Hossenfelder: Physics is still in crisis

An interesting position coming from a dyed-in-the-wool physicalist:

An interesting position coming from a dyed-in-the-wool physicalist:

Sabine Hossenfelder (from her blog):

"In the foundations of physics, we have not seen progress since the mid 1970s when the standard model of particle physics was completed. Ever since then, the theories we use to describe observations have remained unchanged. Sure, some aspects of these theories have only been experimentally confirmed later. The last to-be-confirmed particle was the Higgs-boson, predicted in the 1960s, measured in 2012. But all shortcomings of these theories – the lacking quantization of gravity, dark matter, the quantum measurement problem, and more – have been known for more than 80 years. And they are as unsolved today as they were then…

Instead of examining the way that they propose hypotheses and revising their methods, theoretical physicists have developed a habit of putting forward entirely baseless speculations. Over and over again I have heard them justifying their mindless production of mathematical fiction as “healthy speculation” – entirely ignoring that this type of speculation has demonstrably not worked for decades and continues to not work. There is nothing healthy about this. It’s sick science. And, embarrassingly enough, that’s plain to see for everyone who does not work in the field.

This behavior is based on the hopelessly naïve, not to mention ill-informed, belief that science always progresses somehow, and that sooner or later certainly someone will stumble over something interesting. But even if that happened – even if someone found a piece of the puzzle – at this point we wouldn’t notice, because today any drop of genuine theoretical progress would drown in an ocean of “healthy speculation”."

This so-called "healthy speculation simply isn't science, since notions of multiverses (in particular) simply can't be subject to experimental observational confirmation. They are simply ideas fueled by (in this case) the strong desire to materialistically or naturalistically explain Fine Tuning.

It's not just Sabine Hossenfelder that is alarmed over the state of physics. Roger Penrose:    

"It’s not a uncommon thing in popular descriptions of science to latch onto some idea, particularly things to do with string theory, which have absolutely no support from observations.,,, They are very far from any kind of observational (testability). Yes, they (the ideas of M-theory) are hardly science.”

Hossenfelder restates her frustration with the current state of physics in this way (also from her blog):

"Over and over again I have heard them justifying their mindless production of mathematical fiction as “healthy speculation” – entirely ignoring that this type of speculation has demonstrably not worked for decades and continues to not work.

Simply put, it you cannot prove that your ‘mathematical speculations’ are connected to the real world in some meaningful way through empirical observation then you might as well be writing fantasy novels.

Moreover, it is not as if the current mathematical theories that we have are disagreeing with empirical observation, (in fact the (current dominant) theories are empirically confirmed to be true to almost absurd levels of precision), it is, first and foremost, that the current mathematical theories that we have, namely quantum mechanics and general relativity, simply refuse to be mathematically unified with each other into a quote/unquote ‘theory of everything’ in any acceptable way."

There appears to be an impenetrable, even a mathematically infinite, barrier that prevents theoretical physicists from ever realizing their dream of a truly plausible and scientific single overarching mathematical theory of everything.

Physicists will never admit that such a barrier may have its origin in the imponderable mystery of a supremely intelligent and powerful creator of the system who would have no limitations in setting up the system, including setting it up with built-in mathematical barriers such as incalculable asymptotic infinities. Of course the original founders of science such as Isaac Newton and Michael Faraday would have had no such trouble. If we rightly allowed the agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics. But of course, total materialism or naturalism is too thoroughly dominant a paradigm for this to happen in the foreseeable future. Hossenfelder herself carefully shies away from even a hint of such a recourse.

I'm no physicist but wouldn't it be true to say that many great theories started with "beautiful maths" and ended up being accepted? Or, at least, some notion in the mind of a physicist that led to working out the maths and then to empirical observation? I thought that was the way of things. 

It seems to me that the problem is that physicists these days are constrained by the physicalist ideology and that speculation of the sort that led Einstein and Bohr to their theories is just not tolerated in the academic system. Perhaps it is a consequence of the peer review system where the peers themselves are lacking imagination?

I'm no physicist but wouldn't it be true to say that many great theories started with "beautiful maths" and ended up being accepted? Or, at least, some notion in the mind of a physicist that led to working out the maths and then to empirical observation? I thought that was the way of things. 

It seems to me that the problem is that physicists these days are constrained by the physicalist ideology and that speculation of the sort that led Einstein and Bohr to their theories is just not tolerated in the academic system. Perhaps it is a consequence of the peer review system where the peers themselves are lacking imagination?

I think it is also partly due to all the "low hanging fruit" having been already picked by the great theoretical physicists of the past. That is, what is still to be discovered may be beyond the capacity of human intellect to comprehend, simply beyond the grasp of our greatest minds. 

Another possibility would be that there simply are no higher, more comprehensive all-encompassing mathematical structures for theoretical physics yet to be discovered. There is no reason why the mathematical structure of reality can't have a limit. A limit that we've reached, set by the agent creativity of whatever intelligence built the system.

After all, there is no particular reason why mathematical formulations have to underlie physical reality at all, much less ones that just happen to be not only humanly discoverable and comprehensible but also beautiful and elegant. This has been recognized as being truly extraordinary. Why not a reality that has no mathematical structure at all? Of course, such a reality presumably could not contain intelligent beings anything like ourselves.

I think it is also partly due to all the "low hanging fruit" having been already picked by the great theoretical physicists of the past. That is, what is still to be discovered may be beyond the capacity of human intellect to comprehend, simply beyond the grasp of our greatest minds. 

Another possibility would be that there simply are no higher, more comprehensive all-encompassing mathematical structures for theoretical physics yet to be discovered. There is no reason why the mathematical structure of reality can't have a limit. A limit that we've reached, set by the agent creativity of whatever intelligence built the system.

After all, there is no particular reason why mathematical formulations have to underlie physical reality at all, much less ones that just happen to be not only humanly discoverable and comprehensible but also beautiful and elegant. This has been recognized as being truly extraordinary. Why not a reality that has no mathematical structure at all? Of course, such a reality presumably could not contain intelligent beings anything like ourselves.

I'm not sure I would class relativity or quantum mechanics as "low hanging fruit" but what I do suspect is that those two great theories pointed the way for physics (and science in general) and that the materialist scientists didn't like that direction. People like Schrödinger, Heisenberg and Pauli (with his collaboration with Jung) started to see the similarities between their discoveries and things that the mystics and spiritual teachers had been saying for millennia. Einstein was a physical realist and couldn't stomach the emerging metaphysics so he spent the rest of his life trying to reconcile the science with his realism. It seems that he failed to do so.

On the subject of beautiful maths, I find it entirely consistent with my own worldview that the mathematical framework for our reality should be so exquisitely elegant. Again, I think that it may be that there are indications in the equations that have caused the physicists to reject them and try to make something work which is more in-keeping with their ideological bias. Yet there are scientists like Donald Hoffman who says things like this:

The neuroscientists are saying, “We don’t need to invoke those kind of quantum processes, we don’t need quantum wave functions collapsing inside neurons, we can just use classical physics to describe processes in the brain.” I’m emphasizing the larger lesson of quantum mechanics: Neurons, brains, space … these are just symbols we use, they’re not real. It’s not that there’s a classical brain that does some quantum magic. It’s that there’s no brain! Quantum mechanics says that classical objects — including brains — don’t exist. So this is a far more radical claim about the nature of reality and does not involve the brain pulling off some tricky quantum computation. So even Penrose hasn’t taken it far enough. But most of us, you know, we’re born realists. We’re born physicalists. This is a really, really hard one to let go of.

Einstein was a physical realist and couldn't stomach the emerging metaphysics so he spent the rest of his life trying to reconcile the science with his realism. It seems that he failed to do so.

Einstein was a proponent though, at least as far as Psi is concerned?

edit:

He wrote the introduction for Upton Sinclair's (of The Jungle fame) book on telepathy, Mental Radio.

JL have read the book of Upton Sinclair with great interest and am convinced that the same deserves the most earnest consideration, not only of the laity, but also of the psychologists by
profession. The results of the telepathic experiments carefully and plainly set forth in this book stand surely far beyond those which a nature investigator holds to be thinkable. On the other hand, it is out of the question in the case of so conscientious an observer and writer as Upton Sinclair that he is carrying on a conscious deception of the reading world; his good faith and dependability are not to be doubted. So if somehow the facts here set forth rest not upon telepathy, but upon some unconscious hypnotic influence from person to person, this also would be of high psychological interest. In no case should the psychologically interested circles pass over this book heedlessly.

[signed] A. EINSTEIN

More on this can be found in this article ->

Albert Einstein Endorsed a Popular Psychic in 1932. This Is the Controversy that Ensued

Einstein was a proponent though, at least as far as Psi is concerned?

edit:

He wrote the introduction for Upton Sinclair's (of The Jungle fame) book on telepathy, Mental Radio.

More on this can be found in this article ->

Albert Einstein Endorsed a Popular Psychic in 1932. This Is the Controversy that Ensued

Einstein is one of those few universally respected figures whom everyone wants to claim as a supporter of their particular worldview. The fact that he liberally sprinkled his comments with the word God caused many to claim him as devoutly religious even though he was not. He was not a practicing Jew as is made clear by one of his written comments:

For me the unadulterated Jewish religion is, like all other religions, an incarnation of primitive superstition.

Likewise, atheists have loudly proclaimed him as one of their own after Einstein made comments like this:

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.

But they carefully disregard that fact that his disdain for atheism as at least as strong as that for religion.

I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist, I believe in Spinoza’s God ...

Walter Isaacson recounts, in his book "Einstein: His Life and Universe", that Einstein was upset by the fact that atheists had claimed his support:

It made the great man furious to be used in support of atheism: “There are people who say there is no God,” he told a friend. “But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views.”

So it comes as no surprise to see that proponents of psi (as many of us are here) also claim Einstein as a supporter while I think that the truth is that he was, at the very least, uncomfortable with the supernatural and, at heart, a physicalist who would look for natural causes for psi phenomena, even if he found those phenomena genuinely convincing.

https://monkeywah.typepad.com/paranormal...d-psi.html

Einstein said he could find no explanation whatsoever for Rhine's results, but made his scepticism clear. He was alienated by the lack of any attenuation with distance, that it didn't seem to make any difference how far separated the subject was from the agent or the experimenter. In his belief this indicated the presence of a "systematic error".

As I said, Einstein was a realist which prompted his arguments with Bohr (who was not). As this article in The Scientist points out ...

Einstein was, of course, dissatisfied not with the numbers that came out of quantum theory, but with its philosophical implications and what he felt was an incompleteness of the theory. He believed that any physical theory that did not have an observer-independent reality "denied the most basic goal of rational science." And, as is well-known, this attitude eventually led to a debate with the antirealist Niels Bohr. According to Fine, this debate was far more than a mere sideshow in physics. Bohr was seriously worried that Einstein's views, if accepted, might impede the progress of physics for years—yet he knew they could not be dismissed.

Fine also points out that while Einstein was a realist, his realism was of a peculiar kind. He believed in an external objective physical reality that we may not be able to grasp with fullest certainty, but one to which we are at least guided by the totality of our experience.