Favorite Scientific mistakes and Pseudoscience

[SmallIsPower]

I admit it, I listen to Art Bell sometimes, he's often good for a laugh.

 

Wrong science and Psudoscience can be very entertaining, so I thought we could share a few laughs here with our favorites:

 

 

1)[size4] God doesn't play dice with the Universe![/size]

-Einstein

 

2) Art Bell, insisting that he'd generated zeropoint energy through a 1000 foot antena generated zeropoint energy, because he noticed a voltage difference, browbeat phycisist Michu Kaku, into saying that the voltage difference might be zeopoint energy. (It's created by the earth's magnetic field, because the core is iron and spins.)

 

3) Metatron's posts on this site.

[ecoli]

well, number one isn't pseudoscience. It's religion, and a completely different matter.

[ydoaPs]

well, number one isn't pseudoscience. It's religion, and a completely different matter.

It isn't religion; it is a metaphor. Einstein quotes, especially the ones about "God", are often metaphors. That statement was Einstein stating his dislike for quantum mechanics, due to it's probabilistic nature.

[the tree]

Yeh, the word "God" in the realms of science often doesn't imply any belief, or anything like that. For instance,when I asked a biology teacher why some leaves have patches of hardly any chlorophyll in, she didn't know the awnser and said that "maybe God thought it'd be pretty like that".

 

Einstien was just saying that he belived the Universe to be deterministic (non-random). There's nothing pseudoscientific about it.

[ecoli]

I never knew that... got a source?

[the tree]

Sure, well, kind of. It's a slight misquote. The original was: "Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice."

It was written in a letter to Max Born in 1926 and quoted in "Einstein: The Life and Times" _{ISBN 0-380-44123-3}.

[bascule]

God doesn't play dice with the Universe!

 

That's just Einstein's way of stating that he's a strong determinist. Science has nothing to say yet about the validity of strong determinism. It's still very much up in the air.

[Severian]

That's just Einstein's way of stating that he's a strong determinist. Science has nothing to say yet about the validity of strong determinism. It's still very much up in the air.

You have something against Bell's Theorem?

[ecoli]

Sure' date=' well, kind of. It's a slight misquote. The original was: [i']"Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice."[/i]

It was written in a letter to Max Born in 1926 and quoted in "Einstein: The Life and Times" _{ISBN 0-380-44123-3}.

 

Thanks for that, tree. I never knew that quote was taken so out of context. Interesting.

[bascule]

You have something against Bell's Theorem[/url']?

 

I'll let Stephen Hawking field this one:

 

These quantum theories are deterministic in the sense that they give laws for the evolution of the wave with time. Thus if one knows the wave at one time, one can calculate it at any other time. The unpredictable, random element comes in only when we try to interpret the wave in terms of the positions and velocities of particles. But maybe this is our mistake: maybe there are no positions and velocities, but only waves. It is just that we try to fit the waves to our preconceived ideas of positions and velocities. The resulting mismatch is the cause of the apparent unpredictability.

[Severian]

That hardly constitutes determinism being "up in the air". Everyone agrees that Quantum Mechanics is non-deterministic (even Stephen Hawking), and QM (or rather QFT) has been very well tested. Non-determinism has, in my opinion, been proven by the Bell inequality.

 

I think Stevie is just trying to sell books with that sort of comment.

[YT2095]

Number 2 does indeed work I do something similar myself with a Long-Wire.

but I strongly doubt it`s anything to do with ZPE, and more like Radio Waves (unless ZPE has a DJ)

[JustStuit]

We started a similar thread a while back if you wanted to look through it.

http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=18880

[bascule]

That hardly constitutes determinism being "up in the air". Everyone agrees that Quantum Mechanics is non-deterministic (even Stephen Hawking), and QM (or rather QFT) has been very well tested. Non-determinism has, in my opinion, been proven by the Bell inequality.

 

It seems Stephen Hawking is trying to argue that quantum indeterminacy is an artifact of perspective, and not a definitive statement about the entire universe.

 

I think Stevie is just trying to sell books with that sort of comment.

 

As for me, I'll side with Hawking and Einstein.

[swansont]

As for me, I'll side with Hawking and Einstein.

 

Gotta go with the experimental evidence. Einstein's quote is from before the Bell inequality experiments, and Hawking's is from a book for a lay audience.

 

"It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is - if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong."

Feynman

[ajb]

Hawking is right. If you gave me a general wave function and a Hamiltonian, I can give you the wave function at a later time EXACTLY.

 

What I could not do is predict the outcome of an experiemnt exactly, but probabilistically.

 

I think this is what Hawking ment.

[bascule]

Gotta go with the experimental evidence. Einstein's quote is from before the Bell inequality experiments, and Hawking's is from a book for a lay audience.

 

Quantum indeterminacy is the assertion that the state of a system does not determine a unique collection of values for all its measurable properties. How can this be extrapolated into a general statement about the universe itself? How do we know the indeterminacy isn't the result of unmeasurable properties (e.g. many worlds hypothesis)

[CPL.Luke]

I personally like indeterminacy, because an inevitable result of a deterministic universe is that we ourselves would have to be completely predictable, and while there is no denying that there are predictable properties of any collection of people. The behavior of a single person can never be precisely predicted. (at least in my world view)

 

 

if one decides that the universe is deterministic than you have to conclude that no person has free will, and that every action that you make is the product of the way the atoms distributed themselves (of course in a pre-determined fasion) at the big bang.

 

Whereas if one takes the position that the universe is non-deterministic then its up in the air if humans have free will or not, it becomes a matter if one takes the position that its all random chance based on the near infinite number of probability waves interacting around you. OR that your moment to moment choices are real decisions, since in a non-deterministic universe your present actions are in some way seperated from the past its possible that you do make moment to moment decisions.

 

so anyway, once again I'm posting while I'm far to tired to write coherently so I hope the above makes sense, and if not then I may edit it in the morning so that it does.

 

one last point however is that in order for the deterministic universe to work, and still have originated at some point in time, then at that first point in time "something" would have had to chose where everything went and what the original pattern was going to be. Whereas if the the universe is non-deterministic than the big bang could be a purely random event with everything falling into place based on a probabilty rather than by "somethings" choice.

[bascule]

One day people will learn that strong determinism and free will are not incompatible concepts

[CPL.Luke]

how can they be compatible? strong determinism in its purest form clearly states that if you know the position and momentum of every particle in the universe, then you can predict the motions of every particle exactly.

 

how does that leave room for us to do whatever we want?

[bascule]

how does that leave room for us to do whatever we want?

 

We model and predict reality, then choose from possible futures. Prediction is what gives way to choice, not non-determinism.

 

The seemingly deterministic nature of reality (at least on the level at which we experience) is what allows us to model and therefore predict reality. I'd therefore argue that without a deterministic universe, consciousness could not exist.

[Severian]

Quantum indeterminacy is the assertion that the state of a system does not determine a unique collection of values for all its measurable properties. How can this be extrapolated into a general statement about the universe itself?

 

That is the definition of non-deterministic! All physics statements' date=' like "the state of a system does not determine a unique collection of values for all its measurable properties" are already "general statement[s'] about the universe".

 

How do we know the indeterminacy isn't the result of unmeasurable properties (e.g. many worlds hypothesis)

 

First of all, many worlds is also non-deterministic, in exactly the same way (since it is random which branch the measurement is made on). Secondly, that "indeterminacy isn't the result of unmeasurable properties" is exactly what Bell's Theorem is all about. Bell's inequality has been proven, which implies that there are no hidden variables ("unmeasurable properties").

 

Edit: I agree with what ajb said - if this was what Hawking was meaning then I can't complain - but I don't think it was.

 

Edit2: Apologies for taking this completely off-topic.

[the tree]

Is it possible to describe in lay terms how one could possibly prove the absense of unmesurable properties?

It seems intuitively wrong (I know that is a fallacy, but still).

 

edit I: don't awnser that, I shall start a thread in on an apropriate board.

 

edit II: here, perhaps.

[swansont]

Edit: I agree with what ajb said - if this was what Hawking was meaning then I can't complain - but I don't think it was.

 

 

I think it's too vague to tell for sure, since it's not meant to be rigorous; I think you can take it either way. If there are multiple possible outcomes, yet you know the relative probabilities, is the system unpredictable? Depends on how you define the term, and the term wasn't defined there.

[CPL.Luke]

"We model and predict reality, then choose from possible futures. Prediction is what gives way to choice, not non-determinism."

 

-bascule

 

thats the very definition of non-determinism, you just said there were multiple futures that could exist, in a deterministic universe there is only one future