A math professor’s recent video lamented the automation of mathematics as a loss, because we won’t develop the tools to approach those problems ourselves. His key example is graph theory emerging from Euler’s bridge problem.
His key mistake is obvious: these are the tools to approach these problems, ourselves. Euler inventing topology to solve that puzzle ultimately produced a variety of practical uses. Spicy autocomplete being capable enough to even argue it earned a millennium prize makes it more than capable of advancing other fields. We can bemoan that no single person deeply understands a new aircraft wing that’s twice as efficient, but if the damn thing stays up, we kinda have to roll with it. Quantum physics are already proof the universe doesn’t care if humans understand it.
Quantum physics are already proof the universe doesn’t care if humans understand it.
No, quantum physics is proof that humans don’t care to understand it.
As Bell said: “the subjectivity of the orthodox version, the necessary reference to the ‘observer,’ could be eliminated…that vagueness, subjectivity, and indeterminism, are not forced on us by experimental facts, but by deliberate theoretical choice”
Nature is not incomprehensible. People who insist nature is incomprehensible only do so to justify their incomprehensible explanation of nature (multiverses, some fundamental role for consciousness, etc). There is literally nothing empirical or mathematical barring us from interpreting quantum mechanics in a logical way.
Simple explanations are rejected outright precisely due to your overwhelmingly dominant attitude that nature is inherently incomprehensible, so anything comprehensible must be wrong, and thus a social and institutional bias for incomprehensible explanations.
Yet, again, these rejections are not empirical or mathematical, but social. No one has ever published a paper in the academic literature anywhere showing that it is an empirical or mathematical necessity to believe that cats are literally both alive and dead at the same time until you look, or, more broadly, that systems cannot be said to possess a real configuration until observed.
It is a popular belief, but reality is not a popularity contest.
