Although I think the mindset you’re arguing against is held by more modern scientists than it should, I don’t think that was what marko was proposing, nor do I think it necessarily is the “consensus” paradigm. It certainly may seem that way because of how we bolster forward with these ideas written behind us, but I think there’s more complexity than that.

For instance, the abstract math used are quite different than a explanation-gap filler such as the turtle with the air pump. Both indeed are cases where the prediction agrees with the experiment, but we aren’t using the current models (emphasis on that word) in physics simply because we are satisfied with that fact. We use them because they also have predictive power for other phenomena, and they work! We should continuously put them under scrutiny and try and figure out the whole picture (which physicist indeed do!), but we shouldn’t just say “well, this isn’t the actual [or whole] truth” and just get rid of it. It’s far too useful for that. After all, even if we thought describing a system as a wave was ridiculous, well, wave functions open up new technological insights and advancements.

I don’t think this is “abandoning the muses of reason and logic for quick results.” I think it’s just pragmatism. If we can develop a mathematical model that works (emphasis), even though we might not understand the full nature of all that is going on, why not? Maybe someday we could look at individual quarks and leptons interacting more directly and describe them so, but the fact is that we are just grasping the truths of our universe lightly, and to do so better, we need technology that we don’t yet have. The mathematical models we have now aren’t giving up, they are making the best with what we are given.

And at some point though, I believe we are going to have to cede that on some eventual level, things in our universe just won’t sound right to us. After all, either our universe came from nothing, or something before it (or itself) has always existed. Neither of those “make sense,” but one of them must be true. Maybe quantum mechanics is the level where that peculiarity begins. We shall hopefully see.

Now maybe the ease by which modern physicists talk in such an abstract framework should be unsettling. I think that ease comes from writing the oddity of it all as a caveat would eventually get tiresome and so they get used to the functionality of this means of thinking. That of course is mind-boggling to us, but it doesn’t make it bad. It may be though still, but I can’t peer into all of their minds so easily. I DO think though that we should shy away from even wilder sounding descriptions of our universe when trying to come up with a model with predictive power though until we get more empirical evidence to support them. For instance, quantum mechanics models sounds weird, but it has the empirical backup and an amazing amount of predictive power. Things like string theory though seem too far reaching, without the empiricism or the strong predictive power to back them up.

I understand your frustration though. It drives me crazy sometimes too, as I definitely think there are some celebrity scientists who think it is ok to not look deeper, or at least to not do so without fighting tooth and nail for a “sensical” diagnosis first. I remind myself though that this is not how it all goes, and pragmatism is often employed.

As for your examples of particle interaction…with all due respect, are you serious? You pose some excellent and very relevant questions, state you don’t know how it’s possible to explain certain interactions logically (attraction/repulsion), and then… you basically throw your hands up and say ‘screw it, I want my answer now, I don’t care how I get it’ then abandon the very things that made you pose the question to begin with, your curiosity and reason. Think carefully about what this means. You don’t want to accept magic or miracles (the incomprehensible) to be the method of understanding… you take up the discipline of science, reason, and logic, encounter something you don’t understand, and then employ such wonderful scientific methods such as paradox, contradiction, imaginary numbers, point particles, renormalization, all the various math fields parading around as physical fields and forces, backwards causality, non-localized whatever, spontaneous ‘anything’,breaking symmetries, and I will stop there… because it keeps going and going … so you employ such methods to your scientific process and believe you are going to “describe nature precisely enough”. Do you see the disconnect? You reject mechanical transfers of momentum and energy as being unworkable with atoms, but favor purely mathematical virtual particles that ‘tell’ other particles to repulse or attract to get the quantum field theories to function? Particles that tell other particales what to do? Come here! Go away, Go left, right, Get down! My goodness, how can you have attraction from such pushy little particles! Why bother with so much inexplicable fudge, just go back to miracles and magic… “God did it.” There, all done, no mystery here, nothing to see…Hey, do NOT look behind that imaginary number! But, as you said , you need abstract maths…lots and lots of endless abstract maths…and now you will also need basically infinite universes to make the endless maths go round and round…like some kind of fractalized descent into Mandelbrot computational hell.

I’m sorry vmarko, I don’t mean to offend and you have been patient with me, and I respect that, and I respect your obvious intelligence. But I do think you need to consider that something is SERIOUSLY wrong with a scientific process and physics community that has decided that it would rather defy causality or invent new particles or dimensions before it checks its many many premises everytime it can’t explain what is going on (Quantum tunneling anyone?). If you can’t explain some interaction, re-examine your assumptions, especially your maths, especially various previous ‘interpretations’ by crusty old wizards who told you not to look behind their uncertainty curtains and Feynman diagrams, before giving up and spackling over with more abstraction and heuristical fudge. If you want to be the next Einstein or Copernicus, you aren’t going to be able to agree with a lot that you’ve been taught. Whatever else you do, don’t abandon your muses of reason and logic for quick results.

Physics is ‘supposed’ to be about the physical interaction of actual things, like those “particles and balls” Marko is dismissing. Marko would seem to believe (sadly, as most mathematical folks do) that math is physics, or reality. This is not logically or physically true. Math in physics is supposed to try and describe reality (those pesky particles and pool balls) by creating models that can make accurate predictions about what actual particles and pool balls do. When you jettisson the reality of actual particles that have physical extension and mass in favor of abstract virtual point particles that only exist in fields of abstract force carrying math, you are moving further and further away from what physics is supposed to be about. Look around before you discard your rational intuition, there are other possibilities that don’t insult logical causality.

What I was explaining to Josh was a theoretical description of elemetary particles and their interactions (that is what he asked for, IIUC). The Standard Model is just that — a mathematical model. Generally, in describing natural phenomena, one is allowed to use whatever math is suitable and available, as long as the description and predictions of the model are consistent with experiments. Physicists never claim that the SM is the true reality, but rather only just a good-enough description of it.

As for intuition, balls, pool and stuff… Once you see an experiment with the single electron flying through two slits simultaneously, the “particle-is-a-ball” intuition falls on its nose in a very embarassing way, never to reassert itself again. Human intuition about processes happening in nature is tailored to work for low-energy medium-distance observations, and one is forced to abandon it when dealing with high-energy and small- or large-distance phenomena. Physicists do not abandon their intuition light-heartedly. On the contrary, we are quite pushed into it by experiments and observations of nature itself.

To see an example, consider the “pool balls” scenario for the electrostatic Coulomb force between two electrons. One electron “throws away” a photon, which then “hits into” the other electron. The net effect is that two electrons repel each other, due to the momentum transfer by the photon, just like pool balls. This is ok. But now, consider electron and a proton — the electron throws away the same photon as above, which then goes on to hit the proton. How can the proton now be attracted to the electron, as opposed of being repelled? Momentum transfer cannot explain that — when you play pool, the balls can never get attracted to each other by exchanging the cue-ball between them. The ball-throwing description falls short of describing attractive forces, which are known to exist in nature.

Of course, you may reconsider that model and substitute ball-throwing with some more complicated mechanism, that can account for attractive forces. But then I would probably find some other argument against your new model, so that you would have to refine it again, and again, and again… After some time of playing this game, you will most probably end up inventing a model which is mostly equivalent to the field theory I described in the previous two posts. That’s how physicists actually ended up with all this abstract-theoretical logically-insulting interacting-fields-description-nonsense stuff. We didn’t introduce all that because we like abstract math, but because we need abstract math, if we are to describe nature precisely enough.

Best,
Marko

I would tend agree with you, but I don’t have the evidence or expertise to support that hah! That’s why I mentioned positivist thought, which I think we are kind of pidgeon-holed into at the moment simply because we don’t know enough. There is, however, also the possibility that the way the universe works is complete nonsense (by our reasoning), and I think we should be willing to cede that possibility. But first I do think an extremely stringent and stubborn look for the “rational” explanations should precede the admittance of course.

Tony
So concisely and well said. Thank you.

I think the issue of my understanding lies actually when you use the word “interaction.” How do such particles “interact” with others to generate a force? Could I perhaps think of it as an exchange of momentum (crudely like that of one pool ball hitting another which then hits another, the middle being the “force carrier”)?

You should not think of interaction as balls hitting each other (despite Feynman diagrams suggesting such an interpretation, it is quite wrong). Keep in mind that the term “particle” is quite often abused in hep-th slang — the elementary particles have nothing to do with balls, but rather plane waves, and interactions like scattering of one plane wave off the other is fuzzy at best, from the intuition point of view.

What interacts are fields. Mathematically, the interaction is just a cubic (or higher) term in the Lagrangian, which translates to a nontrivial “source” term in equations of motion for the fields (like Maxwell equations with sources). If you want to have an intuitive mental image which corresponds to this, imagine the following (of course, I am again oversimplifying things beyond any decency…):

Suppose you have a large square sheet of rubber (10×10 meters) floating on the surface of a still water (lake, sea, etc.). The surface of the water is one field (we are talking 2-dimensional field theory here). The rubber sheet is the other field (also 2-dim). Now imagine water waves coming from elsewhere towards that part of the water-rubber system. As soon as the waves hit the covered water, the rubber will start to sway as well. That is “interaction” (more precisely called “contact interaction”) between the water and the rubber. The nonzero magnitude of one field induces the nonzero value of the other field, at the same spacetime point.

Now, the rubber has its own elasticity properties, different from water. So the water waves will induce the rubber waves, but the rubber waves will influence back on the water waves as well. The end-result are the “changed” waves of the water (as opposed to the situation when there is no rubber), as well as “changed” waves of the rubber (as opposed to the situation when there is no water). Those changes occur due to the contact interaction (pushing and pulling) between water and rubber. We say that water and rubber fields “are interacting”.

Of course, both water and rubber are made of particles, so you could try to explain their waving and swaying by considering individual particles of water hitting at the particles of rubber and vice versa. However, in a fundamental field theory, fields are not made of any “material”, and their interactions might be too complicated to be explained via pushing and pulling of molecules. Nevertheless, the interaction between fields (the swaying of one field influencing the swaying of the other) is just like the water and rubber, and is quite real.

As for particles, they are… well… complicated. Each particle is a “wave packet” of a particular field. So particle scattering is the situation when two waves of different fields get together and mix. One water wave crest coming from “east”, with one rubber crest coming from “west”. When they meet, all sorts of stuff may happen, depending on how water and rubber fields interact. For example, the outcome of the “collision” might be several larger and several smaller waves of both types. That is called “particle creation”. That is what they are doing at the LHC — they hit one proton wave with another proton wave, and see what comes out.

And a caveat: a “proton wave” is not a swarm of protons, it is a wave of the “proton field”, since each particular proton is one particular wave packet of the field. They are colliding a swarm of such proton waves with the the other swarm (coming from the other direction), and hope that at least two waves (i.e. two protons) from each swarm would pass by each other close enough for something nontrivial to happen. And then they catch what comes out of the interaction of the respective fields, hoping that the waves of proton fields will induce waves in other fields, such as the Higgs field. And so on.

So the interaction happens between fields — a non-localized, distributed entities that fill up all space. Forget particles and balls, this stuff is much different from playing pool.

HTH,
Marko

I fully agree. I believe the tendency to single out individuals (either as scapegoats or heroes, for punishment or reward) is a left-over from prehistoric times, when it was probably beneficial to have a single strong leader for your tribe (which is also why masses of people tend to follow a single enigmatic leader instead of everytime going their own way). As Sagan once said, we’ve got a lot of “evolutionary baggage” with us, some of which appears very anachronistic in our technological society.

If I were in charge of handing out Nobel Prizes, I would just give it to the machines themselves, and have the various detectors and parts of the LHC argue with each other who deserves the prize more. Because that is exactly how ridiculous it now sounds as we discuss which three individuals should get most credit for this gigantic effort.

Also, I find it curious that rarely, if ever, the Nobel Prize is given for a non-discovery. If the LHC would have not found the H particle (love the idea to name it just H) and eventually disproven its existence, that would be just as important a scientific insight as its discovery now is, but certainly no one would talk about who’s going to get a medal for it.