`` As if - the explanation of Emergence

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Science


If I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants - Sir Isaac Newton - letter of 1675


Index


  1. Science is Important

  2. Francis Bacon - Scientific Method

  3. Isaac Newton - Gravity and Light

  4. Thomas Young - Light

  5. Charles Darwin - Evolution

  6. James Clerk Maxwell - Electromagnetism

  7. Ernst Mach - Inertia

  8. Albert Einstein - Relativity

  9. Edwin Hubble - Redshift

  10. Werner Heisenberg - Uncertainty

  11. John Stewart Bell - Inequality

  12. Mistaken Interpretations

Science is Important


Science is an important thing to know at least a bit about, because science is one of the very few general methods that we have, that can tell us something with certainty about the world that we live in; and that is very useful when it comes to having some chance at predicting the future, let alone all the technological benefits. So if science can be brought to bear on philosophical matters, then the sure footednes it has can be greatly informative. Of course, recruiting such a helpmate does require that we keep a weather eye on their presuppositions and simple opinions, but otherwise science is the most reliable thing that we have.


What exactly are presuppositions and opinions? The axioms of science, whether explicit or not, include some assumptions that are properly speaking philosophical, and cannot properly be called scientific. The foremost among these is Materialism. This is the belief that only material things exist, and it is untestable in science because science only deals with material things. Other assumptions include that the laws of science apply equally to all parts of the Universe. This is an explicit axiom for Einstein, and personally I would concur that the laws are universal, but even so, it is important to realise why we think this.


The following are short introductions to those scientists and their discoveries, who over the centuries have contributed some of the most informative building blocks of knowledge that we have. These are the ideas that I'd suggest are essential reading for anyone who wants to have an informed opinion about anything.


Francis Bacon - Scientific Method


Francis Bacon (b.1561 d.1626) contributed the 'Scientific Method' as a means to know what is. There is really very little difference between a scientist and a philosopher; once upon a time scientists were known as natural philosophers.


Isaac Newton - Gravity and Light


Sir Isaac Newton (b.1642 d.1726) gave us the mathematical tools to properly start getting to grips with the world around us. This was Rocket Science before rockets. Not only could we calculate gravity and acceleration etc. but he also demonstrated the properties of light, leading to the concept that light was composed of particles.


Thomas Young - Light


Thomas Young (b.1773 d.1829) demonstrated the interference of light, thought to be particles since Newton, and so showing light to be waves, and although the significance of this was not fully grasped for over a century, we now recognise the phenomenon as wave/particle duality, and that even more mysteriously, it incorporates quantum entanglement.


Charles Darwin


Charles Darwin (b.1809 d.1882) was a naturalist, and did much to promote the idea of evolution, which was tremendously important as it undermines all claims that there had to be intelligent design behind the complexities of life. Along with Newton and Einstein, Darwin forms the triumvirate of scientific giants. Yes, there were others, but these three gave us the greatest leaps in understanding what Science should be. Not that they had the final word on the matter.


The last evolutionary event in Britain was probably the plague of 1350, that wiped out half the population and left a genetic mark on those that were left, due to a mutation that helped some of the survivors not succumb to the illness. Nowadays the evolution of genes has all but stopped, because evolutionary pressure has stopped - everyone survives. Now the evolution that takes place is of memes, and we are already in the throes of the next great revolution that is the Internet. Round One of this was the invention of writing, then the invention of the printing press, arguably film and TV, and now all of that has cross-pollinated with the production of more divergent truths than you can shake a stick at.


James Clerk Maxwell - Electromagnetism


James Clerk Maxwell (b.1831 d.1879) unified electricity and magnetism, showing them to be two expressions of a single thing.


Ernst Mach - Inertia


Ernst Mach (b.1838 d.1916) is best known for Mach 1 - the speed of sound, and so on, but it is his explanation of inertia, and Sir Isaac Newton's bucket experiment that interests us here. This is where rotating a bucket of water has friction causing the water inside to spin, and then rise up the sides of the bucket, producing the question what is the cause of inertia ? The explanation matters because it tells us something fundamental about the Universe, as well as including a hint about Dark Matter shaping spiral galaxies. Ernst's explanation is that all the matter in the Universe acts gravitationally on all the other matter in the Universe, giving it all inertia, which is generally thought of being a reluctance to move. I should point out that Virtualism, as I have conceived it, has gravity as emergent precisely because of Mach's Principle, but that the resoning is reversed, i.e. that objects only move because of all the masses in the Universe - really it is more correct to say because of all the energy, but it is easier to think of objects with mass, or to put it another way, to say that mass emerges from energy.


Albert Einstein - Relativity


Albert Einstein (b.1879 d.1955) probably contributed more to the modern state of science than any other person. Special Relativity and General Relativity, and the Nobel Prize winning Photoelectric Effect, are all fundamental to the way that science looks at the world, and this is despite the fact that science has moved on over the last hundred years. Like Sir Isaac Newton before him, and whom his theories superseded, Albert Einstein was not wrong, it is just that later ideas have proved to be more correct.


As New Scientist stated, 'While one is unlikely to find a single physicist who would claim that the theory of General Relativity is the whole answer to how the universe works, the theory has passed every test to which it has been subjected.'


Edwin Hubble - Redshift


Edwin Hubble (b.1889 d.1953) discovered the redshift of light that showed that the Universe was expanding, and which when extrapolated led to the idea of the Big Bang.


Werner Heisenberg - Uncertainty


Werner Heisenberg (b.1901 d.1976) gave us the principle of Uncertainty, which is a mathematically derived law that tells us that any quantum object has neither mass nor position, as an intrinsic property, until it is measured, and whats more, if you measure mass [energy], then there is no possibility of there being position, and vice versa. This profound discovery is close to the heart of Quantum Mechanics, and is one of the facets that make it seem so weird.


John Stewart Bell - Inequality


John Stewart Bell (b.1928 d.1990) created the truly elegant Inequality, a mathematical proposition that gave the theoretical possibility to determine whether the universe we inhabit behaves classically, or else in a quantum manner. Later experiments using the Inequality proved that we do inhabit a quantum universe, and John Bell would have shared the 2022 Nobel Prize for this had he lived. It is really not possible to overestimate just how significant a discovery this was, ranking alongside Einstein's equality of energy = mass.


The Inequality, which could be understood as a distillation of a three way Venn diagram in algebraic form, shows the following [thanks to Canadian physicist John Harrison for the succinct explanation paraphrased here]:
Let us set the following assignments for the three parameters of Bell's inequality:
A: electrons are 'spin-up' for an 'up' being defined as straight up, which we will call an angle of zero degrees.
B: electrons are 'spin-up' for an orientation of 45 degrees.
C: electrons are 'spin-up' for an orientation of 90 degrees.
We made two assumptions to derive Bell's inequality which here become:
1. Logic is valid.
2. Electrons have spin in a given direction even if we do not measure it - Hidden variables.
Now we add a third assumption in order to beat the Uncertainty Principle:
3. No information can travel faster than the speed of light.
We can state these a little more succinctly as:
1. Logic is valid.
2. There is a reality separate from its observation
3. Locality.
Bell had three measurements he could propose re electron spin being a hidden variable, i.e a real thing even when we don't observe. The inequality is that the number (A, not B) + number(B, not C) >= number (A, not C)
If experiment proves this not the case, then we have shown that reality is not classically physical, i.e. either 2 or 3 are false, or that logic itself is false. Experiment did indeed break the inequality, so now we know that one or more of the assumptions of classical physics are incorrect.


Mistaken Interpretations


Despite Science giving us so much understanding of the Universe, and a shedload of technology, the world that Science describes is very much stranger than many scientists appear to be comfortable with. The following are some of the misguided [IMNSHO] interpretations of the facts as so far discovered by scientists.


The Big Bang

The Adam and Eve of all dodgy scientific theories. The Big Bang is the idea that the Universe commenced with a singularity, a compression of all the energy in the Universe into a space and time that had zero dimension, i.e. infinitely dense energy. This theory came about by extrapolating the expansion of the Universe, as discovered from Redshift, backwards 13 billion years, or so. But just like Adam and Eve, there is no good reason to think that any of it was actually possible. The biggest problem wih the concept of the singularity is that it distorts the theories of space and time with infinities. In short the maths goes wrong. The other problem is that we have no means to check that far back.


The Block Universe

Albert Einstein's conception of the Universe as laid out from the beginning of time to the end, just statically there in all its dimensions. This concept was needed to accommodate Spacetime, because in General Relativity every moment in time is just as real as every other moment in time. Unfortunately that leaves no explanation for why we experience time progressing, nor why we are unable to move backwards and forwards through time.


Time and so Spacetime

Hermann Minkowski claimed that 'Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.', back in 1908. But this shows, to my mind anyway, unwarranted faith in General Relativity. In an emergent universe, as claimed by Virtualism, both space and time are emergent things, and what's more, they are such different things that a concept such as Spacetime just cannot survive. In short there is no time travel, so time cannot be like space, they are different things with different causes, so it is misleading to unite them.


Many Worlds

Hugh Everett's idea that all possible worlds actually exist, because at each quantum change that occurs the Universe splits, so that many worlds are created, each with a different version of how the Universe might have turned out. To be fair, there are many different interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, and the Copenhagen Interpretation is probably still the more widely accepted explanation, as far as it goes. But, the long and the short of it is that Quantum Mechanics is problematic in so far as explaining what actually underlies the very well tested and accurate mathematics of it.


Quantum Fields

Quantum Field Theory is the idea that was created to combine Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity. The thrust of the idea is that space is not just a vacuum, but is permeated by quantum fields that allow the propagation of each kind of quantum wave. No doubt Quantum Field Theory provides a very useful calculaory tool, but as a concept it suffers from a lack of explanation of where these fields are supposed to originate, and what they are supposed to be composed of. As with a lot of science over the centuries, the theories go so far and then have to resort to just saying 'Because it is like that', which is no kind of explanation at all.


String Hypothesis

The hypothesis that is commonly called String Theory has not yet attained the status of theory proper, but has gained a lot of purchase in academic circles, largely due to its ability to start to tackle the multitude of dimensions in the Universe. What String Theory does is bundle together some of the numbers of these dimensions as objects called strings, also as objects called branes. This hasn't yet been made to work successfully, leaving the hypothesis somewhat controversial. Be that as it may, at the heart of the theory is the concept that some dimensions, such as those of space, are extended, the way we experience them, whereas some others are 'curled', making some objects appear stringlike. The problem with this is that it only really attempts to get to grips with a part of the question, which is the behaviour of particles, while failing to address what makes dimensions in the first place.


It may be that String Theory has a role to play as part of a greater explanation, in modelling the properties of emergent particles; in showing just how those particles are composed of bundles of numbers. But, if it is to succeed, the theory requires a context in which to exist, and I'd suggest that Virtualism makes a very suitable philosophical context.


Holographic Universe

One of the current explanations of the Universe is that it can be thought of as a hologram. This raises a few philosophical eyebrows, or should. However, the idea is that from a physics perspective, the boundary conditions define the content, but with one less dimension - this is a shortened version of the principle of holograms. But, the problems with this that firstly, thare is no explanation for what may be defining those boundaries, so we end up with an endless regress, just as with the humunculus explanation for consciousness, and secondly, when we examine any emergent system, we see that the whole arises as the sum of the parts - a sum that adds nothing to the terms of those parts, but does add the boundaries [the facts of the whole] that then place constraints on those parts.


Bearing in mind that Science does not yet have all the answers in regard to the Universe, and that in an emergent universe there will be an unending stream of new facts and theories to describe all the new things that will be along eventually, we can still gain much by understanding what we can about the things that Science is pretty sure of. Beyond that, we should all speculate as much as we can, because somebody will add some answers, and there is no monopoly rule as to who that will be.



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