Inconsistency of words like 'nothing' or 'randomness'...

I have encountered several times that scientists (or at least those that are interested in science) misinterpret what I say because the words themselves has inconsistent meanings. Nothing, for example, if taken in this context; "a particle can come to existence out of nothing in quantum physics", according to some scientists the "nothing" that this refers to is absolute nothing as in "the absence of everything and anything" while some scientists say that it isn't actually "nothing" but a field. Yet Hawkings suggest that the universe (along with space and time) came from nothing, which is not from a field, but rather from the non-existence of everything and anything.

As of this time I still haven't found out what the scientists mean by "particles coming to existence from nothing", do they mean actual nothing? - as in "nothing at all"? They seem to mean that, since they also say that they spontaniously comes into existence, and "spontaniously" should (if I understand the word correctly) mean "no prior cause" or "caused by itself", which is essentially the same as "nothing" - as in "the absence of everything and anything".

Also, non-existence has exactly the same inconsistency since scientists often say that particles pops in and out of existence (where they must have been non-existent if they were to pop in to existence, right?).


Also, if we take the word random, can there be actual randomness in the world? Immediately we get "define randomness", as if the word itself wasn't good enough. I think that the context should have made it clear, but more often than not was I mistaken. Many words are like that, but I'm starting to wonder if it is simply some kind of strategy from the people involved in the discussion to attempt to hide the fact that they just don't know the answer. It seems that whatever I try to say I always get the reflex "define blablablah", even when it should have been clear from context. It seriously damages the discussion of the subject (as we're now discussing semantics instead of the actual subject), and I basically think it is very childish. I guess I could understand it if it was a very complicated word...like "gamete" or something, then they could ask that I define it for them so that they don't need to look it up, but any ordinary english word can be fairly accurately estimated due to the context that it is in. I would be happier if they said "what do you mean?" than when they say "define that and that", because I don't like that the focus is shifted to single words instead of the concept, especially when the concept should be enough clue as to how to define the words.


One time I said "you don't exist after you die" and I got into a discussion of several pages where one of them didn't get that I meant the mind and not the body, was it really hard to understand? How could I have meant that the body would stop to exist after a person dies? I mean, just a bit of common sense is needed to understand what that meant. Also, in everyday talk, if someone said "I don't believe that we exist after we die", of course I wouldn't think that they thought that the body just vanished. I do have some respect for my fellow man.

Yeah, you know...I can't shake the feeling that the people that behaves in this manner have the intent to derail the thread. I guess that I'm just overly suspicious though and I don't point that accusation at a single person so don't take it personally. I have to say that I think it's pretty annoying though and I hope that people have enough brains to figure out what meaning single words have if taken in context. If they don't get it then just ask what I mean, not how I would define the single word cause more often than not do we get caught up in several pages just to explain that single word, and it's just not worth it and it ruins the thread.


Other examples of words that has been in need of definition in my threads or where my definition of it has been unclear:

Truth - could it mean uncorrupted? I think so, because truth is necessarily uncorrupted and can't be otherwise.
Meaning - could it mean "importance"? I think so, at least if something is meaningful then it is equal to something having importance, which could be said to have meaning.
Effect - Appearently all effects aren't a caused change which is entirely non-intuitive if you ask me (from this thread)

There's probably more examples but those are what I could find right now.

The words in bold in the text are words that has this inconsistency and have been discussed in lengths instead of the subject at hand.

Thanks for your time.

 

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“If you wish to converse with me,” said Voltaire, “define your terms."

Science itself, along with the scientific methods, consists of an agreed upon set of definitions for certain concepts.

You keep saying "The meaning should have been clear from the context". But obviously this has not been the case. Instead of seeing a dark conspiracy, perhaps you ought to put the burden upon yourself, and simply define the terms you are using when asked to do so. We who deal in science education, particularly in trying to present science to the public, soon become familiar with a whole raft of terms which we know, from experience, that the general public does NOT understand, in spite of the fact that they believe they do understand them. People will argue vehemently that evolution is impossible - and yet, they are not able to even define evolution! Another one is the term "information". Creationists will claim that "No new information is ever evolved", or "No new information is added by evolution". Yet they cannot define "information", nor can they tell us how they would propose to measure the amount of information.

Most words have at least several meanings; the more generally the word is in use by the public, the more possible meanings there are - and the meaning being used is almost never clear from the context.

Rich

 

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There are two kinds of "randomness" that come up in quantum mechanics, and they are unfortunately not distinguishable from one another in a scientific sense. One is randomness that arises from good old-fashioned ignorance. If I toss a coin in the air, and we agree that it can land on either heads or tails, that is really randomness as ignorance. If we knew the force I applied to the coin, and the angular momentum imparted to it, and the details of the surface on which it will land and the details of the gravitational field through which it passes, and many many other facts it is possible, in principle, to predict how the coin will land. Gathering those details is functionally impossible, but still, we can think of a coin toss as "really" deterministic, but chaotic ("chaotic" in the mathematical sense, that is...sensitive to initial conditions).

Another kind of randomness comes up in several (but all) interpretations of quantum mechanics. Most of the interpretations that have developed suggest that quantum events are "truly random" in that there is *no* causal mechanism that leads to a particular event, so even if we knew everything about the system (which we can't due to the uncertainty principle), we would still not be able to predict many quantum level phenomena, except as a matter of statistical certainty.

Many physicists hated that, however, and much effort was put into developing new interpretations of quantum mechanics that did not incorporate this notion that certain events happened uncaused. They did succeed in developing these models and they work just as well as any of the others...but there's a catch, they require certain "hidden variables"...which is to say that require that certain information exist that is utterly, scientifically and philosophically unknowable. If these interpretations are correct, and humans persist for a trillion years, they *still* would not have instruments capable of knowing these secret facts contained in quantum systems. In principle, though the systems are deterministic, and if you could know everything there was to know about it, you could predict the otherwise seemingly random events just like you could the outcome of the coin toss.

That's why the variables need to be so fundamentally hidden, though, because the only way to explain what we see in nature is to have a universe where randomness is fundamental (whether as a result of ignorance of all the physical conditions of a system, or as a result of truly uncaused events occurring).

Most physicists do not bother to parse out the differences between those two cases because no one can say which is "real" and which isn't, and both ways of thinking lead you to the same underlying scientific theories (even if each has different philosophical baggage).

It could be that we will eventually work this out, but for now we are in the dark on which if any of our current interpretations accurately describes reality.

 

Thanks for all your replies;

In my posts I have clearly said that it isn't the nothing of "space" that I mean, but the absolutely "nothing", hence that "place" that a particle that doesn't exist would come from. Since the theory does say that a particle pops in and out of existence there can't be any other interpretation than that it means nothing as in the "absence of anything and everything" - in the view of the particle when it is nothing. If it isn't even in existence then there can't be no space or time for that particle - it is, in fact, nothing.


Nothing, as in emptiness, isn't really nothing - as you said, which is why I assume that scientists - which tries to be so precise - would understand that as well. What is the point of scientists trying to be precise with their words if they don't trust other's to be the same - at least as the default approach. Instead the default approach is to think that people involved in scientific discussion uses the layman's words - such that nothing is emptiness - which almost never proves to be the case since they don't trust their fellow man to have a precise understanding of the word.


To confuse the issue even further, they - instead of using nothing as the precise definition of "not anything" as they should, they often ascribe nothing to simply be emptiness - or vaccuum, which is a return to the layman term of nothing and which just simply isn't the precise definition of nothing - nothing - as the word implies in all ways is the absence of everything and anything as it is nothing.

Both meaning and truth were in a context where they could only mean "importance" and "uncorrupted" - it was even explained why it would be uncorrupted in the scenario that I gave.

Randomness - in its most precise definition, can be either when something happens which has no cause, or when the causes of the result is too hard or complex to predict - even in principle. If it is possible in principle to predict the outcome then that isn't truly randomness, then it's chaos.

True. The uncertainty principle states that it is impossible to measure all properties of a particle at the same time, and as such it is impossible to predict the future outcome of any given system accurately enough. This illustrates the two possible definitions of randomness (true randomness), one which is that the outcome is impossible to predict although there are causes for it, and one where the outcome is uncaused and as such impossible to predict. My question in the thread when the argument about the word "random" occured was "is randomness uncaused?", obviously the answer to that question lies in the definition of randomness, so why should I define it for them when I am the one who is asking???

Btw; this is the thread: Is randomness uncaused?, it sounds to me like you would be interested in that question.

Yeah, I wish. Unfortunately the agreed upon set of definitions seem to vary from scientist to scientist. Hawking seem to interpret "nothing" as meaning "nothing at all, not even time or space" while some scientists seem to interpret "nothing" as meaning "emptiness" or "vacuum", and yet some think of "nothing" as a field where particles pop in and out from. It depends on who you ask really.

I beg to differ. The meaning has been clear from the context but most scientists seem to just glance it through and not think about the implications that the context has for the meaning of individual words.

This is exactly what I've been trying to do. Not only have I tried to define the terms that I deem could be confusing but also tried to put the ordinary words (that really shouldn't be confusing) into a clear context where no misunderstanding can be made without producing truly ridiculous results. Like the example that I gave; "You don't exist after you die", appearently a scientist thought I meant the body, that the body doesn't exist after you die which is completely ridiculous and just a attempt to stray the thread. It isn't conspiracy theory, I'd rather think that it's ignorance, scientists can be really arrogant and think they know best. This causes the misunderstandings, if you ask me. The guy that thought my body would disappear after I die wasn't like that though, he just thought I was a low-intelligent creationist. I told him that he shouldn't think of me like that, and not the creationists either.

Unfortunately, the same ambiguity that infects common people also infects scientists and there are seldom any agreed upon definition outside of context. So it seems that context is all we have to go upon when using words at all, cause most of them have several meanings.

 

I couldn't agree more, it is a real pain for those of us that want to present our ideas and instead of useful feedback only get to define our own common english terms, which is already defined through the context as in ordinary speech. My "theory" (in this context it should be clear that it isn't a scientifical theory that has substantial evidence) or, rather "hypothesis" is that scientists reading the posts are just too lazy to interpret it according to context and instead blindly focuses on individual words.

It is the equivalent of asking "is Obama a good president?" and getting the answer "define good". It should be clear that I intend "good" to mean in the context of being a president and not good as in "is he a good father to his children?" or "is he a good husband to his wife?".

 

Reminds me of a recent conversation here specifically about the LHC. I had used the scientific (and contextually correct) term “quench”. A poster noted that he was confused since (to him) the term quench refers to a metal that is suddenly cooled (i.e. tempering). Since we were discussing the LHC, I had assumed that everyone would understand that I was referring here to a magnetic quench. It never occurred to me that he had no previous knowledge of what constituted a magnetic quench.

Just another example of how a commonly used word can have various meanings depending on context, and how assumptions/misunderstandings can easily arise.

 

That's exactly the kind of problem that I'm talking about. I used the word "random" in the context of quantum physics and the uncertainty principle, that which is random in that context is different from that which is random when throwing a dice or that which is random in a pseudo-random generator. I'm glad to hear that people have had similar problems. One of them even accused me of being dishonest.

I do understand that there is inherent flaws in language, but those flaws are open to everyone and people that are experienced in discussion (as the long-term members here undoubtably are) should recognise those flaws and try to see the words in the context they are in.

I feel that it, in some cases, can hinder the flow of discussion, and sometimes not just hinder but steer it in the wrong direction where everything gets to be about a single word instead of the concept that is discussed.

 

Any physicist who is being careful would distinguish between quantum mechanics (a largely mathematical construct that predicts how subatomic particles will behave in a given circumstance) and the "interpretations" of quantum mechanics (which generally try to say either "why" the particles behave that way or equivalently attempt to describe an underlying reality of what "is really happening" at the subatomic level when not being observed or measured). The former is the science as we know it, while the latter is a philosophical interpretation of what the science "really means" about the quantum world.

The scientists agree on the quantum mechanics itself (for the most part), but there is no general consensus on the interpretations (and there are many of those, mostly mutually exclusive but yet each works as a consistent explanation of the actual science as we know it). Plenty of practical types *never* trouble themselves over the interpretations, and simply rely on the math to predict what will happen (in a statistical sense) to a given quantum system without ever bothering to consider the underlying physical reality of what is going on to cause the prediction to be accurate. Bohr himself said that it is not even a proper question to ask what is happening when no one is observing or measuring a quantum system, because it's not something we can ever know.

It may be that, as science progresses though, we will be able to rule out certain of the current interpretations. For right now, their main use is to provide a rough intuitive guide for people and provide some philosophical fun pondering the underlying nature of reality.

I also think most scientists would admit that they can't prove or disprove any of the interpretations right now, but many still have emotional reactions to them. Some people love the "many worlds" interpretation, for example, and some think of the universe and all its mass and energy being duplicated it its entirety over and over again, all in an instant, an unthinkable number of times each second, as sounding preposterous (perhaps because it "feels like" it violates the conservation of mass/energy rules we all learned in science class).

 

Indeed. A bit clumsy in the philosophical sense, but its faithfulness to the underlying mathematics is undeniable.

 

No one can dispute Fraggle Rocker's remark that technical people are notorious for mangling language. (I won't even attempt to condense the rest of what he said, which is full of other ideas.)

My observation is this. We rely on fundamental ideas like "nothing" or "time" or "matter" etc., because we are generally concerned with the practical problems in the real world, at least when we are working from the applications side. We even use cookbook formulas without deriving them over and over. This allows us to operate at a higher level, without getting bogged down in elementary concepts. It even becomes efficient for us to mangle language in the process, because we are sliding over the holes in our foundations just to move the larger problems forward. Another consequence of this is that, as people design their own heuristic or custom solutions to esoteric problems, they begin to invent their own dialects without consideration that they are further mangling the ideas behind words, or losing track of the conventions in our already massive vocabulary.

Furthermore, it's not just language that we are worried about preserving, but the abstractions themselves. We need a compact and efficient way to communicate the most peculiar ideas, without loss of particularity, as these ideas get handed down. I think this is why technical briefs are so dry. The author is striving for clarity amid this noise and haste that clutters our speech.

Finally, the point of your concern addresses some of the most basic concepts imaginable - time, space, existence, nothingness, etc., which, when we attempt to characterize them, elude us in the specificity we seek. I think what happens next is that we gradually converge closer to verbalizing the most abstract of ideas, but perhaps without ever arriving there. Maxwell's equations can be viewed through this lens, something that gradually dawned on science, converging in the mind of Maxwell, in this particular language, to describe phenomena that had previously eluded this particular association of earlier ideas. But in order to comprehend them, we already have to assume an understanding of "infinity" or "infinitesimal", or "continuum" before we can even address the esoteric principles like "field" or "charge", ideas that are already inordinately cumbersome in terms of exercising our ability to form abstractions.

My own view is that this is a natural process in speech. At its heart speech itself seems to rely on convergence. For those ideas that by chance we have a common understanding, we may converge upon them instantly. Other ideas may take longer, perhaps years, before convergence is noticeable.

In the mean time we exhaust all the alternatives, by process of elimination, until we do converge. This produces a dithering or thrashing about, which may be nothing more than a syndrome of the underlying healthy activity we call understanding.

Maybe that thrashing about is all that's on your mind, and, in time, you will feel like there is no recourse but to vent your frustration and continue to press against it.

 

Yes, but digging up a fossil is a measurement. Einstein boiled the debate down in his question to Bohr, "Do you really believe that the Moon doesn't exist when no one is looking at it?" Under the purist's form of quantum mechanics, the theory doesn't address what the particles do when no one is observing them, and (as noted in the prior post) any number of physical descriptions of what may be happening are consistent with the actual scientific theory (including creating separate branching universes for each thing that any one particle might do, singles particles that simultaneously travels along multiple paths at once, particles that send information about their actions backwards in time so that their actions can affect other particle before the act occurs, and many other possibilities).

Bohr held to the Copenhagen interpretation (which was the only game in town at the time) and that theory, as believed in by Bohr, is extremely skeptical of asking questions about certain states of particles not covered by the scientific theory proper.

Many different, mutually exclusive, interpretations are logically possible. The Copenhagen interpretation rejects questions like "what was the electron's position before I measured it" as being meaningless, because they define "position" itself as being dependent on the measurement, much as, as Heisenberg wrote, "it is meaningless to to talk of the position of a particle of fixed velocity." The notion that a position is an objective feature that exists whether or not we are interacting with a particle is, in this view, mistaken "classical" thinking. It is our intuition misleading us into thinking that the quantum world is like the macroscopic world...and many adherents took that further and said that maybe the macroscopic world really doesn't match that intuition either...maybe the Moon doesn't have a "position" when no one's interacting with it. (Since then, we've developed the idea of "decoherence" which suggests that large numbers of quantum systems can cause a mutual collapse of their own wave functions, that means that, even under the Copenhagen interpretation, the Moon really does exist when no one is observing it, but the same is not necessarily true of an isolated atom, or even 1000 atoms.)

Not that I cleave to that interpretation, I don't really feel strongly about any of them, but Copenhagen takes a view that there is a certain "non-reality" to things like energy levels, position, momentum and certain other traits in the quantum world prior to the moment of (direct or indirect) observation.

 

This famous quote of Niels Bohr comes to mind here:

"If you are not completely confused by quantum mechanics, you do not understand it."

In essence, our intuitions and language of utility derive from classical reasoning and logic. On many levels however, quantum mechanics is extremely counter-intuitive and is the antithesis of classical experience.

 

A college professor once said to me (I’ll paraphrase)... "If you can’t expound on a complicated idea in a manner that the average person can understand, then your communication skills are sub-par. On the other hand however, our vocabulary is not keeping pace with the increasing demands of complexity."

What is your solution to this conundrum FR? The coinage of new words? I am not being sarcastic or flippant here. I joined this board to explore different topics and avenues. I really am interested in reading your thoughts on how to best remedy the inherent short-comings and limitations of modern English, especially in regards to the sciences.

 

Yes, that's true, a better question would be "do you think Obama is a good president?" since obviously if Obama is a good president is highly subjective (or we wouldn't need elections). The problem is that when having to define the term "good president" I only get to answer my own question instead of hearing his opinion, which was what I asked for. If I define a good president to be what Obama is then "yes, he is a good president", but I asked him not myself and personal opinion should be assumed since that's the only reasonable option, or the thread is immediately strayed in favor of defining what a good president is, which for any sake is also subjective in almost every regard. I could very well want to continue after I've heard his opinion to reflect my opinion and bases of it, instead of spending several pages trying to define what a good president should be, and I stress that it's still only my opinion, why would I ask that question to someone just to get to reflect upon it myself?