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Objective Reality Doesn't Exist
- Thread starter bholder
- Start date
Can you better explain what you mean? What laws? Who went ape?
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The idea that there is no objective reality has long been true.
Indeed, those kinds of speculations have tended to be short lived. On the other hand, one of the puzzles of black holes that Hawking was wrestling with, was how much information they can contain. What if there is more information in the laws of physics, than can be contained in a black hole?
Hawking said that information disappears in a black hole. That violates the law of physics that says matter cannot be created or destroyed.
Black hole information paradox - Wikipedia
Black hole information paradox - Wikipedia
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Hawking's then came up with a way for black holes to give information back using quantum mechanics. He conceded per your link in 1997.
Right. But the outrage was over the laws of physic not applying everywhere in the universe. The scientific community needed objective reality.
Outrage is a bit of a stretch. The bet was for a baseball statistics encyclopedia. Hardly seems like an outrage.
Objective reality hasn't been a thing since the early 20th century at least. That is agreed on scientific theory. The problem with "no hairs" for black holes was it made something else incorrect. So science had to come to a solution. Both couldn't be true.
It was an outrage at the time. Susskind called it a "genuine scientific controversy."
"This really undermine everything we knew about physics. Everything that we know about physics today and even much earlier was based on a principle of physics that was so basic that we forget to mention it to our students. It's the idea that information never disappears... Stephen was saying the exact opposite."
So that brings me back to my original question. If there is no objective reality, will scientists abandon basic principles instead of devising convoluted theories to make them remain valid?
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The lack of objective reality means that if you observe something and I observe something, we can have equally valid observations that are different. Science has a goal to explain observations. Just because reality doesn't always make intuitive sense doesn't mean we should abandon understanding and describing it. Sometimes, we need a complex equation to explain reality that leads to other breakthroughs. If we had stopped at Newtonian physics, we would never have GPS as just one example. GPS of course wouldn't work if we didn't understand that objective reality doesn't exist.
Fair enough. But there's a bias toward conventional thought in scientists. Everyone from Galileo to Darwin battled closed minded scientific communities who refused to let go of their basic principles.
Also, some of the disagreement is a lot more amicable than it might seem. I think of Sir Eddington and Chandrasekhar as two that had a disagreement that ultimately ended in the latter's favor regarding the fate of aging stars. But they were very much friends and colleagues.
Actually, the resistance that Galileo faced was primarily political. The Vatican astronomers bought a telescope from him, and endorsed his observational evidence, while also pointing out weaknesses in his theory. They accepted a compromise model that had the planets going around the sun and the sun going around the earth, which seemed to make more sense at the time. This matter wasn't really settled until Newton came along.
The battle between new ideas and rigid traditionalism is possibly a mold that we force history into, that isn't always an accurate portrayal of events.
The way I see it, there simply isn't a tradition to hang onto, regarding the precise details of fundamental physics.
Not letting go of tradition, letting go of basic core beliefs. If someone were to prove tomorrow that the laws of physics don't apply everywhere in the universe, scientists would have to reassess everything.
Indeed, holding beliefs to be tentative, pending the introduction of robust evidence, is itself a principle of scientific methodology. Sometimes we don't even know what our beliefs are. Do we know for sure that scientists share a common set of basic core beliefs at all? Is such a thing even necessary if we all follow similar methods and share our results with one another? The beliefs that were violated by modern physics could probably not have even been articulated in a precise way by Galileo or Newton. Progress in that area required a simultaneous refinement of how we articulate our beliefs (in things like causality, locality, objectivity, etc.), and how we test them.
For instance, I have no idea whether I believed in whatever belief was shattered by this latest experiment.
Yes, I use the term "belief" to include things like physical laws, which we hold on a tentative basis pending robust evidence. Having our own beliefs disproven over and over is part of the learning curve of becoming a scientist.
Now, in the case of physical laws, we presently face a problem in fundamental physics, which is that our theories of quantum mechanics and gravitation contradict one another, so we sometimes put asterisks next to our beliefs as needed.
Now, for something to be a "core belief" of myself, first I have to understand it. That lets me off the hook on most things. The last time I seriously worked with quantum mechanics was in the early 90s, and then I wasn't even studying fundamental theory at that point. I've forgotten most of my beliefs.
Science is Science. Show me something more accurate, more repeatable, more devoid of influence by partisan human emotion and I might become interested.
