what scientific idea is ready for retirement

8/13/2019 What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement

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http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/2014/01/15/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-retirement/

The Curious WavefunctionMusings on chemistry and the history and philosophy of science

What scientific idea is ready for retirement?By Ashutosh Jogalekar | January 15, 2014 | Comments10

Wavefunction collapse, an idea that may be ripe for retirement (Image: A Friedman)

Every year since 1998, Big Questions guru John Brockman has posed one big question on Edge.org and gotten about forty or fifty of the worlds leading thinkers tocome up with their own answers. This year the question is What scientific idea isready for retirement?. The answers showcase a range of thinking and topics and they make it clear that every thinker interprets the word retirementdifferently. For some retirement means what it does, abolition to the shadows of polite discourse. For many others retirement really means refinement, to abolish not an ideaitself but its interpretation. Yet other thinkers are annoyed with semantics rather than the content of the ideas themselves.

Here are a few of my favorites.

David Deutsch argues that the whole notion of quantum jumpsis a concept way pastits utility. Deutsch describes how the behavior of particles like electrons is often interpreted in abrupt, discontinuous terms. The truth though is that when you are observing these particles in phenomena like energy transitions in atoms or quantum tunneling, what you are seeing are continuous, changing probability distributions, not absolute disappearances and appearances.

The truth is that the electron in such situations does not have a single energy, or position, but a range of energies and positions, and the allowed range itself can change with time. If the whole range of energies of a tunneling particle were below that required to surmount the barrier, it would indeed bounce off.

And if an electron in an atom really were at a discrete energy level, and nothing intervened to change that, then it would never make a transition to any otherenergy.

Similarly, Freeman Dyson wants to do away with the whole perception of wavefunction collapse. He makes the point that probabilities are not real and are actuallya measure of our ignorance, so they cannot be treated like physical objects thatdisappear upon measurement. And asking what happens to a wavefunction after a measurement is irrelevant since a wavefunction does not exist then.

Unfortunately, people writing about quantum mechanics often use the phrase collapse of the wave-functionto describe what happens when an object is observed.This phrase gives a misleading idea that the wave-function itself is a physical

object. A physical object can collapse when it bumps into an obstacle. But a wave-function cannot be a physical object. A wave-function is a description of a probability, and a probability is a statement of ignorance. Ignorance is not a physical object, and neither is a wave-function. When new knowledge displaces ignorance, the wave-function does not collapse; it merely becomes irrelevant.

Other thinkers urge us to break down black and white distinctions. For instanceheres Steven Pinker arguing against the classic behavior=genes + environmentdichotomy; the truth is that each one of them influences the other:


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Gene-environment interactions in this technical sense, confusingly, go intothe unique environmentalcomponent, because they are not the same (on average) insiblings growing up in the same family. Just as confusingly, interactionsin the common-sense sense, namely that a person with a given genotype is predictably affected by the environment, goes into the heritabilitycomponent, because quantitative genetics measures only correlations. This confound is behind the finding thatthe heritability of intelligence increases, and the effects of shared environment decrease, over a persons lifetime. One explanation is that genes have effectslate in life, but another is that people with a given genotype place themselvesin environments that indulge their inborn tastes and talents. The environmentincreasingly depends on the genes, rather than being an exogenous cause of behavior.

Martin Rees strikes down the soaring belief that we will never hit barriers to understandingin spite of our spectacular current understanding of life and the universe:

Theres a widely-held presumption that our insight will deepen indefinitelythatall scientific problems will eventually yield to attack. But I think we may need to abandon this optimism. The human intellect may hit the bufferseven though inmost fields of science, theres surely a long way to go before this happens

We humans havent changed much since our remote ancestors roamed the African savannah. Our brains evolved to cope with the human-scale environment. So it is surely remarkable that we can make sense of phenomena that confound everyday intu

ition: in particular, the minuscule atoms were made of, and the vast cosmos thatsurrounds us.

Nonethelessand here Im sticking my neck outmaybe some aspects of reality are intrinsically beyond us, in that their comprehension would require some post-humanintellectjust as Euclidean geometry is beyond non-human primates.

Fiery Cushman tells us to abandon the belief that big effects have big explanations. He points out that sometimes many small explanations can add up to a big oneand sometimes one small explanation engendered by accident can lead to catastrophe. This is true not just of science but of human affairs; for instance the reason conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination will always persist is because many people will simply be unable to accept the fact that a Big Event (JFKs dea

th) had a Small Explanation (Oswald). Similarly, think of the cause of World War1.

Adrien Kreye argues against Moores Law and his explanation is similar to Martin Reess (and flies into the face of singularitarianslike Ray Kurzweil): the fact thattheres been exponential progress in any given field by itself does not mean there will continue to be exponential progress in that field. Dean Ornish points outthe shortcomings of large, randomized, controlled clinical trials, arguing thatmany interesting individual effects are averaged out in such studies. Finally,Peter Woit and Paul Steinhardt argue for the true retirement of two ideas whichhave not been supported by a shred of experimental support string theory unification of physics and the multiverse.

Heres my choice for an idea that should be retired: The idea that science is a concept-driven revolution. As with many other thinkers in that list I dont actuallythink the idea is wrong or unimportant, its just that its overrated. New tools are appreciated far less than new ideas, especially outside the sciences. I propose that the idea that science is a tool-driven revolution should be given equal time. This is especially true for chemistry and biology which have been much moreexperimental compared to physics. Even in psychology an idea-driven field if there was one the advent of fMRI has engineered a revolution whose ramifications are still rippling across the landscape of psychological research. As Freeman Dyson says in his book Imagined Worlds:


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New directions in science are launched by new tools much more often than by new concepts. The effect of a concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in new ways. The effect of a tool-driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explained.

Unfortunately the concept-driven revolution idea came from Thomas Kuhns famous book. Kuhn was a physicist, and his biases dictated his views. If Kuhn had been achemist his survey of scientific history might have led him to very different conclusions. Fortunately Peter Galison has been the pioneer of the tool-driven revolution paradigm, and his book Image and Logicremains the standard torch-bearer for this line of thinking. If we want to see science for what it truly is, we need to recognize the importance of tools as well as ideas.

What scientific idea do readers think is ready for retirement?Ashutosh Jogalekar About the Author: Ashutosh (Ash) Jogalekar is a chemist interested in the history and philosophy of science. He considers science to be a seamless and all-encompassing part of the human experience. Follow on Twitter @curiouswavefn.

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The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

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1. rloldershaw 11:03 am 01/15/2014

My candidate for retirementwould be Absolute Scale.

Absolute scale is the root cause of the hierarchy problem, the unnatural Planck mass, and the vacuum energy density crisis, for starters.

Relative scale could not be continuous, but rather has to be a discrete or brokensymmetry. It has been a long time coming but the general principles, the basics of how it works, and the means to test the new paradigm are readily available (see below).

Robert L. Oldershaw http://www3.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw Discrete Scale Relativity/Fractal Cosmology Link to this


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2. jtdwyer 12:53 pm 01/15/2014

The worlds leading thinkersshould consider which ideas have had the greatest impact on major fields of study while resisting definitive confirmation forthe longest periods. - My nomination remains the requirement for dark matter initially inferred solely from the discrepancy between the observed flat rotation curves of spiral galaxies and expectations loosely based on planetary systems. In the seminal work, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1980ApJ238..471R V. Rubin, K. Ford Jr. andN. Thannard concluded, based solely on observed flat rotation curves: This form for the rotation curves implies that the mass is not centrally condensed, but that significant mass is located at large R. The integral massis increasing at least as fast as R. The mass is not converging to a limiting mass at the edge of the optical image. The conclusion is inescapable that non-luminous matter exists beyond the optical galaxy. - This evaluation erroneously presumes that gravitational potential imparted to any galactic disk object is centralized rather than distributed at varying distance throughout the disk. Proper evaluations of distributed mass and gravitational potential produce flat rotation curves for disk galaxies based on visible structures alone, without requiring any extended halo of undetectable compensatory masses 6-10 times that of detectable galactic mass. - The long held idea that enormous amounts of undetectable mass exists

in all galaxies has affected interpretations of observations in the fields of astronomy, cosmology, and theoretical and experimental particle physics. - Since no physical evidence for dark matter exists beyond those inferred by gravitational evaluation of large scale, compound configurations of innumerable discrete masses, I suggest that its original proposal be very thoroughlyreevaluated rather than continuing to reinvest in confirmation efforts. Link to this

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3. Uncle.Al 4:17 pm 01/15/2014

Retire the Equivalence Principle (EP) by demonstrating its violation.

Rewrite quantum gravitation to contain testable predictions.

Physics arises from vacuum symmetries. Theory postulating exact bosonphoton vacuum symmetries for fermionic matter (quarks) suffers unending parity violations, symmetry breakings, chiral anomalies, Chern-Simons repair of Einstein-Hilbert action. The vacuum is trace chiral toward matter. Opposite shoes embedwithin chiral vacuum (mount a left foot) with different energies. They vacuum free fall non-identically, violating the EP.

A geometric Etvs experiments opposite shoes are visually and chemically identical, single crystal test masses in enantiomorphic space groups. Contrast right-handed versus left-handed alpha-quartz. Observe, repair theory, mourn the dead, and get on with the job.

Link to this

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4. RSchmidt 8:28 pm 01/15/2014

I think we should retire the idea that science has nothing to say about morality or existential questions about life. There has been a perception thatthere are certain questions that are above science, that are free of its process and constraints and therefore they can only be answered by religion or philoso


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phy. I see no practical reason that any aspect of the human condition is immuneto scientific inquiry or cannot benefit from its dispassionate eye. It has beena case of shooting the messenger, where some dont like the answers science provides in these areas and therefore they reject it completely. It is about time thatwe understand that if it cant be known through science it simply cant be known. Link to this

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5. Dr. Strangelove 8:56 pm 01/15/2014

Retire the idea that mathematical theories are equivalent to scientific theories. String theory and multiverse are mathematics. It informs science butscience itself is built on observations and empirical evidence. Theoretical physicists are becoming pure mathematicians. They can no longer distinguish mathematics and science.

I like the retirement of quantum jumping and wave-function collapse. These terms reflect our ignorance. A futile attempt to reconcile the bizarre behavior of subatomic particleswith the concept of a real particle. They are just semantics. We can call the observed phenomena kachingand they will not be more or less accurate than current terminologies. But it will not give the false mental picture of tiny spherical balls and waves moving in the air. Link to this

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6. Dr. Strangelove 9:25 pm 01/15/2014

we should retire the idea that science has nothing to say about morality or existential questions about life.

Science can explain morality through psychology, anthropology and sociology. Metaphysics and theology are beyond science. The scientific method cannotbe applied to things that cannot be observed. Science can explain why the humanbrain imagines things but not the imaginations. Link to this

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7. rloldershaw 10:05 pm 01/15/2014

Dr. Strangelove,

I heartily second your three candidates for retirements.

Too much theoretical hand-waving instead of empirical science for thelast 50 years. Link to this

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8. curiouswavefunction 10:56 pm 01/15/2014

I agree with the proposals by Strangelove and others. The other day Iheard a prominent science writer say that she is more enamored of mathematical elegance and exciting speculation than empirical testing. I sympathize with thissentiment but I dont see how we can say whats real based on mathematical elegancealone. Basically I think we need to reconsider science as it was described by Galileo and Bacon.


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what scientific idea is ready for retirement

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