Swimmer963 comments on Configurations and Amplitude - Less Wrong

26 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 April 2008 07:41AM

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Comment author: Swimmer963 14 April 2012 01:57:21AM 1 point [-]

When theories use these words interchangeably as nouns and verbs, I realize that it is not only grammatically incorrect at times, it is nonsensical and so I must disregard what I am being told.

I've read in a lot of books on quantum physics that yeah, the ways of explaining it with commonplace nouns and verbs don't make sense. But the math makes predictions anyway, so we can make a wild guess that whatever reality is like on that level, it has something that corresponds to our mathematical concepts. There are 'particles' which are a little bit like our everyday conception of the word (a small piece of matter) and a little bit not, since no commonplace 'particle' is massless. But the math only gives correct predictions if you have some particles, like photons, be massless...and it's simpler to assume that they actually exist than that we're getting the whole theory horribly wrong and somehow still getting useful predictions out of it.