On Tuesday, June 11, 2019 at 12:27:07 PM UTC-5, Lawrence Crowell wrote: > > On Tuesday, June 11, 2019 at 7:13:55 AM UTC-5, Philip Thrift wrote: >> >> >> >> On Tuesday, June 11, 2019 at 6:38:41 AM UTC-5, Lawrence Crowell wrote: >>> >>> ... >>> This trend has galloped off into some sort of nonsense. Some of these >>> people are fairly well known, such as Dowkers, Wharton, Sorkin and Deutsch, >>> but they have all gone into some sort of fantasy land. It is too bad in a >>> way that Bohr is not still alive to shake his finger at these folks. It >>> appears that in some ways this is a case of Alan Ginsburg's *Howl*, >>> with "I have seen the best minds of this generation go mad." These ideas >>> are so patently wrong, that with a fairly basic even minimal argument based >>> on plain vanilla QM they can be seen as false. >>> >>> LC >>> >>> >>>> >>>> >> So *Fay Dowker *and *Rafael Sorkin * >> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fay_Dowker >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_Sorkin >> >> are now in fantasy land. >> >> You want to turn physics into a religious fundamentalist cult. >> >> @philipthrift >> > > Sorry, but there are trends in academia where people by virtue of their > position are able to promote nonsense. I think Jonathan Swift had a bit to > say with the the floating island of Laputia, which was a knock on academia. > > The problem with Dowker and her path integral ideas is the path integral > is a math method; it has no additional physical content. In fact in general > in the way it is written it has less content because it is expanded around > a classical extremum. QFT is much the same. QFT sets commutators of > observables with spacelike separations to zero, when quantum mechanics in > its pure setting tells us there is nonlocality and this condition is an > auxiliary postulate meant to ease calculations. String theory has some > "funnies" to it as well. The interesting thing about the holographic > principle with black holes is it tells us that quantum fields are > projections from fields near the horizon where Lorentz symmetry has these > quantum field in a time dilated and nonrelativistic QM form. In effect > plain vanilla QM, the stuff in Merzbacher or Cohen-Tannoudji etc is really > the fundamental stuff. > > Along these lines with fundamental physics, with exceptional group theory, > Leech lattice, and Jordan algebras etc, the theta representation of these > involve equations that in complex form are Schrodinger equations. In a > Euclideanized form they are heat equations with heat kernel solutions. When > applied to the integral representation of qubits on a stretched horizon it > does suggest that in some fancy way, say with relationships between > entanglements, causality and spacetime, the most fundamental theory of the > universe is just plain QM. > > I would strongly advise anyone to avoid ideas about hidden variables or in > this case ideas of advanced potentials that in ways "wire up" the > appearance of nonlocality with local rules. For various reasons these ideas > are not consistent with QM, and at the end of it all these ideas do not > produce QM as some derived result, but rather demolish it. > > LC >
So Dowker (professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London) is misguided and you are not. Who are you? The main idea of "Lost in Math" (Sabine Hossenfelder) addresses the fundamentalist mindset expressed above that traps many (she would know more how many, being around them) physicists. Better to consider Feyerabend and reject fundamentalist certainty. "All descriptions of reality are inadequate. You think that this one-day fly, this little bit of nothing, a human being--according to today's cosmology!--can figure it all out? This to me seems so crazy! It cannot possibly be true!" https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/was-philosopher-paul-feyerabend-really-science-s-worst-enemy/ @philipthrift -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/bdae7d6b-d632-4d0b-b8bb-5d251d5c530e%40googlegroups.com.
