RE: Are Particles 'Physical Things' or 'Abstract Ideas'?
April 13, 2015 at 8:59 am
(This post was last modified: April 13, 2015 at 9:03 am by bennyboy.)
(April 13, 2015 at 1:30 am)Alex K Wrote: @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.
