The quote says that biologists don’t deal with questions such as “what is life?” because that’s essentialism and that’s Bad. Similarly, physicists certainly don’t study ideal systems like atoms or light. The disease is in the false dichotomy.
spxtr
Asking whether radio waves really count as light is just arguing a definition. That’s not interesting to anyone who understands the underlying physics.
Notice that the questions he gives for essentialists are actually interesting questions, they’re just imprecisely phrased, e.g. “what is matter?” These questions were asked before we’d decided matter was atoms. They were valid questions and serious scientists treated them. Now these questions are silly because we’ve already solved them and moved on to deeper questions, like “where do these masses come from?” and “how will the universe end?”
When a theorist comes up with a new theory they are usually trying to answer one of these essentialist questions. “What is it about antimatter that makes it so rare?” The theorist comes up with a guess, computes some results, spends a year processing LHC data, and realizes that their theory is wrong. At some point in here they switched from essentialist (considering an ideal model) to nominalist (experimental data), but the whole distinction is unnecessary.
… they don’t study some abstract platonic version of light or atom derived from our intuitions …
Yes, they most certainly do. QED is an extremely abstract idea, derived from intuition about how the light we interact with on a classical level behaves. This is called the correspondence principle.
String theorists come up with a theory based entirely on mathematical beauty, much like Plato.
That’s right, more or less.
I watched several Charlie Chaplin films. They’re so old that you can watch them for free on youtube, and they’re hilarious.
In descending order of enjoyment:
The Gold Rush
Modern Times
The Great Dictator
The Kid
City Lights
The most traditional way to begin a study of quantum mechanics is to follow the historical developments—Planck’s radiation law, the Einstein-Debye theory of specific heats, the Bohr atom, de Broglie’s matter waves, and so forth—together with careful analyses of some key experiments such as the Compton effect, the Frank-Hertz experiment, and the Davisson-Germer-Thompson experiment. In that way we may come to appreciate how the physicists in the first quarter of the twentieth century were forced to abandon, little by little, the cherished concepts of classical physics and how, despite earlier false starts and wrong turns, the masters—Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and Dirac, among others—finally succeeded in formulating quantum mechanics as we know it today.
However, we do not follow the historical approach in this book. Instead, we start with an example that illustrates, perhaps more than any other example, the inadequacy of classical concepts in a fundamental way. We hope that by exposing the reader to a “shock treatment” at the onset, he or she may be attuned to what we might call the “quantum-mechanical way of thinking” at a very early stage.
-- Modern Quantum Mechanics by J. J. Sakurai, the standard graduate level quantum textbook. Following this quote is a discussion of the Stern-Gerlach experiment. I post this quote because it is in line with Quantum Explanations.
It’s not an introductory text, so it probably goes way too fast if its your first book on QM. I agree about SG being a great experiment for explaining QM principles.
1) “AI” is a fuzzy term. We have some pretty smart programs already. What counts? Watson can answer jeopardy questions. Compilers can write code and perform sophisticated optimizations. Some chatbots are very close to passing the Turing Test. It’s unlikely that we’re going to jump suddenly from where we are now to human-level intelligence. There will be time to adapt.
AI is a fuzzy term, but that doesn’t at all back up the statement “it’s unlikely that we’re going to jump suddenly from where we are to human-level intelligence.” This isn’t an argument.
2) Plausible. Read Permutation City, where the first uploads run much slower. This isn’t strong evidence against foom though.
3) Being able to read your own source code does not mean you can self-modify. You know that you’re made of DNA. You can even get your own “source code” for a few thousand dollars. No humans have successfully self-modified into an intelligence explosion; the idea seems laughable.
Humans don’t have real-time access to the individual neurons in our brains, and we don’t even know how they work at that level anyway.
Mean and variance are closely related to center of mass and moment of inertia. This is good intuition to have, and it’s statistical. The only difference is that the first two are moments of a probability distribution, and the second two are moments of a mass distribution.
Classical physics, excluding thermodynamics, is invariant under time reversal. I certainly wouldn’t call that causal, but maybe I’m missing something.
Any introduction to astronomy textbook will help you out. I used BOB.
Instead of having huge individual telescopes which run into issues {How do you keep the mirror clean? What shape do you make it? How do you deal with the atmosphere (Adaptive optics are hard enough for small telescopes)? Constructing a telescope this large in space would be fantastically difficult and expensive.}, you can do interferometry. The largest telescopes these days run into the tens of meters, see E-ELT.
This is a book for undergraduates, and it’s a good thing that you didn’t grok much. It’s kind of like an intro chemistry book. If you really want to understand chemistry you need quantum mechanics, but it’s a bad idea to start (most) chemistry students off with Schrodinger’s equation. If you want to grok particle physics you need QFT, which is among the most difficult subjects. If a non-QFT person tells you that they read Griffiths’ particles book and understood it all then they don’t know what it means to understand something.
The Patrician took a sip of his beer. “I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of the roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”
I regularly made these three mistakes.
I was in debate club and considered politics important and worth my time. Within months of reading the mind-killer sequence I became so frustrated with that whole ordeal that I quit, and I haven’t looked back since.
Other than that, yes, you’re right.
Why the Many-Worlds Formulation of Quantum Mechanics is Probably Correct by Sean Carroll.
Our only assumption was that the apparatus obeys the rules of quantum mechanics just as much as the particle does, which seems to be an extremely mild assumption if we think quantum mechanics is the correct theory of reality. Given that, we know that the particle can be in “spin-up” or “spin-down” states, and we also know that the apparatus can be in “ready” or “measured spin-up” or “measured spin-down” states. And if that’s true, the quantum state has the built-in ability to describe superpositions of non-interacting worlds. Not only did we not need to add anything to make it possible, we had no choice in the matter. The potential for multiple worlds is always there in the quantum state, whether you like it or not.
The explanation is at a slightly lower level than the sequences, but it’s a concise summary with a healthy dose of proselytization. I think it works nicely.
How to Read a Book was not particularly useful to me, except for the suggested reading list at the end.
Clear and Simple as the Truth was interesting.
The Ode Less Travelled was good.
Highly recommend all three.
Swans—To Be Kind. I’m not sure how I feel about it. The production value is excellent, the vocals are powerful, the layering is up there with the best, and yet some of the songs just didn’t work for me. Toussaint Louverture!
And So I Watch You From Afar—All Hail Bright Futures. Pure joy.
Wolves in the Throne Room—Celestite. A black metal band makes an excellent ambient/drone album with neither vocals nor drums. It’s beautiful.
“The second interesting thing about angels, Mr. Lipwig, is that you only ever get one.”
Why did you post this quote? It seems like a good example of diseased thinking, but I’m not sure if that was your point.