Erroneous common sense vs nonsensical Reality : Sciences, solid vs quantum

quantum-modernity

Modernists such as think tank climate deniers pride themselves on their side's "solid science" , their "common sense" science developed from that reliably Anglo Saxon trio of Newton, Dalton & Darwin .

They dismiss the other side's (quantum-based) science as "nonsensical".

On both counts they are correct but unfortunately, also in error.

(Rather like a quantum particle which can be shown by experiment to be in two places at once and also both a particle and a wave.)

Nineteen Century science - the only sort of science that 21st century university undergraduates and high school seniors are ever taught, is indeed solid and commonsensical.

Unfortunately, starting in the 1890s it was also shown to be fundamentally wrong (more accurately : wrong at fundamental scales) and only apparently semi-accurate over a limited (but very common) scale of activities.

Up until about 1947, nothing we had ever built in the Age of Modernity (except perhaps natural penicillin antibiotics) reflected the new quantum sciences of physics,chemistry and biology.

Not even the A-Bomb.

But starting with transistors and other semi conductors, almost everything truly major invented since then has been only possible by understanding and accepting quantum science's take on reality.

We can still safely build huge bridges and dams using only old Newton's rules, but I won't want to land a plane using a GPS system built by Newtonian Science : crash ,boom, dead !

What we take to be solid actually isn't fundamentally solid - not from those little hard elastic balls we thought were atoms, right down to the smallest possible sub atomic building block, sorry random vacuum energy flux.

And a great deal of quantum science is indeed non-intutitive and nonsensical but the measurements do not lie ; to parts per million they are real, they are reality.

Our sense impressions are at fault : not Reality.

By contrast much of Newton's & Maxwell's most fundamental laws fail embarrassingly at crucial points.

Nineteenth century science convinced engineers, at least, that feathers fell as fast as lead ball (in a vacuum) and that the sun's gravity "force" affected the earth via "spooky action at a distance" : neither ideas seem on the surface to be commonsensical.

But they were (and are) wildly popular notions among modernists and deniers despite all that.

Why ?

I would argue this is because Nineteenth Century Science promised us that while our macro (Man-sized) world of volcano and weather sized objects and events seemed complex, dynamic and uncertain, it reassured us that underneath - at the most fundamental level - Reality was actually solid, simple, certain, regular.

 Fundamentally Reality was knowable, controllable and manipulatable by Man.

A libertarian capitalist or socialist's dream : in Isaiah Berlin's formulation : Liberty for Man and Slavery for Atoms.

What quantum science revealed was exactly the reverse: a man sized rock was solid - particularly if your car hit it - but neither its fundamental atoms or their tinier components were solid - really just flickering bits of energy : altogether the wrong sort of eternally shifting sand to set the foundations of an ideology of certitudes upon.

Quantum science and Solid science of modernity / libertarianism / climate denial are fundamentally opposed - only one can be true.

No science experiment - even at the high school level - shows that solid science beats quantum science ; always solid science is a subset of quantum science, a useful subset that sometimes works - and then embarrassingly - sometimes does not.

But quantum science's revealing of the reality at its most fundamental has split over into post-modernity ; in fact helped create it and sustain it.

Post-modernity is quantum-modernity ......

dear think tanks : I will DENY Higgs Particle for cash - no marked bills please ....

Political science BAs are like old school nuclear physicists , we think we can talk about everything like an expert

Why not ?

If Marc Morano is qualified to be an expert on climate change, than so am I on the Higgs particle.

Like Marc, I have a BA in political science, hold strong opinions and am at times very partisan.

On the other side, it too is a similar story : teams made up of thousands of scientists at universities and institutions all over the world have laboured for decades before coming up with a a cautious scientific consensus.

(A) Humans are causing the atmosphere to heat up  (B) we have located evidence that the predicted Higgs particle exists, to Sigma 5 level of probability.

So on one side, high level tenure & repeated high level peer-review has qualified about one earthling in a million to truly be regarded as experts on a technical scientific matter.

These 7,000 experts have divided themselves into two big world-wide groups to look for the Higgs by two totally different methods and each big group has now separately decided, by general consensus, that the Higgs does exist.

One the other side, amateurs in the academic world's second oldest profession : not pros but game - on the game in fact.

Now all we need is a pimp and a john.

Strident advocacy think tanks die without constant infusions of hot cash --- they'll know who has some readies available.

Maybe Big Asbestos - they under the gun lately - seems at least 100,000 people die annually thanks to this killer mineral.

But how would proof of the existence of the Higgs particle damage the libertarian-capitalist world view enough to waste money refuting it ?

SOLID science is threatened, like never before, by Higgs

Well, I guess I would begin - strictly as a Devil's Advocate - to argue that what all of the various denier efforts have really been fighting is the notion that erroneous common sense (solid) science has been losing a century long battle with nonsensical but accurate quantum science.

The Higgs particle is the missing keystone to the Standard Model of how ultimate fundamental reality actually works.

How it works is in a manner totally in conflict with the 19th century commonsense positivist science that all deniers and corporate CEOs expouse.

Basically what we take to be a solid reality, based on a solid science, turns out to be neither.

Solidity is a vivid illusion - but illusion nevertheless.

But who can blame the deniers & CEOs - it is what they were taught and what 21st high school teachers still teach kids, (in part, because it is easy to teach and easy to write exams for) .

Solid - Newtonian - science is a BLACK BOX - it gets more less accurate results at a certain limited but common scale of events, but it is not a true explanation of the world.

But it is this old fashioned newtonian and daltonian and darwinian science that we spoon-fed high school and yes university kids with.

Rather than teach their trusting charges science that is difficult and unsettling but also happens to be true : quantum physics, quantum chemistry and yes, quantum biology.

By no coincidence, High School teachers teach this crap because because politicians in school boards and departments of education force them to.

Politicians and their corporate handlers sense that if quantum science was taught to all of the population, in a lay manner, it would unsettle the current human belief that we are the only smart and rational beings in a stupid but stable and simple world.

This belief is what lies behind libertarian skygod-ism and the denial of human climate pollution.

Attack Higgs, you attack the quantum theory and thus you attack the quantum (earthling) way of looking at the world.

So gentlemen, when do I get my money ......

Causes of WWII: what we learn at 15 we never forget, UNFORTUNATELY...

   WWII was run by the High School physics of 1895 , run by old Isaac Newton himself - his last hurrah.

  This is because WWII was, in particular, an old man's war - almost all the world leaders were in their sixties or even older  (hello Marshal Petain !)

   These old men had all been young once.

   And in many ways - many unfortunate ways - they still were.

   We learn best - and never forget - what we learn around age 15.

    So, half a century earlier, all the world's leaders, in every field of endeavor, had all been in high school learning the state of art of Science, as least as high school science teachers understood and taught it.

   In 1895, HS teachers understood and taught state of the art science just as the leaders of 1895 Science understood the state of the art as well.

   But this happy meeting of minds: from the world's top scientists to the dumbest of 15 year old (unwilling) HS physics student was about to end.

   From now on, after 1895, the world's top scientists would have to grapple with new, unexpectedly highly complex, verities to replace Newton's old HS-physics -simple verities.

   And if they found these new complicated verities unpalatable, imagine how much more so did the average HS science teacher find them to be.

   First to understand, even dimly ; difficult but possible.

   Then to demonstrate them physically : virtually impossible, even with the best most expensive university equipment.

   Above all to set as exam questions for 15 year old minds, to render forth, inside of two hours, as correctly completed equations.

    Simply not possible : the only correct answer any student /teacher/Nobel prize winner can say - thanks to post-1895 Science - is that "the photon is both a wave and a particle and as to where it is and was it it is, at any moment of time,  is as good your guess ,teacher, as it is mine."

   Not the sort of answers that parents and employers want to hear, nor the sort of answer that science teachers want to produce, if they expect to paid well and much respected.

   So,it was not just the old men who ran WWII, but all the young men and women running the actual scientific side of the war, who continued to be taught in, and at least half believe, the old Newtonian verities.

  Still are taught them, in fact !

  This more than 100 years after they began to be seen, at best, as merely an approximately correct version of a sub section of real physics (IE relativity and quantum physics).

  Published Science - in GCR's definition of that term - IE published in peer-reviewed ,credible, journals in basic science, changed greatly, after 1895 ,without really impacting the world at all  ---- in the physical sense.

  Even its intellectual impact was muted until the 1980s - if even then.

  Popular Science ran WWII - which is to say Science as understood by the general population - including Prime Ministers, Presidents and dictators.

   And that Popular Science still saw humanity's ability to mold and re-shape Nature and Reality in such exalted, unrealistic, fashion that it led the leaders of the world 1939-1945 into History's most horrific war, simply by extrapolating what they had been taught 50 years earlier in science classes.

   To make these distant events seem more pertinent to today (and tomorrow) : the old men running the world today also last learned what little science they know 50 years ago - back before the rise of the environmental science for example.

   Inside their perpetually-15-year-old-minds, the remnants of  optimistic 1950s-era science still can't understand what this fuss about Climate Change is all about......