Name: Physics and philosophy
ISBN: 9780061209192

rramadassOct 2026

> Might one speak of thousands - of millions - even of multitudes ? The "aggregate macro level" can be a combinatorial explosion of beauties and horrors.

By "aggregate macro level" I mean the averaging out of aggregate probabilities of multitudes of random events. This is what gives rise to an emergent predictability and determinism which we perceive as certainty. One way to understand this is; For any one event its aggregate probabilities must sum to one thus making it certain within its outcome space. This is carried forward when you consider (as you put it) "a combinatorial explosion" of multitudes of random events.

> You also imply (I think) that there is a finite space (bounded) for a variable to range in. Analogous to an LLM spanning and recombining its training materials. But what of the infinite - the unknown ?

Your comparison of random variables in quantum theory with random variables in LLMs is a bit far-fetched but there certainly are some parallels in the usage of probability distributions in a information-theoretic sense (including infinity).

> Of course one might say that we as hoominz are similarly bounded - that we are a variety of wetware LLM, limited by our own training materials (i.e. genes + sensory inputs + generated mental experiences).

W.r.t. Humans vs. LLMs one needs to bring together; a) A study of Language as being indistinguishable from the "Reality" it describes. b) A study of psychological theories like "Self-Determination Theory" (SDT), "Operant Conditioning", "Behaviourism" and finally, c) Neurobiology which gives rise to what we call "emergent Consciousness". Humans are not just a variety of "wetware LLM".

> But being of a spiritual bent myself, I ask: Where is the foot in the door for the divine ? Knocking at the door of fundamental unknowability - as you say, "unpredictable and indeterministic at the quantum micro level". If there is an intangible, immaterial element to our existence - call it a "soul" - then we might have identified the interface where "the rubber meets the road".

Now we are in the philosophical realm. At the human level we have the various schools of philosophy of which the dualistic Hindu school of "Samkhya" is a good model to study and seek mappings from. According to this school, there is a constant/unchanging/attributeless "Consciousness" (which in materialistic science we can map to an "Emergent Property" of a complex system that is the total Human Organism) and no "divinity" outside of you. Complementing it is the "External Reality" which includes everything else both material(matter etc.)/immaterial(your thoughts/feelings etc.) and which is constantly changing/evolving dynamically over time. It is said that "Consciousness Observes/Witnesses Reality".

This directly parallels quantum theory where the Observer and the Object are entangled into one system during the act of Observation/Measurement though they are separate. This entanglement is what you could call (roughly) "The Mind" where you build Reality i.e. collapse of the possibilities into a single result.

The above is one of the reasons that most Quantum Physicists were quite enamoured of and studied the various Hindu schools of philosophy since there were many parallels here.

Finally, at the Physics level see the excellent "Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberg" for a nice exploration.

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rramadassSep 2026

Later down in the essay, Dirac himself answers this;

With this kind of cosmological picture one is led to suppose that there was a beginning of time, and that it is meaningless to inquire into what happened before then. One can get a rough idea of the geometrical relationships this involves by imagining the present to be the surface of a sphere, going into the past to be going in towards the centre of the sphere, and going into the future to be going outwards. There is then no limit to how far one may go into the future, but there is a limit to how far one can go into the past, corresponding to when one has reached the centre of the sphere. The beginning of time provides a natural origin from which to measure the time of any event. The result is usually called the epoch of that event. Thus the present epoch is 2 x 109 years [actually 2x10^9].

One further point in connection with the new cosmology is worthy of note. At the beginning of time the laws of Nature were probably very different from what they are now. Thus we should consider the laws of Nature as continually changing with the epoch, instead of as holding uniformly throughout space-time. This idea was first put forward by Milne, who worked it out on the assumptions that the universe at a given epoch is roughly everywhere uniform and spherically symmetrical. I find these assumptions not very satisfying, because the local departures from uniformity are so great and are of such essential importance for our world of life that it seems unlikely there should be a principle of uniformity overlying them. Further, as we already have the laws of Nature depending on the epoch, we should expect them also to depend on position in space, in order to preserve the beautiful idea of the theory of relativity there is fundamental similarity between space and time. This goes more drastically against Milne's assumptions than a mere lack of uniformity in the distribution of matter.

Show respect to Mathematicians/Physicists/etc. many of whom had studied Philosophy and i dare say had a better understanding/insight of it than mere academic Philosophers. Why? Because they don't go off into la-la land but try very hard to have both observed evidence and a mathematical model of it match cleanly via a Theory.

For your edification, read first "Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes" followed by "Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberg".

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rramadassOct 2025

Most folks don't understand what Physicists mean when they say "Reality doesn't exist at the Quantum level". Words like "Reality", "Illusion" etc. mean quite different things when applied at quantum level vs. classical-macro level.

The best book to get a grasp on the above is Werner Heisenberg's classic Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. The introduction by Paul Davies itself is worth the price of the book since it highlights the main issues quite clearly.

At the fundamental level quantum systems have an inherent indeterminism (as a consequence of the famous uncertainty principle) which is what we find hard to grasp. It does not mean total anarchy but that you can only calculate relative probabilities of the alternatives in the answer set i.e. it is a statistical theory. Thus it can make definite predictions about sets of identical systems but generally cannot say anything definite about a specific individual system.

For example, an electron doesn't exist as a single thing occupying a specific trajectory around the nucleus. It only exists as a set of potentialities occupying an area of space viz. the so called electron shell. Only when a measurement is made does a electron-with-position or electron-with-momentum can be said to come into existence (since before the measurement there are only probabilities and you cannot measure both position and momentum sharply simultaneously). It is in this sense that the Reality of an electron is said to only exist in the Measurement/Observation and cannot be said to exist otherwise.

The other side of the coin is that, Modern Neuroscience tells us that the Brain itself is wired to Construct Reality from incomplete data and we seek/construct patterns where there are none. See for example Cordelia Fine's A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives and watch this Ted talk by Susana Martinez-Conde Reality is made of illusions—and we need them - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzDw07RqCSs

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evanbJul 2017

I broke up my list into cultural (that is, about the people, history, etc), popular (that is, not aimed at a student or an expert), and texts.

CULTURAL

Einstein - Essays in Humanism

Frayn - Copenhagen

Feynman - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Feynman - What Do You Care What Other People Think?

de Grasse Tyson - Death by Black Hole

Hoffman - The Man Who Loved Only Numbers

Kaiser - Drawing Theories Apart

Kaiser - How the Hippied Saved Physics

Macaulay - The Way Things Work

Paulos - Innumeracy

Sagan - Cosmos

Sagan - Broca's Brain

Sagan - The Demon-Haunted World

Salam - Science in the Third World

Seife - Zero

Weisskopf - The Joy of Insight

POPULAR

Deutsch - The Beginning of Infinity (especially his explanation about fungibility in quantum mechanics)

Feynman - The Meaning of It All

Feynman - Lectures on Physics

Feynman and Weinberg - Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics

Galison - Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps

Gamow - One, Two, Three... Infinity

Hadamard - Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field

Hawking - A Brief History of Time

Hofstadter - Gödel Escher Bach

Heisenberg - Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science

Polya - How to Solve It

Schrödinger - What is Life?

Susskind - The Theoretical Minimum

Susskind - Quantum Mechanics

Wallace - Everything And More

Weinberg - The First Three Minutes

Wiener - God & Golem, Inc.

TEXTS

Aaronson - Quantum Computing with Democritus (but I don't have a version with me in the acknowledgements https://books.google.com/books?id=jRGfhSoFx0oC&lpg=PR31&ots=... )

Abelson and Sussman - SICP

Abrikosov, Gorkov, and Dzyaloshinski - Methods of Quantum Field Theory in Statistical Physics

Cohen-Tannoudji - Quantum Mechanics (1+2)

Dirac - Lectures on Quantum Mechanics

Eddington - Space, Time, and Gravitation

Feynman - Feynman's Thesis

Feynman and Hibbs - Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals

Fermi - Thermodynamics

Gattringer & Lang - Quantum Chromodynamics on the Lattice

Goldstein - Classical Mechanics (the old version, NOT with Poole and Safko)

Griffiths - Introduction to Electrodynamics

Griffiths - Introduction to Quantum Mechanics

Jackson - Classical Electrodynamics (2nd edition---the last one entirely in CGS---is preferable)

Kleppner and Kolenkow - An Introduction to Mechanics

Landau and Lifshitz - any book in this series

Nielsen and Chuang - Quantum Computation and Quantum Information

Pauli - Selected Topics in Field Quantization

Peskin & Schroeder - An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory

Purcell - Electricity and Magnetism

Ryden - Introduction to Cosmology

Sakurai - Modern Quantum Mechanics (up to chapter 5, after which Sakurai dies and the editors put his notes together)

Sussman and Wisdom - Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics

Sipser - Introduction to the Theory of Computation

Thorne - Black Holes & Time Warps

Thouless - The Quantum Mechanics of Many-Body Systems

Weinberg - The Quantum Theory of Fields I, II, and III

Zee - Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell

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astazangastaMay 2016

Hard to say - it was a visceral reaction that mostly manifested as a brief resistance to the idea ("no, that can't be right"). I imagine some component of my thought wants a space in the universe that is claimed by mystery. I enjoyed reading Heisenberg's "Physics and Philosophy", where he discusses the quixotic nature of the double-slit experiment and so on, notably things like observation collapsing the wave function and removing the diffraction pattern. Heisenberg definitely colors these things with an air of mystery, the idea that the operation of the universe flies in the face of what we think of as sensible. I'm someone who has always enjoyed being on the margins, questioning, overturning, poking at consensus. Before I understood the uncertainty principle I think it was a door to a much blacker mystery, and thus a much greater rejection of the notion that "we understand", which I think is something I have always associated with evil, hubris, and folly.

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astazangastaApr 2015

I'll add "Physics and Philosophy" by Heisenberg as a personal favorite.

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