Comment by danharaj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danharaj | Hacker News Reader

i believe the world is made up of excitations of quantum fields. Is this a scientific belief?

i haven't done the experiments.

it would take me weeks to work through a single path integral from even the best pedagogical textbook (I have Zee [1] in mind).

Why do I believe that? Because it makes 'sense'? QFT as physicists do it is mathematically inconsistent. can i interpret the immense amount of accumulated experimental data from bubble chambers to the LHC with any reasonable chance of saying something sensible?

i'm not a scientist; how could my beliefs be scientific? what exactly are people saying about their beliefs when they say that they hew to rationality and science? it doesn't seem materially much different from magical beliefs in how the world works. it just so happens, yeah, the world is probably a bunch of excited quantum fields because that's what makes me laptop run, or so i've been told.

ultimately, most of us are trusting an authority, and the strength of science always must be that there is no central authority: that all that is true is freely observable by anyone. there's no special rites that need to be observed (though if you were to go to grad school, you'd say otherwise), there's no purity that must be established. you don't have to be a man, or white, pharaoh or a priest. science is defined by this egalitarian radically free epistemology, and it is important not to take that for granted because it is constantly under assault by those who would seek to claim exclusive authority over truth.

the idea of science can easily be used to smuggle in magical ideas. science itself is defined not by its rhetoric, its jargon, its sociopolitical structure, whose paying for it, all the property rights and patents that enable it to be hoarded, etc. but by the ability to observe an experiment and ask another human being to reproduce it. science is mutual trust, good faith, and cooperation in the search for truth.

[1] http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9227.html

This comment is largely a variant on the usual "science is just another belief like religion". It really isn't. The far fringes of science that you need lots of eduction and tools to work with, sure, you need to take those on faith. But you don't have to "believe" them, don't have to take them on faith. Your life is not changed one iota if you personally believe in quantum mechanics or not.

Meanwhile, the bulk of science is in the human scale - you can do a ton of scientific experiments with the stuff in your house right now. There's this misconception that 'science=theoretical physics' and it's just not so. You don't need to trust that gravitational acceleration on earth is 9.8m/s/s, you can determine that yourself, easily. You don't even have to use meters or seconds - use your own units. You will find that it works out the same anyway.

You can work out science from first principles and get a long way - the difference here with religion is that in religion, the first principles are not accessible to anyone. "This book is holy because I was told it was holy". There's no way to verify the initial state and work through from there.

Trying to paint science as this thing that exists only in our heads and investigating only the really tiny (quantum mechanics) or the really large (astrophysics) misses the vast bulk of the science we use as humans - the stuff that's been tested again and again through use. The edge of science is where you'll find conjecture, and hence a lot of trappings that sound like religion, but that's not the whole of science, not by a long shot.

> You can work out science from first principles and get a long way - the difference here with religion is that in religion, the first principles are not accessible to anyone.

i think that's exactly the point i made, actually.

It read to me more that you were saying that science is about invisible woo just like religion is, it's just that the practitioners aren't about rituals or rhetoric.

In particular, your last sentence says that science is about mutual trust and good faith - when in fact it is much less about that than religion. You don't have to have mutual trust to do science since you can work it out all the way from first principles. Science aims to be robust enough that you don't have to trust other people. Good science has different groups repeating the same experiment multiple times, to better ensure that the effect is observable, and not based on trust or faith. Yes, at the cutting edge, you might have to use trust more when there's only one or two groups with the capacity for doing the testing, but ideally you have multiple groups specifically to avoid relying on trust and faith.

That knowledge then trickles down to applied science, where it's field-tested. A materials scientist at a widget company doesn't trust a theoretical scientist - they'll take the latter's study, make their own prototypes, and check the stuff works as suggested.

Science is not about trust and faith or defined by them; we just use them as humans to facilitate sharing knowledge on the experimental edge.

Faith and good faith are different things. Good faith is the dual of trust: it is being sincere in communication and actions. It's actually a weird term because "faith" is an extreme, uncritical form of trust while "good faith" is behavior that is worth trusting.

The trust that is essential to science is believing that someone else who attempts to reproduce your results and failed is sincerely trying to reproduce your results. Mistrust would be issues like rejecting someone's results with accusations of fraud or incompetence.

The good faith that is essential to science is trying one's best to reproduce results and making one's own experiments easily reproducible. An example of bad faith would be deliberately obfuscating sources of data.

Your example exemplifies trust and good faith: the materials scientist assumes the theoretical scientist is produced their study in good faith. If they have difficulties reproducing the results, they would try to communicate with the theoretical scientist and others in an attempt to clarify the discrepancy between their experiments. This cannot possibly work without mutual trust and good faith in the act of doing science.

In contrast, the way religious beliefs are developed and propagated is not usually rooted in trust and good faith. It can be when it is unhierarchical and rooted in personal experience, but in organized religion it is not. Religion is a hierarchy of authority on truth. Instead of trust, we have obedience. Instead of good faith, we have righteousness.

The first half of my comment was contrasting "things i believe that i call scientific knowledge" and "the act of doing science". There are more distinctions I briefly alluded to: "the social organization of science", "the economic structure of science", "ownership over scientific knowledge", etc. We can even have science about science, analyzing any of these particular facets. Many facets, but they come together as a whole. No one has a pure conception of science. All of these facets are inextricably related. I think it's important to distinguish "scientific beliefs" and being "scientific".

Lots of people claim to be rational, or scientific based on their beliefs. To me, this is clearly incomplete. It is easy to fool someone with dressings of scientific language or pantomimed motions that look like scientific actions. Good science is mixed up with "bad" science, which is a strange term because bad science is clearly not science by definition. One trap that i see people often fall into is feeling that their beliefs are rational/scientific and meeting someone with conflicting ideas, then attributing "irrationality" or "unscientific" nature to that person. Maybe it's a strawman that lives only in my head. I think it happens an awful lot. It's happened to me, at least.

absolutely right. how do you translate from the strings "excitations of quantum fields" to "math with a lot of greek symbols"? Very illuminating is the attempt to convert higher math into computer programs (Bertrand Russell tried this 100 years ago). What is mathematics not reducable to programs, and why isn't physics written in a logic language? It would look like this: http://us.metamath.org/nfegif/mmnf.html

Ultimately you end with set theoretic axioms. But what about functions over time? Category theory is more philosophic than one would think. The true mystery to me is why unconventional thought is so rare. I guess it doesn't pay well to think about things from scratch, certainly in business and also not in science driven by peer-review.

I'm still hoping for something like the "calculus of statement" described in Heinlein's "Blowups Happen." I think that a plurality of axiomatic approaches and formalisms is always better - consider the dialogue between those advocating a change to category-theoretic axioms for modern math and those that want to retain the set-theoretic ones. The debate is very productive.

So I think the world needs more thinkers-from-scratch. Shinichi Mochizuki is one such, regarding his work on the "abc conjecture." But his case makes obvious one other reason there's not more from-scratch unconventional thought: it often requires Von Neumann-level intellect to pull off.

actually, it definitely looks like category theory!

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/rosetta.pdf

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