Why I Don't Think Reductionism Should Be Part of the Physics "Package"

November 11, 2024

I made this video a few days ago and for some reason it got over 1,000 views. So far it has ten comments, one of which is worth responding to. It is the one asking me to suggest some imagined possible explanation of the Black-body Radiation Spectrum, other than that put up by Max Planck. I think I can do better than than that. I can suggest how you could imagine something other than the standard reductionist model which launched Quantum Mechanics. All you need to do is to imagine you are an experimental physicist like Ben Krasnow, with a laboratory and some money and the necessary skills to make your own equipment. Then what you need to do is imagine how you are going to verify the spectrum of Black-body radiation. You are going to try to make a perfectly black sphere in thermal equilibrium with its surroundings and inside it is going to be a perfectly reflective surface with one tiny hole from which it is going to radiate a beam of infrared and visible light and you are going to measure the spectrum of that light. So you are probably not going to be able to do this perfectly. There are bound to be discrepancies here and there: parts of the surface that are hotter than others and parts of the inside that are less than 100% reflective. So there will be hot-spots here and there which are going to cause conduction of heat around on the inside surface, and those hotspots will also emit radiation which will bounce around on the inside of the sphere. So your sphere will be filled with these wildly fluctuating electromagnetic fields and all you will be looking at is a tiny sample radiating from a pinhole. Now you have just imagined a huge number of different possible models for the cause of the Black-body radiation spectrum and they all depend on the actual geometry of the whole system, not just on some putative "oscillators" on the inside surface of the sphere. I am not saying that any of these models you imagine will actually produce the effect, just that you have imagined how vast the space of possible models is, and that is enough to give you an idea of why I said what I said. The development of modern physics was primarily driven not by empirical experiments, but by the sociological context of the community of physicists who dominated the field between the two world wars.

Here's a PBS SpaceTime video about spin: