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A review by mikusa
Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum by Lee Smolin
2.0
What I liked: he's enthusiastic, willing to challenge the status quo. Um, that's about it.
What I disliked: he doesn't understand Quantum Physics. Sophistical of me to say so, I know, since no one understands QP (a la Feynman). Maybe I should say he doesn't understand the Copenhagen Interpretation.
I'm going to expose my ignorance here and just write as though I know what I'm talking about. This is, after all, where I journal my thoughts, not create NYT book reviews. I don't really know what I'm talking about though.
I liked Smolin's books in the past, but this one was seriously obtuse. I couldn't track with him very well. His example about a dog and cat lover and something about politics just didn't work. It came across as a mathematician trying to put maths into words, which often doesn't go well. There were so many sentences too that just didn't make sense. That's probably partly my fault, since physics isn't my speciality. But I've read enough books on physics to know how to track with these, and I didn't track with these.
Now for the biggie. Smolin writes as though QP is a theory about what is, when I think it's a theory about what we can actually say/know. QP boils down to the observer problem, which means that no experiment can truly test a theory, ever, because theories assume a god's eye view, but all real world experiments interact with their theories in feedbacky loopy kinds of ways. In philosophical terms, this is equivalent to trying to prove one's own sanity. You can't do it, without assumptions, and those assumptions can't be verified. Physics is incomplete because observers will never truly understand the system of which they themselves are a part. It sucks. I grew up committed to the idea of objective truth, and objective reality. Now I think it's pointless to talk about it. I feel like Smolin hasn't grasped this, and he's still trying to prove that we're all sane and there is an objective reality. We'll never be able to know.
I don't think that Schroedinger's cat is about a cat actually being in a superposition, or actually being dead and alive until there's a 'measurement'. I think the theory implies that there's no way, ever, to know if the cat is dead or alive until we do the measurement. There's no back door, or god's eye knowledge, that can get us around that. Einstein wanted there to be a way, and kept trying to come up with ways. But Bohr kept showing him how he was 'cheating', and that his theories always left a step incomplete. I was cheering for Einstein for a long time. Now I think, frustratingly, that Bohr saw more clearly.
Oh, and the other thing that I think that Smolin gets completely wrong, is that he says that the Copenhagen Interpretation claims that 'measurements' are special. I hear this a lot, and sometimes I hear it from woo spiritualists who think that consciousness is special and brings worlds into existence and things like that. I think Smolin has it backwards. I think that Realists (like Smolin and Einstein et al) discount measurements. They forget that every experiment must include the act of measuring the results, and measurements are physical processes. In Einstein's thought experiments, he was doing the measurement by 'magic', that is, by measuring in his head from a god's eye view. But you can't do that in 'reality'. For the theory to have real world application, it can't leave out a part that impacts the experiment, and measurements impact experiments. Once you realise that, you have to measure the measurement. And measure the measurement of that measurement. And so on ad infinitum. Which means, you can never really complete an experiment. Which is what's so frustrating about QP.
It goes like this: let's do an experiment. OK, done, now let's find out what happened - the theorist just 'knows' what happened by doing magic metaphysical thoughts, but the experimenter has to send a grubby beam of light into the results, which are now the results that include the grubby beam of light. This would be fine on the macro scale (measurements wash out), but when we're trying to find out about beams of light, we have to calculate how the grubby beam of light affected the results, and we don't know how to do that because if we test the grubby beam of light, we're sending yet another gubby beam of light at it. It's like trying to tell how firm an avocado is, so you keep pushing on it, but you're not sure if it's squishy because you're squeezing it, or because it was already squishy. So you squeeze it some more to see when it stops getting squishy.
It's not that QP is incomplete, it's that epistemology is incompletable. It's Gödels all the way down.
At least, this is where I'm at with QP at the moment. I might be completely wrong.
What I disliked: he doesn't understand Quantum Physics. Sophistical of me to say so, I know, since no one understands QP (a la Feynman). Maybe I should say he doesn't understand the Copenhagen Interpretation.
I'm going to expose my ignorance here and just write as though I know what I'm talking about. This is, after all, where I journal my thoughts, not create NYT book reviews. I don't really know what I'm talking about though.
I liked Smolin's books in the past, but this one was seriously obtuse. I couldn't track with him very well. His example about a dog and cat lover and something about politics just didn't work. It came across as a mathematician trying to put maths into words, which often doesn't go well. There were so many sentences too that just didn't make sense. That's probably partly my fault, since physics isn't my speciality. But I've read enough books on physics to know how to track with these, and I didn't track with these.
Now for the biggie. Smolin writes as though QP is a theory about what is, when I think it's a theory about what we can actually say/know. QP boils down to the observer problem, which means that no experiment can truly test a theory, ever, because theories assume a god's eye view, but all real world experiments interact with their theories in feedbacky loopy kinds of ways. In philosophical terms, this is equivalent to trying to prove one's own sanity. You can't do it, without assumptions, and those assumptions can't be verified. Physics is incomplete because observers will never truly understand the system of which they themselves are a part. It sucks. I grew up committed to the idea of objective truth, and objective reality. Now I think it's pointless to talk about it. I feel like Smolin hasn't grasped this, and he's still trying to prove that we're all sane and there is an objective reality. We'll never be able to know.
I don't think that Schroedinger's cat is about a cat actually being in a superposition, or actually being dead and alive until there's a 'measurement'. I think the theory implies that there's no way, ever, to know if the cat is dead or alive until we do the measurement. There's no back door, or god's eye knowledge, that can get us around that. Einstein wanted there to be a way, and kept trying to come up with ways. But Bohr kept showing him how he was 'cheating', and that his theories always left a step incomplete. I was cheering for Einstein for a long time. Now I think, frustratingly, that Bohr saw more clearly.
Oh, and the other thing that I think that Smolin gets completely wrong, is that he says that the Copenhagen Interpretation claims that 'measurements' are special. I hear this a lot, and sometimes I hear it from woo spiritualists who think that consciousness is special and brings worlds into existence and things like that. I think Smolin has it backwards. I think that Realists (like Smolin and Einstein et al) discount measurements. They forget that every experiment must include the act of measuring the results, and measurements are physical processes. In Einstein's thought experiments, he was doing the measurement by 'magic', that is, by measuring in his head from a god's eye view. But you can't do that in 'reality'. For the theory to have real world application, it can't leave out a part that impacts the experiment, and measurements impact experiments. Once you realise that, you have to measure the measurement. And measure the measurement of that measurement. And so on ad infinitum. Which means, you can never really complete an experiment. Which is what's so frustrating about QP.
It goes like this: let's do an experiment. OK, done, now let's find out what happened - the theorist just 'knows' what happened by doing magic metaphysical thoughts, but the experimenter has to send a grubby beam of light into the results, which are now the results that include the grubby beam of light. This would be fine on the macro scale (measurements wash out), but when we're trying to find out about beams of light, we have to calculate how the grubby beam of light affected the results, and we don't know how to do that because if we test the grubby beam of light, we're sending yet another gubby beam of light at it. It's like trying to tell how firm an avocado is, so you keep pushing on it, but you're not sure if it's squishy because you're squeezing it, or because it was already squishy. So you squeeze it some more to see when it stops getting squishy.
It's not that QP is incomplete, it's that epistemology is incompletable. It's Gödels all the way down.
At least, this is where I'm at with QP at the moment. I might be completely wrong.