Physics canon is immutable
Published by admin September 24th, 2007 in Physics, Doctors of PhilosophyCarl Brannen writes:
I’m not trying to educate people in the standard model, but instead my slant on it.
This is an important difference from physicists’ attitude. As far as I understand you are not pushing your version as religious dogma. For physicists the physics version is not open to questioning by outsiders.1 As a professional class with a protected monopoly on theoretical knowledge physicists always market and enforce their definitions as absolute truths.
Physics canon is immutable. It can only be amended, it cannot not be changed. What I mean is explained by Feynman in the link you provided to his book QED: The Strange Theory of Matter and Light. As quoted by commenter Michael Wischmeyer, Feynman
mentions that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is really no longer a necessary construct. “If you can get rid of all the old-fashioned ideas and instead use the ideas that I am explaining in these lectures–adding arrows for all the ways an event can happen–there is no need for an uncertainty principle.”
If uncertainty principle is superfluous it must be removed. But it cannot because it is part of the canon. Physicists continue to teach it as part of the canon and use it as a principle to prove other things and if they don’t need it they eliminate it either by mathematical fraud or by polemics.
Can we extend Feynman’s proposal of “getting rid of all the old-fashioned ideas” and start with a clean slate? To me events observed in accelerators2 are many layers removed from what happens. And there is an incestuous relation between model and experiment. It seems to me that the software running the experiment decides what is observed. Any comments?
The problem with physics grad school is that the math is so difficult that students have very little time to contemplate and study the foundations of the theory.
I believe that students are not supposed to contemplate or question or doubt the physics that they are studying. They are supposed to cram the canon to pass the exams. Students who stop to question will be left behind and if they exhibit scientific skepticism and ask tough questions about physics they will be dubbed cranks by their peers and their careers will end. There is no room for non-conformist students in this system.amortize loanoutlawing loans payday 2008100 loans home financingvegas home loans las 10080 loan 20 calculatorinstant loan $500401k loan rulesloan home 1st buyer time Mappayday uk loan advance 8 11loan 90 equity home hawaiiaccount quick loan savings paydayloan adjustable mortgagerate loan adjustable informationmortgage adjustable loan rate calculatormortgage loan rate disclosure adjustablepayday illinois advance loan Mapuinion credit aacloan fas 91credit abs enhancementsdebit loan ace cardofficer administrative plan crediting607486 loan agriculturetatus credit 720720 tatus credit Map
- with the exception of your advice about how to do that. [↩]
- I assume accelerators are where the data that Standard Model is trying to model comes from [↩]
I don’t think that there is any sort of deliberate plan to teach students the way that they’re taught. I think that physicists are taught only a very limited (and therefore biased) view of the foundations is that there are very few physicists working on the foundations, and therefore capable of making intelligent comment on the foundations.
The vast majority of physicists work essentially the way that physicists think engineers work. They are given formulas in books, and their job is to apply those formulas. Having worked for years as an engineer, I know the mindset. If you have the formula, you don’t have to understand the foundations behind it.
So what happens is that physicists absorb “facts” about the foundations as a sort of impractical hobby on the way to their practical studies on the task of making computations. As a result of this, many of them are completely unaware that there are alternative ways of interpreting those foundations.
If you get a half dozen physicists (who work in QFT and QM) together, and ask them a question about the foundations of QM and QFT, they will begin to argue with each other. Since they didn’t have any classes on the subject, and since almost none of them read books on the foundations, and since academics are always very certain of what they believe, they never can come to agreement except that they believe the others are clearly idiots. They cannot even come to agree that the questions are not yet answered.
What I’m saying is that there is no canon being taught as far as the foundations go. What’s taught is not the foundations of physics, but instead the practical applications of physics as a branch of engineering.
For people like me who are trying to see how to modify the foundations, this makes the task of publishing extremely difficult. If you do try to publish something, you will find that different physicists will reject your work for different reasons. You will often find that the rejections are made for reasons that are mutually exclusive. In fact, you will even find that a single physicist will express incompatible objections to your methods.
As with any other physics work, you can only talk intelligently about the foundations of physics with one of the very few people who concentrate on that particular branch of the subject. Unlike any other branch of physics, those who are not specialists in the subject nevertheless are convinced that they are experts who understand it much better than you do.
I just discovered your blog,. Thank you for the link! Experience says that calling something (like c or G) an immutable constant is almost certainly wrong. I agreee with Carl’s assessment of physicist behaviour.
Carl,
Thanks for the comment. I agree with all of this except with the one about physics canon not being taught.
There is no such plan because physics is a hierarchical bureaucracy. As in all bureaucracies tradition is sanctified. That’s why physics is still taught the way it was taught in the 18th century. The change happens in scholastic time.
I agree. What is taught is legal and canonized physics that cannot be questioned. Foundations can only studied by questioning.
I agree. And physicists believe that those formulas are sacred and cannot be changed and should not be changed. And this has a professional reason because in order to rate physicists by standard testing throughout their careers there must exist a static and standard canon.
I agree. To me this means looking at the history of the formula. How did it come to be like that? What is the meaning of each term? Are there cultural terms that need to be eliminated? But for physicists history does not exist except in the form of physics mythology.
Not only unaware, but they enforce the fact that physics form is sacred and it is the absolute true form. This is what makes physics scholasticism.
I agree. The one with most authority will win.
I differ on this one. Newtonian force, F=ma etc is the canon and this is the foundation of physics. Physicists cannot question force, the foundation of physics. They have developed methods to solve problems by using Newtonian labels and they will never question or change these methods. Problem solving is engineering and it is not necessarily foundations.
I also believe that studying physics leads only to more physics not to foundations.
To me there is no difference publishing in your blog and publishing in a journal. The content is the same.
If physics really works the way you describe it above I think this is a strong indictment of physics profession. There is no standard of evidence in physics and there is no regulation. Physicists make the rules and break them as they wish. Then they call their self-regulation rules science.
There is a confusion here. If c is defined as a unit, this means that it is a constant by convention. By defining c as a unit physicists agree to keep it as constant so that they can measure other quantities with it. In this sense it makes no sense to talk about variable c. As a unit c is constant by definition. It is no different than metric units. For instance, the so-called Gaussian constant is now kept constant. Instead AU is changed if a more precise value of k is obtained.
Same is true for G. Since G was originally defined as k in British units its value is tied to k and G too must be a constant by definition. G is nothing more than a conventional unit. It is silly to talk about a variable G.
Thanks for your comment.