Pop ! goes the Positivist

 [This is a continuation of a thread begun here.]

Another example of fetishizing the visible (cf. now also this)  occurs in Karl Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations: the Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1962; page refs. to the Harper paperback reprint), p. 284:

In the last pages of Testability, Carnap discussed the sentence ‘If all minds should disappear from the universe, the stars would still go on in their courses.’  Lewis and Schlick asserted, correctly, that this sentence was not verifiable.

They so asserted incorrectly.  After all, we have a pretty good handle on those stars in their courses, beginning from not long after the Big Bang  through the present, during most of which there were no human minds.

And here’s a simpler experiment:  Let’s all just refrain from observing the moon for the next two weeks.  Now we open our eyes.  Surpri-ise!  Right where we expected to find it, and at a phase two weeks more mature than when we last checked (rather than the phase as last seen).

One occasionally observes a very young child shut her eyes and announce in a sing-song: “Youuu ca-han’t seee mee….!”  I doubt the child actually believes that, it’s just fun to say.  But suppose she did. She is then entertaining an erroneous optical theory, but not an erroneous ontological one.  She imagines that the lights went out for you as well; but she never entertains the thought that you yourself have been extinguished, or been transfixed into some mute deaf motionless limbo until such time as she shall be pleased to gaze again – after all, she has just shown this, by addressing you.

Incidentally, the whole Schlick-shop with its merry/morose band of logical positivists, appear to have created enormous problems for themselves, and come up with completely counter-intuitive results, from the basic motivation of wishing to exclude all metaphysical propositions from the outset as strictly meaningless.   (The story here is in line with our overarching defense of theism.)  In other words, it wasn’t enough to denounce as wholly unconvincing,  all purported metaphysical statements hitherto; nor to brand it a particularly uninteresting language-game; nor to marginalize the enterprise with the derision usually reserved for circle-squarers.  Metaphysics as such, and for all time, had to have a stake driven through its heart, the stake itself consisting in pure reasoning from selbstverständlich  (metaphysically a-priori? God-given? -- oops, NOT) first principles.  For a demonstration of the absurdities that apparently resulted, cf. Popper, passim.  As (p. 281, op.cit.)

My criticism of the verifiability criterion has always been this: against the intention of its defenders, it did not exclude obvious metaphysical statements, but it did exclude the most important … of all scientific statements … the universal laws of nature.

Why even go near such a disaster, for the sake of excluding-in-principle all metaphysical statements – which they were ignoring anyway?  Popper goes so far as to hazard a guess in a footnote to p. 175:  “One not need believe in the ‘scientific’ character of psycho-analysis (which, I think, is in a metaphysical phase) in order to diagnose the anti-metaphysical fervour of positivism as a form of Father-killing.”  (Note, b.t.w., the capital initial of “Father”.)

*

Since we were obliged, a moment ago, to deprecate Popper, let us hasten to another example, in which we find him on the side of the angels.  First let us note:

             * Our conduct is guided by moral laws.

             * Our scientific activity is guided by metaphysical principles.

             * Both categories are philosophically vexed, and any concrete application of these laws and principles may prove problematic; but we cannot do without them.

            Here is Popper (p. 287) characterizing the logical positivists: “They implicitly accept the rule: ‘Always chose the most probable hypothesis!’  He goes on:

Now it can be easily shown that this rule is equivalent to…’Always choose the hypothesis which goes as little beyond the evidence as possible!’  And this, in turn [amounts to] ‘Always choose the hypothesis which has the highest degree of ad hoc character!’

an undesirable result for science.   (Cf. Chomsky, passim, re the extraordinarily abstract and roundabout way you may have to proceed  to get valid results, by no means simply tip-toeing a bit beyond “the evidence”.)

            The principles which we require instead  may be best illustrated by an old joke (presented here in a slightly revised form):

     A zoologist, a mathematician, and a positivist  are touring the hinterlands of Bohemia by train.  Through the window they spot, standing motionless at some distance, a purple cow.

     “Fancy that!” exclaims the zoologist. “There are purple cows in Bohemia.”

     The mathematician, in a low voice, amends: “There is at least one purple cow in Bohemia.”

     The positivist, raising his finger, crisply corrects to:  “In Bohemia there is at least one cow, purple on one side.”

            The joke is that the positivist has the most precise view of the evidence; and of the three statements, only his own is certainly true (interpreting an unmodified “purple cow” in the natural way, as “purple more or less all over”); yet his scruples are absurd.  Science would not progress, were it bound by such fragmented literalism.  (Indeed, we should have to replace “cow” with “an apparently bovine organism”, and always assuming that we can rule out a mirage, or a collective hallucination, or some effect of swamp gas; or for that matter an analogue to one of Hilary Putnam’s pet entities, the Mechanical Cat from Mars.)  And we would have to gloss Quine’s celebrated interjection, gavagai!, as possibly:  “Lo, a rabbit-stage, seen from the east.”

(For more on bovine mathematics, see "How Now, Round Cow".)

A gathering of Positivists

Note:  Occasionally one meets with such unilateral positivist agnosticism  in a non-jocular context:

Franz Ferdinand rode erect, his visible foot deep in the stirrup, a saber at his side.

-- Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts (1993), p. xxvi

The above scenario has been much discussed among epistemologists, under the rubric “Henry and the barn façades”.   However, the cow version is much funnier.

Ceci n’est pas une grange 

~

To move from this to an outlook useful for science, we need these metaphysical principles:

   (1) a certain uniformity or self-cohesion to nature

   (2) the reliability (not in a logical, but in a practical sense) of induction.

(There are others, of course, such as the usefulness of deduction;  but that applies in every world, not just in this contingent one.)

            Now, both these principles are of vexed and delicate application; as are, indeed, the Commandments.   Just as it is difficult to avoid situation ethics, I see no way around a kind of “situation metaphysics”.   The zoologist, using these principles, together with his discipline-specific knowledge (to the effect that animals generally come in species, not as singletons), concludes the presence of purple cows.  But here I must side with the formulation of the mathematician: there is at least one such cow, but perhaps no more.  For, nature’s uniformity depends on the domain.  Were an experiment ever to identify, say, a Higgs boson, we should conclude the existence of an emphatic plurality of Higgs bosons; that there should only be one in the universe, is inconceivable.  But biology is more mottled than that.  Given our collective prior acquaintance with hundreds of thousands of cows, none of which was ever purple, we would hypothesize here an extremely rare mutation for (bilateral) purple (bilateral because bilaterally symmetric animals generally continue to evolve with bilateral symmetry, pace the occasional narwhal).  Since a cow delivers but a single calf at a time, this one has no identical siblings, so it is probably unique.  Moreover, the bulls will likely shun her for her color, and she shall have no offspring.  The mutation dies with her.

Carnap attempts to avoid the assumption of a metaphysical principle, by declaring (1) to be “analytic” (i.e., more like “2+2 = 4” than like “animals tend to come in species” or “each elementary particle is invariable within its class”).  Popper comments (p.289) that “no such principle of uniformity can be analytic (except in a Pickwickian sense of ‘analytic’)."  In fact, we noticed, the principle is nothing remotely like analytic, having always constraints on its application, which in some domains may be severe.  And as for (2), I concur with Popper (p.292) that it is “a principle of a priori metaphysics.”  And none the worse for that.

[For further notes on ineluctable metaphysical underpinnings of the scientific enterprise, see here.]

More physics porn (further updated)

Contemporary atheists point to cosmological findings of the Big Bang Theory era, to argue that no Creator is logically necessary.   Earlier writers, compassing the same end of assailing theism or even deism, likewise adverted to Big Bang Theory, but put an opposite spin on it.  A philosopher, reviewing Filosofskie Problemy Sovremennoi Fisiki (Moscow, 1957), by  Marxist author Ernst Kolman:

He appears to reject outright the docrine of a cosmological commencement, on the grounds that such theories inevitable lead to the invocation of non-material causes  and hence to religion.  Do they?  How pleased some of our theologians would be if this were so.

-- Ernest Gellner, Contemporary Thought and Politics (1978), p. 138

(Note:  Gellner is not here by any means espousing deism, but merely critiquing one instance of Physics Porn.)

 ~

Richard Feynman, a highly engaging guy and no spoilsport, yet disliked the tawdry “three quarks for Mr Mark” sort of foolishness that the public laps up like frumenty.  In QED (1985), he wrote (p. 136):

The quarks have an additional type of polarization that is not related to geometry.  The idiot physicists, unable to come up with any wonderful Greek words anymore, call this type of polarization by the unfortunate name of “color”, which has nothing to do with color in the normal sense.

And (p. 145)

The “flavor” of this quark is called c, and I haven’t got the guts to tell you what c stands for, but you may have read it in the newspaper.  The names are getting worse and worse!

("Charm".)

And all this was prior to the horrors of .... "The God Particle" ...

~ We here reprint a post from August 2011. ~

"What is that streaking 'cross the evening sky?"

"It's a bird!"  "It's Balloon Boy!"   "It's the HI-I-IGGS  BOSON !!!"

In an earlier post, I commented on the debased public presentation of physics, comparable to the way in which Natural History is reduced to giant colored plastic dinosaurs (with or without Adam&Eve in the diorama, according to taste).

Do  note:  the epithet "porn" is hurled, not at the content, but at the presentation.  As Edward Wilson lamented (in Consilience, p. 268),  concerning Americans' attitude towards science:

They don’t understand it, they prefer science fiction, they take fantasy and pseudoscience like stimulants to jolt their cerebral pleasure centers.

Even more trenchantly, Richard Dawkins, in his essay “Drawing Room of Dukes”:

‘Science Weeks’ and ‘Science Fortnights’ betray an anxiety among scientists  to be loved.  Funny hats and larky voices  proclaim that science is fun, fun, fun.

(Having myself tried to scale its cliffs, I can rather attest, that it is hard, hard, hard -- and gets unbelievably harder as you near the summits.)

Our remarks here are thus in the spirit of  Dawkins,  who wrote “I am attacking only the kind of populist whoring that defiles the wonder of science.”   By no means are the barbs aimed at science, nor at haute vulgarisation.

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TWpcZGE_q4

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

~     ~     ~

The other day, a most useful site, aldaily.com, which links to articles of especial interest from around the globe (though only in English), saw fit to link to this one, in the Irish Times:

         'God particle' may be discovered soon

No, don’t bother to click -- spare your forefinger.   The brief wisp of an article announces, not any actual development, but a hope or anticipation of a possible eventual development, namely the ‘discovery’ (something of a misnomer; see below) of the freaking Higgs boson.  (Somehow I can never resist calling it that.  Might as well re-dub it the FHB.)  Such an anticipation has been in the news for many, many years, and has grown mold.

For those (chiefly children and Pacific Islanders) who have not yet heard of the marvelous (though possibly non-existent, anyhow completely unobserved) FHB,  the article explains:

It has been called the “God particle” or the “stuff that makes stuff stuff” as, without it, there is a mystery as to how objects get their mass.

Don’t misunderstand -- it will be very nice if they do ‘discover’ the Higgs boson, since particle physics is rather a mess, and needs all the help it can get.  It would be like filling in a gap in the periodic chart of the elements.   But how would it be more than that?  True, there is a mystery as to how objects get their mass.  But at that level, there is a mystery, how Time got its start, or Why is there something rather than nothing.   At this level, such questions are fundamentally unanswerable:  we have hit rock bottom, our spade is turned.  

Still, there is much that can usefully be done.   Thus, Newton did not discover the fact of gravitational attraction, let alone explain how it came to be -- as he well knew.   What he did was posit a precise formula -- the inverse-square law -- which, when you do the math (and he had to invent much of the math) turns out to fit precisely the observed orbits of the planets, as well as the behavior of falling apples.   This was a formal tour de force, and was of immediate philosophical significance as well, as uniting the supralunary and sublunary spheres, traditionally thought to obey quite different laws.  Nay further, as Arthur Koestler puts it epigrammatically  in The Act of Creation (1964):

This equally applies to the discoveries of the artist who makes us see familiar objects … in a strange new revealing light … Newton’s apple and Cézanne’s apple  are discoveries more closely related than they seem.

Now, there are two basic ways in which some new constuct, like the FHB, might be desirable. 

One, like Newton’s Universal Gravitation, it might be illuminating, in that it would formally unite gravity with something else, which is the goal of the Theory of Everything.   But in that case, it would seem, the intellectual work has already been done:  someone has calculated that, given a particle of such&such particulars, it would be a key that would fit both locks.   And that might constitute a conceptual tour de force, only -- the actual ‘discovery’ of the particle is philosophically an anticlimax:  it would not be really a discovery, the way penicillin or X-rays or the Cosmic Microwave Background -- previously unsuspected -- were discovered.   It would simply mean that the already-posited and largely-understood particle  was finally physically spotted -- the way the positron was spotted, after Dirac had predicted its characteristics with math.

 [Update 23 April 2012]  Thus indeed now Steven Weinberg:

"The discovery of the Higgs boson would be a gratifying verification of present theory, but it will not point the way to a more comprehensive future theory. We can hope, as was the case with the Bevatron, that the most exciting thing to be discovered at the LHC will be something quite unexpected. Whatever it is, it’s hard to see how it could take us all the way to a final theory, including gravitation."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/10/crisis-big-science/?pagination=false&printpage=true

Unfortunately, this happy scenario may not be the case.  Rather, we may be faced with Case Two:  the particle is needed, not because, like the calculus and the working out of the consequences of the inverse square laws, it is a key that opens many doors;  but only because, for purely formal reasons, without it, you’re screwed.  Such is the picture as presented in Wikipedia:

The existence of the particle is postulated as a means of resolving inconsistencies in current theoretical physics …

In other words, the Standard Theory is sweating beneath the auditor’s eyeshaded gaze,  “We seem to have uncovered certain inconsistencies in your physicofinancial statements…”, and the hope is that adding yet one more creature to the Particle Zoo  will stave off the day of reckoning for a time.

Okay, so:  a non-story, at many levels.   Why, then, did a well-informed site like aldaily choose to link to it, rather than to any of a number of substantive scientific articles for a lay audience?  (For examples, see any issue of the excellent American Scientist.)   The answer is obvious:  the tawdry misinvocation of the Deity in that misbegotten amelus of a nickname, “the God particle”, which manages to degrade comprehension of both science and religion at one go.

[update 19 IV 11:]  aldaily has now promoted that piece of tripe to its coveted "nota bene" section.

[update 21 IV 11:]  Ah, just what we needed:  toss in the much-battered metaphor of the Holy Grail (now decapitalized and pluralized):

http://www.financialexpress.com/news/physics-and-the-search-for-the-holy-grails/779476/0

[update 26 IV 11:] As we anticipated.... "Nevvah mi-ind..."

And so the media once again climbs down from its puffed-up non-event.  But meanwhile they have sold some more newspapers, and John Q. Citizen can feel that he has kept "up-to-date" with Science.

[update 28 IV 11]  As an antidote to all this, see the current New Yorker for some excellent physics reportage.  The subject -- quantum computation and Many Worlds -- is difficult to approach without falling into mystification or gee-whiz, but reporter Rivka Galchen manages nicely.

[update 14 VIII 11]

More digs at Higgs

The FHB is beginning seriously to get on my tits.   Now this:

To More, the usual concept of empty space was meaningless because space is always filled with divine spirit.  To us, the usual concept of empty space  may be similarly elusive, since the empty space we’re privy to  may always be filled with an ocean of Higgs field.

 -- Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004), p. 270

Ergo, a new Paternoster, for the Physics-Porn crowd:

            Our Particle, who art in Aether,

            Shallow be thy name …

[update 24 VIII 11]

The alarming possibility just occurred to me, that this post might be misconstrued as dissing physics popularization  as a genre, as a whole.  Not at all !  There are several quite excellent books.  Heading the list would be the brief and very readable title by Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (1965).

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(My name is Dick Feynman, and I approved this message.)

~         ~

~

[update 18 IX 11]

Cf. now also this.

[update 24 IX 11]

And this.

Hooray for the Higgs

Yep, you heard me right, folks.  Got nothing against the Big Bad Boson, just the fluff which, in journalism, surrounds it, like a corona of virtual particles.  But today’s op-ed by particle physicist (and gifted science writer) Steven Weinberg is unfailingly informative, sans dog nor pony:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/opinion/weinberg-why-the-higgs-boson-matters.html?hpw&pagewanted=print

Favorite line:

If the new particle is the Higgs boson, it would have to be like a knuckleball in baseball; unlike all other known elementary particles, it would have no spin.

For further quotations from the ever-quotable Prince of Physics, click here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Steven%20Weinberg

Strangely, the professor does not mention our own recent discovery, documented here for completeness (“WDJ -- the Blog of Record”):

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/07/doctor-justice-discovers-higgs-boson.html

A worthwhile look at implications for physics:
http://www.nature.com/news/theorists-feast-on-higgs-data-1.11018
 

Physicists shrink God to particle-size

Today’s big headline in the persistently shameless Washington Post:

Researchers to announce evidence of ‘God’ particle that explains universe

Not enough, apparently to call it the ‘God’ particle;  now it’s the particle “that explains the universe” (an almost nonsensical hyperbole); next time it’ll be the particle that explains the universe and cures cancer and does windows.

In short, more physics porn.

This story never dies, and never really changes.  Here’s a repost of our notice from 7 March 2012.

~     ~     ~

Higgs-like odor detected

BUMP DISCOVERED IN DATA

Crowds Go Wild

From today’s New York Times:

Physicists from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., say they have found a bump in their data that might be the long-sought Higgs boson,

Beate Heinemann, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been deeply involved in analyzing data from the Large Hadron Collider, said recently of the CERN results, “This very much smells like the Higgs boson.” But, she noted, the signal could also go away when more data is obtained.

Those of you who enjoy hearing the thing (or the no-thing) called the “God particle”, can consult a more breathless account  in today’s Washington Post, still pandering away at the same stand.   (The downside to such a come-on is, should physics determine that there’s no Higgs after all…. You see the problem.)

The Higgs boson, you probably know, is the Official Subatomic Mascot of the media, doing yeoman work over the years and decades, by repeatedly being sought-for, and repeatedly failing to show up.  The Godot boson, we might dub it.  The whole process feels a little like the Republican Presidential primaries.

Exciting details here.

[Update, July 2012]  Some well-done and informative graphics here:
http://www.lefigaro.fr/sciences/2012/07/03/01008-20120703ARTFIG00863-boson-de-higgs-le-chainon-manquant-de-la-physique.php

Higgs-like odor detected

BUMP DISCOVERED IN DATA

Crowds Go Wild

From today’s New York Times:

Physicists from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., say they have found a bump in their data that might be the long-sought Higgs boson,

Beate Heinemann, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been deeply involved in analyzing data from the Large Hadron Collider, said recently of the CERN results, “This very much smells like the Higgs boson.” But, she noted, the signal could also go away when more data is obtained.

Those of you who enjoy hearing the thing (or the no-thing) called the “God particle”, can consult a more breathless account  in today’s Washington Post, still pandering away at the same stand.   (The downside to such a come-on is, should physics determine that there’s no Higgs after all…. You see the problem.)

The Higgs boson, you probably know, is the Official Subatomic Mascot of the media, doing yeoman work over the years and decades, by repeatedly being sought-for, and repeatedly failing to show up.  The Godot boson, we might dub it.  The whole process feels a little like the Republican Presidential primaries.

Exciting details here.

[Updates 8 III 2012]  On a more serious note:

Science vs. sideshow:

http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/fascinated-by-science-why-dont-we-study-it/

China advances in particle physics:

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/03/physicists-in-china-nail-a-key.html