Economics

Folk economics and the persistence of political opposition to new housing, Nall, Elmendorf, and Oklobdzija (2022)

We the people don’t accept that building more housing will reduce rents and new home prices. Why? Nall et al. aren’t sure, but their careful study design suggests that motivated reasoning—rationalizing one’s interests—is only a small part of the reason. Even more puzzling, people make more accurate supply-demand connections in markets other than housing. There seems to be something about housing that distorts our view of what’s possible. Jump out of the pot, frog! It’s getting warm in there. B+ ↑

Nall, Clayton, Christopher S. Elmendorf, and Stan Oklobdzija. “Folk Economics and the Persistence of Political Opposition to New Housing.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY, November 2, 2022. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4266459.

Physics

On the meaning of physical theories, Born (1928)

Be suspicious if the popular physics book in your hand radiates contentment. The past 120 years have brought truly marvelous advances in our understanding of the universe, but the truth is that all the really interesting stuff is up for grabs. Max Born, one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics, wrote On the meaning of physical theories nearly a century ago, just months after Heisenberg and Schrödinger and their fellow giants laid down the fundamental equations of the quantum world. In the intervening decades, the predictions of quantum mechanics have been experimentally confirmed to a greater accuracy than any theory in the history of science; but still a philosophically tolerable interpretation of what we’ve managed to predict, what the equations are describing, eludes us. The character of physical reality is better described by probability, action-at-a-distance, and wave-particle duality than our familiar experience of determinism, locality, and the simple binary of being: if this is this, it is not that. All of this weirdness appears in Born’s early essay; the troubling implications of the quantum revolution were immediately evident. So what does a century of philosophical—or if you prefer, scientific-interpretive—failure signify? That philosophy was always a fool’s errand, and we had best just shut up and calculate? That nature does not care for our distinction between nouns and verbs, here and there? Or, as Born puts it, that senses—and the instruments that extend our senses—will always border on the world and never penetrate it? At the limit, fundamental things must seem impenetrable, because otherwise we couldn’t say we’d arrived at the limit. Always through a glass, darkly. Maybe it’s time to hand the baton to the nearest neuroscientist, or some other species of mystic. B+ ↑

Born, Max, 1928. On the meaning of physical theories, in: Physics in My Generation. Springer-Verlag, New York.

The quantum theory and reality, D’Espagnat (1979)

D’Espagnat accessible history of the philosophy of quantum mechanics argues that the Copenhagen interpretation–the still-majority sentiment among physicists–is more subtle than “shut up and calculate.” We humans can think of observation as an act that stands somewhere between revelation and creation. The concept of observation, however, may not have fundamental meaning in nature, any more than a concept orthogonal to both TRUE and FALSE can. The Copenhagen interpretation has had its discontents, mostly famously Einstein. But it has a certain humility: our reference point as observers, is not privileged, and this is the central philosophical message of relativity theory as well. D’Espagnat notes that we just give up either the notion of an objective physical world, the legitimacy of inductive inference, or non-locality in order to accept the experimental results of QM. Non-locality is the standard sacrifice. It may be, however, that the other two are also vetoed by nature. If interaction and being are synonymous, then “objective” and “subjective” have no sensible meaning; and the eternal tenuousness of induction is another way of stating that there are limits to human knowledge. If we’re being honest, and without making concessions to sky gods, these conclusions seem more probable than the alternatives. A ↑

D’Espagnat, Bernard. “The quantum theory and reality.” Scientific American 241 (1979): 158–81. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1179-158.

Life, gravity, and the second law of thermodynamics, Lineweaver and Egan (2008)

It’s time for a national conversation about entropy production in gravitational collapse. For reasons no one knows, there’s more matter than anti-matter in the universe. This “excess” matter warps the fabric of spacetime and falls in on itself. The gravitational collapse forces energy to hurtle outward; this is the nature of a dissipative system, a category which includes all of the phenomena we find interesting in the universe—stars, planets, bodies. In an otherwise unremarkable solar system at the edge of a commonplace galaxy among several hundred million galaxies in the universe, the availability of free energy from the gravitational collapse of a star has borne a unique kind of dissipative system: life. You couldn’t make this stuff up. Are you ready, my people? If we live, we live to tread on kings. A ↑

Lineweaver, CH and Egan, Chas A. “Life, gravity, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.” Physics of Life Reviews 5(4):225-242. doi:10.1016/j.plrev.2008.08.002.

Gravity, entropy, and cosmology: in search of clarity, Wallace (2011)

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the surest thing in science, as Arthur Eddington famously said a century ago. How strange, then, that its relationship with known cosmology remains mysterious. The early universe must have had lower entropy and it must have been a uniform gas, but these two facts don’t fit together well. Wallace offers a simple explanation: uniformity notwithstanding, the early universe was not in equilibrium. In the fifteen billion years since, entropy has increased due to both universal expansion and local clumping, the latter because clumped systems—stars, galaxies, bodies—are dissipative: we disperse more energy than we concentrate, thus following the dictates of the Second Law. Wallace is a philosopher by training, and the master narrative he summarizes here is philosophically stunning. Reality is non-equilibrium, and always has been. A ↑

Wallace, David. 2011. “Gravity, entropy, and cosmology: in search of clarity.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61(3): 513-540. doi: 10.1093/bjps/axp048