
Thank you very much for your response and your offer.
This may indeed be the case, but taking the outside view—if I didn’t know you were talking about QM, but knew it was about some purported scientific theory—giving a free pass to the usual strict rationalist requirement to “define your terms clearly” would seem pretty dubious. There are a lot of ways to build whole systems out of equivocations and other such semantic fudging, a lot of religious argument operates that way, and so on.