Quantum Untangled

[JQH]

I went to the above named exhibition at the Science Centre near Guys Hospital. Intent is to make QM accesssible to the general public.

You can see some short videos briefly explaining what QM is and how it impacts our lives(take away message: the Many Worlds Hypothesis is probably correct) and see some art installations based on QM. Also, going back to MWH, two seemingly identical office spaces set up with six subtle differences. Spotting them made more difficult by the fact you can't have both in view at the same time.

Free. On until 28th Feb.

[Gfamily]

Would/wouldn't recommend?

[JQH]

Would recommend.

[IvanV]

take away message: the Many Worlds Hypothesis is probably correct

Since apparently a majority of quantum physicists believe this, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Though perhaps more to the point, I remember a great physicist saying something along the lines of, it is one of those ideas that sparks a lot of interest and wonder in the wider population, and so acts as good publicity and attracting people into physics. So we shouldn't object to the publication of this fantasy, even though we consider it fantasy.

I put the many worlds people in the same box as I put the string theorists. And, being an economist, also in this box are the many economists who place excessive faith in the forecasts they compute. In particular, in the case of string theory and many worlds, I think non-falsifiability is a big problem. Well, some things we need to try to understand - like much of economics and climate science - are fundamentally unfalsifiable. So non-falsifiability isn't always a problem. But we acknowledge there is something different about those non-falsifiable "sciences", from the hard sciences, where falsifiability is the ultimate criterion of what we are willing to accept.

I also subscribe to the definition of wisdom as being a clear understanding of just what it is that we don't really know. Whilst on the whole I'm more impressed by the many worlds rejectionists, I'm never really been able to decide whether Roger Penrose is wise, or too clever for his own good.

[bjn]

A quibble, surely "string hypothesis" is a better name for it than string theory as to be a theory in the scientific sense you need a body of supporting evidence not just the ideas.

[IvanV]

A quibble, surely "string hypothesis" is a better name for it than string theory as to be a theory in the scientific sense you need a body of supporting evidence not just the ideas.

I wish everyone would accept your quibble, but they just won't. If we could make hypothesis and theory two separate concepts that people carefully separated, within the scope of the hard sciences, that would stop misinformation peddlers using the "it's just a theory" put-down, which conflates two quite different meanings of "theory".

But unfortunately it is hard to insist on how people should use words. I'd also like them to stop using "refute" as a synonym for "deny", but they just won't. And so in practice, the word "theory" has several established usages. A synonym for hypothesis is just one of the additional meanings. I suppose if we are being very careful with our words here, we can separate the "string hypothesis" - the hypothesis that string theory describes fundamental physics, from "string theory", the mathematical theory. For in mathematics, there is an entirely separate meaning of the word "theory", such that string theory is in fact such a mathematical theory, if we ignore the physics part of it. A mathematical theory is an area of mathematical investigation based on a particular set of axioms, definitions or mathematical objects. We see this usage in numerous accepted mathematical terms such as number theory, Galois theory, and that fundamental basis of most modern mathematics, Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory.