{"id":14753,"date":"2014-03-13T03:00:07","date_gmt":"2014-03-13T08:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=14753"},"modified":"2014-03-13T03:00:07","modified_gmt":"2014-03-13T08:00:07","slug":"getting-real","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/14753","title":{"rendered":"Getting Real"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest Post: Is It Solipsistic in Here, or Is It Just Me?<\/a><\/p>\n

Our first major breakthrough came when we realized that physics can pin down what\u2019s real and what isn\u2019t. It\u2019s one of those things that\u2019s somehow stupidly obvious and yet deeply profound: something is real if it\u2019s invariant. That is, something is real if it remains unchanged from one reference frame to the next. Just look at a rainbow. You\u2019ll see one in the sky if you\u2019re in just the right reference frame with the Sun shining in from behind you, and droplets of water in the atmosphere refracting the light. It\u2019s pretty, but good luck trying to grab it. A rainbow is not a physical object stapled to the sky. It\u2019s a product of your reference frame. Which is to say, it\u2019s not real.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An interesting viewpoint, and one I don’t recall coming across before, probably because I don’t do physics that ventures into this area. One of the stumbling points I’ve observed in discussions about what is real is the definition of real<\/em> \u2014 real as in a physical object instead of a concept, or real as in not an illusion, i.e. not fake? Here it looks like the former: a rainbow is not a physical object, hence it’s not real<\/em>. But it’s not an illusion, not some bit of fakery. The effect (refraction of light) is real.<\/p>\n

There are plenty of not-real (not physical object) things in physics; the author concludes that basically all of it falls into this category, but that’s not the point of physics. Physics exists to tell us how nature behaves, not what it is. Electric fields and phonons and lots of denizens of physics models don’t physically exist. There is no claim that they do. It’s that nature behaves as if they existed, and since that lets us predict and retrodict what happens, that’s good enough. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest Post: Is It Solipsistic in Here, or Is It Just Me? Our first major breakthrough came when we realized that physics can pin down what\u2019s real and what isn\u2019t. It\u2019s one of those things that\u2019s somehow stupidly obvious and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14753\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}