Do you think quantum fields are nothing, /sci/?

[Anonymous No.14761986]

So Krauss has been having meltdowns on the Internet because lowly science journalists, a philosopher professor (with a doctorate in physics), and a smattering of professional physicists (who can be written off as theologically minded) have said, in essence, that quantum fields are a something, not a nothing. It's weird, though, that he's not really getting any pushback from the luminaries of his field, and we all know how fierce these quarrels can be (in recent memory, Higgs vs. Hawking), but this could be because physics luminaries are shying away from being on the receiving end of Krauss, Dawkings, and their horde of overweight, militant fedora-wearers.
What's your take, /sci/?

[Anonymous No.14761991]

> not really getting any pushback from the luminaries
because they have better things to be doing than care about a nobody talking about the irrelevant.

[Anonymous No.14761992]

>>14761986
> philosopher professor
philosophy professor
>Dawkings
Dawkins. Sorry, senpai, Grammarly didn't help me here...

[Anonymous No.14762014]

>>14761986
>that quantum fields are a something
Your sentence is a philosophical nightmare. You have a subject that exists, so you don't need the second part saying they are something.

quantum fields are, therefore they exist, an existent thing cannot be nothing

[Anonymous No.14762035]

>>14761986
I have this book and it's just another shitty popsci book that conflates precise definitions to make philosophical arguments. It's also been completely btfod before it was even released.

[Anonymous No.14762039]

>>14762014
But surely the renowned fedora Krauss wouldn't be so comically sloppy. What are we missing?

[Anonymous No.14762054]

>>14762039
>What are we missing?
A rudimentary philosophy education. Not even, really. This would be a problem in like remedial metaphysics, if such a course existed.

>Q1: Larry says that all that we see came from nothing. Larry also says all that we see came from quantum fields. Why is Larry wrong?
>"Ooh, ooh, because quantum fields are something!"
>"Good job, Jaunquavius, you get an extra ten minutes in the reading corner!"

I don't really care about his position on atheism or whatever, but there is no way he is making this egregious an error. I have to hope his position has just been mischaracterized.

[Anonymous No.14762056]

>>14761986
No, quantum fields have energy and momentum therefore they are not "nothing"

[Anonymous No.14762057]

>>14761986
I don't know dude I'm just a shitposter. Is spacetime a something? When you measure an inch are you measuring space? You'd think so but you've never seen "a" space
Fields are kind of the same, no?

[Anonymous No.14762151]

>>14762054
>I have to hope his position has just been mischaracterized.
His idea of "nothing" is the quantum vacuum:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_vacuum_state
Of course, you'd ultimately have to read the book yourself to see whether this is a mischaracterization.
If you stripped the title and subtitle from the book and his occasional waffling about "nothing" throughout, you'd have an elegantly written, highly engaging pop-sci book on QFT, which is probably why his groupies consider it some kind of literary crime to hold him to his title, a title that, when revisited after completing the book, yields "quantum fields are nothing."
Even his critics, getting paid by the word, skirt around the insulting succinctness of "quantum fields are nothing," but that's what his book amounts to if you feel it's fair game to center his thesis on his book's title and subtitle.

[Anonymous No.14764158]

>>14761986
first of all, there's ultimately just one unified field, all the "other fields" are just modalities of this single field
secondly, yes, to be precise that field is indeed "nothing", because it isn't a "thing", it is that in which all "things" arise, since "things" are arbitrary delineations of perception
this "nothing" is also known in a wide variety of metaphysical traditions as e.g. "emptiness", "the boundless", "that which has no end", "the infinite", "the absolute", "Tao", "Brahman", and so on

[Anonymous No.14764178]

>>14761986
The quantum field can not be expressed as only an empty set therefore it is by definition not nothing. It has energy and momentum and transformations defined with matrices etc.
this is the end of it and there is really no more conversation to be had. Krauss, and anyone else, is wrong if they disagree and it quite simply does not matter whatsoever if you do. If they were to disagree with me to my face I'd break their jaw for being such morons lol

[Anonymous No.14764184]

>>14764158
So a fedora-tipper coming around to theology while thinking he's "debunking" it

[Anonymous No.14764192]

>>14764184
there's nothing theological about any of that, just metaphysical fact

[Anonymous No.14764203]

>>14764192
You literally listed synonyms of God, do you actually think theology is speculating about a magic grandpa in the sky?

[Anonymous No.14764210]

>>14762151
Vaccuum isn't "nothing." It's an area where various fields are around their energy default. Sort of like a pendulum at rest across a grid, whereas the elementary particles' movement through spacetime is like a shift of these pendulums to different values across the grid.

Vaccuum is roiling with virtual particles. The set points are at zero energy. In some cases, lower values for a field result in higher energy, and thus they are unstable. This is why, if you clear out space to make it more empty using incredible amounts of energy, you'll see that the emptier space spontaneously generates quark antiquark pairs, so-called quark condensate. There are other condensates like this.

Spacetime itself maybe should be thought of as a field, not a container. Wilczek's The Lightness of Being makes this case. The Void has activity and it has mass. It has relationships with other things.

It's definetly not a nothing. It's not even an absolute. There is some evidence the set points for fields have changed over time, and simply settle into one default, but may shift to another. Theories of quantum gravity generally tend to imply that the seemingly fundemental forces of our universe could have had other values, and cosmic inflation suggests they likely do have other values in other regions of space that are inaccessible to us. This helps solve the Fine Tuning argument.

I'm sure he's aware of most of these things, but I don't see how he can say the vaccum is nothing. Hell, plenty of physicists think we'll discover that space and time, the metric field, comes in discrete rather than continuous units, just like the other fields. How can you have discrete units of a nothing? How do you divide zero by something and get units.

Seems dumb at face value. Maybe he defines nothing strangely.

[Anonymous No.14764241]

>>14762054
He is. David Albert (double PhD physics & philosophy, professor @ Columbia University) debunked him so hard that Krauss disinvited him from a science conference that year.

[Anonymous No.14764249]

>>14764158
This is not a mainstream interpretation. First off, while there are holes that all the fundemental forces can be unified the way EM and the weak force appear to be, there isn't good support for this to date.

Hopes for a grand unified theory of everything generally don't posit "one field." They posit a deeper mathematical entity that explains the appearance of fields to observers (e.g. strings, loops, etc.)

Second, few physicists would say this is "nothing." In part, this is just because most don't spend a lot of time looking into the philosophy of physics, and so default to a poorly defined physicalism that falls prey to Hemple's Dilemma. But aside from that, information theoretic approaches are huge, including ontological ones (It From Bit) and information is definitionally a something. You do have theories about how more information can be generated from "nothing," as sort of Boehme inspired "Bit Bang."

Or you have the Mathematical Universe hypothesis that posits the universe is an existant abstract object (Greene has written on this, Tegmark proposed an early version and has a book on it).

Only by a stretch can you call these embodiments of any ancient religious system lol. Although the parallels are interesting.

[Anonymous No.14764255]

>>14764249
And the Absolute if Schelling, Hegel, Bradley, etc. is everything, not nothing.

It's the contradiction of it trying to be something, when there is nothing else by which to define it, that leads to the dialectical and becoming. Absolute Idealism rests on the idea that pure undifferentiated being and nothing make up a contradiction.

[Anonymous No.14764266]

>>14764249
>Only by a stretch can you call these embodiments of any ancient religious system lol. Although the parallels are interesting.
It doesn't require a stretch at all, almost all of them are exactly the same things as what were said in various ancient philosophies/religions they've just been slightly formalized (which does not make them different in quality)
Tegmarks mathematical universe is exactly the same as the pythagorean believe that "all is number", as an example.

[Anonymous No.14764384]

>>14764266
Yeah, in a very general way. But "all is number," is not the same as "all is empty," or "A = A." These are different ontologies, despite being similarly parsimonious.

I liked Tegmark's book, but he has to punt to totally unexamined panpsychism, that there is something "it is like" to be information being processed in a certain way. Felt weak compared to other parts.

Also the whole Doomsday argument thing. I can't believe this guy had the great idea of redefining entropy and bringing the observer into the equation, but simultaneously falls into the fallacy of using pure frequentist statistics to determine how likely it is that you are the Nth human. I also don't get how the academic he mentioned could make any hay on the Doomsday Argument, it gets absolutely BTFO by Bayesian statistics.

Actually, it seems to me like information theoretic approaches overall could benefit from using a Bayesian calculation of surprise.

[Anonymous No.14764489]

>>14764203
wrong
the notion of "God" in virtually all theology implies personality, a creator deity
not a single of the synonyms I listed are equivalent to that fallacious notion at all
emptiness is no such thing whatsoever
>do you actually think theology is speculating about a magic grandpa in the sky?
yes, that is literally what theology is, except your naive and simplistic notion of a "magic grandpa in the sky"
you seem to have a hard time understanding the difference between metaphysics and theology

[Anonymous No.14764491]

>>14764249
>ancient religious system
see my above comment
not a single thing I said had anything to do with religion at all
it's all metaphysics, objectively verifiable fact through the use of reason

[Anonymous No.14764565]

>>14761986
There's something about the aether that makes physicists seethe

[Anonymous No.14764612]

>>14764489
fine, i should have said attributes of God to be more precise, which "the boundless", "that which has no end", "the infinite", "the absolute" certainly are. Christian theology identifies the Logos with God (or rather one part of the Trinity), which as a concept is very similiar to the Tao and the Brahman, the latter even being identified with the personal Atman, almost like the theological idea that God is within you.
My whole original point was that fedora-tippers seem to be appropriating old religious ideas and try to pass it off as "objective metaphysics", as you do. You don't seem to know the extent of theological thinking, and for some some reason misparse obvious sarcasm as MY "naive and simplistic notion of a "magic grandpa in the sky"" while it seems to be close to yours.

[Anonymous No.14764689]

>>14761986
>it's another "retard completely misinterprets the definition of a field" thread

[Anonymous No.14765248]

>>14764689
> it's another "retard is too scared to elaborate and risk outing himself as a retard" post

[Anonymous No.14765278]

>>14765248
I've already done so a hundred times in a hundred different threads and dumbasses like you still keep popping up like indians after they get a whiff of cow pussy, so what's the point

[Anonymous No.14765457]

>>14761986
>quantum fields are a something, not a nothing.
Nothing is a something, though, or there wouldn't be so many words for it and it wouldn't be quantized as the zero value or empty set.

[Anonymous No.14765466]

>>14764241
>debunked
qrd?

[Anonymous No.14765479]

>>14764565
The fact that they banished it but found out they needed to fill the emptiness with "dark matter" to fix their models.

[Anonymous No.14765483]

>>14765457
The word for nothing is something, but the concept it describes is an emptiness of things. You're just making a semantic argument.

[Anonymous No.14765501]

>>14765483
So it is a word with many synonyms and a concept and a description of some thing without certain other things?
How is that different from something?

Of course I am making a semantic argument, this is a thread about specific semantics about how nothing is actually defined and characterized, do you want me to measure nothing with nothing and tell you I did nothing instead?

[Anonymous No.14765791]

>>14764689
There's literally no explicit scientific claim from the OP to object to, though there are strong suggestions that OP would declare quantum fields to be something, not nothing. If you don't suffer from poor reading comprehension like so many on this board, then, the claim you take issue with is "quantum fields are something, not nothing."

[Anonymous No.14765807]

>>14765791
Nothing is also something, so there is no reason nothing and quantum fields can't be the same thing if they are both definitely things and they share all the same basic qualities, forms, and functions.

[Anonymous No.14766023]

>>14765807
>qualities, forms, and functions
>nothing
pop-sci consoomers will go through more gymnastics than any theist to defend their idols like Krauss, who btw is a shitty writer and philosophically retarded

[Anonymous No.14766033]

>>14766023
Yes, nothing has qualities, it is a type of set, an empty set, emptiness is one of its primary qualities.

It takes the form of the formless and fits to any container where every you have some things, the last thing in the list is always nothing else.

Nothing functions like a vacuum and a source of potential, a placeholder for anything else to fill.

If you aren't up for mental tasks, then go to /tv/ or somewhere you can passively mindlessly watch things pass you by.

[Anonymous No.14766069]

>>14764158
Tao and Bramham are not these things at all and actually have very different, codified meanings to what you're trying to use them as some sortve 'cultural consciousness' evidence or confirmation (which really only makes you seem less credible BTW)

[Anonymous No.14766072]

>>14764489
>God has a personality
Projecting hard

[Anonymous No.14767960]

>What's your take, /sci/?

Ever since quantum theory was mathematically proven, physicists cannot handle the idea of conceptualizing an object as a particle *and* a wave. I know it sounds silly at first but when you get down into it, at a micro level particle theory makes it much easier for physicists to make experiments with available equipment. Postulating that certain all particles are also waves messes with this because it creates patterns and spaces where particles should be but aren't and vice versa it prevents exacting measurements that only particle-exclusive theories can do. The double slit experiment and the uncertainty principle are the two largest manifestations of this.

It's mostly an issue of imagination. Thinking about EMF as a wave is, generally, only done by radio operators. Even electrical engineers can think of EMF as particles as electron flows through instrumentation giving up values of amperes and volts. Conceptualizing a wave is more difficult. In an attempt to manage this, string theory was ultimately generated which is postulates that everything is a 2D wave and that particles (including force particles, this is *very* important) emerge when these strings obtain certain patterns or symmetries from interacting with each other. This is VERY hard to think about unless you're into radio, because similar problems regarding propagation and symmetry exist within terrestrial radio broadcasting.

>pic unrelated

[Anonymous No.14768168]

>>14765807
>Nothing is also something
I don't think you even believe this. If you're >>14764689 poster, I think you're disingenuously trying to save your outburst after realizing that maybe you were unnecessarily harsh.

[Anonymous No.14769026]

>>14768168
If nothing weren't something we wouldn't be having a whole conversation about it.

[Anonymous No.14769104]

>>14769026
Krauss (and others for centuries): "Why is there something rather than nothing?"
You: Nothing is something.

Congrats, I guess. Who would've thought that all it required was a midwit semantic shell game?

[Anonymous No.14769108]

>>14769104
Yes, now the real question they meant to as is: how does nothing become something else in addition to nothing, ie why does 0^0 = 0! = 0+1?

[Anonymous No.14769115]

>>14769104
>>14769108
I should say the why is easy because if everything is purely nothing that means everything is bounded by nothing and something bounded by nothing is infinite, so everything must be infinite in a universe of nothing bounded by nothing which means even with nothing there must be something because obviously nothing is something.

[Anonymous No.14769118]

>>14769104
>"Why is there something rather than nothing?"
> all it required was a midwit semantic
It is a semantic question, that gets a semantic answer, how else should it be?

[Anonymous No.14771395]

>>14766072
God is generally considered to be a personal god, so why wouldn't a personal god have a personality?

[Anonymous No.14772161]

>>14761986
Hes saying absolutely nothing of value. All of physics is a model to correlate experimental inputs.
>If X goes in then Y=F(x) goes out
>Stick in X and Y comes out
>OMG the model works so this means "the model" exists hidden somewhere inside reality floating in hyperspace. There really are little F=m a formulas filling the universe

[Anonymous No.14772213]

>>14771395
What the fuck are you going about? How is god personal in any way?
In no abrahamic religion is god personal. God is one, he doesnt have human characteristics anyone can understand, and that's all there is to it. God is not your friend or someone you talk to.
This idea of a personal god is some Anglo boomer made up shit from #local protestant church of "make your own religion! and it isn't mainstream in the world or even in America

[Anonymous No.14772244]

>>14772213
He's not personal but he hates people for having the wrong kind of sex. Hmmmm, really makes you think.

[Anonymous No.14772254]

>>14765466
Other anons already explained in the thread.
>Krauss: what if what we thought was nothing, outer space is filled with quantum particles coming in and out of existence?
>Albert: then that's not nothing, but actually something. we still haven't figured out what was nothing
>Krauss: OY VEY HOW DARE YOU EMBARRASS ME LIKE THAT I WAS SUPPOSED TO DEBUNK CREATIONISM FOREVER WITH THAT EPIC THEORY YOU ARE DISINVITED FROM MY CONFERENCE GOY

[Anonymous No.14772308]

>>14761986
Krauss is correct of course despite the numerous anti-scientific attacks on him by the 'philosophers' and other luddites such as the morons on /sci/. The philosophical idea of 'nothing' is meaningless nonsense so he instead replaced this schizobabble nothing by a proper scientific object and gives possible explanations of how this well-defined nothing gives rise to the things everyone is familiar with.

[Anonymous No.14772323]

>>14764158
GAS GARY ZUKAV AND FRITJOF CAPRA.
I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE.

[Anonymous No.14772326]

>>14772308
>he instead replaced [...] nothing by a proper scientific object
Yes, we all know how Krauss generated something from nothing.

[Anonymous No.14772331]

>something can't come from nothing!
that's a rule, which is something
a state where this rule exists isn't a state of true nothingness
true nothingness would be the absence of all rules (like how something can't come from nothing)

[Anonymous No.14772336]

>>14772308
Krauss was attacked by philosophers who knew their physics like Professor David Albert at Columbia University (PhDs in physics and philosophy, teaches philosophical foundations of physics). This is a cope.

[Anonymous No.14772349]

>>14772308
Unless quantum fields had to exist (i.e., are necessary), it's incredibly disingenuous of Krauss to pretend that "Why do quantum fields exist?" is a question only a Godcuck would wonder about.

[Anonymous No.14772350]

>>14772336
>philosophers who knew their physics.
Lol
>Albert has published three books, Quantum Mechanics and Experience (1992),[2] Time and Chance (2000)[3] and After Physics (2015), as well as numerous articles on quantum mechanics
All his publications sound like the typical cringeworthy babbling by people who don't understand physics

[Anonymous No.14772361]

>>14772350
>He received his bachelor's degree in physics from Columbia College (1976) and his doctorate in theoretical physics from The Rockefeller University (1981) under Professor Nicola Khuri.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Albert grew up living and breathing physics at Ivy League schools until he had a turn towards philosophy.

[Anonymous No.14772390]

>>14772350
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Alford
>Mark G. Alford is a theoretical physicist and chair of the Department of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis.[1] He researches dense matter inside neutron stars.[2][3][4]
>Alford received his bachelor's degree with first-class honors from Oxford in 1984 and his master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard in 1988 and 1990, respectively, under the supervision of Sidney Coleman.[5] Afterwards he held postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Santa Barbara Institute for Theoretical Physics (now the Kavli Institute), Cornell's Laboratory of Nuclear Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. He became a lecturer at the University of Glasgow in 2000,[1] before becoming professor at Washington University in 2003.[6][7] He is currently chair of the Washington University Physics Department.[8][9] He is a fellow of the American Physical Society.[5][6]

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.14772391]

>God is wabtum fields
>I am very smart

[Anonymous No.14772392]

>>14772390
https://web.physics.wustl.edu/alford/reviews/Krauss_Nothing.html
>However, his efforts to define Nothing seem half-hearted; he mostly defines it as empty space which is not noticeably more precise. He also proposes equal amounts of matter and antimatter (p177) and space filled with a constant energy density (p103), both of which sound more like Something than Nothing. There are sharper definitions available: the most obvious would be all the degrees of freedom are in their lowest-energy state (ground state): we'll return to this below. A more radical definition would be no degrees of freedom at all, in which case it would certainly be impossible to get Something from Nothing.
>[...]
>His strongest pronouncement is that theologians and philosophers have no foundation in science for their contention that Nothing will always remain Nothing (p174). Here Krauss is making an interesting and provocative claim, but I think it is an overstatement. If one uses a natural scientific definition of Nothing, namely the lowest-energy state of a system, then it is a simple consequence of Schrodinger's equation that this state will never evolve in to any other state.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.14772396]

>>14772392
>Krauss suggests that fluctuations in the ground state can be the source of Something, but this is really just an artefact of using classical language which obscures the static and unchanging nature of the quantum mechanical ground state. The only way such so-called fluctuations can become real is through the influence of an environment consisting of additional degrees of freedom that, through a process called decoherence, effectively measure the state of the original system. But decoherence will not occur if the environment is also in its ground state (C. Kiefer and D. Polarski, Adv. Sci. Lett. 2, 164-173 (2009)). So, as long as we are in the realm of conventional quantum mechanics, current science supports the theologians: Nothing will always lead to Nothing.

>Conventional quantum mechanics, however, does not include the dynamical flexing of space that we think is an essential aspect of gravity. For that one would need a theory of quantum gravity. Krauss, as usual being admirably clear about the fact that he is stepping in to speculative uncertainty, outlines some ideas that have been suggested about the quantum-gravitational nucleation of baby universes and the possible origin of our universe from them. However, this does not imply that one is getting Something from Nothing. As Krauss himself notes (p182), theories of quantum gravity may not contain anything corresponding in a straightforward way to our current concepts of Nothing and Something. This leaves one unable to come to any scientific conclusions about questions involving these concepts. At this point the science of Nothing is overwhelmed by so much ambiguity and speculation that I am not sure how much advantage it has over theology.

[Anonymous No.14774544]

bump
new material presented from mark alford worth discussing

[Anonymous No.14774616]

That "you can't know nuffin" greentext? How do you discuss "you can't know nuffin"?