Will Kinney

Cosmologist, physicist, dirtbag mountain biker, expat Montanan, Copernican extremist. Part of the problem.

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

Let me tell you a little bit about my second book, and how it relates to my first book. 1/

https://t.co/JHoTxMKsRh

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

@rveulacia Nobody in a lab cares even slightly whether it's "bad philosophy" or not.

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

Philosophers of physics constantly make this mistake. Physical theories have two parts. First is a mathematical structure, which needs to be rigorous and self-consistent. Second is an interpretive structure that tells us how to map the mathematics to physical systems. This second piece need not be axiomatic, it need not gave a coherent ontology, it doesn't even really need to make sense, as long as it correctly describes the outcome of experiments. The Schrödinger Equation is an example of the former, the Born Rule is an example of the latter. Another example is the mathematical structure of spacetime vs the assignment of causal structure and the arrow of time. Is the block universe real? Who cares?

I tried bringing this up at the "Nature of Time" workshop at ASU last week, and had a bunch of philosophers get all condescending, as if physicists don't know how to do physics, and need philosophers to tell them how to do it. Except the philosophers are all stuck doing "foundations" of quantum mechanics like it's the 1940s, and doing quantum gravity with the Wheeler-deWitt equation like it's 1963. Completely unserious people.

[Glyph @glyphikon]

Not a coincidence that physics being the most notoriously Kantian influenced of all the hard sciences particularly in the way quantum physics was developed by Heisenberg and Bohr is also unique among all the hard sciences in having incoherent theoretical foundations which are fundamentally and inexplicably incompatible with each other.

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

@rveulacia People in labs do it every day.

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

Yeah, why are there so few condensed matter crackpots?

[Olivier Minazzoli @OMinazzoli]

Why is it that so many people with little to no understanding of fundamental physics are convinced Einstein was wrong, or have invented their own models of black holes or cosmology?

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

@Quasilocal @OMinazzoli @pilkself I'll put it on my (very long) list of papers to read.

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

@rveulacia It's a really fucking good oracle, then.

Look, it's nice to have an understandable ontology behind a physical theory, it's just not mandatory. Nature does not owe us anything like that. It's allowed to be weird an counterintuitive.

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

GM 🤎

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

@tszzl No. Do not do this.

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

@Matzan481_ She did great.

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

First time?

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

@VergaraLautaro A snip of the toenails and some stripping.

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

@Matzan481_ Affirmative

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

@richfinewoman @danieltanfh95 OK 1960s.

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

@aryehazan Lookin badass.

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

@aiexplorations Her name is Faye.

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

GM 🤎

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

@Steph2Dogs At the same what?

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

@danieltanfh95 Aside from pretty much all of them?

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

@Steph2Dogs I dunno. It's an incoherent question: what exactly does "simultaneously" mean?

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

@Kaju_Nut 🤣

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

@Steph2Dogs For or against what, exactly? Relativity works.