Yes! I am keen to know what will be said about that. I had been told, in a hand-waving sort of way, that the rejection of Hidden Variables means that there are no physical mechanisms behind the randomness in the quantum realm.
Then string theory, the big bang, the cell, water, ether, sacred geometry, modelling...stop me now. Having trained as an engineer 30 years ago, suffice to say I wish I had been taught then what I know now.
It may be my engineering brain that gives the ability to know that all things being equal, they're never quite perfectly equal. Murphy was an optimist, sh1t happens and when the sh1t flies it sticks to the engineer. So given that there will undoubtably be variations in the coin, toss, mech, air density, air movement, center mass, surface, alloy, density, gravitational anomalies, ect.
The solution is straight forward,
- it's always better to overbuild with redundancy.
(Dam the accountants when they say something will never happen; If it can, it will!)
After spending many years flying a much experimented upon aircraft in the USAF, my fellow pilots and I used to complain that Engineers are great at designing very elegant and technically perfect solutions that were functionally useless.
I'll never forget explaining to one of those guys why mounting the control head of a fairly complicated electronic system in an overhead panel that was positioned behind my head, and expecting me to use it at night while flying at 100' AGL on NVG's, was not really gonna work. It took longer than it should have to get him to agree to reposition it.
middle managers also love to say something will never happen - it seems like the very act of stating that ought to shift our model’s probability of that something occurring toward 1 rather than toward 0.
I'm delighted to hear that folks with more math and physics chops than I command are challenging the probability paradigm. I've always had trouble with the concept of randomness. That would seem to imply that things happen, or not, for no reason.
Probability is usually thought of as predicting the future, but it needn't be limited to that. Suppose you and I are standing on opposite sides of a picture window, and a third party shuffles a standard deck of cards 5 or 7 times, and then tapes them each face down against the window. He points out a card and asks what the probability is that it is a seven of spades. I see only the back sides of the cards, and I have to answer that it is 1/52. You see the same cards from the front, and your answer is either 1 or 0, depending on what card you actually see. The same objective reality returns different probabilities according to the observers' perspectives.
I take the view that reality is absolutely determinate, but absolutely unpredictable, due to insurmountable limitations to our knowledge. Probability exists, but only as the confidence a subjective reality-modeler (e.g. a person) may have, under a given set of assumptions and inputs, in the validity of its model.
Looking forward to your treatment of quantum mechanics!
I love the machine you and your dad made, and I agree that quantum mechanics is tainted. I take the perspective of David Harriman in The Logical Leap [ https://people.math.osu.edu/gerlach.1/TheLogicalLeap/index.html ] where a mathematical formalism, even with 100% predictive power, can still be bunk.
Models that are 100% effective at prediction (so far) can be bunk. But this means we disagree on some level, as you've argued that the only test of a model is its ability to predict. You might fear that my reading The Logical Leap turned me into a Rationalist, willing to grant the existence of abstraction (e.g., Plato's Realm of Ideas).
I would disagree though.
If I claim that Beryllium-7 -- no matter what you change, no matter what you throw at it -- will always have a half-life that will be found to have occurred within the narrow range of 50 to 57 days, then isn't that an indication that it "has" a (narrow range of) probability of decay?
You can get coin flips to come out heads repeatedly, but the evidence base indicates that you cannot do anything to ever make Beryllium-7 have any other kind of half-life than one that is found between the interval of 50 to 57 days.
Regarding Beryllium-7, what if we were to hire ten million people to each roll two dice (without a machine) once a day until they got snake-eyes, at which point they are out of the experiment. Wouldn't we get a half-life to that as well?
Our host would argue that each roll of the dice is determinate, depending on an array of unpredictably variant physical factors that influence the outcome. If a radioactive substance decays with a half-life rather than all decaying at once, doesn't that suggest that there are unpredictably variant physical factors that determinately cause an atom of the substance to decay when these factors all line up just right with that atom?
That brings up the contrast between Beryllium-7 atoms in general vs. a singular atom. Whether the singular atom "has" a probability is harder to prove than whether a collection of a trillion atoms does.
Because there is a rate of decay, applied to all atoms, and it is know-ably within a narrow range, then the average probability of the individual atoms forms the overall rate of decay. Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius, but not all water does. Water at altitude doesn't. Water with salt doesn't.
But just because you can "make" the boiling point change doesn't mean that there was not an inherent propensity for individual water molecules to "boil" (liquid > vapor). Once the purity and the pressure are brought back to baseline, the boiling point "returns" -- just as if it is an inherent property of the individual water molecules.
Fascinating insight, William! Quantum mechanics is an intricate "probability" model. If the notion of probabilities being nonexistent holds true, the pioneers of QM Niels Bohr, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, and others might have invested a significant amount of time in what could be perceived as “barking up the wrong tree”? Despite having only taken one quantum mechanics class during my career, I remember grappling with the perplexing mathematics. The constant refrain in my mind was, "It works, but it shouldn't have." Your post resonates with that sentiment, and perhaps you've pinpointed the reason behind that lingering sense of unease. Well done! Your perspective has provided some clarity, and now I can sleep at night.
I’ve always been fascinated by random-number generators, because making calculations seem random and fair appears very difficult to me. I’m impressed that 5-7 shuffles of a deck of cards achieves a reasonable about of randomness, but in practice, 3 shuffles works well for most of my impatient friends playing cards.
I shoot pool in a billiards league. Opening break is determined by a coin flip. I play in four matches a night for seven years. The other players laugh because I have won the coin flip twice in that many years. And I flip the coin while the opposing player calls it.
I took 300 level probability and statistics course in college. So I cannot explain.
“This allows you to make a particle that will roll forever downhill, always tracing the path again and again.” -- I think this requires a (very, very) large hill. I wonder which infinite hill on Earth they had in mind?
You see this misunderstanding of what "probability" is in sports analytics. It's how you get insanity like a team that keep shooting threes even after they keep missing until they miss 27 straight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jox6ggZpxnI
If one person throws a ball to another, and they catch it, then you rewind time and run it again, will the other person catch it every time, or will they sometimes not catch it? If they catch it every time then there is no random variation and no probability, and no free will because everything (including our thoughts) is completely determined by what has come before.
I wonder if free will can even be defined. If you say that we have no free will if everything, including our thoughts, is completely determined by what has come before, then what is the alternative? If what we think and do is actually random, such that it is dependent on things happening for no reason, doesn't that imply that we have no control over our actions? I'm just going to get carry-out for supper, and oops! an electron jumped for no reason in one of my neurons, and instead I went out and bought a gun and killed thirty people. Would that support free will better than the determinate case?
Actuarial science makes a real impact on balance sheets when it is done well or done poorly, but it is what acts as a normal distribution one day can act like a non-normal distribution the next day, because of a major change. Many major changes like war and nuclear reactions are explicitly not covered by insurance. For other changes, like Covid-19 injections impacting life expectancy and disability rates, the industry does monthly calculations and raises prices accordingly.
Maybe I'm raising the wrong points. I first assumed that you said that probability doesn't exist (or, there's no such thing). That implies that all that mathy stuff about standard, normal, Poisson, &c distributions are just fancy mathy stuff.
Most (probably [there's that word again] all) insurance policies exempt things like war, acts of God (in the old days), not so much because they're 'probable', but when they do happen, it wipes out 90% to 100% of the insured. They can't spread the risk around if Everybody has the same risk and the same disastrous outcome.
Certainly, over time, the inputs to the insurance company's models change - as building codes and materials change, as cars get better - or worse, like Teslas.....
But I think the underlying models - those distributions and formulas - still hold. We'll still get 5000 (+ or minus a few) heads out of 10000 coin tosses.
Somewhat adjacent to this topic (Hans Schatz is posting about the occult history of "Science" recently) are the 'fatalistic' views of our world as propounded in some Protestant branches of the Christian Faith. "What will be will be", "God's Plan"... etc. I found the most interesting parts of 'probability' discussions to be some of those brought forth by Carl Jung and his idea of 'synchronicity', by which he meant "meaningful coincidence". This also relates to the concept of speaking of something frequently enough, and soon that 'something' seems to come around (and i am not talking about your cell phone listening and a facebook comment about you showing up).
"Gazing in the abyss" and it will stare back is one of the well known occult things mentioned.
I saw a cover on some popular science magazine with the illuminati eye in a triangle telling us that physics now is all about how our gaze affects the gazed. But hey- just open the stupid box and quit talking about it, right?
Has anyone here heard of, or read ( I ran across it years ago ) a study of Murphy's Law published by a group of English physicists? They concluded that in this universe of human-made objects ( toast and tables for example ) the toast did indeed land butter side down nearly 80 per cent of the time, in what appeared to be a very well though out and controlled set of experiments. Is Entropy the ultimate denier of tweaking nature to our desires?
Please do quantum mechanics next!
Yes! I am keen to know what will be said about that. I had been told, in a hand-waving sort of way, that the rejection of Hidden Variables means that there are no physical mechanisms behind the randomness in the quantum realm.
Then string theory, the big bang, the cell, water, ether, sacred geometry, modelling...stop me now. Having trained as an engineer 30 years ago, suffice to say I wish I had been taught then what I know now.
It may be my engineering brain that gives the ability to know that all things being equal, they're never quite perfectly equal. Murphy was an optimist, sh1t happens and when the sh1t flies it sticks to the engineer. So given that there will undoubtably be variations in the coin, toss, mech, air density, air movement, center mass, surface, alloy, density, gravitational anomalies, ect.
The solution is straight forward,
- it's always better to overbuild with redundancy.
(Dam the accountants when they say something will never happen; If it can, it will!)
After spending many years flying a much experimented upon aircraft in the USAF, my fellow pilots and I used to complain that Engineers are great at designing very elegant and technically perfect solutions that were functionally useless.
I'll never forget explaining to one of those guys why mounting the control head of a fairly complicated electronic system in an overhead panel that was positioned behind my head, and expecting me to use it at night while flying at 100' AGL on NVG's, was not really gonna work. It took longer than it should have to get him to agree to reposition it.
Inexperienced, entrenched, haughty, bureaucratic ... are often this way. That would include I’m afraid too many working as a government contractor.
One should ALWAYS listen to the operator.
ALWAYS.
middle managers also love to say something will never happen - it seems like the very act of stating that ought to shift our model’s probability of that something occurring toward 1 rather than toward 0.
"Murphy is always listening"...
Continue to preach, sir. Physics is better for your work.
I'm delighted to hear that folks with more math and physics chops than I command are challenging the probability paradigm. I've always had trouble with the concept of randomness. That would seem to imply that things happen, or not, for no reason.
Probability is usually thought of as predicting the future, but it needn't be limited to that. Suppose you and I are standing on opposite sides of a picture window, and a third party shuffles a standard deck of cards 5 or 7 times, and then tapes them each face down against the window. He points out a card and asks what the probability is that it is a seven of spades. I see only the back sides of the cards, and I have to answer that it is 1/52. You see the same cards from the front, and your answer is either 1 or 0, depending on what card you actually see. The same objective reality returns different probabilities according to the observers' perspectives.
I take the view that reality is absolutely determinate, but absolutely unpredictable, due to insurmountable limitations to our knowledge. Probability exists, but only as the confidence a subjective reality-modeler (e.g. a person) may have, under a given set of assumptions and inputs, in the validity of its model.
Looking forward to your treatment of quantum mechanics!
Briggs,
I love the machine you and your dad made, and I agree that quantum mechanics is tainted. I take the perspective of David Harriman in The Logical Leap [ https://people.math.osu.edu/gerlach.1/TheLogicalLeap/index.html ] where a mathematical formalism, even with 100% predictive power, can still be bunk.
Models that are 100% effective at prediction (so far) can be bunk. But this means we disagree on some level, as you've argued that the only test of a model is its ability to predict. You might fear that my reading The Logical Leap turned me into a Rationalist, willing to grant the existence of abstraction (e.g., Plato's Realm of Ideas).
I would disagree though.
If I claim that Beryllium-7 -- no matter what you change, no matter what you throw at it -- will always have a half-life that will be found to have occurred within the narrow range of 50 to 57 days, then isn't that an indication that it "has" a (narrow range of) probability of decay?
You can get coin flips to come out heads repeatedly, but the evidence base indicates that you cannot do anything to ever make Beryllium-7 have any other kind of half-life than one that is found between the interval of 50 to 57 days.
Isn't that an exception?
Regarding Beryllium-7, what if we were to hire ten million people to each roll two dice (without a machine) once a day until they got snake-eyes, at which point they are out of the experiment. Wouldn't we get a half-life to that as well?
Our host would argue that each roll of the dice is determinate, depending on an array of unpredictably variant physical factors that influence the outcome. If a radioactive substance decays with a half-life rather than all decaying at once, doesn't that suggest that there are unpredictably variant physical factors that determinately cause an atom of the substance to decay when these factors all line up just right with that atom?
That brings up the contrast between Beryllium-7 atoms in general vs. a singular atom. Whether the singular atom "has" a probability is harder to prove than whether a collection of a trillion atoms does.
Because there is a rate of decay, applied to all atoms, and it is know-ably within a narrow range, then the average probability of the individual atoms forms the overall rate of decay. Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius, but not all water does. Water at altitude doesn't. Water with salt doesn't.
But just because you can "make" the boiling point change doesn't mean that there was not an inherent propensity for individual water molecules to "boil" (liquid > vapor). Once the purity and the pressure are brought back to baseline, the boiling point "returns" -- just as if it is an inherent property of the individual water molecules.
If probability is conditional on information, then 'random' probability is based in lack of knowledge. And ignorance is just opposite of science...
Fascinating insight, William! Quantum mechanics is an intricate "probability" model. If the notion of probabilities being nonexistent holds true, the pioneers of QM Niels Bohr, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, and others might have invested a significant amount of time in what could be perceived as “barking up the wrong tree”? Despite having only taken one quantum mechanics class during my career, I remember grappling with the perplexing mathematics. The constant refrain in my mind was, "It works, but it shouldn't have." Your post resonates with that sentiment, and perhaps you've pinpointed the reason behind that lingering sense of unease. Well done! Your perspective has provided some clarity, and now I can sleep at night.
I knew you would probably get around to writing about this.
I’ve always been fascinated by random-number generators, because making calculations seem random and fair appears very difficult to me. I’m impressed that 5-7 shuffles of a deck of cards achieves a reasonable about of randomness, but in practice, 3 shuffles works well for most of my impatient friends playing cards.
I shoot pool in a billiards league. Opening break is determined by a coin flip. I play in four matches a night for seven years. The other players laugh because I have won the coin flip twice in that many years. And I flip the coin while the opposing player calls it.
I took 300 level probability and statistics course in college. So I cannot explain.
“This allows you to make a particle that will roll forever downhill, always tracing the path again and again.” -- I think this requires a (very, very) large hill. I wonder which infinite hill on Earth they had in mind?
You see this misunderstanding of what "probability" is in sports analytics. It's how you get insanity like a team that keep shooting threes even after they keep missing until they miss 27 straight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jox6ggZpxnI
If one person throws a ball to another, and they catch it, then you rewind time and run it again, will the other person catch it every time, or will they sometimes not catch it? If they catch it every time then there is no random variation and no probability, and no free will because everything (including our thoughts) is completely determined by what has come before.
I wonder if free will can even be defined. If you say that we have no free will if everything, including our thoughts, is completely determined by what has come before, then what is the alternative? If what we think and do is actually random, such that it is dependent on things happening for no reason, doesn't that imply that we have no control over our actions? I'm just going to get carry-out for supper, and oops! an electron jumped for no reason in one of my neurons, and instead I went out and bought a gun and killed thirty people. Would that support free will better than the determinate case?
Yet you'd never be able to rest the universe to the same point.
Thousands of people working in the insurance industry will find this surprising.
They ought to.
So then, they've all been working a fool's errand?
And making lots of profit from it? ( That is, not paying out where the math says they shouldn't. )
Actuarial science makes a real impact on balance sheets when it is done well or done poorly, but it is what acts as a normal distribution one day can act like a non-normal distribution the next day, because of a major change. Many major changes like war and nuclear reactions are explicitly not covered by insurance. For other changes, like Covid-19 injections impacting life expectancy and disability rates, the industry does monthly calculations and raises prices accordingly.
Maybe I'm raising the wrong points. I first assumed that you said that probability doesn't exist (or, there's no such thing). That implies that all that mathy stuff about standard, normal, Poisson, &c distributions are just fancy mathy stuff.
Most (probably [there's that word again] all) insurance policies exempt things like war, acts of God (in the old days), not so much because they're 'probable', but when they do happen, it wipes out 90% to 100% of the insured. They can't spread the risk around if Everybody has the same risk and the same disastrous outcome.
Certainly, over time, the inputs to the insurance company's models change - as building codes and materials change, as cars get better - or worse, like Teslas.....
But I think the underlying models - those distributions and formulas - still hold. We'll still get 5000 (+ or minus a few) heads out of 10000 coin tosses.
Somewhat adjacent to this topic (Hans Schatz is posting about the occult history of "Science" recently) are the 'fatalistic' views of our world as propounded in some Protestant branches of the Christian Faith. "What will be will be", "God's Plan"... etc. I found the most interesting parts of 'probability' discussions to be some of those brought forth by Carl Jung and his idea of 'synchronicity', by which he meant "meaningful coincidence". This also relates to the concept of speaking of something frequently enough, and soon that 'something' seems to come around (and i am not talking about your cell phone listening and a facebook comment about you showing up).
"Gazing in the abyss" and it will stare back is one of the well known occult things mentioned.
I saw a cover on some popular science magazine with the illuminati eye in a triangle telling us that physics now is all about how our gaze affects the gazed. But hey- just open the stupid box and quit talking about it, right?
Has anyone here heard of, or read ( I ran across it years ago ) a study of Murphy's Law published by a group of English physicists? They concluded that in this universe of human-made objects ( toast and tables for example ) the toast did indeed land butter side down nearly 80 per cent of the time, in what appeared to be a very well though out and controlled set of experiments. Is Entropy the ultimate denier of tweaking nature to our desires?