Venerable Variable
There was a science article released today, actually released four days ago, but took that time to trickle through the system to where I caught it, about a very unusual pulsar that "surprised" scientists. In and of itself, nothing noteworthy, but the discussions about it, revolving around science and how it is perceived, are indeed noteworthy. A large portion of the general populous does not understand what science is. This is a problem that's been known for a long time, and has probably always been around, but it seems to be compounding and changing nature as technology grows. For the common man these days, people act like anything that surprises scientists must threaten the very fabric of space and time.
That is a problem, a huge problem, with perception. It stems from a view that whatever scientists say, whatever models they have, must be immutable and the universe must act according to them. A highly arrogant position that even some scientists slip into that isn't arrogance when born from ignorance, of course, but which pervades our current culture.
Science, with its math and models, is simply a type of language. Just like English is a language, science is the language and description of observation. Math is a human invented quantative language, but a language no less. The scientific method is only a standardized means to ensure that what a scientist is discribing is what the scientist is actually observing--quality control. The quantative language of math allows us to communicate in objective and reproducible terms. But none of this changes the fact that all we are doing is observing reality. We are not writing reality, but relating to ourselves and one another what we have seen through science, and then predicting what we expect to see next if we change a few variables or look at some new ones, via models. That's it, that's all it is, observation of reality. The world will do whatever it darn well pleases, we merely tell one another what we've seen of its operation and call that telling "science"!
So, you can see a very profound and fundamental problem arises when people begin to act and treat scientific observations as immutable laws. They aren't. Everything in science is 100% subject to revision, if any observations change in reproducible ways. The earth is round. No it isn't, it's oblong--that's revision, that's science. If the laws of physics decide to change tomorrow and turn the world into a flat two dimensional plane, then if anyone is alive in a form to observe that change, they'll record it, revise our understandings, and science will go on. It's nothing incredible, nothing mystical, nothing esoteric. Yet people treat science as if it's the "Word of God". This is a terrible error, and thus every other day some new observation is made which "shocks" everyone (and which shouldn't!), or the media calls it a "breakthrough". Just observation, we watch how the world works, but it does its own thing. It seems so obvious, yet the mob mentality just doesn't get it.
This then leads to a whole other issue, something I discussed with a recent associate. He was saying that the universe acts like dominoes, that one thing happens and that leads to the next thing always the same, that there's no random of any sort, only cause and effect. Now, in the nice Newtonian view of the world, this is only mostly correct (in a pure, simulated mathematical sense it is, but actual experimentally observation shows it isn't). Throw in quantum mechanics and it's totally off. Why? It sounds so nice. I once believed like that--but it's absolutely wrong, and provably so.
The world runs on probabilities. There is always variance. No matter how controlled the environment, no matter what the experiment, every time something is done twice you get a different result. No result, what so ever, at no time, is 100% reproducible. This is why science is always expressed in statistics (something else which is lost on the population). There is always, always variance. Now, variance in an experiment where we observe and learn something about how the universe works is very low, that is, not statistically high enough to break our "one population under observation" rule, so we can derive concrete, reproducible experiments. Reproducible means the MEAN (aka average) is reproducible, never the exact results. So, even if you do a Newtonian experiment, even if you hit two balls together more than once, the results, the distances, the arcs, everything will always be slightly different, no matter how perfectly controlled the experiment is. This small level of variance is normal, when we are observing something new, that's when the variance between older data and the newer data grows to be statistically significant. That's how we know and show we have a "different population", a "different mean" and thus a "different system" under study.
Yes, the stock market isn't strictly random: it is run on probabilities. If one stock goes up, you know the probability of another going up and down, and the more that one stock goes up, the probabilities of the other changing changes in accordance. But it's still probability. Even if it's 80% chance it'll happen, there's still a 20% chance it won't, and sometimes it just doesn't happen even when we fully expect it should. Yay, probability, variance.
If you flip a coin, the position of your finger already determines if it'll be heads or tails before it lands. No, it only tells you how probable it'll be heads or tails before it lands.
Probability is only the result of not knowing enough variables. Prove that. It can't be done. Because even in super colliders there's variance, and that variance is more than simply machine variances added together. Always there is variance, and then even in our detectors, in our machines, there is variance. Never can you escape it. Via Occam's Razor, it only makes sense to view the world as being run by probability. When viewed that way everything falls into place, from the stock market to the beating of a heart, and you now have predictive power with a versatility you lacked under the "domino" view. So, the Newtonian view of if you know enough variables you can predict the outcome to any event is false. But you can know the "general" or probable outcome to within a certain degree of error--this is where people get hitched and confused. You can, because variance has a characteristic size within a given population, predict the "general" results if you know enough variables acting on a system and how they interrelate and interact with that system. But you can never predict the exact result, because it isn't a "domino" run universe, it's a probability run one--so far as we've observed and which we can experimentally show.
And then you throw in quantum mechanics and all of this makes even more sense. There is a world which runs strictly on probabilities. And worst yet for those "domino" viewists, [i]it works[/i]. And works all too well. Already we even have working quantum computers. Even the orbits of the planets are only explained via quantum mechanics, via probability, not by Newtonian views.
If it wasn't for the fact it's been observed to be how the universe runs--if it wasn't for the fact it works, I'd still strictly believe in the Newtonian world view. And really the population is still taught in that sort of way, loosely, since science education to begin with is so poor! But that isn't how it goes. If a domino falls and hits another, maybe there's only a 90% chance that other will fall, and when that one strikes the next in the line there may only be a 89% chance that one will fall. THAT is how the universe has been observed to work at every single level. So if the nth domino in the line falls or not depends on the sum of the probabilities of all those fallen dominoes from before. Again this is observibly true: the butterfly effect is not real. If a butterfly flaps its wings, it doesn't cause a hurricane because the system is inherently buffered. That is, over iterations and time a cause slowly gets washed out and can no longer contribute to an effect. By the nth time, after enough times, the probability goes to 0.
So then, the interaction of some atoms at the beginning of time no longer has any bearing now. That cause was swallowed up, diluted away, and is no longer apart of the events of now--the dominoes stopped falling.
Then one can say "But we've always seen objects fall towards the Earth. If it was all probability, isn't there a probability that it may fall up one day?" Yes, obviously. From the quantum view that's pretty obvious. But the probability is so vanishingly low, the number of times things must be dropped just to get a case where one doesn't drop quite as fast, let alone the wrong direction for any length of time, is basically infinite. But it isn't completely infinite. We can't test a system as big as an apple, but we can test smaller systems, like atoms and molecules or light, and indeed, they don't always get affected by gravity and fall down 100% of the time: just most of the time, and that's all that's needed to give us our mean, our general result, and our macro observed common experience.
This is not to say the world only works via probabilities, which cannot be proved absolutely, and isn't observably true so far. But the vast majority of the observed universe does. There are some seemingly immutable laws: conservation of mass and energy, conservation of momentum, the laws of thermal dynamics. These laws form a framework within which probabilities exist, as they couldn't exist otherwise. So even if probabilities run most things, there has to still be a framework to make sense of them in. Then again, if we suddenly do see an instance where one of those laws fail due to some probabilistic event, I wouldn't be surprised, and nor should scientists. Instead, we should observe, describe, and refine our models to incorporate the new information--an act which is the heart and soul of science.
That is a problem, a huge problem, with perception. It stems from a view that whatever scientists say, whatever models they have, must be immutable and the universe must act according to them. A highly arrogant position that even some scientists slip into that isn't arrogance when born from ignorance, of course, but which pervades our current culture.
Science, with its math and models, is simply a type of language. Just like English is a language, science is the language and description of observation. Math is a human invented quantative language, but a language no less. The scientific method is only a standardized means to ensure that what a scientist is discribing is what the scientist is actually observing--quality control. The quantative language of math allows us to communicate in objective and reproducible terms. But none of this changes the fact that all we are doing is observing reality. We are not writing reality, but relating to ourselves and one another what we have seen through science, and then predicting what we expect to see next if we change a few variables or look at some new ones, via models. That's it, that's all it is, observation of reality. The world will do whatever it darn well pleases, we merely tell one another what we've seen of its operation and call that telling "science"!
So, you can see a very profound and fundamental problem arises when people begin to act and treat scientific observations as immutable laws. They aren't. Everything in science is 100% subject to revision, if any observations change in reproducible ways. The earth is round. No it isn't, it's oblong--that's revision, that's science. If the laws of physics decide to change tomorrow and turn the world into a flat two dimensional plane, then if anyone is alive in a form to observe that change, they'll record it, revise our understandings, and science will go on. It's nothing incredible, nothing mystical, nothing esoteric. Yet people treat science as if it's the "Word of God". This is a terrible error, and thus every other day some new observation is made which "shocks" everyone (and which shouldn't!), or the media calls it a "breakthrough". Just observation, we watch how the world works, but it does its own thing. It seems so obvious, yet the mob mentality just doesn't get it.
This then leads to a whole other issue, something I discussed with a recent associate. He was saying that the universe acts like dominoes, that one thing happens and that leads to the next thing always the same, that there's no random of any sort, only cause and effect. Now, in the nice Newtonian view of the world, this is only mostly correct (in a pure, simulated mathematical sense it is, but actual experimentally observation shows it isn't). Throw in quantum mechanics and it's totally off. Why? It sounds so nice. I once believed like that--but it's absolutely wrong, and provably so.
The world runs on probabilities. There is always variance. No matter how controlled the environment, no matter what the experiment, every time something is done twice you get a different result. No result, what so ever, at no time, is 100% reproducible. This is why science is always expressed in statistics (something else which is lost on the population). There is always, always variance. Now, variance in an experiment where we observe and learn something about how the universe works is very low, that is, not statistically high enough to break our "one population under observation" rule, so we can derive concrete, reproducible experiments. Reproducible means the MEAN (aka average) is reproducible, never the exact results. So, even if you do a Newtonian experiment, even if you hit two balls together more than once, the results, the distances, the arcs, everything will always be slightly different, no matter how perfectly controlled the experiment is. This small level of variance is normal, when we are observing something new, that's when the variance between older data and the newer data grows to be statistically significant. That's how we know and show we have a "different population", a "different mean" and thus a "different system" under study.
Yes, the stock market isn't strictly random: it is run on probabilities. If one stock goes up, you know the probability of another going up and down, and the more that one stock goes up, the probabilities of the other changing changes in accordance. But it's still probability. Even if it's 80% chance it'll happen, there's still a 20% chance it won't, and sometimes it just doesn't happen even when we fully expect it should. Yay, probability, variance.
If you flip a coin, the position of your finger already determines if it'll be heads or tails before it lands. No, it only tells you how probable it'll be heads or tails before it lands.
Probability is only the result of not knowing enough variables. Prove that. It can't be done. Because even in super colliders there's variance, and that variance is more than simply machine variances added together. Always there is variance, and then even in our detectors, in our machines, there is variance. Never can you escape it. Via Occam's Razor, it only makes sense to view the world as being run by probability. When viewed that way everything falls into place, from the stock market to the beating of a heart, and you now have predictive power with a versatility you lacked under the "domino" view. So, the Newtonian view of if you know enough variables you can predict the outcome to any event is false. But you can know the "general" or probable outcome to within a certain degree of error--this is where people get hitched and confused. You can, because variance has a characteristic size within a given population, predict the "general" results if you know enough variables acting on a system and how they interrelate and interact with that system. But you can never predict the exact result, because it isn't a "domino" run universe, it's a probability run one--so far as we've observed and which we can experimentally show.
And then you throw in quantum mechanics and all of this makes even more sense. There is a world which runs strictly on probabilities. And worst yet for those "domino" viewists, [i]it works[/i]. And works all too well. Already we even have working quantum computers. Even the orbits of the planets are only explained via quantum mechanics, via probability, not by Newtonian views.
If it wasn't for the fact it's been observed to be how the universe runs--if it wasn't for the fact it works, I'd still strictly believe in the Newtonian world view. And really the population is still taught in that sort of way, loosely, since science education to begin with is so poor! But that isn't how it goes. If a domino falls and hits another, maybe there's only a 90% chance that other will fall, and when that one strikes the next in the line there may only be a 89% chance that one will fall. THAT is how the universe has been observed to work at every single level. So if the nth domino in the line falls or not depends on the sum of the probabilities of all those fallen dominoes from before. Again this is observibly true: the butterfly effect is not real. If a butterfly flaps its wings, it doesn't cause a hurricane because the system is inherently buffered. That is, over iterations and time a cause slowly gets washed out and can no longer contribute to an effect. By the nth time, after enough times, the probability goes to 0.
So then, the interaction of some atoms at the beginning of time no longer has any bearing now. That cause was swallowed up, diluted away, and is no longer apart of the events of now--the dominoes stopped falling.
Then one can say "But we've always seen objects fall towards the Earth. If it was all probability, isn't there a probability that it may fall up one day?" Yes, obviously. From the quantum view that's pretty obvious. But the probability is so vanishingly low, the number of times things must be dropped just to get a case where one doesn't drop quite as fast, let alone the wrong direction for any length of time, is basically infinite. But it isn't completely infinite. We can't test a system as big as an apple, but we can test smaller systems, like atoms and molecules or light, and indeed, they don't always get affected by gravity and fall down 100% of the time: just most of the time, and that's all that's needed to give us our mean, our general result, and our macro observed common experience.
This is not to say the world only works via probabilities, which cannot be proved absolutely, and isn't observably true so far. But the vast majority of the observed universe does. There are some seemingly immutable laws: conservation of mass and energy, conservation of momentum, the laws of thermal dynamics. These laws form a framework within which probabilities exist, as they couldn't exist otherwise. So even if probabilities run most things, there has to still be a framework to make sense of them in. Then again, if we suddenly do see an instance where one of those laws fail due to some probabilistic event, I wouldn't be surprised, and nor should scientists. Instead, we should observe, describe, and refine our models to incorporate the new information--an act which is the heart and soul of science.