Where to now? People suppose that society gravitates to order.
I do not think that the natural state is chaos. Mankind greatly prefers order. However, the creation of a Fresh Order is always difficult, particularly in the World of Ideas.
The Greeks were right. Man is a Teleological Creature, animated and propelled by spirit.
Here, I follow Carver Mead. His thoughts on physics energize me. They make sense.
His recent outing at an electrical engineering conference impressed me.
The essential point that he made is this:
Science Ultimately serves Humanity.
This goes double for the Engineer. If your ideas help no-one then why have them? You must develop and simplify your ideas to move us all forward.
Carver Mead has spoken of the Crisis in Physics. This once noble subject, which has served as the bedrock of Engineering, now seems to be a Rotting Corpse.
The people in it seem to have forgotten that Physics is useful, even if it is old physics. I would go further, the Old Physics is the most venerated and useful of the lot.
What do we see instead?
An endless obsession among Academic Physicists for: New Physics.
This is an ego-maniacal exercise on the part of the community to “Wipe the Slate Clean” and Enter the History Books. Hence the recent comment of Mead:
A Bunch of Big Egos are Strangling Science
I think he is damn right. On target, to perfection.
The essential problem is that Physics cannot change quickly. Nature does not change her laws. Why pretend that New Physics is Always Just Around the Corner?
This is lunacy. It is also damaging to young careers. Expectations are too high.
Classical Physics evolved continuously for some 300 or more years after Newton. The laws did not change but the depth of our understanding of them did.
That is the Clarion Call of Mead:
For God’s Sake People: Let us make the Present Quantum Theory Make Some Sense.
Consider this. The majority of Physicists will not rise to this challenge. They respond, weakly and wanly, in the spirit of Feynman:
Well, Gee, Nobody Understands Quantum Mechanics!
Well, did you ever goddam try? Really! I like Feynman, but this crap really annoys me.
It is a holier-than-thou attitude. I am Feynman, I tried, and it did not work out for me.
Mead made a valiant attempt at this goal in his monograph Collective Electrodynamics.
The book seems to have received the same attention as his talks.
None.
I find this perplexing.
How can people claim that it is legitimate to run around claiming all kinds of grand insights into speculative physics such as String Theory and then Pooh Pooh every considered effort to understand the: Goddam Theory We Already Got?
In my opinion, Mead is spot on in his critique. Laser sharp and right on target.
You may think his solution poor, but he goddam tried.
All the Big Egos are off very safely speculating on things that will never be examined.
The solution, I feel, is obvious.
Let Engineering Inherit the Earth.
Physics is One Lame Mule.
Put it down now. We could take the theory we got and just work hard at simplifying it.
I can see massive opportunity to do this already, and society is alive to understand Quantum Mechanics. For some bizarre reason, the public want to understand it.
Not the Teleportation Bullshit…
I mean understand how the world actually works without the Holy Wow Shit.
People want “To Get It!” They are hungry for actual real live working understanding.
So: Stop Bullshitting Folks! Stop pretending that blowing Opaque Colored Smoke out of Every High Priest Orifice counts for understanding. It Counts for Nothing.
It is a Ruffle Collar and a Purple Robe and Bunch Of Cryptic Latin Verse.
Right now, I see zero evidence of that among the carefully groomed Egos of Big Shots.
I see an endless: Fan the Flames of Confusion Ego Trip.
A droning dull as dog crap incantation: This stuff is so weird you will never ever get it.
Bullshit! That is why I am not a Physicist anymore.
It is just too Goddam Embarrassing.
I am a Quantum Engineer.
Hurrah! You speak for the legions of folk like me who seek an understanding of phenomena and not just incomprehensible, patronizing science-speak (if I hear “weird and just got weirder” from front men like Brian Greene, Brian Cox, Michio Kaku, etc. I will stick my head in the gas oven). And you speak from a platform of strength – you’ve been there, paid your dues. As an “enthusiastic amateur” (a retired chemist with a passion for physics) I discovered your blog a couple of months ago and its laser-like insights immediately resonated.
In the same way the feared Mongol hordes were a cleansing wind, removing a corrupt ‘civilization’ so that a better one might take its place, the armies are gathering for an assault on the corrupt forces that have ensnared the Physics Establishment. I sense a mounting momentum. I hum the lines of a Leonard Cohen song:
Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing,
through the graves the wind is blowing,
freedom soon will come;
then we’ll come from the shadows.
In defence of Feynman, I think he really tried to make as much sense of QM as he could. Hence his beautiful path integral approach.
He may have made his statement in part to provoke exactly this reaction: Pointing out that really nobody can make sense of it, but doesn’t talk about it either. Can’t imagine he’d be happy with the status quo of “Feynman said so, hence we may stop thinking”.
In his recollection on Feynman in the personal preface of his “Collective Electrodynamics”, Mead makes quite clear how immensely fond he was of Feynman, and that he wouldn’t have gone into science if it wasn’t for him. In fact, the way he writes about him was probably some of the most moving text I ever read in a science publication.
I do not disagree with you that Feynman was well intentioned. However, even the much lauded Path Integral is not the end of the road. You can demonstrate quite easily what the path integral actually is within the framework of nonlinear quantum theory. It is twenty two years this month since I made that discovery and the physics community know nothing about it. I tried, but they simply closed their eyes and their ears. The reason I make provocative comments in this area is because Physics has a Genuine and Serious Problem. It has abandoned the Scientific Method. How can you possibly take seriously a person such as Richard P. Feynman telling you, on the one hand, that Nobody understands QM, and then on the other hand inventing a bullshit story about probability amplitudes and pretending that the “virtual processes” are real? Schwinger did not buy any of that bullshit. He used path integrals, as do I, because he understood them as one understands a Fourier transform. However, to say that today is controversial. I do not know why. Feynman was a great guy and a stupendous physicist but I can do a path integral better than he.
Note to self: write up The Feynman Path Integral for Engineers to explain what this thing is actually about. It is actually quite a cool approximation method with general applicability but Feynman himself never figured that out. He just did the quadratic Lagrangian case, shrugged, and said “Aw, it must be right.”. Well, there is more to it than that but you need the math that he did not have. It did not exist then. You cannot blame Feynman for that. Invention is different from refinement towards perfection.
Yes. You may be able to ‘describe’ and ‘predict’ and I might believe you if you say you ‘understand’. You might be able to ‘teach’ so I can ‘describe’ and ‘predict’ as you can. But I will only really ‘understand’ if you can ‘explain’, which is rather harder. But we might of course both be able to ‘fake’ it (saying we truly ‘understand’ when we don’t) but I can’t see the point in that. ‘Describing’, so we can ‘predict’, may well be as good as it gets, and more than sufficient for us to be ‘useful’.