Why is there so much crackpot physics?

[Reality Check]

Do we agree the existence of 4D is an assumption? I.e.: That it was inherited from ancient times and passed down within our math and theory, rather than derived from modern physics observations?

I think that no one will agree with "the existence of 4D is an assumption".
The existence of 3 dimensions of space is self-evident (from ancient times).
The existence of 1 dimension of time is self-evident (from less ancient times).
That there is a 4D space-time is derived from modern physics observations starting from the formation of Special Relativity to basically make the laws of physics (such as Maxwell's Laws) consistent in differnt frames of reference. Minkowski then pointed out that SR is based on a 4D space-time.

 

[Reality Check]

I use anomaly in the Kuhnian philosophy of science meaning, to refer to a spectrum of unexpected observations that range from stuff just outside what our theories were looking for, to things tha are generally regarded as impossible. Examples might include elliptical orbits, meteorites, the platypus, the x-ray, the expansion of the universe, etc.

Kuhnian anomalies are the observations that a current paradigm cannot explain. WHen you get enough of these anomalies then paradigms shift as they have in the past. See Paradigm shift.
Your examples are not anomalies because they are all explained observations that range from stuff inside what our theories predict to things that are generally regarded as possible.

P.S. Nice books - none of which suport your assertion of a lack of progress.
It is fact the opposite, e.g. if we assume that string theory has been shown to be useless then that is scientific progress !
Just like showing that phlogiston theory was wrong was scientific progress.

 

[Reality Check]

My assertion that physicists have claimed progress is being purchased by rejecting traditional "reality" was described as "nonsense" without evidence.

Your assertion is wrong.
Physicists have claimed progress is being purchased by looking at what really happens. What really happens is not what our "ape brains" thinks happens just because we have evolved to think that way. We look at a thrown rock and say that it has a known position and momentum. This is not true for an electron.

Do we agree a super-positioned cat 50% alive and 50% dead does not exist in traditional definitions of reality from either physics or philosophy of science?

Yes- duh!
It is a thought experiment. The cat does not actually exist even as 100% dead or 100% alive.

BurntSynapse: Do we agree a super-positioned photon 50% in one spin state and 50% in another spin state does exist in modern definitions of reality from either physics or philosophy of science?

 

[Reality Check]

Reliable rules for distinguishing science from pseudo-science are not within the purview of biology or astrology, they are in philosophy of science, except unlike repair manuals which mechanics are aware hold best practices for their work, books by Carnap or Bhaskar are not generally known or used.

Sort of right, BurntSynapse.
No one is saying that reliable rules for distinguishing science from pseudo-science are within the purview of biology or astrology.

Reliable rules for distinguishing science from pseudo-science are within the purview of reality. You ask pseudo-science the same questions that you ask in science and about scientific literature:

• Dies it match existing data?
• Does it make testable, falsifiable predictions?
• Do these predictions match existing data?
• What are the prospects of actually testing the predictions?
• Is the science self-consistent?
• Is the mathematics valid?
• Are the assumptions justified?
• etc.
• Has the science been peer-reviewed?
• Has the science been cited?
• Is this a single author paper (modern breakthoughts are rarely by single authors)?
• etc.

I regard reality as a thing that exists and operates quite well in its own way,
...
In such a paradigm, nature tells us nothing, ...

That is an idiotic and contridicting paradigm. You are saying that we cannot even rely on measurement, e.g. if I measure the distance between points A and B then this tells me nothing!
If "reality as a thing that exists and operates quite well in its own way" then we can measure it and nature tells us everything.

Your wishes do not mean anything. Physics research works regardless of how you want it to work. It workds through a good, (fairly!) clear rules and standards that feeds back into improving the quality and reliability of that practice.

Once again with the fantasy that string theory being wrong means that there is a lack of progress on science, BurntSynapse .

Showing that string theory was wrong would be be scientific progress.

However string theory is not wrong - it is just not progressed much beyond the mathementics. There are few credible predictions and these tend to be too broad to be useful.

 

[BurntSynapse]

One can certainly argue against apathy, though such an augment would need to be particularly compelling.

I don't believe can argue successfully against apathy unless they argue against something else, which is somewhat of a contradiction.

We could devise a clear, falsifiable test:

If anyone can convince me of any position they like, on any topic they like I would gratefully yield to them the victory with on camera honors in a vlog episode with some cool graphics or something equally worthy of their success.

I promise to be honest to the best of my ability, and the only restrictions on the topic are that it must be unrelated to anything I consider worth my time to consider. Fair?

Analysis of anything benefits from “rigorous definitions”. What “rigorous definitions” are not “expressed in specifically defined terms”?

Depending one's position, perhaps none. In the course however, the prof uses currently undefined terms in definitions and then unpacks the meaning of the definition by later defining those terms, and so on. In distinguishing between what should count as science or non-science, philosophers want to create criteria that clearly exclude astrology, but include astronomy. The road to doing that turned out to be harder than it sounds.

The only two assumptions that are needed are logical consistency (TRUE = NOT FALSE)

In the areas where only boolean logic is applicable, I agree, but when dealing with any measurements or observations UNKNOWN can typically occur. I think this is especially true in science, the domain in question. UNKNOWN is clearly NOT FALSE, but we wouldn't want to assign it TRUE, nor be forced to chuck our project or put it on hold for a result that may never come.

...and historical consistency (that events of the past can be predictive of events in the future). These may be the ‘rational’ and ‘comprehensive’ axioms you refer to above. It is specifically because they can’t be proven (within a “rationally comprehensive” system) or disproven (within an ‘irrational incomprehensible’ system) that they can only be taken as axioms. Indeed accepting them as axioms is for pragmatic reasons as asserting the universes is logically inconsistent (TRUE = NOT TRUE) and/or historically inconsistent (past events can’t be predictive of future events) has absolutely no use (except to crackpots).

LOL! Nice.

As while the former makes even the impossible possible the latter ensures none of it can have any predictive power in relation to future events.

The problem of course comes that by your own assertion of “objective reality” what dasmiller, you, I, Einstein, Steven Weinberg, Bayesian or philosophers like E.T. Jaynes think (or thought) or what they are (or were) apathetic about or not can’t change that “objective reality”.

This is true, but it does seem important to recognizing research that should not count as proper science. The categorization is different than the things we are categorizing as good science vs. pseudo-science.

So there is no reason not to be apathetic about it (unless you plan to make a career of it) as it can not change the predictive applicability of some theory and/or model. In fact having some preference for how “objective reality” appears to you can be quite detrimental in one’s ability to make such effective predictive models.

Absolutely. The problem is that we must have a structure to tell us what the world is, and while the benefits of our current structures we use are very easily perceived, the detrimental effects are incredibly hard to see until after we've adopted a different paradigm we consider superior.

This would explain why atheist skeptics converted from religion often clearly perceive advantages of a natural worldview and detrimental impacts of superstition, while believers' perceptions are largely opposite.

“some other compromised mindset”? Sure you don’t what to load that question more?

Oh, I do...

Unfortunately “Approach 2” seems to be exactly what you’re doing…

Well, obviously I don't think so, but if there's somewhere I am doing this, I honestly do want to know and correct it.

Rejecting interpretations based simply on what you profess to be your “core” “understanding of reality".

While I admit my understanding plays a crucial role in my reasoning, I don't think attributing the rejection to me is fair. This kind of rejection was being argued long before I was born, and I think both sides have merit.

Whether we actually have (at least) the three spatial dimensions we directly perceive or the third is just information encoded on some lower dimensional ‘brane’…

(url blocked)

…we may never know and if the two interpretations have the same predictive power one is entirely justified in being apathetic about which, if any, others might consider to be more realistic based simply on their expressed ‘core understanding of reality’.

Decisions are justified on the bases of available information, not the future unknown state of nature. Thus, purchasing a lottery ticket can be justified economically when the expected value reaches a positive value, like a $100M jackpot has accumulated, and $50M ticket will be sold for that draw.

Since we cannot know at the decision point (purchase) whether a ticket wins, appealing to a future unknown as a justification for doing anything would be a mistake.

This common error is one of the first we learn in graduate decision science: good decisions are not based on non-existent future outcomes, they are good/bad decisions based on how well we analyze available information at the decision point.

BTW - I tend to think very highly of the holographic principle you cited. Thanks for sharing it.

 

[smartcooky]

Just like showing that phlogiston theory was wrong was scientific progress.

Yep, I agree 100% with this

Discovering something that was previously wrong is still scientific progress, e.g. the replacement of deferents, epicycles and equants with elliptical orbits by Kepler

Sometimes, a theory isn't necessarily wrong, it just doesn't sufficiently explain what we see observationally. A great example of this is the so-called intra-Mercurial planet, named Vulcan.

Inconsistencies in the orbit of Mercury seemed to indicate that an undiscovered planet existed closer to the Sun, but when they applied Newtonian gravitational theory, they were unable to see a planet in the place it should have been.

Eventually, astronomers were able to show that the inconsistencies were caused by the relativistic effects of Mercury orbiting in the immense gravitational field of the Sun. This doesn't mean that Newtonian theory was wrong... it was in fact used successfully by Urbain LeVerrier to discover Neptune from unexplained perturbations of the orbit of Uranus.

 

[ben m]

This is my reading of an assumption upon which the Quantum Universe Committee based their report.

Let's start with that. First of all, I'm good friends and frequent collaborators with one member of that committee; I've taken another to dinner, applied to grad school to work with a third (but went elsewhere), have casual conference-coffee-hour-level acquaintanceship with two or three more, and of have read papers by most.

Let me be absolutely clear: nothing in that report is talking about "what underlies quantum uncertainty" or whatever. This report, and all of its authors as far as I know, take the 100%-mainstream-physics view of quantum uncertainty, i.e. the view you're criticizing.

I have no idea what part of it you think speaks to the copenhagen/many-worlds/etc. interpretations. Maybe you misunderstood something, but you've certainly got the wrong end of the stick. This is a report, written by people who believe in (or are unconcerned with) the usual quantum interpretations; it's a report about searches for "ordinary" new physics, which is expected to obey the same basic QM laws as regular physics.

If I read you correctly, I see a problem: its that the rules for reliable science lie outside the science itself the same way the rules for car repair are developed outside the local repair shop where repairs actually occur.

I don't think that's what I said.

I would say that I really want physics research to work more like project management and car repair research, where development of good, clear rules and standards feeds back into improving the quality and reliability of that practice, and can serve as the basis for testing and further imlater

What makes you think it doesn't? Physics is funded by central bodies like the DOE and NSF, who are strapped for cash and consequently prioritizing and managing in a very modern way. In 2013 we're in the middle of a "Snowmass process" which is part of the community-feedback aspect of this management.

You seem to have translated your personal outcome preference---"no one has killed off the Many Worlds interpretation yet"---into a process criticism---"... so it's obvious that the management screwed up since obviously this should be worked on." It was worked on, a half-century ago. A very clear picture emerged, this picture appears correct, and there's very little expectation that it will change.

"Not Even Wrong shows that what many physicists call superstring “theory” is not a theory at all. It makes no predictions, not even wrong ones, and this very lack of falsifiability is what has allowed the subject to survive and flourish. Peter Woit explains why the mathematical conditions for progress in physics are entirely absent from superstring theory today..."

String theory is one of many modern-day speculations about particle physics unification. String theory, non-string loop quantum gravity, and all of the alternatives, are all in exactly precisely the same place with respect to "quantum reality". String theory was not intended to "fix" that. String theory's critics do not intend to fix that. It's completely orthogonal. Strings, if they're real, have wavefunctions which collapse nonlocally when observed. E(6) gravitons, were they real, would have had wavefunctions which collapse nonlocally when observed. If you don't like quantum weirdness, Woit should be no comfort to you. (Nor should he be to anyone.)

 

[Farsight]

BurntSynapse: Hi Buck. I watched the video. I don't know if anybody mentioned my background, but I'm essentially an IT project manager. How can I assist?

Can I say in passing that 100 years is way too long. The deliverable is beyond the lifetime of the participants. The project needs to be broken down into subprojects, starting with manned spaceflight. The sort that doesn't use rockets but does offer "Mars in weeks". The sort of thing that allows me to say this:

Wanna take a ride?

 

[BurntSynapse]

I think that no one will agree with "the existence of 4D is an assumption".
The existence of 3 dimensions of space is self-evident (from ancient times).
The existence of 1 dimension of time is self-evident (from less ancient times).
That there is a 4D space-time is derived from modern physics observations starting from the formation of Special Relativity to basically make the laws of physics (such as Maxwell's Laws) consistent in differnt frames of reference. Minkowski then pointed out that SR is based on a 4D space-time.

With the reference to ancient times, I suspect "self-evident" is being used in the informal sense, rather than the philosophy of science sense (wikipedia: self-evidence). It seems to me we inherited this concept from ancients like Euclid's formulation, rather than In the strict epistemological sense.

I think we are more likely to reach inaccurate conclusions in this kind of analysis when we claim a mental interpretation of sense perceptions is actually real, which we clearly see with paradigms we no longer believe. Examples include geocentrism, where celestial motion was self-evident (informal use), or alien abduction / out of body / afterlife explanations are taken as real because the claimant's frontal lobes interpreted incoming stimulus this way.

We cannot escape some paradigm if we are to make sense of the world, and ignoring this seems to add unjustified risk.

I propose we can better manage inherent risk from paradigms by making risk indicators easier to identify, detect, and monitor by acknowledging that the space and time are concepts, and we should be alert for indication they could be generated observations just like celestial motion.

This proposal appears to offer better accuracy and precision, enables better risk control, and facilitates updating our paradigms for research dealing with such concepts. This seems better than defining concepts with a hand-wave and the term "fundamental quantity" (which seems to mean: "shut up and don't ask any more questions").

 

[godless dave]

I use anomaly in the Kuhnian philosophy of science meaning, to refer to a spectrum of unexpected observations that range from stuff just outside what our theories were looking for, to things tha are generally regarded as impossible. Examples might include elliptical orbits, <b>meteorites, the platypus, the x-ray,</b> the expansion of the universe, etc.

WTH?

I'm not aware of any way that meteorites, platypuses*, or x-rays as being unexpected observations that could be called anomalies under any definition.



*or platypods

 

[BurntSynapse]

Kuhnian anomalies are the observations that a current paradigm cannot explain. WHen you get enough of these anomalies then paradigms shift as they have in the past. See Paradigm shift.
Your examples are not anomalies because they are all explained observations that range from stuff inside what our theories predict to things that are generally regarded as possible.

Good point. I didn't make clear that I was referring to things regarded as impossible by previous paradigms going back hundreds of years. At the time those previous paradigms (with flaws we easily recognize now) frequently more explained away anomalies rather than explain them. In hindsight, we now see major clues that should have been treated differently, but scientists they weren't really on the lookout for evidence of flawed assumptions in their paradigms. In project management, watching for signs of incorrect assumptions is a core activity in risk management, and to the degree science is a system for delivering information, the activity is a good practice.

Your criticism of my examples is correct from "our theories", but from paradigms people had earlier, those examples hold. Take cosmologies with crystal spheres for example: elliptical orbits (e.g.f comets) are impossible because they have had to shatter the celestial glass orbs. Meteorites were plausibly explained in pre-revolutionary France as the rantings of uneducated, superstitious peasants committing post hoc ergo prompter hoc fallacy. To be read with a Clouseau accent: "Sem dufice sah a shooteng stah thet append tew bay een zay deracshon of whea ee latah sah en unusual stohn. Zen ee niayvlee leenkt zem een eez mahnd."

The platypus was explained as a hoax that might have been meant as a joke by naturalists who'd been at sea too long, and so on. These are in a way, explanations, just not very good ones by today's standards.

I agree with James Burke on his idea: that we should realize that we are in the same boat, and should apply as much of what we can learn from this to our own scientific structures.

P.S. Nice books - none of which support your assertion of a lack of progress.
It is fact the opposite, e.g. if we assume that string theory has been shown to be useless then that is scientific progress !
Just like showing that phlogiston theory was wrong was scientific progress.

Damn! Another good point, which I admittedly ignored. From a perspective of the scientific body of knowledge, negative results are a net gain to humanity, and we can fairly include that in the term "progress". On the other hand, from the perspective of successfully delivering a well functioning information system which solves the 9 major mysteries listed in the quantum universe committee report, this would be considered an unmanaged, failing effort.

 

[ben m]

I propose we can better manage inherent risk from paradigms by making risk indicators easier to identify, detect, and monitor by acknowledging that the space and time are concepts, and we should be alert for indication they could be generated observations just like celestial motion.

You're probably underestimating of how strongly modern physicists are eager to break paradigms. It's what people do. Experimentalists are eagerly looking for breaks in the Standard Model, and moreover looking for new places to look for breaks. Theorists are looking for new ways of describing the underlying physics---that's where left-field ideas like entropic gravity came from. You see, in high-energy physics and cosmology, the "current paradigm" has been around for so long that there's not too much Kuhnian detail-work left. The entire business is devoted to finding the next thing, whatever it is. What do you think particle physicists do all day?

Do we fill in the details of a widely-accepted string theory, assuming that its "anomalies" will get cleaned up by further detail work? No---there is no widely-accepted string theory. There's a vast category of possible theories, and people are trying to develop mathematical tools for (among other things) winnowing out false ones.

Do we run the LHC just to "clean up" a few "anomalies" in the Standard Model of elementary particles, which is of course going to be proven right eventually? No, the anomalies are supposed to break the model. (The discovery of a "normal"-looking Higgs---which cleans up the Standard Model and *closes off* an obvious route for discovering the next thing---was a huge disappointment to many.) The model is known to break, we need to chase down the anomalies to give us some direction on where it's broken. There's a whole intra-LHC-industry discussing what new-physics signatures the experimentalists might look for, and actually looking for it.

Does Anton Zeilinger's lab keep doing quantum-information experiments just for the fun of it? No, he does it because he hopes one of the experiments---pushing into a corner of Schrodinger that hadn't been pushed before---will disagree with the usual physics and point the way to something new. Why are Tegmark and Aaronson writing about digital universes and multiverses?

What did *you* think was going on? You should read less Woit and Smolin and more of that Quantum Universe whitepaper that describes what physicists are actually doing.

 

[BurntSynapse]

Your assertion is wrong.
Physicists have claimed progress is being purchased by looking at what really happens.

Of course some physicists have claimed this, and unless they were linking that with some clearly questionable conclusion, we and most everyone would all agree.

However, I don't see how the fact that physicists (including Peter Woit and Lee Smolin) agree that progress is purchased this way would invalidate their claims that in specific areas, research has departed from the realm of testable hypotheses, which I think we all agree is bad.

I'm not saying our physics isn't the most awesome in the history of history...it is. I'm asserting with evidence that credible reports of problems exist.

Specific evidence that this claim exists is its presentation in the Woit paper "Quantum Field Theory and Representation Theory: A Sketch".

What really happens is not what our "ape brains" thinks happens just because we have evolved to think that way. We look at a thrown rock and say that it has a known position and momentum. This is not true for an electron.[/QUOTE}
I agree. So why should we not apply the same logic to space & time? I think we are well served to reject the idea that they are real just because our ape brains happened to evolve to think they are?

Perhaps they are fundamental, but until there's evidence in support of that, it seems prudent to document the assumption as one and watch for errors or indications universal reality doesn't conform to our ape vision.

 

[BurntSynapse]

...That is an idiotic and contridicting paradigm. You are saying that we cannot even rely on measurement, e.g. if I measure the distance between points A and B then this tells me nothing!

If "reality as a thing that exists and operates quite well in its own way" then we can measure it and nature tells us everything.

Again, from a certain perspective your criticism seems defensible, but I'm not sure what we gain by taking this chain of concepts and grouping them. Does it purchase us more effective analysis than the view that our interpretation of measurement is what informs us?

It seems dicey to pin down claim nature told anyone Ptolemy was wrong except metaphorically. It is relatively easy for me to see the gradual discovery of heliocentrism by analysis done by investigators using measured observations over hundreds of years. These are events that we can document and pin down to specific points in their letters and journals. I like that having that kind of pinpoint precision available when we need it.

I can imagine there exist situations where the metaphor of nature talking to people and telling us things is more effective for communicating inspirational ideas, motivational content, or poetic messages.

 

[ben m]

Here's the problem, I think:

I agree. So why should we not apply the same logic to space & time? I think we are well served to reject the idea that they are real just because our ape brains happened to evolve to think they are?

You're not approaching this as a disinterested project manager, spotting an authentic management problem, are you? I don't think you know enough about how physics is "managed" (the long-range planning, project prioritization, and peer-review processes) to be able to identify problems, if any, with the system.

You're approaching this as someone who wants a specific different outcome, like Woit and Smolin do; if you had the expertise to do so without becoming a crackpot, you'd advocate for those outcomes specifically. I think that your attempt to comment on physics "management" is a sideways attempt to complain about the details. "Whatever the management is, it hasn't resulted in the details I like, so the management must be wrong somehow."

Maybe I'm mistaken, but that's how I read it.

For an analogy, imagine if Edward Tufte were a fan of cold fusion. "I'm an expert on the visual display of quantitative information. Look at this anti-cold-fusion graph, claimed to suggest that cold fusion is impossible. But cold fusion is well-known; NASA is commercializing it soon! I think there are serious graphic-design issues in the anti-cold-fusion community. Perhaps certain graphs are being misdesigned---I'm an expert on this by the way---in a way that obscures the truth behind the data."

 

[BurntSynapse]

Let's start with that. First of all, I'm good friends and frequent collaborators with one member of that committee; I've taken another to dinner, applied to grad school to work with a third (but went elsewhere), have casual conference-coffee-hour-level acquaintanceship with two or three more, and of have read papers by most.

That's cool.

Let me be absolutely clear: nothing in that report is talking about "what underlies quantum uncertainty" or whatever.

OK, you made yourself absolutely clear this report says nothing about a topic no one has raised AFAIK, nor does the report have anything to do with "whatever". I don't understand either of these points, but perhaps they derive from my poor communication from above, e.g.: where I should have said "from the view of a 600 year old paradigm containing celestial spheres", etc., but didn't...misleading readers badly.

This report, and all of its authors as far as I know, take the 100%-mainstream-physics view of quantum uncertainty, i.e. the view you're criticizing.

I have no idea what part of it you think speaks to the copenhagen/many-worlds/etc. interpretations. Maybe you misunderstood something, but you've certainly got the wrong end of the stick. This is a report, written by people who believe in (or are unconcerned with) the usual quantum interpretations; it's a report about searches for "ordinary" new physics, which is expected to obey the same basic QM laws as regular physics.

Again: The existence of discussion of "ordinary" (Kuhnian "normal science") in the report does not invalidate that the report also explicitly emphasizes the historically valuable role of "revolutionary insights into the nature of the world around us", new and "profound understanding of the fundamental particles and the physical laws", "experimental and theoretical breakthroughs", and the certainty of an upcoming "revolution in particle physics as dramatic as any that have come before". If that's "believing in usual interpretations" by people not predicting revolutionary change, I'm satisfied to agree to disagree unless something more compelling to go on is provided.

What makes you think it doesn't? Physics is funded by central bodies like the DOE and NSF, who are strapped for cash and consequently prioritizing and managing in a very modern way. In 2013 we're in the middle of a "Snowmass process" which is part of the community-feedback aspect of this management.

Interviews with current and former members of the board, members of the team that worked on NSB 07-032 (in current numbering system), and PRP leads. Reports indicated that in the rare instances where philosophers of science were included, they were...well I can't remember if "ignored" was used, but it's close enough to be how I'd describe it.

You seem to have translated your personal outcome preference---"no one has killed off the Many Worlds interpretation yet"---into a process criticism---"...

In that case, I've led you astray again. My personal preference is that researchers find out what space and time are in sufficient detail so we can identify potential loopholes to get from A to B, circumventing the intervening distance.

If FTL will be possible in the future, those who develop it will have information systems that differ from ours in ways we cannot know precisely, but about which I do believe we can infer a number of general attributes, and that project management best practices can help limit the risk of research efforts better than they have in the past.

It was worked on, a half-century ago. A very clear picture emerged, this picture appears correct, and there's very little expectation that it will change.

In their executive summary, your friends say: "The Standard Model’s orderly and elegant view of the universe must be incorporated into a deeper theory that can explain the new phenomena."

If that means "very little expectation that it will change" to you, we will have to agree to disagree.

 

[BurntSynapse]

Here's the problem, I think:
You're not approaching this as a disinterested project manager, spotting an authentic management problem, are you?

No...I'm an interested project manager who spotted an authentic management problem regarding information system development.

But even if I were Lucifer, Woit were Chaos, and Penrose were an orangutang, it would have no bearing on why ape brain naivete is valid to reject when it supports your claim, but not when such rejection might support a claim to which you object. Can you explain?

 

[Perpetual Student]

This discussion is consistent with my view that a great deal of crackpot physics is a consequence of laypeople attempting to force an intuitive interpretation where either an individual's knowledge and training are inadequate or human intuition generally fails. I believe we deceive ourselves that, for example, F=ma is somehow more intuitive than, say, the Dirac equation. Why is F=ma intuitive? Why not f=ma^3/2? We know that F=ma is consistent with experiments, but if experiments demonstrated that F=ma^3/2, would we be perplexed and seeking a deeper reality to explain it why it's not F=ma?
The mathematics of experimentally confirmed physics provides the language and is the model that reflects and describes reality. We have nothing more.

 

[Farsight]

BurntSynapse: there are some very misleading comments on this thread. The Copernican revolution took a hundred and fifty years. Some physicists fight tooth and nail to cling to "paradigm", particularly those with a reputation to preserve. Others promote unscientific theories that are deliberately crafted so that they can never be disproven. Meanwhile others doing excellent work struggle to achieve journal publication and follow-on publicity, particularly if this solves a mystery which is deliberately used to intrigue the public. It is not some noble enterprise, that's just a mask, and sometimes the mask slips. Physics has always been like this. For example see page 53 of Graham Farmelo's The Strangest Man which refers to 1923:

"At that time, Cunningham and Eddington were streets ahead of the majority of their Cambridge colleagues, who dismissed Einstein's work, ignored it, or denied its significance".

Also see the History of General Relativity on wikipedia:

"Kip Thorne identifies the "golden age of general relativity" as the period roughly from 1960 to 1975 during which the study of general relativity,[18] which had previously been regarded as something of a curiosity, entered the mainstream of theoretical physics."

A respected text is The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment by Clifford M Will. See page 6:

"Although special relativity itself never benefited from the kind of “crucial” experiments, such as the perihelion advance of Mercury and the deflection of light, that contributed so much to the initial acceptance of GR and to the fame of Einstein, the steady accumulation of experimental support, together with the successful merger of special relativity with quantum mechanics, led to its being accepted by mainstream physicists by the late 1920s, ultimately to become part of the standard toolkit of every working physicist."

You should agree to differ with ben m, because he is not being honest with you. And as I said in post #1168, how can I assist? Would you like me to say something about those nine mysteries?

 

[Kwalish Kid]

BurntSynapse: Farisght is also being misleading. He represents himself as a master of physics, but he doesn't actually know any physics. He presents himself as a master of Einstein's gravitational theories, but by his own admission he has never worked through any of the mathematics of Einstein's work on gravitation. And he will never, ever, answer a direct question that asks him to provide the details in physics that support his claims.