after giving up on Wikipedia — and rightfully so, their physics articles are uniformly useless for someone approaching the ideas as an outsider …

No kidding. The general maths articles are as bad – it’s like someone has gone through and removed anything that might be useful to a newbie on the basis that introductory material is “not encyclopedic” enough. The pages just go round and around.

Lukacs clearly starts with some picture of Heisenberg Uncertainty–we can’t know the mass and velocity of a particle precisely as they are because the knowledge requires observation, and observation alters the way things are. Fair enough. Somewhere he makes a big jump from that to saying we don’t even know if all of these subatomic particles exist because our evidence of them is also based on observation using human machines (not sure if actually means we don’t know that the subatomic particles exist, but that seems close). Et. cetera et. cetera…. any theory of everything at best purports to tell us the way the world probably works. The inability to have a theory of everything is therefore an epistemological constraint of the Uncertainty principle–which I guess we will assume to be true without any doubt. Depending on the level of certainty/probability you require from a quantum theory of everything, he might even have a point there.

He adds to that a point that scientific knowledge is human knowledge and therefore constrained by our own capacity to understand and interpret the world. It doesn’t mean that the world does not operate according to unified laws, it just means that we as humans will never understand those laws. Now, at first look that is dependent on metaphysical assumptions. After all, there is no basic principle that implies that the laws of physics must be hard to understand. Per Sean’s commentary, we haven’t discovered those laws yet, so lets not rule out the idea that they could be simple.

But some of his discussion suggests that he making a more analytical, and less metaphysical claim about the relationship between the theory of everything and human intellectual capacity. He basically assumes a theory requires a finite system of particles (or fields). I assume that Lukacs doesn’t really understand the finer points of what he is talking about regarding splitting atoms into smaller and smaller pieces. But also, we can’t keep positing and infinite set of new entities to fit into our theory of everything, or else no finite being will ever understand said theory.

Lukacs point here is actually kind of interesting, though by no means something I am ready to accept without question: human language and mathematics inherently involves terms which are infinitely divisible, a theory of everything inherently requires particles which are not infinitely divisible, therefore it is impossible for a human to understand a theory of everything that is written in human language/math.

That just sounds wrong–of course I am capable of understanding discrete items; in fact, I primarily observe the universe as a system of discrete macroscopic object. But at least that is an analytical/linquistic argument against the theory of everything, not metaphysical. Again there is a huge difference. Metaphysical arguments are just anti-science in a sense (not completely: a cosmologist is happy to know that our universe can’t be one which violates the grandfather paradox, or other logical impossibilities; we do want our laws to describe a world that can actually exist). The analytic argument, if it could be made to sound little less weird, I’d be interested in thinking about twice.

I like your analogy!

Thanks,
Peter

However, I agree that it would be nice to have a better way of conveying this state of tentative knowledge more concisely and accurately. Open to ideas on that score. I suspect there may not be a simple solution, just because the concept is very subtle.

Maybe analogies are helpful: “We don’t know, with mathematical certainty, what would be the perfect play to call in any particular situation during a football game. But we’re pretty sure that punting on first down is a bad idea.”

To journalists, one can say, like for any other topic, that there are those who do not understand quantum mechanics because they’ve not studied it sufficiently, but that there are also those who’ve studied it and do understand it. However, part of the latter group, perhaps for historical reasons or perhaps out of personal modesty, don’t admit to it. Notably, Feynman, whose famous quote about nobody understanding quantum mechanics often gets brought up in these discussions, belonged to that subcategory, among other names like Einstein, Bell, Bohm, etc. The much bigger problem is posed by those who claim an understanding without any study. And, unfortunately, there’s no shortage of them.

As a short sound bite nugget, I would offer in the most facetious of tones:

Screw Feynman! Anyone who works at it can understand quantum mechanics.

Though, perhaps, it comes off as a bit too crass for general consumption.

So purple unicorns are not a realistic example, but I’ve had this essentially this conversation with people about faster-than-light communication, and about reasons for quantum computers being fundamentally impossible.

Journalists love to say that scientists don’t understand things. As scientists, I don’t think we should make the claim that we completely understand quantum mechanics (especially when we don’t completely understand how it fits together with general relativity), but I don’t know what we should say instead, though. Any suggestions?

Reading reviews on Watchmen has finally convinced me that most film critics are clueless and only interested in promoting themselves. Ebert is a bit better than most in this category, though, but most of them know about as much science as did a recent former US President.

A few months ago, I had a similar idea about teaching through visuals. I’m in the process of creating short clips to explain Fourier Analysis and Convolution; still getting the hang of After Effects.

Early betas are up right now, your readers might be interested:

Fourier Analysis: http://bafoontecha.com/2008/12/11/a-visual-guide-to-fourier-transforms/
Convolution: http://bafoontecha.com/2009/01/25/on-convolution-and-other-things-you-think-you-dont-know/

But I do think that the default assumption of experts in field X when approaching field Y should be one of respect — imagining that the true experts in that other field are likely to be smart people who have thought hard about very difficult problems. Prolonged exposure may force one to modify the default assumption, but it’s the proper place to start. If something seems ridiculous on first blush, your initial assumption should be that you don’t understand it, not that the people in field Y are all idiots. Likewise, when you want to appropriate some handy concept for you own purposed, it’s a good idea to keep in mind that there are probably a lot of subtleties and caveats involved, and you should probably be careful.

Very few scientists would disagree with these recommendations, if they were given to humanities professors talking about science; I think they are equally sensible when scientists want to talk about the humanities.

I’d like to see some cites here. I’ve seen you chide scientists before about their “naive” philosophical ideas. Heck, I believe your post defending Derrida at the time of his death may be the first blog post I ever read. So, how do you think physicists misunderstand falsifiability? And how in any way does this compare to the near total misunderstanding of things like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle or Godel’s incompleteness theorem among the humanities set? Do you think you understand “falsifiability” and “postmodernism” in a way that most other physicists don’t, or do you merely assume the typical characterization of them is wrong? Do you think working scientists would actually benefit from knowing these things or do you just wish we’d all stop knocking Bruno Latour so you don’t feel obligated to apologize for your fellow physicists to Berube?

Stanford university lectures by Leonard Susskind

I’m halfway through the quantum mechanics course, and so far so good…

You may understand quantum mechanics, but I am suddenly very skeptical of your ability to do basic division.

Making a two-minute video would take less time than writing a decent blog post. (Right?)

Phil Plait did a pretty impressive job with his “Q&BA” series. That might be a model worth emulating.