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Heres how I distinguish science from philosophy. Science addresses questions that can be answered, potentially, through empirical investigation. Examples: Whats the best way to defeat COVID-19? What causes schizophrenia, and how should it be treated? Can nuclear power help us overcome climate change? What are the causes of war, and how can we end it?

Philosophy addresses questions that probably cant be solved, now or ever. Examples (and these are of course debatable, some philosophers and scientists insist that science can answer all questions worth asking): Why is there something rather than nothing? Does free will exist? How does matter make a mind? What does quantum mechanics mean?

This final question has absorbed me lately because of my ongoing effort to learn quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics represents reality at its most fundamental level, that of particles darting through space. Supposedly. Thats why science writer and astrophysicist Adam Becker calls his recent book about quantum mechanics What Is Real?

I suspect well never have final, definitive answers to what quantum mechanics means and what is real. My reasoning is primarily inductive. For more than a century, experts have sought to interpret quantum mechanics, to specify what it tells us about matter and energy, time and space, the infrastructure of existence.

Physicists and philosophers have come up with lots of possibilities, notably the Copenhagen interpretation, the many-worlds hypothesis and the Bohmian pilot-wave model. Ive just become aware of a hypothesis called quantum Bayesianism, or QBism (pronounced cubism), which proposeswell, check it out yourself.

Unfortunately, most interpretations dont offer testable predictions to distinguish them from rivals. (An exception is a quantum model proposed by Nobel laureate Roger Penrose, certain versions of which are reportedly ruled out by a recent experiment.) Hence adherents favor one interpretation over others for largely subjective, aesthetic reasons.

You dig the austere minimalism of the Copenhagen interpretation. I favor the pilot-wave model, which insists that particles are particles, and not probabilistic blurs. If Im feeling frisky, I might go with John Wheelers metaphysically extravagant it from bit proposal, which fuses quantum mechanics and information theory. Arguments about which interpretation is true cannot be resolved, because our preferences are matters of taste, not truth.

When I say a problem is unsolvable, I dont mean we should abandon it. Far from it. I love reading, writing and arguing about intractable puzzles. For example, I dont believe in God, certainly not the God of my Catholic childhood. But I enjoy smart, imaginative theology (defined as the study of God) in the same way that I enjoy good science fiction. Two of my favorite theologians are physicist Freeman Dyson and psychedelic adventurer Terence McKenna.

Im especially fond of what is known as negative theology. Negative theology assumes that God exists but insists that He/She/It/They transcends human language and concepts. Negative theologians try to sayover and over again, and sometimes with great eloquencewhat they acknowledge cannot be said.

Negative theology is an outgrowth of mysticism. Mystical experiences, as defined by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, possess two seemingly contradictory properties. They are on the one hand noetic, that is, you feel you are gaining profound insight into and knowledge of reality. They are on the other hand ineffable, meaning you cannot convey your revelation in words.

Mystical aphorisms often emphasize ineffability. He who knows, does not speak, the ancient Chinese sage Lao Tzu says, violating his own dictum. He who speaks, does not know. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a medieval monk, describes mystical knowledge as being at one with Him Who is indescribable.

I suspect Wittgenstein had his own mystical experiences in mind when he wrote at the end of his cryptic prose-poem Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent. (After a friend, a philosopher, quoted that line to me, I replied: Then why are you still speaking? The friend hasnt spoken to me since.)

In 1999, while doing research for my book Rational Mysticism, I attended a symposium on mysticism at the University of Chicago. At a session on negative theology, a speaker said hed arrived by mistake a day early. Upon entering the empty auditorium, he thought, This is taking negative theology too far. Another speaker described mystical literature as that which contests its own possibility.

Negative theology can serve as a model for scientists and philosophers trying to solve quantum mechanics and another enigma I posed above: How does matter make a mind? This is the mind-body problem, which investigates, as I argue in a recent book, what we really are, can be and should be, collectively and as individuals. Are we really matter, mind, some combination of the two or, perhaps, none of the above?

When we wrestle with quantum mechanics, were also taking on the mind-body problem. Quantum paradoxes like Schrdingers cat and the measurement problem raise questions about the connection between matter and mind, and their status relative to each other. Is matter self-sufficient, as materialists insist, or does reality require mind too?

Mind is essential, according to QBism, it from bit and other quantum hypotheses. I have disparaged these mind-centric frameworks as neo-geocentrism, throwbacks to the ancient assumption that the universe revolves around us. But I enjoy mulling them over, just as I enjoy thinking about theodicies, which seek to explain why a loving, all-powerful God would create such a painful, unfair world. (Ive even come up with a drug-inspired theodicy of my own.)

Many, most, scientists and philosophers who dwell on quantum mechanics and the mind-body problem have faith that these conundrums can and will be solved, eventually. They crave answers, they want to know. If they cannot know during their lifetime, they want at least to feel that their efforts are taking us closer to the truth.

Philosopher David Chalmers, who has rejected strictly materialist solutions of what he calls the hard problem of consciousness, nonetheless insists that one day well crack it. So does another thinker I admire, philosopher-novelist Rebecca Goldstein. They and other seekers will probably dismiss negative theology as a model for inquiry, and I understand why. I share their craving for a revelation so profound that it dissipates the weirdness of the world.

But Ive also become increasingly wary of our craving for absolute knowledge, and absolute certainty, especially when it comes to riddles like what is reality and what are we. People convinced that they possess ultimate knowledge can become self-righteous fanatics, capable of enslaving and exterminating others in the name of truth.

Negative theology helps us avoid fanaticism by keeping us humble. We acknowledge, as an axiom, that ultimate truth will always elude us. Those who have a hard time accepting this anti-truthand hence the premise of negative theologyshould keep two points in mind. First, if we cannot grasp ultimate truth, we can pursue it forever, never losing sight of the mystery at the heart of things.

Second, Im not proposing negative theology as a model for science as a whole. Science has answered, conclusively, many questions, and it will answer many more, including, I hope, those listed at the beginning of this column. Problems related to infectious disease, mental illness, climate change and war will surely yield to dogged empirical inquiry. Although science will never entirely explain reality, it can make it more bearable.

Further Reading:

For more ruminations on quantum mechanics, the mind-body problem and mysticism, see my new book Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science.

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Quantum Mechanics, the Mind-Body Problem and Negative Theology - Scientific American

Science-fiction is a genre that defies all human imagination. It forces the human mind to think and wander, unlike the other genres. Its an ell-encompassing genre that covers everything from parallel universes to world destroying viruses. And then there are movies the go above and beyond. They are so convoluted and conniving they leave our brains in knots by the time credits roll.

Before we begin, this list is not going to pander to mainstream audiences. We will not be talking about Interstellar, Inception, and predestination here. So if you were expecting a typical list of sci-fi movies, this list is not for you.

Arthouse movies are not everyones cup of tea. Alphaville sits atop that sci-fi arthouse throne. So its a very, very niche movie. Legendary experimental film maker Jean-Luc Goddard gives us this classic. Detective Lemmy Caution is sent to infiltrate a dystopian city named Alphaville. Alphaville is governed by a sentient A.I called Alpha 60. Using mind control and brainwashing, Alpha 60 controls the entire citys population. The movie explores several tropes like Surrealism, French New Wave Cinema, and the concept of individuality and creativity. Its a movie that relies on a solid story and incredible concepts to drive the plot forward. And its damn interesting to watch.

From the outside, Ad Astra looks like any normal sci-fi flick. But theres a deeper narrative, something most people will miss in their first watch. Ad Astra is not about a distant son trying to get his estranged father home. Its about relationships across distance, the distance being in lightyears. Does a father remain a father to a son if he is no longer within the boundaries of our solar system? Where does love and passion end and madness begin? The most important part of the story is its slow, unnerving pace. You may think you have figured out the movie but re-watch it again and you will find something interesting every time.

The movie begins like a typical exploration journey. A mysterious meteor strike leads to a region of the United states being enclosed in a quarantined space called the Shimmer. Literally nothing about the Shimmer is ever truly explained. A group of scientists enter the Shimmer in search of another search party. Each of them end up dying in super mysterious ways. add to that the movies non linear narrative and super short foreshadowing and you have a movie as mysterious as it can get.

If you are not familiar with Kabbalah, a Jewish esoteric discipline and school of thought, do not even consider watching this film. The lead protagonist is also the narrator. He is unreliable, a paranoid schizophrenic, and talks in a language that only scientists would understand. The movie revolves around the search for a mysterious universe that could explain literally everything happening in the universe. The lead protagonists paranoia inserts itself into every scene, making an already harder to understand movie nigh impossible to decipher.

Upstream Color is the anti-thesis of convoluted sci-fi. Its beautiful, well-planned and linear. A group of criminals use mysterious parasites to induce a hyper hypnotic state in their victims. The victims are then vulnerable to suggestion. They will do anything the criminals ask them to. Things become complicated when a parasite is inserted into a pig. Theres also a telepathic link between two people who believe they are in love. But later they realize they are both victims of the same parasite attack. The narrative is also extremely obscured that never gives us a definitive conclusion.

This movie is considered to be one of the greatest sci-fi masterpieces of all time. Its also one of the most confusing sci-fi movies of all time. A Black Monolith appears out of nowhere and prehistoric humanity is taught how to use tools. Flash forward to the future and another Monolith appears somewhere else in our solar system and humans send a space-ship to investigate. Meanwhile theres also a crazed A.I aboard the humans need to deal with. A star-gate scene further complicates matters. Theres also a very disconcerting space-faring baby whose true purpose is as bewildering as it gets.

Darren Aronofskys metaphysical drama went through a lot of hoops before it finally hit the theaters. the movie is about the human acceptance of mortality and death. There are three different storylines in one movie, each running parallelly to the other two. Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz play the lead characters in the three arcs. The movie is filled up to the brim with powerful symbolism that might bounce off of your heads. Theres also various historical allegories that are force fit into the movies non-linear pace. This movie will leave your head spinning.

The best movies do not rely in CGI or star power. They rely on clever story-telling with maximum use of whatever resources it has at its disposal. Coherence is a movie that deals with alternate realities. A comet passes over the earth and the power goes out. People attending a dinner party go to the only house in the neighborhood that still has power, leaving a note. When they come back, they find the same note in front of their home. Its not long before they realize that the comet has opened a portal into parallel worlds. The real question is who amongst the people that went out and came back are actually from an alternate universe.

Irony is Sci-fi has always been a genre of high value projects. To make one, you need big pockets. but the most confusing movie of all time was made on a shoestring budget. It explores the most disturbingly difficult science fiction plot element time travel. Two part time inventors accidentally come up with time travel technology. What follows next is literal chaos. Multiple timelines exist simultaneously and there are so many parallel version of the same time traveler that time itself could fragment into a zillion pieces out of sheer confusion.

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9 Most Confusing Sci-Fi Movies That Feel Like You Need a PhD in Quantum Physics - FandomWire

In his waning years, Albert Einstein spent his time tilting at windmills, trying to unify all the forces of nature. He died disappointed, and his attempt would go down in history as his biggest failure.

But Einstein's failed dream could ultimately become his ultimate triumph, as a small group of theoretical physicists rework his old ideas. It won't necessarily bring all the forces of the universe together, but it could explain some of the most pressing issues facing modern science.

The most successful theory of gravity known to humanity is Einstein's famous theory of general relativity. Einstein spent more than seven years developing it, and it was worth the wait. On the surface, general relativity is deceptively simple. All of the drama of the universe takes place on the grand, four-dimensional stage called space-time. Matter and energy the actors and actresses of the cosmos run around doing their thing, saying their lines. Matter and energy deform space-time, causing it to warp and curve. That warping in turn tells the matter and energy how to move and behave.

Related: 8 ways you can see Einstein's theory of relativity in real life

And voila: general relativity! The constant dialogue between space-time stage and matter and energy is what we see as the force of gravity.

Einstein's theory has passed every observational test thrown at it, which is why it's survived for the century since its birth. It has predicted and explained strange phenomena across the universe, including the bending of light around massive objects and the formation of black holes.

And yet, we know that it's broken. While general relativity says that black holes should exist, it completely breaks down when it tries to describe their singular hearts. We have no description of gravity at such a subatomic scale where quantum mechanics holds sway. At this scale, when gravity gets both strong and short-range, general relativity can't even make predictions - the math just falls apart.

Those are places where we know that general relativity breaks down. But beyond that, astronomers have noticed two phenomena that also aren't completely explained by general relativity: Most of the matter in the universe (so-called dark matter) doesn't interact with light; and the expansion of the universe is accelerating every single day (which is thought to be caused by as-yet-unknown dark energy). In order to explain dark matter and dark energy, we have two choices. Either general relativity is perfectly correct, but our cosmos is filled with strange new substances, or general relativity is flat-out wrong.

Einstein himself tried to push past the limits of general relativity. But he wasn't motivated by the puzzles of black hole singularities or an accelerating universe nobody knew that those existed, let alone would be major theoretical challenges.

Instead, Einstein was motivated by a higher purpose: an attempt to unify all the (known) laws of physics in a single mathematical framework. In his case, he had gravity on one side, represented by his now-famous general relativity, and electromagnetism on the other, represented by Maxwell's equations that described everything from magnets and electrical currents to light itself.

In his attempts to make a super-theory of everything, Einstein introduced General Relativity 2.0. The basic version of relativity only cares about space-time's curvature. But Einstein's reboot also paid attention to space-time's twistiness, or torsion. There was no need to include torsion in his original theory, because it turned out that all you needed was curvature to explain gravity. But now that Einstein was trying to explain more than gravity, he had to include additional effects.

Related: The 18 biggest unsolved mysteries in physics

Einstein had hoped that the twistiness of space-time would somehow be connected to electromagnetism (the same way that the curvature of space-time is connected to gravity) but alas, he couldn't find any solutions and his new theory died with him.

But other physicists never gave up the dream, and they have been attempting to unify physics ever since. One of the most well-developed concepts is called string theory, which claims that all particles are really tiny little vibrating strings. Oh, and our universe has extra spatial dimensions that are all tiny and curled up.

String theory was never based on Einstein's original idea of the twistiness of space-time, but now physicists are giving that old idea, which is called teleparallel gravity, a second look.

The name "teleparallel" comes from Einstein's original work that examined the nature of distant parallel lines in his geometric framework, exploring how both the curvature and twistiness of space-time affected the motion of matter and energy. Physicists nowadays don't think teleparallel gravity can unify physics (even Einstein himself eventually gave up on the idea), but it may be an interesting candidate for a new theory of gravity.

That's because theorists have been using teleparallel gravity to explain things like the accelerated expansion of the universe, the early period after the Big Bang when the universe ballooned, called"inflation" and more recent problems such as an observed conflict between different measurements of the expansion rate of the cosmos. In other words, teleparallel gravity has proven to be pretty predictive.

But what about those early dreams of a unified theory? Teleparallel gravity may be an interesting and useful new approach to gravity, but it doesn't get us any closer to understanding a more fundamental law of physics. Instead, physicists have been using the language of string theory to do that job, so naturally the question came up: Does string theory which claims to be an ultimate theory of everything in any way connect to teleparallel gravity? In other words, if teleparallel gravity can potentially solve all these nasty problems like dark matter and dark energy, does it flow as a natural consequence of string theory, or are these two separate lines that don't have any connection to each other?

Recently, theoretical theorists have begun to tie teleparallel gravity to string theory, providing a motivation for the theory within the stringy universe, as reported in a paper appearing in the preprint journal arXiv in November. In their work, they showed how teleparallel gravity can be a consequence of string theory. This is an important insight, because string theory should be able to explain all laws of physics, and if teleparallel gravity is a better version of general relativity, and ultimately turns out to be correct, then you should be able to derive teleparallelism from the math of string theory.

Here's an analogy. Let's say police identify a murder weapon at a crime scene (general relativity). They have a prime suspect (string theory) that they want to connect to the murder weapon. But new analysis of the crime scene reveals that a different weapon (teleparallelism) actually caused the murder. Can the prime suspect still be connected to the new murder weapon?

The short answer is: yes.

There's a lot more work to be done. String theory isn't finished yet (and may never be finished, if we never figure out firm mathematical solutions), so any connection it can make to reality is useful. If teleparallel gravity turns out to be a useful way to explain some of the current shortcomings of general relativity, and we can derive teleparallelism from string theory, then that's one more step in achieving Einstein's ultimate dream of unification not the way he envisioned it, but it still counts.

Originally published on Live Science.

The rest is here:

Physicists attempt to unify all forces of nature and rectify Einstein's biggest failure - Livescience.com

A 17-year-old boy from Orford was invited to an online celebration of some of the brightest young minds in the region thanks to his competition essay on the theories of quantum mechanics.

Thomas Shaw, who studies A-Level Biology, Chemistry and Maths, entered his 2,000-word essay on the fundamental theory in physics in the Pembroke North Essay competition

The competition is run by Pembroke College in Oxford, aiming to support and inspire the next generation of undergraduates as they consider their university choices.

Thomas said: I found the event interesting and I particularly enjoyed being able to ask questions to students about life on campus within the current COVID-19 restrictions.

Although I didnt win the prize I was able to further develop my writing style in anticipation of completing my Extended Project as well as gain a deeper understanding about quantum mechanics.

The former Cardinal Newman RC School pupil entered the competition over summer after hearing about it through Priestley Colleges Graduate programme, which is designed to improve students chances of securing places at the UKs top universities.

Ian Hughes, who helps Priestley students who are aiming for the most competitive universities, said Thomas was on his way to achieve his goal of studying Chemistry at Oxford.

He said: The dedication, knowledge and skills he has shown in producing this essay proves he has the calibre to achieve whatever he sets his heart on.

All participants received feedback from the postgraduates who marked their essays.

The online celebration covered Oxford admissions as well as a lecture from Peter Claus, who is the access fellow at Pembroke, discussing the history of Eugenics.

Priestley College is part of The Challenge Academy Trust in Warrington, offering a mix of A-Levels and vocational options and soon to be one of the first colleges in the country to offer T-Levels.

Priestly was also the first sixth form college in the country to be awarded STEM assured status, meaning it provides some of the best Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths education in the country.

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Orford 17-year-old is among brightest young minds in north west - Warrington Guardian