Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:
The economy as a traffic system, not a market. Brilliant!
Someone paid to be a public intellectual criticizes generic public intellectualism by constructing an easy-to-burn strawman.
Is the idea that life can be treated as a narrative dangerous? Maybe, but I didn’t see an argument in this essay by Galen Stawson.
And here comes a pretty seriously misguided essay “against sustainability.”
Astronomer Arthur Eddington probably didn’t fudge data in order to support Einstein’s theory, contra to what alleged by a pair of sociologists of science.
Misunderstanding Ockham: “The value of keeping assumptions to a minimum is cognitive, not ontological.”
Footnotes to Plato 
Traffic like a financial “market” is subject to chaotic behavior as well as _straightforwardly irrational behavior_
If we fired all the Beamer drivers on Wall St. would that stabilize the markets? Maybe…
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Hi Robin,
Recall that Boltzmann lived before modern cosmology and the Big Bang model, when the assumption was that we lived in an infinitely old, steady-state universe.
That then presented a paradox: why is the universe we see blatantly not in equilibrium, given that it would have had infinite time to attain an equilibrium? Given that the 2nd law of thermo demands that entropy can only increase, why does the universe have a much lower entropy than it could have?
Boltzmann’s answer was that humans could only exist in, and thus that we could only be observers in, a highly-improbable low-entropy universe. Maybe the universe was in a chance fluctuation away from the maximal-entropy state expected from infinite age?
But the probability of *that* is tiny (as in Carroll’s comment that you quoted), and the probability of *that* is then much lower than the chances of single brains fluctuating into existence. Hence it would be more likely that that is what *we* are. Hence the paradox.
But all of this argument is predicated on an infinitely old steady-state universe — and modern cosmology now resolves the problem by starting from a very small and simple bubble, which *can* be a sufficiently probable fluctuation.
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Physicist are not infallible.
Again in the case of even countable infinities probabilities are not defined. It a meaningless discussion to compare them. Everything possible will occur an infinite number of times.
If you have an infinite list of possibilities and you pick a few to be made ‘real’ (the gods playing dice), the odds of any particular one getting picked is infinitesimal (smaller than any number you care to name). If the gods play ‘forever’ all will be picked, but for any finite number of games … etc.
I wish Wolfgang Pauli were around to comment on it.
-Traruh — an experimental physicist
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Coel:
As I understand in current cosmology even the small bubble is infinite. It’s not small but dense. Inflation expands a small piece into our finite visible universe that’s in thermal equilibrium over (formerly) time-like separations.
The infinity of other bubbles is still there and then Linde adds more (whatever that means). So the possibilities are endless and the probabilities undefined.
Of course, Cosmology could change … if we don’t chant
WAP and give up… It’s not written in stone …
“Imagine a demon who whispered…”
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Hi Arthur,
> In the end ‘many worlds’ has to add Born rule in an ad-hoc manner too. The might work this out some day.
Are you familiar with this work?
http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.7907
I don’t really understand it but I gather it is a plausible derivation of the Born Rule from Everettian QM.
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DM: No I’m nor familiar with it. I’ll take a look. Thanks.
-Arthur
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“The Tyranny of Simple Explanations”: Seems in the history of astronomy that they went through a crisis of Identity Theory in trying to figure out the behavior of the planets. The invocation of actual forces interacting between the planets eventually solved the problems.
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DM: w.r.t. Born Rule paper
I’ve written to Hans Zeh about it. Sometimes he responds to my questions and he has succeeded in softening by very negative (if irrational) dislike of ‘many worlds’.
-Arthur
You have my email right? Maybe we should take this off PF. I’ll try to read the paper.
Any way if you want you can send to ‘synredae@gmail.com’ and I’ll give you my real email in response which I don’t want to post too publicly (again).
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I am not sure Butman’s solution for sustainability is any less simplistic than the ones he dismisses. How is changing from “preserving” to “promoting” or from “sustainability” to “adaptability” more helpful than sacrificing a dove to the gods? Changing words will not lead to ecosystem health. By being alive, we interact with and change our environment and ourselves. We can’t not do that (to ascribe this understanding to Latour seems odd). We need to monitor the things we can and can’t control – that’s how we survive – know ourselves and know our environment.
An apt analogy is human health. Would we be better off if we decided to preserve our health or promote our health? Would we be better off if we decided to sustain our health or adapt our health? Wouldn’t it depend on the state of our health and what optimal health is and what the state of our environment?
Seems like a pretty feeble call to action.
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Occam is just a ‘rule of thumb’
I think we can put aside fairies with slide rules and calibers, pushing the earth toward the sun with a force proportional to 1/D^2 by flapping their wings in the aether [a]. Experimentally it would be hard to rule out. I suppose it might predict Brownian like fluctuations! Though that could be gotten rid of by making really a lot of fairies, so they average out to undetectable levels. Still with improved measurement one might detected the fluctuations, so Sir Karl might grant the theory scientific status? Well we could always make the fairies more numerous and smaller, so falsifiability remains illusive … if they get really small we could call the quantum fluctuations? After all what’s in a name (quite a lot actually)?
[a] aether is not found by WordPress spellfixer.
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Michael F:
Reminds me of those absurd commercials for ‘Lifelock’ (identity theft protection) in which a ‘termite monitor’ finds termites in your home, but won’t o anything about it. That is, in fact, a reasonable option for home inspections where you would prefer to have an independent party that’s not got a financial axe to grind inspect your house and then hire someone else to kill the little buggers off if you need to. Termite companies do try to sell useless you like all those little stakes they put in the ground and charge you 80 bucks a month for (which is really insurance in case of termite return – the stake are just for show – though like most insurance is basically a ripe off).
Doesn’t work for the world though. Might not be such a bad idea for dentistry and healthcare…
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DM: Are you familiar with this work?
http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.7907
This looks very similar to Zurek which it’s not widely agreed with. Zeh, a founder of decoherence, is not convinced by Zurek (though Zeh likes Zurek’s physics while appearing to be irritated by some of his hyped up terminology).
I tried to read Zurek, but found his math too hard for an experimentalist who’s mostly been coding of the last hundred years or thereabouts.
I tried to find your email, but it seems I lost it. Maybe we only corresponded on my nearly unvisited blog (I think your the only one who ever posted there).
Sorry Massimo!
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Hi synred,
Quantum fluctuations have finite spatial extent, so once one applies QM into the mix (so that transitions to and from inflationary states are QM fluctuations), then the “bubble” from which our observable universe formed would have been spatially finite (and likely very small at formation, compared to the size of the current observable universe).
Of course one can then ask about the pre-existing state that the fluctuation occurred in, and that can be regarded as spatially infinite — though that really just means larger than the fluctuation, with no evidence as to its actual extent.
One can also invoke quantum-gravity fluctuations, in which one can try to dispense with the pre-existing state, but then that’s getting a bit speculative.
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Quantum fluctuations have finite spatial extent
–pre fluctuation it’s not clear what space means as space and time are created by the fluctuation.
–A fluctuation in space is I think finite. A fluctuation that create space…I don’t know really…I don’t understand that well enough– what does the uncertainty principle mean ‘before’ there’s time or space to be uncertain about?
It appears to me that big bang and inflation calculation start from an already infinite ‘universe’..
-I do understand statistics pretty well and if the possibilities are infinite you can’t formulate probabilities. You need a big ensemble and you can even take the limit as it approaches infinity to define probabilities, but if infinities ‘exist’ then you can’t define probabilities. Mathematicians still argue about this sort of thing, I would guess. It is not entirely clear to me what saying something is infinite means.
If you keep looking ‘forever’ in an infinite universe you’ll find every possibility there. Of course the ‘forever’ makes this a bit circular. If you look at an infinite list, the probability of finding a given item in it in a finite number of looks depends on the order. ‘Most’ items will, of course, not be found at all, since however many you look at the number you haven’t examined is can be arbitrarily larger.
This why Tegmark at one point tries to limit his MUH possibilities to computable, finite ones though the ‘people’ living in the others might not notice his preference.
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> I basically agree with that, but point out in the case of infinite possibilities probabilities are undefined.
An important point. “Equally probable” doesn’t work with an infinite number of possibilities. Some possibilities *have* to be more probable than others (even if you could define a probability distribution).
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I found the Ball article entertaining and informative. I don’t really want to get involved in the discussion concerning physics that has sparked off comments on Ball’s text. But I did want to offer a side comment that might be useful
Occam was a believing Christian and a Nominalist. One reason for the development of his ‘razor’ principle was as a weapon against the more complex, subtle, and nuanced arguments of the Realists whom the Nominalists opposed.
The simplest explanation for events devised by humans is: ‘God’s will.’ And the Nominalists actually wanted certain arguments to resolve into that explanation.
The response that demands evidence or justification for god or god’s will, actually leads to quite complicated counter-explanations – reliance on evidence, for instance, demands qualification of what constitutes evidence, philosophic justifications for reliance on evidence, and so forth, If instead we march down the path of Modern mathematics or higher orders of logic to provide explanatory ground, we are yet pursuing a path that complicates our understanding of the universe, on a ground that continually begs for justification.
I’m not saying that’s wrong; what I’m saying is that Modern science is far more complex a puzzle than Occam’s razor can account for or adequately deal with on the whole – which is surely not to deny its possible uses, as Ball points out.
Nonetheless, stripped of it’s theistic content, the real force of Occam’s Nominalistic reasoning continues to haunt us, as a recurrent skepticism concerning explanations, even when, all things being equal, they are quite probably true.
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Dan:
That makes sense. More like the British usage where ‘public’ means public not Government.
Sorry.
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Hi Coel,
The Boltzmann Brain oaradox only bears Boltzmann name, it is still argued today with respect to modern cosmology. Carroll is not talking about some problem from the past that is resolved now, indeed his point is that it is a definite problem for non EQM cosmologies.
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Coel,
“That then presented a paradox: why is the universe we see blatantly not in equilibrium, given that it would have had infinite time to attain an equilibrium? Given that the 2nd law of thermo demands that entropy can only increase, why does the universe have a much lower entropy than it could have?”
Why does entropy rule? Radiation expands, while mass coalesces. The premise of entropy seems to be a very simplistic, mechanical assumption, that reality is ultimately composed of little tiny objects and eventually they will all get mixed up to the point there is equilibrium and no more mixing would be possible.
Yet is radiation going to stop expanding out at a trillion miles a year, when mass breaks down? Is mass going to stop coalescing into vortices of seemingly infinite density, yet radiating away most of the manifesting energy in the process and seemingly ejecting jets of cosmic rays out the poles of these vortices, all expanding out for billions of years, presumably to eventually cool off to the point mass starts to coalesce and start the process over again.
I realize you will only argue this is just further evidence of my ignorance, but I really would like to be enlightened, even if it’s over my head and would probably argue, but that’s just my trying to see it through my own frame. I see reality is more complicated than billiard balls.
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Righto, EJ. As a good former Lutheran, I remember Luther and Philip Melanchthon talking about the ‘damned scholastics.’
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And Massimo’s keeping us on our toes with a site design change, it seems. Preparing for that post on aesthetics?
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In nature, complexity and simplicity seem to play off each other in many different ways. There is the chicken/egg cycle.
Also that things tend to evolve ever more complexity, but then break down. The irony there is that often this complexity derives from a quest for simplicity, in that when gaps/niches/opportunities/questions arise, the quickest, simplest solution is arrived at, yet it might block other, possibly more effective responses, yet that solution takes on life of it’s own and further guides/forms the process.
In my above comment about the dichotomy of energy expanding and mass coalescing, both, from different perspectives, are the simple solution. Radiation is a breaking of the complexity of mass and expanding out as the most elemental of energy, light. Yet at some point this energy becomes so diffuse and distributed out as a sea of black body radiation from infinite sources, it would seem the waves would seemingly start to quantify out as charge and balance out as particles. Though my physics on that is questionable, it does seem that if mass is energy and breaks down and radiates it out, the opposite must be true as well, that at some stage, it coalesces back into mass.
So then we get to the human mental tendency to seek simplicity, which is actually also to seek some order in the endless complexity and thus chaos of nature.
Yet all our theories turn out to be patches over deeper complexities and its turtles all the way down, as every simple solution has some niggling thread we insist on pulling at.
And all those seemingly clear objects and quantities and individuals and concepts that seem so clear with he objectivity of a little distance, but fuzz out when looked at closely.. They are all just patches over patches between the absolute and the infinite.
Seeking simplicity is like the wave collapsing into the particle, but then the particle is like mass, more complex than the wave.
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I thought the sustainability paper was excellent. And spot-on with regard to a number of the subjects addressed.
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The interval 0 <x <1 is, one might say, externally finite, internally infinite. For any number on that interval there us always a higher number. For any number on that interval there is always a lower number. There are infinitely many neighborhoods on that interval and each of them is identical to the interval itself.
These are all things that physicists have also said about the "bubbles" and really, any kind of space that physicists talk about is a generalisation of 0<x <1.
Of course mathematicians do not generally hold 0 <x <1 to exist.
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Hi SocraticGadfly,
And yet it is interesting to note how very at home the Scholastics would be with modern cosmology and physics.
Actually Duns Scotus has prior claim to what we call Occam’s Razor. We can see exactly how he employs it in an argument (not the way ej suggests).
But as Duns Scotus suggests, the principle dates back to Aristotle at leaat.
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0<x <1
Uncountable infinity and Cantor's diagonal proof.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_diagonal_argument
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Hi Robin,
The issue is indeed still discussed from time to time, but its relevance is limited to one class of models: namely ones that start with a universe in equilibrium (high entropy) and explain the current universe around us as a chance fluctuation to a more ordered, lower-entropy state. Any model along those lines would indeed suffer the Boltzmann Brain problem.
But none of the mainstream Big-Bang models today are along those lines. They explain the non-equilibrium aspect of the universe straightforwardly from the fact that the universe is very young and dynamic, with a recent origin in the Big Bang, with the signatures of the Big Bang still all over the universe (“young” and “recent” here are as compared to the time needed to attain equilibrium). Once one solves Olbers’s paradox with a recent Big Bang, the Boltzmann Brain paradox is pretty much solved alongside.
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If, on the other hand, redshift is an optical effect, the CMBR would be the solution to Olber’s paradox; The light of ever further sources being shifted ever further down the spectrum.
It will be interesting to see what the next generation of telescopes show, which unlike a larger collider, are being built as we write.
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Coel,
So any physicist who talks of the Universe as beginning from a state of maximun entropy or that 8t began as a chance fluctuation isn’t talking about any msinstream model? Yes?
Sean Carroll wasn’t talking about Boltzmann brain applying to any mainstream model?
Any physicist who suggests that Boltzmann brains might outnumber Universes like ours aren’t talking about mainstream models?
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If you look at the paper Boltzmann brains and the scale-factor cutoff measure of the multiverse the authors of which include Guth, Linde and Vilenken (last revision 2010), they don’t seem to have the same confidence that the Boltzmann Brain problem has been solved or that it doesn’t apply to mainstream models.
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