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Anonymous Mon 13 Sep 15:39:02 2021 No.13636352 View Reply Original Report

Quoted By: >>13636655 >>13637045 >>13637743

>It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature

What did he mean by this? Isn’t this the opposite of building from first principles? Is it better to look at the evidence and devise a theory or to devise a theory and test it against the evidence?

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 13 Sep 2021 17:21:30 No.13636655 Report

Quoted By: >>13637039

>>13636352
He is not talking about theory building as you describe, he is talking about a particular philosophy of science called instrumentalism in which theories aren't interpreted as representing the fundamental "states" of nature, but rather, they are just better or worse at predicting empirical data. Hard instrumentalism rejects that it is possible for humans to converge to the actual "state" of nature through science or even reject the metaphysical concept altogether. Niels Bohr interpreted that because quantum mechanics wasn't capable, no matter what you do, to predict the "actual state" of nature of a system at all times even with perfect knowledge of the system at some point or even any interval, that then for him that realism was defeated as there is no way through scientific means of knowing the state of nature at all times, just when one is measuring. This is in stark contrast to classical physics where you can predict the evolution of a system at all times if you have proper initial data. So saying physics concerns what we can say about nature is just another way of stating that we are not capable of actually understanding the state of nature, though we still have a theory that gives us important information about nature. This is obviously controversial and something that depends on what interpretation of quantum mechanics you like.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 13 Sep 2021 19:24:07 No.13637039 Report

Quoted By: >>13637073 >>13637161

>>13636655
>in which theories aren't interpreted as representing the fundamental "states" of nature, but rather, they are just better or worse at predicting empirical data

this makes sense and I see how it differs from what I said in the OP. But surely, such a philosophy would have at least some influence how someone would actually build a theory.

If you believe that the fundamental state can never be known then why would you try to build the theory from the "bottom up". If you believe in his statement, wouldn't it make more sense to look at the data and see "what" we can say about it rather than "how" the data came to be. Or am i completely missing the mark here.

I want to know if his statement completely contradicts the most popular theory today of building from first principles, when really it seems that you should be building from the last principles and working backwards.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 13 Sep 2021 19:25:09 No.13637045 Report

Quoted By: >>13637070

>>13636352
Based Bohr

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 13 Sep 2021 19:33:51 No.13637070 Report

Quoted By: >>13637733

>>13637045
he's overrated

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 13 Sep 2021 19:34:43 No.13637073 Report

Quoted By:

>>13637039
Well the history of quantum mechanics and the inception of the modern theory certainly came from people all who disagreed philosophically or didn't care that much about such questions. Bohr was pivotal for the development of QM but really who came up with the weirdness of QM was Heisenberg. Born (not Bohr) was also the one who gave the weird probabilistic interpretations . So the problem is QM is weird and no one knows exactly how to make sense of it but the theory is accepted by basically all modern physicists as fundamental and what is left is to understand what the fuck is actually going on. So it really is not a question directly related to the theory but the interpretation of the principles behind it. So there are some interpretations that take a realist position.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 13 Sep 2021 19:58:37 No.13637161 Report

Quoted By:

>>13637039
I'm not a physicist or engineer, I'm a statistician, so I don't really build anything (other than "models"). My opinion on the whole "build from first principles" idea is that you can't just follow some general idea and hope that it always works. In fact, a lot of things that are true don't really make sense, and sometimes things that make sense are not true. I say this purely based off of what I've seen. I've worked with theoretical Economists who have very elegant theories about how some social phenomenon works, but then the data doesn't really fit it at all.

What I'm basically trying to say is that you shouldn't pay too much attention to maxims like the one you mentioned, and just analyze case by case what is the most appropriate thing to do. The unfortunate reality is that we have limited minds in an infinitely complex world. But I'm a nobody, so obviously make your own opinions (and also don't know jack shit about building things).

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 13 Sep 2021 20:02:48 No.13637187 Report

Quoted By:

It means nothing because Bohr was notoriously a bad English speaker and he needed his son 'Aage' to translate for him.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 13 Sep 2021 23:13:43 No.13637733 Report

Quoted By:

>>13637070
still based, and his work at least led up to something you can use.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 13 Sep 2021 23:18:00 No.13637743 Report

Quoted By:

>>13636352
>What did he mean by this?

All scientific laws are estimates of how the universe behaves. They aren't literal laws.

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