There is no classical physics model that explains/predicts the atoms in the periodic table, but quantum physics (starting with the Bohr atom) does.
The 'so much more complex' model is the simplest one that works, because in its absence, we have hundreds of elements/isotopes instead of three elementary particles in combinations.
Classical physics also doesn't explain the chemical bond... and there's more than huncreds of variations there.
But it had to be invented for cases where classical physics broke down. Pla nck invented quantisation to avoid "the ultraviolet catastrophe".
It's really a very bad example.
The ideas that work are the only ones that get tested by Occam's razor. The test is not that the idea is simple, but rather that it is no more comp licated than is necessary to fit the facts. Several different explanations can be equally complicated and fit the facts - as came out during the devel opment of quantum theory. It took more work to demonstrate that that they w ere different ways of formulating the same underlying idea. There was no pa rtiuclar reason why they should have been ...
That John Larkin is a bit vague about what Occam's razor actually means.
But how do you prove that it's right? If the complicated explanation makes exactly the same predictions as the simpler one, why should you prefer it?
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Sort of. A simple conjugate diplexer is exact only for Butterworth filters. At least for Butterworths dimensioned for zero source impedance; I'm not sure about the others.
For other filters, conjugate diplexers don't work. For 'tame' filters, Bessel, Gaussian and such, it's rather easy to get good input matching with a simple five component matching section. The match isn't perfect, but it's better than can be achieved using real components, so it's good enough.
I worked out exact matches for Bessel filters, because I use those a lot, but it wasn't actually worth the effort, because the five-component match is plenty good.
Jeroen Belleman
Clifford Heath wrote
Interesting, yes that open possibilities for high current / low current loss improvement.
Occam's Razor applied before a phenom is explained, is dangerous. Applied afterwards, it's trivial.
Of course the only correct explanation is the simplest correct explanation.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
Nobody has shown me a unicorn.
When an outrageous virus mutates and proliferates, it can kill 10%,
50%, or 80% of a population. But it never kills 100% of an otherwise healthy population. Why not?We have marvelously complex organs. Not only are they complex, but they have elaborate repair mechanisms that can cope with very rare forms of damage. How could that evolve by random mutation and selection?
Michael Behe has written about some of these issues, but at the molecular level. I have his new book on pre-order from Amazon.
And that we allow our minds to explore all over the reasonable and unreasonable regions of the solution space. Brains, being massively parallel processors, will do that without much additional expended energy, if only we allow them to. You can do it in your sleep. That idea applies to science, electronic designs, social systems, all sorts of stuff.
You can't test a theory until you have a theory. You can't analyze a circuit if you don't have a circuit.
I have one new design that started as a scribble, barely even a hunch. I didn't begin to understand it until after I'd simulated it. It evolved. But it began with a wild idea, in a strange region of the solution space.
You are saying that once a provably correct theory is in hand, there is no reason to search for a more complex one. And no reason to search for a simpler one. No argument.
Are there any cases in physics where there are two distinctly different, accepted proven theories?
Certainly not always happy. Sometimes the establishment denies the phenom because it's inconvenient.
Theories need to be invented before they can be tested. Circuits ditto. If you avoid looking at giant regions of the solution space because there is not obvious and immediate proof, you'll miss things.
Ultimately flawed conjectures often lead to nearby, correct discoveries. Brainstorming really works wonders, but is easily poisoned by people who want to shoot down ideas instead of playing with them.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
Where do hypothesies come from? A standard reference text of hypothesies?
And you can spend weeks chasing that imagined-simple capacitive effect, when the goofy rise time was an inner layer transmission line stub, or (as we found last week) a current spike in a ground wire bond.
Or, lately, all inside your oscilloscope.
Once you focussed on "known capacitive effects" you elected to look away from other possibilities.
It's astounding how complex, downright sinister, some electronic problems turn out to be. It's sensible to be open to considering any explanation, even highly improbable ones.
Each very complex explanation is improbable, but there are so many of them. That's just one defect in Occam's Razor.
Prejudice against any class of explanations doesn't sound like good advice to me. More like laziness.
It's been said that science progresses as the current generation of professors dies.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
I completely agree with your comments about theory generation. However, the activity must start with some phenomenon that is not yet satisfactorily explained.
There are no provably correct theories. There are adequate ones, and inadequate ones. That is all. Even the adequate theories are susceptible to scrutiny and simplification - but almost always, this is driven by the need to expand the explanatory power, not just for the intellectual aesthetics.
This use of the word "proof" shows that you still believe in absolute knowledge. Using that idea in an argument to *open* minds is bizarre and contradictory. There is no proof, only disproof.
Theories need to be invented, yes. But they need to be linked to observed phenomena which require explanation. A theory with no model (exemplar) is called a myth.
Just recently, a Belgian ham presented his idea for a new topology for a Watson-Watt (crossed loops + e-field ant) direction finding system. His explanation of the manner of operation was strange and wrong. I did the math intending to show why it was wrong, and found that the idea actually worked, but not at all for the reasons he thought. It's a nice solution, and a nice outcome.
Clifford Heath.
Well then, use a circulator. Assuming it's feasible in the target frequency range :)
What's the topology of the five components? Sorry, I probably know it, but would prefer you were more specific.
Clifford Heath.
The purpose of matching is to obtain flat, constant impedance over frequency. Circulators are narrow band devices. I count bandwidth in decades.
Nothing very impressive, really. It's a series RC in parallel with a series RLC. For most tame filters, the theoretical S11 never goes over -50dB. I think this is useful. I wrote it up in .
Jeroen Belleman
Er... no, it doesn't take weeks to test an hypothesis of that sort.
Did your ground wire bond diagnosis have to wait for the ritual sacrifice of a gerbil to appease the Master Gremlin? There's nothing here that indicates a fault attributable to Occam.
The phenomenon of generational succession is more general than science; it applies to any collective heritage we possess. The only thing that bon mot indicates, is that well-published articulate individuals do shape the field of thought, often from professorial posts.
That's a GOOD thing, compared to the Google-can-find-it model of expertise built on trolls' gibberings.
When looking for solutions I've sometimes chased the highly improbable, and sometimes it has led to a much better solution. Everyone else didn't get t here because they didn't think it worth looking there. IOW there's somethin g wrong with human estimates of what ideas are probable & what are not.
NT
it's a good thing when it's mostly right. It's a bad thing when routinely wrong, as in medicine.
NT
a
is
John Larkin being as uncomprehending as ever.
Occam's Razor is a rule about choosing between explanations. It's irrelevan t before somebody has come up with at least two plausible explanations, and becomes irrelevant again after a particular explanation has been picked as the most plausible.
Which ignores the process of working out whether it is actually correct.
Mathematics can generate proofs of correctness. The most that can be said a bout a scientific explanation is that it hasn't yet been falsified - any cl aim that a particular explanation is "correct" is unscientific, though scie nce can demonstrate that a lot of explanations are incorrect.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
What makes you think that a virus can't kill 100% of a previously healthy p opulation?
The eye is a marvellously complex mechanism. How could that have evolved by random mutation and natural selection? We've found all sorts of less compl icated eyes in the geological record, and the evolutionary path seems clear enough.
The repair mechanisms don't seem to fossilise. Looking at immune and repair systems in other (mostly less complex) creatures does seem to have lead to some plausibly hypotheses about evolutionary paths, even if John Larkin ha sn't heard about them.
Why waste your money? Intelligent Design falls over as soon as you see how much stupid design exists in actual animals. Any intelligent designer would have put error-detecting and error-correcting code into the DNA-to-RNA-to- protein translation machinery. There isn't any so there isn't any intellige nt designer.
The unreasonable regions of the solution space are a lot bigger than the re asonable regions. We haven't got infinite time.
Twaddle. Even the most massively parallel processor takes longer to explore a larger solution space.
True, but you still only sleep eight hours per day, and you do have to give your sleeping brain something to get started on. My sleeping brain doesn't compose music.
So what?
One that was almost inaccessible to your conscious mind. That doesn't mean that what was going on there was irrational.
John Larkin doesn't understand evidence or proof. Science doesn't generate "provably correct" hypotheses. Scientists try to come up with hypotheses th at fit all the facts that they know. Once they've got more than one hypothe sis, they can get to pick the simplest and most plausible hypothesis.
There are no "proven" theories in physics, only theories that haven't yet b een falsified.
describe two different representations of quantum mechanical reality - with Feynman's path-integral approach forming a third. Dirac managed to demonst rate that the first two representations were equivalent.
As in the fossil carbon extraction industry denying that anthropogenic clim ate change is occurring, with the sub-claim that if it did happen it wouldn 't be a problem.
s
Obviously, but you need observations to motivate the theoreticians to do an ything useful. String theory seems to fascinate theoreticians, but it hasn' t come up with any testable predictions yet.
ce
What would be an "obvious and immediate" proof that a particular circuit wa s worth looking at?
Sometimes. Linus Pauling specialised in that. Most flawed conjectures are j ust a waste of time - intelligent design is an obvious example.
It's equally crippled by people who produce nonsense ideas and can't accept that their ideas are nonsense. The aim is to explore the solution space, n ot drift off into the non-solution space.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
o
wrong, as in medicine.
NT doesn't know about the Cochrane collaboration designed to encourage evid ence-based medicine.
Medicine isn't routinely wrong. It used to be stuck in the authoritarian do
-what-I-was-taught-when-I-was-young system of education, but it is getting better. This didn't make it "routinely wrong", but it did make it unfortuna tely slow in adopting demonstrably better treatment options.
Sadly, NT is a sucker for mystical revelations, which seem to offer demonst rably bad treatment options (but mostly to people for whom there aren't any good ones).
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Saved, thank you.
Clifford Heath.
Of course, afterwards it's not just trivial but it's tautological.
You're making exactly the dangerous error you complain about above.
- OR -
The solar system's orbits can be described in epicycles or we may be living on the inside surface of a sphere but the math quickly gets wild. Occam suggests that we shouldn't be working so hard to explain something that had been explained in much simpler terms.
The issue isn't whether whether the theory is simple, it's whether it always produces quantitatively correct predictions and conforms with experiment.
Again, is there any situation in physics where two different theories are both experimentally verifyable?
At best Occam's Razor saves time by prioritizing the testing of a list of possible theories; do the easy-to-analyze ones first. But that's just time management.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
QM explains several things which cannot be explained by classical physics. therfor Occam's Razor cannot touch it on that count.
Care to try again?
If two ideas explain all the observations the the simplest is to be preferred
Even if it's right, if the original idea does the exact same thing that the new idea does: it explains the same observations, and makes the same predictions etc. Why would you pick the baroque one?
-- When I tried casting out nines I made a hash of it.
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