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You Then Use Only The Symmetries That Interest You

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Posted by Richard Ruquist on May 9, 2003 15:03:10 UTC

You seem to agree with what I had said.

But I do not want to be confrontational for I very much thank you for pointing me towards von Frassen, who I agree I was ignorant of. I just read his synopsis on Laws and Symmetries as well as other papers on Constructive Empiricism and find that I am one of them, a constructive empiricist.

I have been arguing over many posts in this forum that the foundations of the many theories and interpretations quantum mechanics as well as relativity are in profound disagreement.

Apparently scientific realism, the opposie of constructive empiricism, is the belief that the assumptions that go into a theory are indicative of what reality is.

I have argued that the assumptions of Feymann's QED with positrons going backwards in time and no wave functions, as compared to Everett's Many Universe theory with wave functions only, or the usual wave function collapse into particle theories, or Bohm theory, which I prefer, are so inconsistent that we can only presume that the assumptions have nothing to do with reality and that agreement of the final equations of theory with observables is all that counts.

That is the argument of von Frassen in Laws and Symmetry and it is what I believe. Physics seems to be so dualistic that a whole host of differing assumptions can give you the same equations. You yourself have proven that to me.

My problem is that you do not seem to be a constructive empiricist. You seem to believe in the foundations of your work (Notice I avoided the word assumption). Whereas I say, look here is yet another way to get the same equations. Perhaps only the equations exist and all the symmetries and quanta we perceive to be in nature are just due to our ignorance.

On another forum there is a guy making that claim. That the equations in some coded form are floating around in space-time and we observe the code and infer some sort of reality behind it.
Is that getting closer to your ideas?

So I thank you for relieving me of some of my ignorance. That is how a forum like this works best.

I am having fun,

yanniru

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