
George Ellis Knocks Physicists for Knocking Philosophy, Falsification, Free Will - hachiya
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2014/07/22/physicist-george-ellis-knocks-physicists-for-knocking-philosophy-free-will/
======
Htsthbjig
"Physics experiments are approaching the highest energies it will ever be
possible to test by any collider experiment, both for financial and technical
reasons. We can’t build a collider bigger than the surface of the Earth"

We can't build a collider bigger than the surface of the earth TODAY.

We had not gone outside of the earth, but that does not mean that in the
future they wont.

That "we already know everything about the world" had been said for long. It
was said to Socrates centuries before Jesus was born, and it was said to the
inventor of the microscope(why do we need something to see everything we
already know bigger?).

The interesting part is that we don't know what we don't know. E.g we know 0
about the real cause of gravity.

~~~
coldtea
> _We can 't build a collider bigger than the surface of the earth TODAY._

Yeah, I'm sure the processor that so eloquently addressed tons of issues in
his interview also knew that. The thing is the possibility of doing it
tomorrow is not that big either. We are more like to regress or kill everybody
(from nuclear war to bacterial resistance), than to conquer the universe. And
even if we did fan out to the Solar system planets, the logistics stil look
bad for us. Plus, some things we investigate approach physical limits, so no
amount of "larger colliders" or "more energy" will help us with those.

> _That "we already know everything about the world" had been said for long._

There's nothing about saying something and being wrong for a long time that
precludes it eventually being true.

Plus, it's not like we actually have said that "we know everything about the
world" for a long time. Most societies, from ancient Egypt to Greece, to
medieval times and renessaince and so one, believed there are tons of
mysteries to be solved and things to be explained, and worked on finding
things out. Yes, even the during the so called "dark ages" (mediaval times)
they did that, math and other kind of sciences, from medicine to cartography,
was practiced strongly even then. The common misconception about those ages
thinking "they know everything" is just an old wives tale -- often just based
on the sayings of some fundamendalists.

~~~
pavel_lishin
It sounds like you're saying that we should focus on things that give us a
bigger bang for our buck today, instead of hoping that tomorrow we'll be able
to turn the asteroid belt into a collider. And that's true. But we were more
pessimistic about our survival prognosis during the cold war, and we seem to
have made it through that. There surely is a middle ground between "let's see
what this dollar will get us" and "maybe, in the future, when we have a
quajillion dinaros".

------
hachiya
Dr. George Ellis speaks about physicists that knock philosophy, while they
themselves regularly engage in metaphysics.

 _[...] George F. R. Ellis, the physicist-mathematician-cosmologist, an
authority on the Big Bang and other cosmic mysteries. [...]_

 _Horgan: Lawrence Krauss, in A Universe from Nothing, claims that physics has
basically solved the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing. Do
you agree?_

 _Ellis: Certainly not. He is presenting untested speculative theories of how
things came into existence out of a pre-existing complex of entities,
including variational principles, quantum field theory, specific symmetry
groups, a bubbling vacuum, all the components of the standard model of
particle physics, and so on. He does not explain in what way these entities
could have pre-existed the coming into being of the universe, why they should
have existed at all, or why they should have had the form they did. And he
gives no experimental or observational process whereby we could test these
vivid speculations of the supposed universe-generation mechanism. How indeed
can you test what existed before the universe existed? You can’t._

 _Thus what he is presenting is not tested science. It’s a philosophical
speculation, which he apparently believes is so compelling he does not have to
give any specification of evidence that would confirm it is true. Well, you
can’t get any evidence about what existed before space and time came into
being. Above all he believes that these mathematically based speculations
solve thousand year old philosophical conundrums, without seriously engaging
those philosophical issues. The belief that all of reality can be fully
comprehended in terms of physics and the equations of physics is a fantasy. As
pointed out so well by Eddington in his Gifford lectures, they are partial and
incomplete representations of physical, biological, psychological, and social
reality._

~~~
cromwellian
This is a twisting of what Krauss says. Krauss merely shows that the current
known laws of physics are not inconsistent with this scenario. He does not
claim there is evidence that proves this is what happened. It's not much
different than seeing that some solutions of General Relatively permit warp
travel. It doesn't prove it can work, merely that the current known theories
allow it.

Also, the comments he makes on determinism are nonsense, and resemble the
claims of creationists. A computer can't arise from the laws of physics
because it had a designer? By transitivity, this implies human beings could
not have been the result of bottom up physical processes either. Is what way
is this claim scientific or testable?

"there is a group of people out there writing papers based on the idea that
physics is a computational process. But a physical law is not an algorithm. So
who chooses the computational strategy and the algorithms that realise a
specific physical law? (Finite elements perhaps?) What language is it written
in? (Does Nature use Java or C++? What machine code is used?) Where is the
CPU? What is used for memory, and in what way are read and write commands
executed? Additionally if it’s a computation, how does Nature avoid the
halting problem? It’s all a very bad analogy that does not work."

This just seems really poorly reasoned out. What does the halting problem have
to do with it? Total non-sequitur. Why can't the physical laws merely be a
kind of cellular automata? No need to solve any halting problems. Things
interact iteratively, new states arise, some of those states lead to more
complex forms, etc.

Since cellular automata have been proven to be universal, that means in
principle, any thing that is computable can be carried out, and therefore, all
of classical computer science fits perfectly in this view without having to
invoke some kind of Penrose-like "the universe solves non-computable
functions" magic.

If you asked Ellis how planets or galaxies formed, he would not say "What
algorithm caused star/galaxy/solar system formation", or "how does the
computer solve N-body problems of trillions of elements". There's no need to
posit a designed algorithm for these things, merely that the system interacts
with itself in ways that evolve towards these structures, that human beings
produce higher level mathematical models to predict and manipulate more
easily.

I don't think any scientist working today works under the delusion that our
theories are anything but models.

~~~
PakG1
_I don 't think any scientist working today works under the delusion that our
theories are anything but models._

This. I think this is a key point that the general population doesn't
understand. And it leads to debates like this. The debate itself is moot
because the debate would be a non-issue if all sides understood this point.

~~~
waps
I don't think that an understanding of the concept of models would make the
general public understand. Science is replacing religion. And a religion can
do anything it wants, on any subject, except for one thing : it can't say "we
don't know" on any popular question.

Science has a lot of "we don't know" answers. They only really came to light
in the 20th century however, after the enlightenment had already so thoroughly
captured academia and philosophers in general there was no going back. The
enlightenment had also already caused so much death, corruption (resulting in
economic disasters) and severed heads, of course, that it was getting swiftly
kicked out of government as well, and serious government funds were going to
the restoration of the churches' position in society (that only partly worked
because of the sheer numbers of clergy killed by said government). So a
massive rift between academia and general society opened up, and I'd say it's
still mostly there.

But after all the hubhub around enlightenment and the switchover of academia,
ever more "we don't know" type answers kept coming in. But philosophers are
famous for ignoring practicalities, whether we're talking ancient, medieval,
renaissance, enlightenment or modern era philosophers. And thus the story that
science has all the answers and that it isn't possible that scientific
theories have serious shortcomings. In practice, I would say that scientific
theories are merely "the best available" theory.

And of course, there's the little matter of these theories being used against
religion. Big bang theory is rather important. But, let's compare inflation
and the speed of light. That can't possibly be right ... (yes I know it
explains another "bigger" inconsistency, but I think reasonable people should
agree at a rather high cost). Evolution theory. Oops ... higher animals don't
evolve through mutation. And the trend towards that evolution works, not on a
species level but more on a group, or "group of groups" level. The trend that
you can split the genes that are unique to humans in 2 groups : about 30% that
come from known bacteria, and 70% we don't know where they came from, but they
sure as hell did not come from mutation. And let's just not go anywhere near
climate science, or you'll notice just how biased hacker news is, when, of
course, there is legitimate criticism against climate science that could mean
the whole thing is just simply wrong.

Now of course, most of these are interesting questions. So you have some
criticism, great ! Let's do some research. But of course, part of the
criticism comes from groups that want to push religion (and we're in the west,
in the middle east it works entirely different) or government policies. Like
in the middle ages and during the renaissance, science is an important source
of government policies, and this of course means that politicians can't ignore
universities or just leave them be.

The enlightenment is a great and horrible thing. It's the new religion. Can't
go spoiling that with "we don't know".

~~~
fl0wenol
You seem to be treading on thin ice here: espousing things that are cracks in
the plaster of ... what I think you think ... is a common-sense-ish scientific
body of knowledge that most people instill which has displaced a space once
occupied by religion.

But you do this having a weak grasp on the very concepts for which you claim
inconsistencies or inadequacies, sprinkled with a dash of anti-intellectual
falsehoods/misinformation.

This is probably why you got downmodded, not that you didn't have a larger
point with showing how common beliefs are common beliefs, whether they be from
science, rhetoric, cultural tradition, or religion; and that media or
governments (or other institutions representing the "will of the people")
often color the inquiry that can ultimately shape and theoretically improve
these commonly held beliefs.

------
praptak
I'm disappointed with how he brushes determinism aside. "If you don't have
free will then you are not responsible for what you say." is supposed to imply
"you aren't worth talking to"?

Pretty crappy given his declared respect for philosophical foundations.

~~~
ivanca
Yeah, pretty weak. Determinism means that the concept of "responsibility" is a
social construct created by deterministic events, for example: if you kill
someone you go to jail; such course of action was a reaction of your events.
Accountability for what you say is just the reaction from saying it.

------
acqq
To understand Ellis' motivation, note:

"Q: You are a Christian, more specifically a Quaker. Does your faith have any
effect on your scientific views, or vice versa?

Ellis: It may affect to some degree the topics I choose to tackle (...)"

He just wants to remain religious. Good that the interviewer didn't miss that
question.

On another side, it's interesting that one of the books by the interviewer is:
"Horgan, John and Reverend Frank Greer (2002). Where Was God on September 11?
(A Scientist Asks a Ground Zero Pastor). San Francisco: Browntrout
Publishers." Why "scientist" when the Wikipedia article on Horgan cites his
education as "Columbia University School of Journalism (1983)" I don't know.

------
snowwrestler
I'm not a physicist.

But I look at statements like the ones in this article--that we've probed
pretty much everything we can probe--and I think, what have we learned? Aren't
the best estimates now that dark energy makes up 68%, dark matter 27%, and
normal matter 5% of the mass-energy of the universe?

If the dark stuff does not interact electromagnetically, then wouldn't we need
gravitational observatories to probe 95% of the known universe? Which are in
their infancy. We haven't reliably detected one gravity wave yet, let alone
probed all frequencies.

Like I said, I'm not a physicist, but when 95% of the known universe is a
mystery, it seems early to call the game.

~~~
spatten
The end of physics has been predicted many times. I remember reading an
article in Sci Am about the end of physics a few months before starting my
physics undergrad in the late 80s.

The exciting thing is that it has often been followed by huge breakthroughs --
if I remember correctly, the last time it was widely believed that we had it
all figured out was at the turn of the 20th century, just before Quantum
Physics and General Relativity were discovered.

I'm still patiently waiting for string theory to die and us to start working
on something that we can actually do experiments on.

~~~
scythe
>string theory to die and us to start working on something that we can
actually do experiments on.

You might already be able to do experiments that would confirm or deny string
theory, but we haven't been able to work out the math in sufficient detail to
come up with one.

The thing about physics is that the deeper we get into the nature of the
Universe, the stranger it looks.

In the special theory of relativity, Einstein didn't just do strange things to
physics. He had to work with a sort of mathematical object -- Minkowski space
-- that most mathematicians either had never heard of or ignored, because they
thought it was too weird. Turns out we live in Minkowski space.

And when he worked with Hilbert on the general theory, they had to go and
study Elie Cartan's tensor calculus to make sense of things, and then bring
that into Minkowski space. The enterprise spawned a new kind of mathematical
notation -- the Einstein repeated index summation convention.

And when Dirac tried to quantize the special theory he found himself in the
unruly situation of taking the square root of the gradient operator -- the
square root of a derivative! The solution relied upon an anticommuting algebra
now called the Clifford algebra, represented by Dirac matrices.

And when Feynman wanted to quantize action, he had to take an integral over
paths. When Schwinger studied particle[1] propagation, the integrals went from
the paths of one particle to the paths of all possible particles and particle
creation events.

When you bring in gravity, the absence of any sort of repulsive action of the
field and the number of degrees of freedom mean that any attempt to apply the
path integral leads to infinite energies and infinite numbers of particles.

String theory appeared as sort of a way, essentially, of restricting the
"impact" of new particles by attaching an energy term to the "shape" of the
particle. For simplicity particles were 1D manifolds. This led to the Nambu-
Goto action.

Then they had multiple dimensions, and Witten called it M-theory. It's not
going away: you always end up with something like this to fix gravity.

In any case, it's not string theory we can't test. It's quantum gravity
period. Perhaps another issue is that string theory doesn't work well with
QCD, which itself isn't rigorous, etc.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems#Yang....](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems#Yang.E2.80.93Mills_existence_and_mass_gap)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_quantum_field_theo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_quantum_field_theory)

[http://chaosbook.org/fieldtheory/](http://chaosbook.org/fieldtheory/)

[1]: There aren't actually any particles, but it makes the math easier to
think about.

------
hawkharris
Interesting fact to consider about free will as it relates to philosophy and
religion: A god can have free will and predict the future, but he (or she or
it) can't do both. If you can predict exactly what will happen at any point in
time, you don't have the ability to change it. And absolute free will prevents
you from predicting the future.

~~~
alok-g
Why cannot God have free will and "dictate" (and thereby predict) the future?
(The situation becomes different when multiple entities possess free will.)

~~~
MisterBastahrd
Depends on your definition of God. If it includes perfect and omniscient, then
that being can't make any decisions. They've already been made for him / her.
That god is an automaton.

~~~
KMag
Or alternatively, s/he has "already" made all decisions outside of time/at the
moment time began. From this point of view, any being that is both omniscient
and omnipotent cannot change his/her mind, if said being changes over time,
this implies s/he will make decisions now based on how s/he will feel about
things later, after taking her/his own evolution into account.

I'm sure we're not saying anything that hasn't been said literally millions of
times before half-drunk at countless frat parties.

~~~
fennecfoxen
> From this point of view, any being that is both omniscient and omnipotent
> cannot change his/her mind, if said being changes over time, this implies
> s/he will make decisions now based on how s/he will feel about things later,
> after taking her/his own evolution into account.

You see, the problem is that people think of the evolution of an omniscient
deity as a strict linear progression from cause to effect, but actually it's
more like a great big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey... stuff.

:P

------
drodgers
"the computer on which I am writing this could not possibly have come into
being through the agency of physics alone.

The issue is that these scientists are focusing on some strands in the web of
causation that actually exist, and ignoring others that are demonstrably there
– such as ideas in our minds, or algorithms embodied in computer programs.
These demonstrably act in a top-down way to cause physical effects in the real
world. All these processes and actual outcomes are contextually dependent, and
this allows the effectiveness of processes such as adaptive selection that are
the key to the emergence of genuine complexity."

"they should stop indulging in low-grade philosophy in their own writings."

I think Dr. Ellis needs to take his own advice on this one.

------
Fando
Wow, I never knew of George Ellis. What an insightful and smart man! I'll be
looking into him.

