Instrumentalism or Why we should Shut up and calculate.

Prior to the festive season, I got myself in one of my perenial debates on the physics forum about the meaning or not of quantum mechanics. My main protaganist will be well known to those who follow the debates. He claims to endorse the Copenhagen Interpretation but also denies that he is an instrumentalist. A somewhat inconsistent opinion in my view. Anyone it’s not my job to help him see the contradictions in his position.

I do want to make a defence of instrumentalism however, that is some what missed by self styled philosophers of physics, but is in fact the current practice of most physicists.

OK what is instrumentalism ? essentially it is the view that the main aim of science is to provide empirically adequate models of nature without bothering to much about how the underlying concepts used to make the predictions correspond to reality.

What do I mean by empirically adequate, it is essentiallly the condition that the predictions of the theory when instantiated in a concrete model give reasonable agreement with experiment. For the quantative sciences such as physics this makes the theory testable or at least a given model of a given phenomenon predicitable. If the model does not give reasonable agreement with experiment then one can try and make the model more accurate by including more terms in the model or trying another approach.

It is important to make a distinction between theories and models this distinction is often blurred. A theory is a set of general principles in physics, there are about 8 sets of general principles which have been discovered

Classical physics

Newton’s Laws of motion.
The macroscopic laws of thermodynamics.
Maxwell’s equations.

Modem Physics

Special relativity.
General relativiry.
Non relativistic quantum mechanics.
Statistical physics.
Quantum field theory.

Note I do not include speculative theories such as superstrings because so far there is not one concrete prediction that has come out of it. At this stage it is ‘Not even wrong’

In order to describe natural phenomenon, one takes one of the above set of principles appropriate to the phenomenon in question. Then with the aid of mathematics and empirical information, such as the masses of particles involved sets up the appropriate equations and solves them either analytically or for complicated problems one has to resort to computers.

So for example to model the properties of stars as they collapse, one needs a combination of Statistical physics and General relativity along with an appropriate equation of state. To model planetary motion one would use either Newton’s laws of motion or for say mercury one has to resort to General relativity. A simple model would neglect the interactions between the planets a more complicated model would include these. Deciding on what approximations are appropriate is a necessary skill of a good physicist.

As we apply the above general principles to more and more phenomenon we gradually begin to understand how nature works and whats more with the aid of mathematics can predict how systems will behave. We can predict the energy levels of a molecule or solid. We can predict the orbits of planets, we can predict the decay rates or scattering cross sections of particles. We can even predict the rate of expansion of the universe from it’s early stages by a combination of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. relativistic statistical physics and a knowledge of the basic particles involved.

All of this is so obvious to a practicing physicist, but so called self styled philosophers of science aren’t happy with this. For them the aim of science is not to make concrete predictions of phenomenon but to describe reality as it is initself. They want to concentrate on the meaning of the general principles but therein lies a problem because some of the concepts used can be quite obscure.

For example in classical physics the nature of gravitation remained obscure all one could say about it was that it obeyed an inverse square law. In thermodynamics the concept of entropy also remained obscure although it had a perfectly precise meaning in terms of a measure of heat transfer . Also whilst Maxwell’s equations involved electrical and magetic fields their real nature remained obscure and all sorts of weird and wonderful ideas about the ‘real nature’ of an electric field involving vortices and eddy currents in the Aether were prevalent at the time. However more concrete these models appeared rather than Maxwell’s equations they didn’t really add much to the understanding of electromagnetism and these were ultimately shown to be wrong as the Aether was proven not to exist. The situation in intepreting the nature of an electric field so exasperated Helmholtz that when asked what Maxwell’s theory was he replied that Maxwell’s theory was Maxwell’s equations. Quite similar to the attitude which I favour of ‘Shut up and calculate’ when it comes to interpreting quantum mechanics.

My protaganist in the OU debates on the fora doesn’t like the above view for him and many others like him such as Karl Popper this reduces physics to engineering (as if that were  a bad thing). Well I’ve got news for him and Karl Popper and other anti-instrumentalists most of what is published in physics journals today is an application of one of the 8 above sets of general principles to model a given phenomenon. Indeed it is only by continuing the process of detailed modelling that we understand how nature works. If that’s ‘just’ engineering so what ?

The rest arguing about the nature of gravitation, the wave function, whether or not particles are real or waves are, really doesn’t move us forward and to some extent it doesn’t matter, as I can still use the general principles coupled with empirical information to make concrete predictions about natural phenomenon. What other means of understanding nature do we have ? It is only by shutting up and calculating that we will get any where. The attitude prevalent amongst certain people that one should always be looking for more new general principles is misguided, the need for new general principles will be forced upon us when we are able to probe nature at more and more higher energies or shorter length scales.. Until then we should all shut up and calculate.