Neuroscience
- To Grasp Physics, Students Need To Know About Knowledge
The beliefs students hold about scientific knowledge can affect their ability to understand physics - a finding that researchers say has implications for the way students are taught. Greek psychologists Christina Stathopoulou and Stella Vosniadou tested...
- Social, Creative - That's Physics!
Physics seems to have an image problem. According to BBC News, the physics department at Reading University is set to become the 21st physics school to have closed or merged over the last 10 years in the UK. But now Ursula Kessels and colleagues at the...
- Replication Will Not Save Psychology
"Replication is our only hope." "No. There is another"Psychology is big into replication these days. A lot of people think that a major problem with the field is that many important results have not been replicated, and that this is in part because journals...
- Recapitulation Of Criticism Against The Theory Of Childhood
From Ari Rahikkala's LiveJournal and Pharyngula: An awesome parody of ludicrous creationist nonsense arguments being presented in several scientific fields. I nearly cracked a rib laughing at this! The theory of childhood, also known as child origin,...
- Douglas Hofstadter's Perpetual Search For Beauty
"Hofstadter's butterfly, showing the energy levels, E, of Bloch electrons in a magnetic field.In the limit of weak modulation, shown here, the inverse magnetic flux ratio Φ0/Φ determines the internal structure of a Landau band. For example, at Φo/Φ...
Neuroscience
A Theory of Everything, for Everyone
Read this article in the Indiana Daily Student here....
Since a theory of everything would all the forces of matter, it would be elegant in how much information could be explained so simply. The math and physics behind theory would all have a function with everything else, and there would be nothing below it. As MIT Physics Professor Frank Wilczek put it, “You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity.” [3] But, during the 19th century, while physiologist Emil du-Bois Raymond proclaimed "ignoramus et ignorabimus" (or "we do not know and we will not know"), mathematician David Hilbert would write "For the mathematician there is no Ignorabimus, and, in my opinion, not at all for natural science either. ... The true reason why [no one] has succeeded in finding an unsolvable problem is, in my opinion, that there is no unsolvable problem. In contrast to the foolish Ignorabimus, our credo avers: We must know, We shall know.'"
Beyond what physics can tell us about how matter and forces work, there are issues with the way mathematical statements can actually explain the world. Is mathematics the language through which we describe nature or is it something that nature itself is made of? Is a theory of everything the end of knowledge the same way all biological organisms evolved from a single one? And what if there is no theory of everything? As 20th century American physicist Richard Feynman speculated, it is possible there is no theory that applies everywhere all the time.[1] Everything we observe will have something below it, and we’ll never get to any most fundamental theory.
We might be inclined to search for an answer in logic, a field that we think would prove the answers to all forms of reasoning, and, therefore, all knowledge. The most striking example of how we can prove/disprove these sorts of answers lie in Kurt Gödel's theorems that explain how there exist mathematical statements that can't be proven. And, one might think that, similarly, there are is physics information that can't be proven, either. The trouble with this is that, while Gödel's Incompleteness theorems only say for some fixed, recursively defined, axiom system there are statements you can't prove or disprove, that shouldn't matter for physics because you can just add new axioms when you want. Physics doesn't require a fixed-axiom system.
Save work on the Standard Model (on the fundamental forces and their interactions), theoretical physics hasn't had much success over the past few decades. There are things like string theory, loop quantum gravity, and similar theories, but, while they are ideas that could be true, we don't know.
The are epistemic problems with a theory of everything, as well. Why is it true that we can understand anything? Does finding out how the laws of nature work explain why they are the way they are? And, if we don’t know everything, how can we know anything?
References:
[1] http://nautil.us/issue/29/scaling/the-trouble-with-theories-of-everything
[2] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/theory-of-everything.html
[3] http://ppp.unipv.it/collana/pages/libri/saggi/nuova%20voltiana3_pdf/cap4/4.pdf
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| Hilbert's tomb |
Beyond what physics can tell us about how matter and forces work, there are issues with the way mathematical statements can actually explain the world. Is mathematics the language through which we describe nature or is it something that nature itself is made of? Is a theory of everything the end of knowledge the same way all biological organisms evolved from a single one? And what if there is no theory of everything? As 20th century American physicist Richard Feynman speculated, it is possible there is no theory that applies everywhere all the time.[1] Everything we observe will have something below it, and we’ll never get to any most fundamental theory.
Doing Gödel's work, son
We might be inclined to search for an answer in logic, a field that we think would prove the answers to all forms of reasoning, and, therefore, all knowledge. The most striking example of how we can prove/disprove these sorts of answers lie in Kurt Gödel's theorems that explain how there exist mathematical statements that can't be proven. And, one might think that, similarly, there are is physics information that can't be proven, either. The trouble with this is that, while Gödel's Incompleteness theorems only say for some fixed, recursively defined, axiom system there are statements you can't prove or disprove, that shouldn't matter for physics because you can just add new axioms when you want. Physics doesn't require a fixed-axiom system.
Save work on the Standard Model (on the fundamental forces and their interactions), theoretical physics hasn't had much success over the past few decades. There are things like string theory, loop quantum gravity, and similar theories, but, while they are ideas that could be true, we don't know.
The are epistemic problems with a theory of everything, as well. Why is it true that we can understand anything? Does finding out how the laws of nature work explain why they are the way they are? And, if we don’t know everything, how can we know anything?
References:
[1] http://nautil.us/issue/29/scaling/the-trouble-with-theories-of-everything
[2] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/theory-of-everything.html
[3] http://ppp.unipv.it/collana/pages/libri/saggi/nuova%20voltiana3_pdf/cap4/4.pdf
- To Grasp Physics, Students Need To Know About Knowledge
The beliefs students hold about scientific knowledge can affect their ability to understand physics - a finding that researchers say has implications for the way students are taught. Greek psychologists Christina Stathopoulou and Stella Vosniadou tested...
- Social, Creative - That's Physics!
Physics seems to have an image problem. According to BBC News, the physics department at Reading University is set to become the 21st physics school to have closed or merged over the last 10 years in the UK. But now Ursula Kessels and colleagues at the...
- Replication Will Not Save Psychology
"Replication is our only hope." "No. There is another"Psychology is big into replication these days. A lot of people think that a major problem with the field is that many important results have not been replicated, and that this is in part because journals...
- Recapitulation Of Criticism Against The Theory Of Childhood
From Ari Rahikkala's LiveJournal and Pharyngula: An awesome parody of ludicrous creationist nonsense arguments being presented in several scientific fields. I nearly cracked a rib laughing at this! The theory of childhood, also known as child origin,...
- Douglas Hofstadter's Perpetual Search For Beauty
"Hofstadter's butterfly, showing the energy levels, E, of Bloch electrons in a magnetic field.In the limit of weak modulation, shown here, the inverse magnetic flux ratio Φ0/Φ determines the internal structure of a Landau band. For example, at Φo/Φ...