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kromem t1_iupsqvz wrote

Reply to comment by LesterKingOfAnts in Does Science Need History? A Conversation with Lorraine Daston by Maxwellsdemon17

And yet I was perma-banned from /r/AskPhysics for pointing out in an answer to a question about the many worlds interpretation that the topic of many worlds as a result of quantized matter goes back at least 2,500 years to the Epicureans.

I've found that while every Physics major knows Einstein was the first person to experimentally show that light was quantized (which he won the Nobel Prize for), there's a fair share of even particle physics PhDs that don't know the theory goes back at least as far as De Rerum Natura.

Your experience may have been different, but I too often see the teaching of the "history of Physics" only really covering Aristotle in antiquity, leading to people thinking the sciences in antiquity were just confidently incorrect hogwash, and never learning about the group that in hindsight nailed everything from quantized light to survival of the fittest, but had been suppressed by the religious as impious in favor of Plato and Aristotle's intelligent design.

The whole rediscovery of those naturalist ideas significantly contributed to the scientific revolution following the Renaissance, as was the subject of the 2012 Pulitzer winning book The Swerve. And yet we continue to teach the incorrect minds that were more popular because of their incorrectness while the group that nailed an almost unbelievable number of things still languishes in relative obscurity.

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garmeth06 t1_iuqawjc wrote

I'm having a very hard time linking your article to the many worlds interpretation in QM with any amount of rigour.

Nobody thinks (I hope) that postulating some vague assertions about "many worlds" is a novel 20th century idea. The importance in the physics world is, at most, the connection to understanding the wave function.

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kromem t1_iuqcbhw wrote

So IIRC the question was about the ontological principle within the context of any paradigm of many worlds in Physics, and if there were perspectives in which there wasn't a 'beginning.'

I'm pretty sure I mentioned how Everett's doesn't address the origin of the universe at all as it begins at the same point as this 'branch' of the universe, and instead pointed OP to other current models of multiple worlds like Lee Smolin's fecund universes.

Adding context, I mentioned that the notion goes back a long way (so there's been many different ideas regarding it), at least 2,500 years.

Oh, and while the article is mostly concerned with the Epicurean view of infinite universes from infinite discrete matter in infinite space across infinite time resulting in other locations of physical worlds similar to our own, they were absolutely thinking of very similar ideas to the concept of parallel universes with how they described the notion that dreams were representations of other worlds leaking into ours immaterialy.

As for what they had to do with the wave function, the name of the aforementioned book The Swerve came from how they tried to answer the perceived paradox of free will and quantized matter:

They concluded that the quanta must have some sort of uncertainty to how they would move such that it could end up going in more than one place from an initial state, and referred to what would guide the result to one potentiality or another as "the swerve."

(This was over two millennia before Bell's paradox, the experimental evidence of which was now the most recent Physics Nobel and where one of the proposed solutions for the behavior of quanta is the rejection of free will.)

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flowering_sun_star t1_iur34ym wrote

> where one of the proposed solutions for the behavior of quanta is the rejection of free will

The attempts to involve quantum physics with free will are widely regarded as a great steaming pile, and are rarely proposed by anyone with an inkling as to what quantum physics actually is. It is far too often treated as a form of magic get-out-of-causality-free card, and peddled by woo-mongers precisely because so few people have any understanding of the matter.

So yeah, you probably got banned for promoting unscientific nonsense.

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kromem t1_iurgirk wrote

> The attempts to involve quantum physics with free will are widely regarded as a great steaming pile, and are rarely proposed by anyone with an inkling as to what quantum physics actually is.

Are you disputing that determinism is a key factor in differentiating QM interpretations?

Does Sabine Hossenfelder have an inkling of what "quantum physics" is?

And do you realize that rejecting superdeterminism is necessarily a statement on free will (in agreement with the Epicurean view, which was non-deterministic)?

Yes, it's not as popularly considered in terms of Bell's theorem as the other two, but it is certainly still discussed by widely respected physicists.

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g_bacon_is_tasty t1_iuq66nm wrote

People don't like thinking of "premodern" people as being intelligent, or even as people. Aristotle is popular in modern times because it lets "modern" people jerk themselves off by going "ha ha look at the ancient Greek cavemen people who were too stupid to invent phones because they think space is made of aether." I'm surprised people give proper credit to all the varied and disparate examples of calculus being developed independently of each other.

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garmeth06 t1_iuqb27b wrote

OP probably got banned after an argument due to trying to find vague connections to past philosophizing while presenting it as relevant towards understanding modern quantum mechanics interpretations with rigour.

The attitude that you're referring to I really don't think exists with any significant passion in the physics community.

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Felevion t1_iuqaq4j wrote

A lot of this thinking goes back to the Renaissance. Many of the myths that get parroted to this day are from that period since the people then were trying to portray themselves as being more 'enlightened' than the people that came before them.

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Hoihe t1_iuq8ljx wrote

As someone who enjoys persistent world fantasy roleplaying, i love running into people who do not know about scientific history.

Whether it be astronomical tools, early conceptions of calculus and much more.

Reason much of that is obscure is because people kinda carries it all with them to the grave since it was good job security.

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clicheguevara8 t1_iur0ikm wrote

This is really misleading, although I thoroughly agree in general about the importance of intellectual history.

The Epicurean/Atomist hypothesis has everything to do with Greek philosophy of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, and has little bearing on 20th century physics. Platonism, Aristotelianism and specifically Averroism was much more influential on Renaissance science than Lucretius. The intellectual context of Renaissance and Enlightenment science was much more complex and pluralistic than the usual textbook narrative suggests.

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