Are Particles 'Physical Things' or 'Abstract Ideas'?

[bennyboy]

In my opinion, at the deepest level, physics is almost indistinguishable from mythology, or numerology, or from various mystical traditions: "There are these fields in space which have no volume, no exact position or shape, and which, in their interactions, sometimes generate particles. . . and then there was the Earth!" isn't philosophically a far cry from "In the beginning was the word. . . 2nd blah blah blah. . . finally, man appeared." I'd say the same thing about the objects of physics: QM particles are tricky, ambiguous little buggers that are what they aren't and aren't what they are. It's as though paradox itself is the building block of the universe. Science doesn't seem to have an advantage in establishing what is real: unless reality is defined by the power to make stuff work; at least it has that.

I have to say that the deeper we get into science, the more and more ideas come up which might as well just be taken straight out of Plato or Aristotle.

[Surgenator]

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In between reading Aristotle's treatises on physics, astronomy, biology, psychology, and metaphysics, ethics, and literature, I've detoured into a few modern books on the subjects of biology and physics, namely, Carl Zimmer's At The Water's Edge (a must-read), Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and now I'm on to Julian Barbour's The End of Time. Both of the physics books (granting I haven't yet begun to read the latter but based on impression) seem "out there" to some extent, as in unconventional. Gary Zukav, though he seems very popular with Oprah and the self-help brand of quantum pseudoscience, actually impressed me with The Dancing Wu Li Masters. I was expecting a lot more "woo" but it was a pretty solid, straight-down-the-line physics text that went through the major discoveries of the last 115 years (actually, the book was written in 1979, so of course it didn't include anything from the past 35 years). I'd say about 90-95% was excellent translation of difficult mathematical concepts that physicists have experimentally verified as useful (what 'truth' means scientifically, which is essentially pragmatic) into plain English, and only 5-10% eastern philosophy. That said, there was one thing he wrote that I wanted to get further clarification on (Zukav isn't a physicist but he had five read his manuscript before publication, including David Finklestein, Henry Stapp, and Jack Sarfatti... some of whom have made rather outlandish and controversial claims at times). He said that particles are not actual things. They're ideas. On some level, it seems difficult to see how this could be deemed incorrect when the very notion of discrete objects (particles) that behave like waves and display non-local effects is utterly abstruse and incompatible with everything we directly perceive or are even able to picture when dealing with physical things. The popular physicist Sean Carroll, whom I take to be fairly representative of current mainstream views in physics, also says that we should picture particles to be excitations of energy fields... but what is a field? Is it an abstract construct that we use to predict how events unfold (do they really even 'unfold' in the time-dependent sense we typically mean?) or an actual physical 'thing'? Zukuv quotes a number of monumental discoverers, such as Max Born, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Warner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, David Bohm, John Bell, and John von Neumann, amongst others, as sharing similar sentiments about the idealization of physics and its incompatibility with classical logic. He even quotes Bertrand Russell as saying that "mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true," yet everything beyond the atomic scale is virtually describable only in terms of mathematical concepts. So, what is a particle, or a field, or a wave-function, or a probability-function, or 'collapse,' etc.? Are these representative of real things, or are they merely mental constructs that we find useful in describing our experiences?

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First off, you write too much. I almost avoided the thread because of the sheer wall of text that stood before me.

It is an interesting question on what is more 'real', the field or the particle. We know particles cause fields (electrons cause an electric field). We also know that fundamental particles can combine and break up into other fundamental particles (e-e+ -> Z -> u-u+). So which is more fundamental in my opinion, neither. I believe the particles and the field are two sides of the same coin. The particle can be though of as an excitation of the field, but that analogy only goes so far. You cannot de-excite the field to a point where the particle no longer exist (e.g. violation of lepton number). So the field and the particle seem interlinked; hence, my belief that they are one thing viewed at two different ways.

As for the question about particles being ideas, I find it absurd. There are possibly an uncountable number of ideas that we can come up. However, there is ~28 fundamental particles that we deal with in our regular lives. So you can argue that a majority of ideas are composites of other ideas. Which is a good start, but then how do you know which ideas are fundamental. How can you test if the idea is fundamental? Plus, a fundamental idea would presumably be able to do only one thing, e.g. the idea of moving to the right. However, a photon can do more than one thing. Since the photon is the messenger particle of the electromagnetic force, it can cause another particle to move closer or farther away.

[Alex K]

@bennyboy

A not very subtle difference between the poetry and the physics which you lump together here: it may sound vague and mysterious when translated into everyday language and metaphors. But you've got to be aware that the actual theory is not what you just said, but a very concrete mathematical construct. It makes quantitative predictions to many digits precision before the fact. Only when you try to formulate what's going on in plain english does it sound a bit mythical. Yet, we know exactly what we mean on the maths side, which is parsimonious and with little ambiguity.

[Mudhammam]

Surge, you call THAT a "wall of text"?! I try to keep things simple but these ideas are far from it. But at any rate, I'll show you a REAL wall of text! 

Exhibit A: http://atheistforums.org/thread-30896.html


Search for any thread started by Harris for exhibits B, C, D, etc...



At most mine can only be called a "short block."

[Surgenator]

Surge, you call THAT a "wall of text"?! I try to keep things simple but these ideas are far from it. But at any rate, I'll show you a REAL wall of text! 

Exhibit A: http://atheistforums.org/thread-30896.html


Search for any thread started by Harris for exhibits B, C, D, etc...



At most mine can only be called a "short block."

Hmm, I'm lazy and it's late.

Also, I wanted to make a quick correction on what I said. We interact with ~19 fundamental particles in our everyday life, not 28. I accidentaly included all the quarks instead just the first three. Hence the mistake.

Good night.

[Alex K]

Maybe one shouldn't say that the text is too long (it is not very long). You should have added two paragraph breaks at points that make sense, because those are very encouraging to the potential reader and can make a text that looks very daunting en bloc appear much more manageable.

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Surge, you call THAT a "wall of text"?! I try to keep things simple but these ideas are far from it. But at any rate, I'll show you a REAL wall of text! 

Exhibit A: http://atheistforums.org/thread-30896.html


Search for any thread started by Harris for exhibits B, C, D, etc...



At most mine can only be called a "short block."

Hmm, I'm lazy and it's late.

Also, I wanted to make a quick correction on what I said. We interact with ~19 fundamental particles in our everyday life, not 28. I accidentaly included all the quarks instead just the first three. Hence the mistake.

Good night.

Do you count color multiplicities separately there? 3v+e+mu+3u+3d+8g, right...

[bennyboy]

@bennyboy

A not very subtle difference between the poetry and the physics which you lump together here: it may sound vague and mysterious when translated into everyday language and metaphors. But you've got to be aware that the actual theory is not what you just said, but a very concrete mathematical construct. It makes quantitative predictions to many digits precision before the fact. Only when you try to formulate what's going on in plain english does it sound a bit mythical. Yet, we know exactly what we mean on the maths side, which is parsimonious and with little ambiguity.

I have a few things to say about that.  First of all, applying numbers to the activities of things does not make them less mysterious.  Responding to the light/wave duality of light with "Well duh it's not really either of those things, but I can graph my results remarkably well" doesn't make single-particle interference less mysterious.  The effects of both gravity and magnetic fields are well understood and quantifiable, but that doesn't make either of them less mysterious, either.

I think the first clue is that you describe physics in mathematical terms-- rather than specifying that the math merely represents things, their properties and interactions among them.  You are describing the relationships among quantities and principles, and it really doesn't matter if there is any "thing," ultimately, there or not. So in practical terms, I'd say that you DEFINITELY have abstract ideas at work, and you MIGHT have actual things which they represent, or might not, and will probably never know which is the case due to the limitations of making observations.

[Neo-Scholastic]

...I have to say that the deeper we get into science, the more and more ideas come up which might as well just be taken straight out of Plato or Aristotle.

Pretty much my opinion as well, although I have already taken the next step into neo-Scholasticism.

[Mudhammam]

Do we know for a certainty that all electrons everywhere, whatever they basically may be, regardless of their size or lack thereof, are all each and everyone one of them absolutely totally identical to each other ?

Turns out they are, it's a pity I don't recall why . . .

If you were ever able to ask the "Deity" that question, I suspect it would give you the same answer you gave yourself.

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With regards to the ancients and the particular issue of time, or absolute vs. changing forms (realizing they were inseparable from matter for Aristotle in a way Plato's Ideas were not), one might say this debate really started with Heruclitus and Parmenides. My own speculation finds it increasingly and (counter-)intuitively pleasing to conceive of the idea that the ONE being is William James "specious present" (regardless of however one might quantify the gaps between each "photographic moment") and the MANY being(s) are the configuration spaces in which each NOW resides... simultaneously, as in NOW!

[Alex K]

@bennyboy

A not very subtle difference between the poetry and the physics which you lump together here: it may sound vague and mysterious when translated into everyday language and metaphors. But you've got to be aware that the actual theory is not what you just said, but a very concrete mathematical construct. It makes quantitative predictions to many digits precision before the fact. Only when you try to formulate what's going on in plain english does it sound a bit mythical. Yet, we know exactly what we mean on the maths side, which is parsimonious and with little ambiguity.

I have a few things to say about that.

Well, this is a discussion forum after all!

First of all, applying numbers to the activities of things does not make them less mysterious.  Responding to the light/wave duality of light with "Well duh it's not really either of those things, but I can graph my results remarkably well" doesn't make single-particle interference less mysterious.  The effects of both gravity and magnetic fields are well understood and quantifiable, but that doesn't make either of them less mysterious, either.

Let me ask you - what would make it less mysterious?

I think the first clue is that you describe physics in mathematical terms-- rather than specifying that the math merely represents things, their properties and interactions among them.

I'm not so naive that I think the mathematical objects are immediate real objects in nature, if that was your impression. That notion is falsified by
a simple look at history which shows us that the mathematical objects in theories describing the same type of physics change over time, as in the transition from classical to quantum mechanics.

What, though, is the difference between describing something and using mathematical expressions which represent things? Would you like to have your description in plain English? And if yes, using which words?

  You are describing the relationships among quantities and principles, and it really doesn't matter if there is any "thing," ultimately, there or not.  

What if in the end it's all relationships and interactions that are the real deal, and "objects" are just a construct to describe them? I don't even know what the difference would be.

So in practical terms, I'd say that you DEFINITELY have abstract ideas at work, and you MIGHT have actual things which they represent, or might not, and will probably never know which is the case due to the limitations of making observations.

Is the cup of coffee standing in front of me right now real? How do you describe this cup, and aren't you just using a set of abstract ideas to describe it and there is no actual thing there? My point is, you act as if the problems you raise are somehow special to fundamental physics, and I wonder whether not the ordinary notions of what is real or not are pretty much on the same footing. That wouldn't mean that the question is not interesting, but it would not be criticism that needs to be specifically levied against modern physics. I find the notion naive, that objects in every day experience are somehow more well-defined and more real just because we can describe them using words drawn from experience. It might be an illusion that those are more real and more concrete than our descriptions of electrons using fields or wave functions.