Adirian comments on Can You Prove Two Particles Are Identical? - Less Wrong

32 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 April 2008 07:06AM

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Comment author: Adirian 17 April 2008 12:46:00AM 1 point [-]

Will - field theory is pretty good, yup, although...

We're basically at the same point in physics we were a little more than a century ago. Back then, there were two major camps - the atomicists, and the energists. The energists' position was essentially that everything was made of energy, the atomicists' position was that there were these tiny particles we hadn't seen yet, but they were in fact real.

Now, at the time, both camps had equally valid positions, although the energists had the stronger support - but there was a very interesting distinction between the two. If the energists were right, we were in a position where we knew all the basic rules of the universe, and it was just a matter of sorting out a few weird details. If the atomicists were right, there was a LOT of stuff we didn't know yet.

The atomicists, as history will back me, were right, and physics went right on trucking. Well, actually, that isn't quite correct - the atomicists were mostly right; the particles they thought existed weren't quite what we found. We did indeed find the particles, but not the fundamental indivisible particles much of their camp had been expecting. A few years later, the roles were reversed; the atomicist position had some smaller particles, and everything, except for a few weird details, was sorted out. (One can say something of the amazing predictive power of quantum physics - well, it wasn't any more remarkable than the amazing predictive power of Newtonian physics.) And the energists owned the next age, although not quite the way they had ever expected.

We've reached that same point again today. The atomicists for the most part no longer believe in an atomic (indivisible) particle, but the fundamentals are otherwise the same; if the energists are right, then we basically know all the basic principles of physics, and it is just a matter of sorting out a few really weird details. Meanwhile, you have the atomicists, now called neo-realists, inspired by the late giants Einstein and Feynman, finding some curious approaches to handling those few weird details - although pushed into a much harder corner this time by Bell's theorem. Third time is the charm, I suppose?

Anybody who is proposing we know all the fundamentals of a field should arouse your instant suspicions - this is a hubris from which men have fallen every time they've mounted it. It's a very seductive idea to those who chase order. It is also a mindkiller.