An ordinary product from ordinary minds: quantum mechanics
Theoretical physicists, somewhat in a self-serving, expedient manner, qualify quantum mechanics (QM) as an “elegant,” “beautiful” theory. It is usually considered to be a “difficult” theory, too. Somewhat “mysterious” and “counterintuitive,” it is regarded to be the “gem” of modern physics, mainly due to its predictive power of microscopic events as perceived by humans, based not on direct observations of atomic objects obviously, but on measurements in indirect ways.
From a practical, realistic and pragmatic engineer's point of view, none of these attributes makes much sense. Not only the QM concepts are no different than that of classical mechanics, but also its mathematical formalism is completely borrowed from the latter. There is nothing new or original about the foundations of QM. There was no need to develop any new mathematical theory to describe it. Even the Hilbert-space abstraction applied to QM by von Neumann in 1930 is classical.
Besides, its various philosophical interpretations, as expressed by no other than physicists themselves, do not make any sense, either. The euphemism used to describe its nonsensical features is its being counterintuitive.
Linearity, superposition, time variance and invariance, Hamiltonians, Hermitian operators, differential equations, linear harmonics, Fourier series, noncommutitavity, matrices, and complex numbers—all the mathematical tools used to describe it had already been introduced and employed in other fields long before QM was formalized. It took a quarter of a century for the best minds of theoretical physics to come up with an odd theory that turned out to be incomplete, far from describing the independent physical reality—Kant's Ding an sich (thing-in-itself)—and at the end these single-track physicists and philosophers blamed the supposedly noncausal, random nature of Nature for their failure.
We should not expect them to come up with a complete theory anyway, since humans including them, at this point in evolutionary history, cannot be held accountable, if they cannot explain the external reality to which they do not have direct access. Having gross physical and mental limitations, humans are incapable to grasp the reality directly, only relying on their extremely limited perception of its appearance by their sensory organs when the object is macroscopic or through man-made, artificial instruments and gadgets when the object is microscopic.
Humans are a product of a mess called evolution. It took 3.5 billion years for the Nature to produce this freak accident. And the end product was full of junk: books and papers written by scientists refer to “apparently useless” genetic material as the junk DNA. In reality, however, the functional importance of the roughly 98% of mammalian genomes not corresponding to protein-coding sequences actually remains largely undetermined. For example, a recent study concludes that there are 481 segments longer than 200 base pairs that are absolutely conserved [100% identity with no insertions or deletions] between orthologous [a gene in two or more species that has evolved from a common ancestor] regions of the human, rat, and mouse genomes, and everybody is at a loss at this point in time to explain why this could be the case. Apparently, mutations over millions of years could not scramble these so-called “ultraconserved” bits of the genome, contrary to the basic assertion of the evolution theory.
Furthermore, it turns out that 99.4% of human genetic material is identical to those of chimpanzees and bonobos, humans' closest relatives that, like any other animal in the planet, are looked down by them due to the fact that, not having the distinctively human characteristic called language, they cannot talk or write or do not have other higher cognitive activities humans claim to have. On top of everything, they are so egocentric that they believe they will eventually be able to explain the origin of the universe, life and mind. They have not gotten their lesson from Copernicus' revolution.
On one hand, denying any genuinely goal-directed process in Nature, they claim the evolution is aimless and purposeless, essentially based on chance mutations. On the other hand, as a freak accident of that random process and with about 98% “junk” DNA in each of the trillion cells in their bodies making up organs such as kidneys and hearts, each of which seems to have a genuine purpose after all, namely, the maintainance of their owner's livelihood, so that s/he can go on speculating about the nature of the universe, life or mind, they think they will one day solve all the mysteries and secrets about and around them. If the former assertion is true, i.e., if the evolution is nonteleological, then why would human beings be equipped by Nature with a brain to solve these mysteries? Obviously, it was not Nature's intention to evolve humans for this particular purpose—what good would it serve anyway?—as it was not its purpose to endow them with hands to tickle ivories, either. There might be those who will probably counter by claiming that this actually shows humans' ingenious resourcefulness: they were indeed creative enough to use them for other purposes. Does that mean, then, that humans have a purpose in life while the Nature does not?
Furthermore, with severely limited sensory system continuously feeding input from the external world, the same mind seems to play the role of judge, prosecutor and jury in trying to explain how consciousness arises or how mind itself works. It is self-referential and probably paradoxical.
Turning back to the lackluster yet overly exaggerated theory of QM, it is not so difficult to show that it is just another theory among others, albeit one that can describe the perceived empirical data and measurements made at atomic levels. Its incompleteness is to be expected, not only because of the reasons listed above, but also due to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems. What does not distinguish it from any other is the fact that it is yet another axiomatic theory.
The problem with today's science in general is that its theories are computational in nature. They all are based on axioms, computations and algorithms. Therefore, everything can and is intended to be reduced to being run on computers, touted as the wonder product of human imagination, especially the much-hyped and ubiquitous digital computers of our age, mainly made up of silicon, the material Nature somehow did not choose to create their creators who nevertheless opted for to solve problems Nature does not seem to wish or care them to solve.
Among many problems with QM in particular, one is that physicists, when interpreting its consequences, in a way take complex numbers, with their “imaginary” parts, literally, as opposed to engineers who employ them only as convenient tools to avoid cumbersome solutions. Not only QM is not difficult to understand or counterintuitive, in fact it is straightforward especially for those who are familiar with analog or digital circuits and networks, and the mathematical tools utilized to analyze them. Hence, it is somewhat surprising, in retrospect, why it took so many physicists so long to come up with this completely undistinguished and uninspiring theory, because all the mathematical tools were already available in the previous century, developed for entirely different reasons and applications.
From a practical, realistic and pragmatic engineer's point of view, none of these attributes makes much sense. Not only the QM concepts are no different than that of classical mechanics, but also its mathematical formalism is completely borrowed from the latter. There is nothing new or original about the foundations of QM. There was no need to develop any new mathematical theory to describe it. Even the Hilbert-space abstraction applied to QM by von Neumann in 1930 is classical.
Besides, its various philosophical interpretations, as expressed by no other than physicists themselves, do not make any sense, either. The euphemism used to describe its nonsensical features is its being counterintuitive.
Linearity, superposition, time variance and invariance, Hamiltonians, Hermitian operators, differential equations, linear harmonics, Fourier series, noncommutitavity, matrices, and complex numbers—all the mathematical tools used to describe it had already been introduced and employed in other fields long before QM was formalized. It took a quarter of a century for the best minds of theoretical physics to come up with an odd theory that turned out to be incomplete, far from describing the independent physical reality—Kant's Ding an sich (thing-in-itself)—and at the end these single-track physicists and philosophers blamed the supposedly noncausal, random nature of Nature for their failure.
We should not expect them to come up with a complete theory anyway, since humans including them, at this point in evolutionary history, cannot be held accountable, if they cannot explain the external reality to which they do not have direct access. Having gross physical and mental limitations, humans are incapable to grasp the reality directly, only relying on their extremely limited perception of its appearance by their sensory organs when the object is macroscopic or through man-made, artificial instruments and gadgets when the object is microscopic.
Humans are a product of a mess called evolution. It took 3.5 billion years for the Nature to produce this freak accident. And the end product was full of junk: books and papers written by scientists refer to “apparently useless” genetic material as the junk DNA. In reality, however, the functional importance of the roughly 98% of mammalian genomes not corresponding to protein-coding sequences actually remains largely undetermined. For example, a recent study concludes that there are 481 segments longer than 200 base pairs that are absolutely conserved [100% identity with no insertions or deletions] between orthologous [a gene in two or more species that has evolved from a common ancestor] regions of the human, rat, and mouse genomes, and everybody is at a loss at this point in time to explain why this could be the case. Apparently, mutations over millions of years could not scramble these so-called “ultraconserved” bits of the genome, contrary to the basic assertion of the evolution theory.
Furthermore, it turns out that 99.4% of human genetic material is identical to those of chimpanzees and bonobos, humans' closest relatives that, like any other animal in the planet, are looked down by them due to the fact that, not having the distinctively human characteristic called language, they cannot talk or write or do not have other higher cognitive activities humans claim to have. On top of everything, they are so egocentric that they believe they will eventually be able to explain the origin of the universe, life and mind. They have not gotten their lesson from Copernicus' revolution.
On one hand, denying any genuinely goal-directed process in Nature, they claim the evolution is aimless and purposeless, essentially based on chance mutations. On the other hand, as a freak accident of that random process and with about 98% “junk” DNA in each of the trillion cells in their bodies making up organs such as kidneys and hearts, each of which seems to have a genuine purpose after all, namely, the maintainance of their owner's livelihood, so that s/he can go on speculating about the nature of the universe, life or mind, they think they will one day solve all the mysteries and secrets about and around them. If the former assertion is true, i.e., if the evolution is nonteleological, then why would human beings be equipped by Nature with a brain to solve these mysteries? Obviously, it was not Nature's intention to evolve humans for this particular purpose—what good would it serve anyway?—as it was not its purpose to endow them with hands to tickle ivories, either. There might be those who will probably counter by claiming that this actually shows humans' ingenious resourcefulness: they were indeed creative enough to use them for other purposes. Does that mean, then, that humans have a purpose in life while the Nature does not?
Furthermore, with severely limited sensory system continuously feeding input from the external world, the same mind seems to play the role of judge, prosecutor and jury in trying to explain how consciousness arises or how mind itself works. It is self-referential and probably paradoxical.
Turning back to the lackluster yet overly exaggerated theory of QM, it is not so difficult to show that it is just another theory among others, albeit one that can describe the perceived empirical data and measurements made at atomic levels. Its incompleteness is to be expected, not only because of the reasons listed above, but also due to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems. What does not distinguish it from any other is the fact that it is yet another axiomatic theory.
The problem with today's science in general is that its theories are computational in nature. They all are based on axioms, computations and algorithms. Therefore, everything can and is intended to be reduced to being run on computers, touted as the wonder product of human imagination, especially the much-hyped and ubiquitous digital computers of our age, mainly made up of silicon, the material Nature somehow did not choose to create their creators who nevertheless opted for to solve problems Nature does not seem to wish or care them to solve.
Among many problems with QM in particular, one is that physicists, when interpreting its consequences, in a way take complex numbers, with their “imaginary” parts, literally, as opposed to engineers who employ them only as convenient tools to avoid cumbersome solutions. Not only QM is not difficult to understand or counterintuitive, in fact it is straightforward especially for those who are familiar with analog or digital circuits and networks, and the mathematical tools utilized to analyze them. Hence, it is somewhat surprising, in retrospect, why it took so many physicists so long to come up with this completely undistinguished and uninspiring theory, because all the mathematical tools were already available in the previous century, developed for entirely different reasons and applications.
posted by SiberTanrı | 18:16
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