Home · Book Reports · 2017 · The Philosophic Corruption of Physics

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Thoughts

Kant seems to have been one of the biggest mistakes mankind has ever encountered. Everything he touched turns to an unknowable mess even in the face of empirical evidence. I suppose it all goes to hell when your foundation is that there is no way to experience objective reality. It SEEMS like it might make sense to say your senses are filtered and the world you experience is a reflection of the unknowable objective in you subjective mind, but as we can see now it leads to the rejection of causality and acceptance of the arbitrary.

I chuckle every time I think of Goethe studying light by sitting in a dark room and dazzling himself with a bright light occasionally. Although I can’t say discoveries about light couldn’t be made this way, it is silly at its face value.

As to the validity of quantum mechanics, I personally don’t have any real knowledge of what is going on in the field, but given its roots and my belief that some “elite” are attempting to socially engineer a world of their liking I can at least entertain the possibility that the whole exercise is to get the general public to throw their arms up and declare “there is nothing we can know, call in the technocrats”.

Table of Contents

• Part 1 @ (1:21)
• Part 2 @ (1:55)
• Part 3 @ (2:35)
• Part 4 @ (3:48)
• Part 5 @ (4:50)
• Part 6 @ (6:17)

· Part 1: (start=1:21)

• The New Intellectual by Ayn Rand

• The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peacock

• “As to physics, learn why mind and reason are so decried as impotent when coping with the universe, isn’t there some huge mistake there?” - Ayn Rand

• John Locke individual rights leads to creation of USA.

• Kant destroys this with politics of 20th century.

• Physics was the same. Starts with Newton and is also destroyed by Kant.

• Modern physics reinforces the irrationality (rejection of reason) we see in pseudo-science, drug abuse, Hollywood, education, etc on a cultural scale.

• Thesis: Kant is at the heart of the irrationality, but first…

• Issac Newton was the father of modern physics. Fundamental change. Reason by induction. The calculus. Universal laws.

• Newton demonstrates the efficacy of reason.

• Deeper understanding of causality.

• All scientific knowledge must be based on observation. (Radical at the time)

• Newton defines hypothesis: “…only such a proposition as is not a phenomenon nor deduced from any phenomenon but assumed or supposed without experimental proof (evidence).”

• Accepting the arbitrary undercuts all knowledge. No certainty.

• Newton says reject the arbitrary without contemplation.

• Newton asked that arguments against his physics be constrained to his insufficient observations and observed evidence in the contrary to his.

· Part 2: (start=1:55)

Philosophy strikes back:

• Hume’s Treaty: can see nothing beyond the sensation of the moment.

• Kant claimed to be the Copernicus of philosophy, seeing completely new ways.

• Actually totally difference. Primacy of existence should be discarded in favor of the Primacy of conciousness.

• Cardinal Bellarmine vs Galileo: reality was the providence of religion not science, science was to describe sense experience with mathematical schemes.

• Kant argues essentially the same.

• We can’t know reality, only the interpretation by our mind. The mind constructs the world we see.

• Kant combines the worst of Newton/Leibniz views on space.

• Kant has categories - rules by which our minds synthesize the experience.

• Causality is only a category/rule, not having to do with actual (unknowable) objects.

• Kant rejects efficacy of reason, causality, and laws of nature induced from observation.

· Part 3: (start=2:35)

• Reality, its negation, together limitation

• Like Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis

• Kant shows that there are “bodies”, and laws of “attraction” and “repulsion”

• Replacing the what with the how, get rid of the object of cognition and replace it with the form.

• Kant rejects atomic theory. Matter can be reduced to force.

• The will is the key to the world.

• Romantics after Kant.

• Goethe studied light by sitting in a dark room and occasionally exposing himself to bright light. Did this to counter Newton’s Optics, called Newton an outright liar.

• Ritter (sp), started off experimentalist, ended up with divining rods.

• In England… Coleridge returns from visiting Germany, where he adopted Kant. He rubs off on Davey, together they tested nitrous oxide and talking Kant. After tripping Davey adopts the idea everything is made up of thought.

• Davey adopts Boscovich’s almost dead idea that atoms have “forces” at their centers, and different forces combine for different molecules.

• Davey hired lab assistant, Faraday, who is influenced to reject the idea of matter at the heart of atoms.

· Part 4: (start=3:48)

• Late 1800s

• Kant combined the worst of both world again (Newton/Leibniz). He took the innate concept of the rationalist with skepticism of the empiricists.

• “Conciousness is detached from an unknowable reality” -Kant

• Followers of Kant usually run with 1 half of this. Initially it was the rationalists, but they failed so the empirical view took over.

• Dominant 19th century Kantian empiricism is aka positivism.

• Mach was a phenomenalist, reason is limited to sensation.

• Mach reads Kant at 15, considers the entities irrelevant.

• Mach sees math as the way to describe the sensation.

• Kant/Mach puts reality beyond reason and science. Forced scientists to reject philosophy.

• To make you unconscious of philosophy by means of your philosophy.

• Mach compares matter/atoms to the soul, we know nothing of either.

• By the 1890’s we see the split into classical/modern physics.

• Classical physics is one of a real causal physical world and the goal of physics to discover its basic nature.

• Modern physics holds that there are appearances and the goal is to describe them mathematically.

• Boltzmann was Mach’s “rival”. Described equilibrium/entropy.

• “The last pillar” of classical physics. Committed suicide at 62 in 1906.

• Boltzmann reacted to learn some philosophy and he said their (Kant, etc) philosophy was nonsensical.

· Part 5: (start=4:50)

• 20th century

• Kant taken hold, Einstein discovers relativity

• Einstein is a phenomenalist, agrees with Kant we only experience sensations

• Einstein thought you could not induce theories from nature, they had to be arbitrarily proposed and then tested versus experience.

• Basically Kant plus choice (that you can arbitrarily make sense from the manifold of sensation; Kant thought the interpretation was fixed).

• “Concepts are free inventions of the human mind.” - Einstein - Essays in Physics

• Einstein was rationalist, unlike Mach, he wanted to theorize, but not inductively. Then they [theories] should be tested against reality.

• “There is no inductive method that could lead to the fundamental concepts of physics. Failure to understand this fact constitutes the basic philosophic error of so many investigators of the 19th century. Logical thinking is necessarily deductive it is based on hypothetical concepts and axioms.” - Einstein - Essays in Physics

• “We now realize how much in error are those theorists who believe that theory comes inductively from experience. Even the great Newton could not free himself from this error.” - Einstein - Essays in Physics

• To solve the constant speed of light problem Lorentz before Einstein said that light travels through a medium, the ether, like sound. Unlike sound our instruments are also in the ether and are affect so we measure the same speed all the time.

• OR the speed of light is actually the same with respect to observer because the instruments affect the ether in such a way to alway produce the same speed for the speed of light.

• To show light is constant to all observers, Einstein simply distorts space and time.

• Einstein adopts Lorentz’s transformation equations.

• A theory is NOT a set of equations. It is also an interpretation. Rand and Kant would have very different opinions of the same equations.

• He didn’t understand relativity, but he memorized the equations. He was very confused but he still got good grades on his exams.

• Students are split into 2 universes. They instinctively are attuned to the primacy of existence, but they are asked to imagine a world where there is no length, only the length of any observer.

• This reminds me of the “split” in worlds I see between the “left/right” political paradigm.

• Objective interpretation of Einstein’s equations, open to the total opposite view.

• Lewis Little uses the same equations to show how to get separate the object from the appearance. He uses the equations to “subtract out” the distortion caused at high speeds.

• Example: 2 people view a lighting strike from different distances. Based on the delay between the lightning and thunder they can each calculate the actual distance to the strike. Lewis Little’s view allows for such.

• Relative mass doesn’t replace Newton’s law, so now physicists say “rest mass” as the actual mass.

• Relative mass moves away from matter to forces and motion, with no justification.

• Therefor E=mc^2 is arbitrary in Einstein’s theory, it could fit with Lorentz.

• The particle accelerators are measuring energy and momentum, not mass?

• Motions should be determined by entities and their relationships, not matter the perspective of the observer.

• Relativity would be better described as Invariance of Reality, where the perspective does not affect the physics of the matter “out there”.

• Feynman rejected philosophy (meeting many 20th century scientist philosophers) and told his students not to waste their time on quantum paradoxes.

· Part 6: (start=6:17)

• Quantum Theory (actually starts at 6:10)

• 1925, Heisenberg, First publication

• 1926, Schrödinger, Second essentially the same

• 1927, Interpretation by Neils Boor (Copenhagen)

• German physicists rejected causality before this, Hermann Weyl 1920, Walther Nerst 1921, Schrödinger 1922, Boor 1922

• Almost a religious renouncing of causality in the early 1920s Germany

• Kant was the father of Nihilism, in metaphysics he denied reality in order to make room for an illusion. In epistemology he “denied knowledge in order to make room for faith” (Kant’s words). In morality he denied happiness in order to make room for duty.

• Epilogue to Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand passages:

• “Kant offers humanity no alternative to the realm of that which is and no reward for renouncing it. He is the first philosopher in history to reject reality, thought, and values not for the sake of some high version of them but for the sake of the rejection. The power on behalf his genius speaks is not pure reason, but pure destruction.”

• “Hatred of the good for being the good. The hatred took shape in the culture of nihilism. Modern intellectuals are comparable to a psychopath who murders for kicks. They seek the thrill of the new and the new to them is the negative. The new is obliteration. Obliteration of the essential in every field. They have no interest in anything to take its place. Thus the uniqueness of the century behind us. Philosophy gleefully rid of system building, education based on the theory that cognition is harmful, science boastful of it inability to understand, art which expelled beauty, literature which flaunted anti-heros, language liberated from syntax, verse free of meter, non-representational painting, atonal music, unconscious psychology, deconstruction in literary criticism, indeterminacy is the new depth in physics, incompleteness is the revelation in mathematics, a void everywhere that was claimed by the avant guard with a metaphysical chuckle. It was the sound of triumph, the triumph of the new anti-ideal of the unknowable, the unreachable, the unendurable. In a Kantian reality, nothing else was possible.”

• “Matter is an image in our mind, mind is thus prior to matter.” -Schrödinger

• Boor didn’t call wave-particle duality a contradiction, it was “complimentary”.

• Pilot wave theory, 1927, French, de Broglie. Particle guided by or “ride” waves. (adopted recently by Lewis Little)

• Schrödinger didn’t agree with Copenhagen theory, years later said he wished he hadn’t been a part of quantum theory. (Only Nobel prize winner to regret his discovery?)