[whatsThisBtn4]

9 years of philosophy and I'm over platonic realism and reading contemporary philosophy of science.

The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions. Everyone knows about the copernican revolution. But when it first happened, the old models(earth at the center of the solar system) were more accurate at predicting where the plenets would be.

Scientists pragmatically spend their time doing best fits. (Typically)

But then the paradigm shifts and we are closer to reality than the current local minimum/maximum.

Before reading philosophy of science, I was into m theory and string theory. Now I'm nearly sure it's bunk that might be replaced in our lifetime.

I thank scientists, but I do not envy them.

[podocarp]

The difference with the Copernican stuff is that you can fly a satellite (e.g. Voyager) to the edge of the solar system, look back, and see the planets orbiting the sun. There is no sane way to put the earth in the center once you do that. If I do a push up the Earth moves beneath me but no reasonable person says I'm pushing the Earth away. Hence I feel heliocentrism is simply an observable fact. It's not a mathematical convenience. It's a fact you can see with a camera. The relativism or perspective argument is irrelevant because as we established you have to be very unreasonable to describe a picture of a huge ass sun that hardly moves with small planets zooming around it as earth centric.

On the other hand nobody has observed any particle or ever will, we only see effects of particles (cloud chamber trails, other particles, radiation, etc). This makes it very different for the traditional "seeing is believing" claim. In this case you actually possible to argue it's a mathematical convenience. It's possible to say we are stuck in the pre Copernican age in QM, we're modelling these things in such a complicated way, maybe one day we will see aha we got it all backwards, electrons are actually made of trapped light, or some crazy theory will come out... And I can't blame string theorists and physicists in general for trying.

Take for example quarks. QCD actually forbids naked quarks. That means you can never observe one on its own. How's that for a falsifiable scientific theory? Yet it is very successful in all its predictions. So obviously the Popperian "falsifiability" is too simple a criteria for science.

[wbl]

Humans can detect single photons with their eyes! https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12172

[Min0taur]

Thanks for the link, this is sick

[aurareturn]

In the 1500s, it might just as well be impossible to fly a spaceship to the outer edge of the solar system to confirm heliocentrism without doubt as it is right now to build a solar system sized detector to look for the graviton.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Hence I feel heliocentrism is simply an observable fact.

It isn't. You can easily define a coordinate system for the universe in which the earth is the center.

Heliocentrism just makes some approximate computations easier because the sun is so heavy. Thus in heliocentrism, the orbits of the planets are approximately ellipses (near-circles) around the sun, while in a geocentric model, the orbits have more complicated shapes.

Nevertheless (to explicare "approximate" even in the Newtonian gravity model (i.e. not Einsteinian gravity)) be aware that even in the heliocentric coordinate system the earth (and the other planets) don't move along an elliptical (near-circular) orbit around the sun, but both the sun and the planet move around a common center which is near to the sun.

> There is no sane way to put the earth in the center once you do that. [...] Hence I feel heliocentrism is simply an observable fact. It's not a mathematical convenience. It's a fact you can see with a camera. The relativism or perspective argument is irrelevant because as we established you have to be very unreasonable to describe a picture of a huge ass sun that hardly moves with small planets zooming around it as earth centric.

Modern physics really is about that there is no preferred coordinate system: this manifests itself in the fact that conserved quantities can be derived via Noether's theorem from such symmetries in the natural laws. There is just a choice of a coordinate system which in our solar system makes computations easier.

[kps]

>both the sun and the planet move around a common center which is near to the sun.

Within the sun, with one exception.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Within the sun, with one exception.

OK, I admit that I never did the actual calculations, but only knew this property of the formulas. :-)

[xelxebar]

Geocentric coordinates are easily observable; just look at the sunrise and sunset. And if you zoom out even more and look at the galaxy, heliocentric coordinates become unreasonable.

[stbede]

And at the speed at which the solar system is orbiting the galaxy, I don't know that it would even look much like like the planets are orbiting the sun.

[mikk14]

In fact the planets aren't orbiting the sun. They're orbiting the galactic center, and the sun just happens to disturb their orbits a bit: https://youtu.be/0jHsq36_NTU?si=VbRsJ_SyA7JK4TD8&t=53

[zakki]

Does it mean we are surfing our galaxy? I mean we are not in the same exact location any second-lapsed?

[stbede]

> The difference with the Copernican stuff is that you can fly a satellite (e.g. Voyager) to the edge of the solar system, look back, and see the planets orbiting the sun.

Or you can put the satellite in the back of a truck and back the truck out of your garage and see the sun orbiting the earth. Yet it remains sane to put anywhere in the center depending on your context.

[podocarp]

If you have a reasonable grasp of Newtonian gravity you would also be unable to conclude that. A wrestler flailing a skinny guy around, from the POV of the skinny guy, is still definitely not the skinny guy flailing the wrestler about. I don't see what's to argue here. Given all facts, then there is no POV that results in the conclusion the sun goes round the earth. Just like how there's no placement of the camera that results in you claiming I'm pushing the earth away.

[stbede]

I agree with the example of human agents because we can acknowledge concepts like will, choice, agency, etc. But none of those ideas are present in Newton's laws of motions.

[IIsi50MHz]

Will, choice, and agency are unnecessary for explaining the example. It can be described simply by the forces exerted. The locations of the observers or sensing equipment matter little in this case, though they do become problematic when attempting discern whether heliocentric model fits unaided observations from a planetary surface.

[stbede]

Am I wrong to think that because equal and opposite forces are always present, names have to be given to phenomena that are not present in the formal math itself?

[GranularRecipe]

> Yet it is very successful in all its predictions. So obviously the Popperian "falsifiability" is too simple a criteria for science.

Those two sentences contradict each other. If something unobservable implies some observable, i.e. predictable, consequences, then falsifying these predictions would also falsify the unobservable antecedents.

[lazide]

The hidden variable/better (unknown) alternative theory problem is what he is referring to.

Newtonian Mechanics are falsifiable, but no one could figure out an example that actually did so, until roughly when the orbit of Mercury was fully observed.

Then it was obvious something was missing.

Is there the equivalent for quarks? Or not?

[inigyou]

We can't even see an electron. But we can see the effect of a beam of electrons on a low-pressure gas quite easily.

We can't even see a table. We can only see the nerve impulses resulting from the photons resulting from the sunlight bouncing off the table.

A computer can't play sound either, it can only send bits to a DAC.

[podocarp]

That is true. I'm not arguing for that standpoint, but it works perfectly fine for all classical matters and has been since Descartes.

I think in a common sense way you do get what I mean though when I say it is obvious that when we see two billiard balls colliding we know it but when think of electrons colliding it is only indirectly through whatever happens after the collision, never the process itself.

[inigyou]

We saw the things that were easy to see long ago. Now we're seeing the things that are harder to see. That is, of course, harder, and more complicated, and only gets worse as we probe deeper, with more and more indirection, but I think all the stuff we are seeing has a pretty good grounding so far that it's actually something we are seeing indirectly and not a model artifact, at least until you get to quarks and gravitational waves, and we definitely can't see the strings of string theory.

[analog31]

From what I've read, a problem with the Copernican model was that it assumed circular orbits. Galileo insisted on this as well. It doesn't matter what orbits what, if you've got the shape of the orbits wrong.

Oddly enough the Catholic astronomers were willing to accept a model that had the sun going around the earth, and the planets around the sun. What settled matters for them was Newtonian physics, which provided a way to detect whether the earth was rotating or not. That was what caused them to eventually lift their ban on Copernicus. Newtonian physics also eliminated the question of whether anything in the solar system is justifiably the center of the cosmos.

[aleph_minus_one]

Relevant concerning your point:

> What is the most misunderstood historical event?

> The Galileo Affair

> https://tidbits.quora.com/What-is-the-most-misunderstood-his...

[xelxebar]

> The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions.

This statement itself predicades on a Platonic realist metaphysics! Indeed, what is the ideal against which things are judge right and wrong? I think the psychological roots of Enlightenment rationality run deep in the West, making it brutally hard to usurp.

That said, I think we can go a long way in this one case by just throwing out the "wrong" judement and laser focusing on the particulars of utility that science provides. One zoomed-out facet sees it as a collaborative effort as squeezing out repeatable processes, a la Popper et al.

[stbede]

How do you feel about Aristotelian realism? Makes more sense to me than nominalism/conceptualism ever has.

[dieselgate]

> The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions

I understand where you're coming from but this is a very cynical take. String theory is a strawman compared to the empirical "discoveries" of items like black holes or the Higgs boson.

[ColdStream]

I think it is similar to the 'All models are wrong but some are useful' adage.

There is reality and there is the math at which we point at it with. The pointing will never be reality but that doesn't mean it is useless.

In the same way you cannot blow the wind with the word 'Fan'. But the concept of a fan is very useful.

[jambalaya8]

Aye, but we only sorta kinda "know" what things like black holes might be. We have models that make sense to us based on our understanding of science, and we think our instruments can faithfully report on what they can be with measurements we believe we are making correctly, but we have no clue what we don't know, and no real way to prove it, just theorize, and sort of bundle up what we believe is data supporting it.

[mmooss]

> we have no clue what we don't know

We have very good ideas about it, including the issue described in the OP. We also don't know how gravity and the other forces work together. We don't know where other life is in the universe. We don't know how to travel to other stars. We don't know what is under the surface of Europa (but we'll soon find out).

And we have a very good idea of what we know because our theories, based on our observations, predict things accurately.

The original upthread comment and followup seem like taking some philosophical questions to logical extremes.

[jeremyjh]

There are so many observations that fit the theory at this point, that we know there is a supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy just as well as we knew the earth orbited the sun before the voyager flight.

[jambalaya8]

Well, not really. We can hypothesize there is certainly something _very_weird_ going on in the center, and we kinda know weird things happen at super-densities, and we can conjecture based on our understandings of things like gravity and celestial collapses, but any new black holes or even ones we know of that might have occured won't be in our timeframe, and we can never actually witness one even if it were (short of it suddenly happening to our own glowy ball of gas, but there'd hardly be a you to witness it)...

People like Wheeler and Hawking came up with theories and people basically sought to prove or disprove them, but maybe we have a limited capacity to think outside of those boxes. Like, who really knows, maybe the big bang had similarities... who knows how being close to a black hole really affects stuff like space-time curvature.

[ButlerianJihad]

> People like Wheeler and Hawking came up with theories and people basically sought to prove or disprove them

Basically, except that theories aren't "proven".

[jambalaya8]

I can totally prove 'theories' of mechanics (including planetary mechanics) using calculus-based physics, given a writing instrument and some notepaper; prior to centuries of that then-evolving thing we now take for granted (math, in its advanced forms, including multivariable calculus, differential equations, polar geometry, modern trigonometry, modern algebra (the grad-level stuff), that would not be possible. Though, likely since as long as humans have walked the planet, they had seen 'proof' with their own eyes (collision physics, metabolism, bulldings not falling down randomly).

But stuff like black holes, special relativity, etc, are like phenotype vs genotype: the former you can witness and deduce, and prove, and witness the proof. The latter, you can witness instruments, hypothesise, use math, use instruments, deduce... you aren't really witnessing the stellar event though; you are merely witnessing instruments and playing matching games.

Humans will probably never ever be able to measure or witness what would really happen if you tossed a Cabbage Patch Kid into a black hole, no less an exoplanet or whatever. We will almost certainly never be conscious and anywhere near an accretion disk, nor even have cameras that can show us them, nor be able to toss that Cabbage Patch Doll in. Yes, we can hypothesise and 'sorta prove' there is a whole lotta denseness going on, but our ability to really understand it IS somewhat limited to numbers.

Theories are theories until proven multiple times. But even when we prove them, that doesn't always mean the theories we built around them are also right. For instance, maybe there are things that can seem like supermassive black holes that are something else entirely.

[oersted]

Well, it seems that the question still remains somewhat open. There are theories that fit the data as well or better than the black-hole model.

My naive intuition is that this is mostly just physicist publishing papers and throwing some exotic ideas out (we still don't know enough about dark matter), and that the black-hole model will remain as the consensus. But it's not as unquestionable as you say it is.

> An alternative to the black hole (BH) scenario has been recently proposed in terms of a supermassive compact object composed of self-gravitating fermionic dark matter (DM).

https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/546/1/staf1854/843111...

> Sagittarius A* Might Not Be a Black Hole

https://youtu.be/7tRww03EKlk?si=0XcJ1yw-gPj1IzQW

[jambalaya8]

I am one of those people that feel that dark matter is not something humans should be studying too much. Just like hadrons, wormholes, and those people interested in creating lab-based little black holes. It strikes me as naive and dangerous to assume all physics is meant to be studied. Just because we know splitting atoms can make really big explosions, for instance, doesn't mean it might not have had other effects on the fabric of the universe we lack the mental facilities, advanced knowledge, or context to fathom.

[jambalaya8]

Still remembering how many people bought into m-branes and p-branes.

[jeremyjh]

Black holes are simply a consequence of GR, which has made more successful predictions than just about any physical theory. Did M-branes make any successful predictions?

[blooalien]

"The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know." — Aristotle

[shusaku]

The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know to whom you should ascribe a quote.

[blooalien]

@shusaku> "The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know to whom you should ascribe a quote."

Well, so far I see variants of this particular quote from Aristotle, Einstein, and Voltaire. Someone else probably said it earlier than any of 'em probably, but I honestly don't care enough to dig any deeper than this. Besides, half the time I've dug deeper into Mark Twain or Albert Einstein quotes (just for a couple really common examples) I find that they're attributed with saying a thing they never actually said anyhow, so... :shrug:

https://motivane.com/quote/more-you-know-more-you-dont-know/

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/620163-the-more-i-learn-the...

https://wiseopinions.substack.com/p/voltaires-paradox-about-...

[odyssey7]

Could have learned a thing from Socrates.

[BobbyTables2]

and Donald Rumsfeld (;->

[CuriouslyC]

The Higgs and black holes are quite different. We've basically observed Higgs according to how we've defined them, while we've only observed phenomena consistent with black holes as we hypothesize them. Singularities are the result of theories based on (ironically named) real numbers, it's entirely possible that what we call black holes are really dark stars formed from exotic matter that can only exist in hyper-extreme conditions, like a leveled up neutron star.

[i_no_can_eat]

The difference is that we have theorerically sound formation scenarious for black holes under very broad conditions, and we have absolutely no model for a formation scenario of such an exotic dark star.

[mr_toad]

Observations keep poking holes in those hypotheses (I’m not sure they even count as theories). We keep finding black holes with anomalous masses, or black holes that formed too early.

Part of the problem is that we have very little observational data. But another big problem is that our best ideas, based on general relativity are known to be incompatible with quantum mechanics.

[i_no_can_eat]

My comment was specifically about those alternative "dark stars" hypothesis. Is there one with a formation scenario?

[CuriouslyC]

That's gated by a constructivist replacement for general relativity and a deeper understanding of heavy quarks. Science marches on.

[gtowey]

The thing is we have a lot of models which make very accurate predictions most of the time, which are useful for doing some impressive science.

But we have no accepted theory of what is actually happening behind the math. What we have is that in 1925 most theoretical physicists decided that we have already uncovered the most fundamental structures of the universe and further investigation into how or why things are the way they are is fruitless. This view has dominated for the last 100 years. Physics has been focused only on modeling and testing, but nobody knows exactly what the models are telling us about the universe.

I agree with the above poster that this is wrong and we may yet learn that our models are only very close to reality, but the actual mechanics are different. At least I think more research should be pointed in this direction.

[exmadscientist]

> in 1925 most theoretical physicists decided that we [are done]

No. Just... no. Even advancing that fifty years to 1975, the Standard Model reigns not because people want it to reign, but because no one can knock it off its throne. There is no better idea that can explain more than the Standard Model can. It's not a conspiracy.

(I did used to joke with my students that progress in physics stopped around 1975, which is around when LSD got banned, so there might well be a lack of ideas. But I'll leave that one to the reader!)

[podocarp]

From my understanding of the parent I think he's not saying that nothing is trying to replace the standard model etc. But instead nobody is trying to explain the standard model (or whatever).

For example, wavefunction collapse. You can see the wikipedia page for all its interpretations. There's no such page for Newtonian dynamics (even though gravity is also spooky action at a distance) and classical EM (you're telling me there's more of these fields everywhere I can't see).

I think it's simply because classical experiments are a primary source and quantum experiments are a secondary source of information. The classical case you just see and know the result. Quantum experiments you're always looking at some medium that detects or measures or whatever the original interaction. So you're only interrogating the detector, not the original particles or interaction. So of course we're stuck with an interpretation problem. It's the same problem with news. The primary sources are always 100% certain what happened because they saw it. The secondary source will allow for more interpretation because they have heard from multiple primary sources, etc.

[mr_toad]

> Quantum experiments you're always looking at some medium that detects or measures or whatever the original interaction. So you're only interrogating the detector, not the original particles or interaction.

Exactly, waveform collapse is a philosophical question, it’s not an actual problem for the theory.

[oersted]

I'm reticent of falling into this endless conversation again, but it's a bit addictive.

I believe the point is that the Standard Model is still built on Quantum Field Theory, but looking into what's really going on under quantum mechanics is a bit taboo and very few people are spending time on it.

Frankly, I acknowledge that I am an outsider and that surely my perspective is far too naive and simplistic, I'm sure the reality in the field is far more nuanced. But still, I'm in good company when I question what's going on, like Einstein and many other prominent physicists have.

It is true that the end of the conversation was just "shut up and calculate", which is wise on some level, but it also implies that the mathematical model is the end-truth and you should unquestionably just build on it. There is a consensus that the mathematical model of quantum theory is really what is mechanistically happening, and that the wave function is a real physical thing.

But one can also argue that it is merely a probabilistic theory that, yes, describes the probability distributions of what will happen extremely accurately, but still is a partial answer and it doesn't actually predict what will happen. In every other context, we use probability to describe processes that we don't have a complete model for. It is a bit presumptuous to think that in quantum mechanics probabilities are somehow fundamental and not emerging from more deterministic underlying phenomena.

You can have a theory that says that there's an equal likelyhood of getting heads or tails on a coin, and that theory can reflect the statistics extremely accurately. But that is obviously not the end of the story, there are deeper mechanics determining if you get heads or tails at each given time, it is not fundamentally random, you just don't fully understand what's going on yet.

[HappMacDonald]

But the real litmus test is and always has been "can a theory predict the results of empirical measurements (such as controlled experiments) more accurately than its competitors".

The Danish-interpretation quantum physicists might urge you to shut up and calculate, but what we lack is any model capable of both describing why and how the wave function collapses and simultaneously offering more accurate predictions than QM does. The most well known low hanging fruit being: describing events in noticeably curved spacetime (or put in other words, in situations where the effects of gravity are non-trivial) because we don't even need a better model to know that QM breaks there, QM itself will happily tell us that much by piling on infinities and singularities that can no longer be canceled via renormalization.

So the take home is less "shut up and calculate" and more "don't waste their time with speculation about underlying mechanics until it can also offer more accurate predictions, and until then redirect your energies back to calculating: making use out of the tool we already have at least".

If nothing else, familiarity with the tool that does work up to a certain standard is more likely to lead someone to the next big step than hanging back in the wings of Newton and Aristotle with layperson intuitions about macroscopic objects in terrestrial gravity.

[oersted]

Of course, but such a theory doesn't pop out of nowhere. Like in any technical field, new paradigms are always inferior to the incumbent on key metrics, and need room to be nurtured for long periods.

My perception is that there's a cultural issue suppressing the investigation of the causes of quantum mechanics, making it much harder for a better theory to flourish.

It's also really-really hard. If you take my earlier example, the probabilistic theory of the coin-flip is worlds apart in terms of complexity from a real understanding of the forces acting on the coin when it's flipped. It's a massive gap to jump over, you have to come at it from another easier and longer path, like it was done with classical physics.

[exmadscientist]

Yes, this, exactly.

The moment someone has a theory that's experimentally testable somehow (somehow possible, anyway), there will be plenty of interest. There has never been such a theory to date.

Until that arrives, it's all just hot air.