Anastasia

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Anastasia

Anastasia

@demystifysci

secretary of nature | collector of theories | a certain flavor of elephant feeler | https://t.co/iK6lkXWJUp

Katılım Şubat 2020
1.4K Takip Edilen8.4K Takipçiler
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Anastasia
Anastasia@demystifysci·
Can We Know Anything For Sure? We sit down with James Ellias of @Inductica to ask whether physics can ever truly prove anything. James pulls the inductive method out of the margins and holds it up against a century of guess-and-check, and together we trace the line from Newton's bucket to the cosmic microwave background so that we can ask where confidence becomes dogma and where models start passing for truth. Bodies, waves, ether, entities, the categories blur the moment you press hard enough, and the foundations of physics start to feel less like bedrock and more like habit. This is a conversation about what it means to be certain, and wether or not physics can ever claim such conviction for itself. 00:00 Go! 00:05:11 Can Physics Actually Prove Anything? 00:10:30 The Ninja Problem in Scientific Reasoning 00:15:10 Cosmic Microwave Background and Misplaced Certainty 00:36:31 Paradigm Shifts and the Limits of Prediction 00:50:46 Descriptions Aren't Mechanisms 01:00:01 What Counts as a Physical Entity? 01:17:37 Bodies, Waves, and the Trouble with Categories 01:32:21 Can Physics Work Without Bodies? 01:52:28 Definitions, Language, and Conceptual Rigor 02:09:02 Beyond Guess-and-Check: Structured Inference 02:23:17 Belief and the Illusion of Certainty
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Anastasia
Anastasia@demystifysci·
@BennoList man they're letting anyone into high energy physics these days, huh
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Anastasia
Anastasia@demystifysci·
Nobody wants to believe Einstein's theory doesn't make sense
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Anastasia
Anastasia@demystifysci·
@BennoList the origin of the equivalence principle is a philosophical discussion as much as the existence of atoms was in the 1700s - and cannot be resolved without a material substrate for fundamental physics
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Benno List
Benno List@BennoList·
@demystifysci No I can’t. The origin of the equivalence principle is certainly an interesting topic for philosophical discussions. So what is the „material substrate“ supposed to mean?
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Anastasia
Anastasia@demystifysci·
@HillsJah nooooo there's single sentences at the tops of pages!!
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Anastasia
Anastasia@demystifysci·
playing "whoops" with the manuscript - paging through it until i find a mistake then fixing it and starting from the top again. so close
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Anastasia
Anastasia@demystifysci·
@BennoList ok. can you explain why inertial mass and gravitational mass are equivalent?
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Benno List
Benno List@BennoList·
@demystifysci I think there’s a problem with a sentence like „The problem is that it’s exclusively relational without having any material substrate upon which these dynamics are playing out.“ Care to explain what kind of material substrate this guy, whoever he his, expects and why it’s needed?
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Anastasia
Anastasia@demystifysci·
@BennoList I mean, yes? again, i don't think there's any problem with the math
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Benno List
Benno List@BennoList·
@demystifysci Do you understand the math? Do you understand the reasoning that lead Einstein to this theory? Einstein, more than almost anybody, was a master in developing seemingly simple, intuitive pictures (flash light in a train, the Einstein lift) and walking us through the consequences.
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Anastasia
Anastasia@demystifysci·
@DorinCheptea uhhh no? we took the math and pointed out that it appears to be telling a story about materials in motion
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Dorin Cheptea
Dorin Cheptea@DorinCheptea·
@demystifysci "Material model"? You mean your are so bad at mathematics that you invented some woodoo sorcery instead?
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Anastasia
Anastasia@demystifysci·
@steveinpursuit seeking a material foundation for the mathematics just got to be really uncool. feels like the full arc of how that happened is gonna take a lifetime to unravel
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Steve Patterson
Steve Patterson@steveinpursuit·
That was the first domino, at least. Then you've got the development of the Vienna circle, which also made fashionable the idea that pure conceptual analysis is dumb and cannot yield truth--a priori truths became "mere tautologies", etc. So in a span of, say, 80 years, we went from "truth-seeking is good and possible" to: No true knowledge in math ("axioms" are merely starting points; nothing is self-evident; no system is consistent and complete) No true knowledge in physics (reality is not in a state outside of measurement;) No true knowledge in philosophy (everything is an empirical claim or a meaningless tautology) This happened, from what I can tell, from roughly 1870-1950 (a time span in which there were other massive paradigm shifts in other domains too, two world wars, electrification, communism, etc). Peak revolutionary period in which the notion of "truth" got destroyed.
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Anastasia
Anastasia@demystifysci·
it seems like everyone - from the knuckle draggers to the pinky out crowd - believes that while the world *seems* rational, there is a scale at which nothing can ever be understood. They believe this because the smartest people in the world said it was so. What is going on??
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Anastasia
Anastasia@demystifysci·
@BennoList who said anything about attacking it? All I'm saying is that the super accurate math doesn't explain the underlying cause of the phenomenon
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Benno List
Benno List@BennoList·
@demystifysci So, microbiologists attack general relativity because they don’t understand it. I that a problem for general relativity? I think not.
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Will Kinney
Will Kinney@WKCosmo·
@demystifysci @skdh If what you mean by "material bodies" is little immutable billiard balls or bean bags or something, then yeah. That's not how any of this works.
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Anastasia
Anastasia@demystifysci·
@WKCosmo @skdh it's not even wrong that a physical explanation should concern the actions of material bodies?
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Daniel Whiteson
Daniel Whiteson@DanielWhiteson·
@demystifysci This is a silly strawman. There is a scale at which things are not NOW understood and no guarantee it will be. Not the same as “can never be” and I suspect you know the difference.
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Anastasia
Anastasia@demystifysci·
@Stoic_David I don't want to make them mad! I want us all to get along why does it have to be like this
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Anastasia
Anastasia@demystifysci·
@AbhishekSachan3 my whole point is that a material interpretation of quantum physics is supported by all the evidence available
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Abhishek Sachan
Abhishek Sachan@AbhishekSachan3·
@demystifysci “I am so attached to my personal notions of how the world should work that I’m unwilling to drop them even on the face of evidence because it threatens my identity.”
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Anastasia
Anastasia@demystifysci·
"everyone has told me the world doesn't make sense for so long that it has become a central pillar of my identity"
Abhishek Sachan@AbhishekSachan3

If by "sensical narrative" here is meant "commonsense"/psychological familiarity, then let me remind you of a fact which everybody knows but seems to ignore by falling prey to ego's tricks to feel superior to nature- our commonsense (a set of patterns/intuitions about the external reality which we have captured through repeated exposure and experience with it, which is passed on from generation to generation apart from being encoded in our biology) is a function of our evolution history which has constrained our relationship with the external reality to be sensetive to only certain length, energy and time scale; anything outside this scale is just viscerally foreign to us if we view it through our limited window of commonsense given to us by evolution. Just because some truth of nature is not contained in this limited commonsense window, doesn't mean it's non-existent. Perhaps, if our planet were near a star with much more gravity, we would have evolved to develop a commonsense for gravitational time dilation if it were crucial to our survival historically- just for a thought experiment. Since we are blinded by this evolution-dependent window, we are forced to probe the physical reality using mathematics and experiments to discover truths about objective reality and document them in a consistent language (which also allows us accurate prediction), and gradually expand our window of commonsense to include them (but nonetheless, these truths which lie outside the realm of the visceral length, time and energy scales we are perceptive to, will feel foreign to us if we weigh them only psychologically.....whenever that happens we have to remind ourself that nature is not limited to the visceral domain of our senses which we happen to posses, it's much broader and deeper... but its still beautiful that we can have glimpses outside this limited domain through the scientific method which gives us kind of extended senses- non-visceral but true nonetheless)

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Dorin Cheptea
Dorin Cheptea@DorinCheptea·
@demystifysci Physics is entirely about fitting the experimental and observational data. Period. Read the article, it is very good, talks about exactly your kind of pitfall: being in love the an idea, "material bodies" in your case.
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JKNMurph
JKNMurph@JKNMurph·
@demystifysci Are these "statically defined bodies" in the room with us now?
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Anastasia
Anastasia@demystifysci·
Critically defining "physical" for physics
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Anastasia
Anastasia@demystifysci·
@shayes717 what kinds of things do you think are impossible to know?
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Sean Hayes
Sean Hayes@shayes717·
@demystifysci I think there are 100% things impossible to know because of our biology. And there are 100% things we certainly we know. The problem is people are not engaging with the mysteries properly, not that there are mysteries. You couldn’t do science if there wasn’t mysteries.
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