Holidays are Finite, Math Ain't
Fun stuff for the non-vacation vacation
While procrastinating on work, Sabine Hossenfelder gave me an excuse to waste even more time. It is always worth a laugh coming across a Finitist and wondering about whether they think their soul is countable (or Zero).
Hossenfelder takes on the Finite Mind of Gisin .
“This Physicist Says We’re Using Maths Entirely Wrong”
Finitism in a Doughnut
People who are over-educated are always mistaking topology for ambient discreteness. “A doughnut has one hole in it. Therefore the doughnut is discrete”. How can you argue with that sort of logic? “Oh, but it has a finite number of atoms and calories?” lol.
You go eat your doughnut Homer. I’ll enjoy my infinite Torus, or should I say my,
I had a few comments for Sabine. She sets things up, “We’ve tried the plausible explanation for quantum emchanics…” (so why not take a look at Gisin?) It’s only a speech blooper, but I cannot help my pedantry.
Well no… @1:00 “we” haven’t tried the plausible explanation for quantum physics. lol. What do you even mean by that? It’s nonsense language. There is no plausible explanation for QM until there is a consensus on at least some explanation, and it has been tested to whatever extent it can be with current technology.
Are the Real numbers non-physical. Hell yeah they are. Who ever thought otherwise?
@2:50 that is complete bollocks from Gisin. We use real number concepts all the time in the abstract, in our mental processes. The fact we cannot write or code a real number in material form is irrelevant. Mathematics is not computation, someone tell Wolfram will ya. Sure, our mental processes might be completely mad, insane and “mental” but you cannot prove that, all you can say is that they might be inconsistent. But the ℝ (with surrounding axiomatic structure) are not known to be inconsistent.
We encounter finitists and intuitionists in all walks of life. You can still keep them as pets. But if you want to have some very useful results in mathematics as actual theorems, rather than assumptions, you need the Axiom of Infinity. There are several theorems that absolutely need the AoI. It is plain fugly to have them as ad hoc axioms. Oh… what was that I heard from Sabine? “Beauty is not a criterion for truth?” OK, Gen-X’er. But beauty is a damn good guide towards truth.
Does the act of measurement cause any mathematics to do anything? Does mathematics cause physicsal stuff to do anything? Hell no to both.
@4:00 nope? The “act of measurement” makes the superposition in the model “go away”. But the superposition was never really physically there in the first place, except for entanglement structure. The whole Cat is never in superposition, only the elementary particles can be in effective superposition by virtue of monogamous entanglement (and there is realist gravitational model for that, ER=EPR). You should also check out Jacob Barandes' framework for QM, it is “radically conservative” but clearly shows that superpositions and Hilbert space are convenient fictions, and what is base marble is something like entanglement. Barandes does not know what this “entanglement” is physically/ontologically, but his non-Markov transition matrix formalism clearly establishes what superposition of macroscopic objects does not have to be taken literally.
Often at the end of a Sabine episode I find myself agreeing.
@7:00 Sabine, I completely agree with you 99% 🤣 The fact is the Block Universe concept is utterly unfalsifiable. So it is not really scientific. Nonetheless, I subscribe to it, it does help in imagining plausible physics models (yes, imaginative cartoon aids are “a thing”). Note that a Block Universe does not rule-out “free will” nor does it rule out psychological passage of time. The outcome of processes in the spacetime cobordism still are not functions of all past data behind the past Cauchy horizon. (Conway-Kochen-Specker.) The spacetime cobordism interior is not deterministic even in a Block Universe metaphysics, since you still have the boundary conditions.