Fake Physics • Hacker News Board

Re: Fake Physics

#91

Post by lamontcg » Mon, Jan 23, 2017, 5:42 PM UTC

bvv wrote: post #26

As usual I think that Woit's blog post is unnecessarily polarizing. If you decide to read his post then I would recommend you also read the excellent comment by Marty Tysanner on the same page. Also, sigh. If you dig deep into the dark corners of the internets then I am sure that you can find fake anything. Focus on the beauty and the truth, people. For example: [1] LIGO continues to work beautifully, as evidenced by…

- The detection of gravitational waves has been expected for decades based on the orbital decay of binary neutron star systems

- There have been dozens of 'bumps' in the data that went away over the past several years. The Standard Model still stands and there's no BSM physics that we've found. I'd bet the bump goes away just like the recent 750 GeV bump.

- The magnetic moment of the proton and antiproton being the same is also not BSM physics at all.

The problem is that fundamental elementary physics continues to boringly grind along and validate the standard model and things that we already knew had to be found (Higgs, LIGO).

The result in the popular press, though, is that multiverse mania has taken over, which is a non-solution to the problem. You'll actually find arguments that we stop thinking about alternatives to string theory and just assume it works because its beautiful, but it can never be measured--which is not a scientific argument.

500 years from now if we haven't made any progress we might wind up going "meh, probably string theory, but we'll never know", but its too soon to throw in the towel yet.

Re: Fake Physics

#92

Post by scottlocklin » Mon, Jan 23, 2017, 6:59 PM UTC

eliasbagley wrote: post #54

scottlocklin wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higgs and LIGO are big nothingburgers compared to anything that happened in physics in any given year between 1910 and 1950 or so. Meanwhile "physicists" spend their careers doing piffle like writing programs for quantum computers that arguably will never exist in the corporeal world. Yeah, I coulda been one of those guys: I even had a pretty good idea for an imaginary QC platform and a position in a major research i…

Why is it stagnating though? Lack of talent? Lack of funding? Is it that all the lowest hanging fruit is gone and the problems are becoming intractable to solve?

Social problems, IMO. Physics career track is designed to produce this outcome. Peter Woit (OP) wrote a decent book on the subject.

Re: Fake Physics

#93

Post by brodix » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 2:46 AM UTC

I think a big part of the problem is we look at and model time backward. It isn't the point of the present moving from past to future, which physics codifies as measures of duration, but change turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth turns. So the present is a constant state of collapsing probabilities. Duration is just the state of the present, as events form and dissolve. This makes time an effect of action, more like temperature, color, pressure, etc. Thermodynamic cycles are more fundamental than the linear, narrative effect of time. As high pressure is causation, while low pressure is direction. Time is not causal. Yesterday doesn't cause today. Energy is causal. Sunlight on a spinning planet creates the effect of days. As energy is conserved as the present, the past is consumed by the present, as much as the inertia of this energy directs present events. Time is asymmetric because action is inertial. The earth turns one direction, not the other. Clocks run at different rates because they are separate actions, not because the fabric of spacetime is curved. A faster clock will simply expend energy quicker. That's why the twin in the faster frame ages quicker.

Re: Fake Physics

#94

Post by Strilanc » Wed, Feb 01, 2017, 10:40 PM UTC

YZF wrote: post #88

Strilanc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are also no real signs that a quantum computer will beat a "classical" computer at anything any time soon John Martinis' group is planning to do that within the next two years [1][2]. Ten years might be realistic for solving useful problems faster and cheaper, but the esoteric speedups are right around the corner. 1: https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00263 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgMWommXxU8

Just watched the talk. Definitely an interesting direction. One question I'd have is whether quantum simulation is indeed the fastest way to solve the quantum speckle problem on a classical computer. The other related thing to think about is whether the output of a quantum speckle computer can only be explained by the large state space and quantum mechanics or whether there are alternative explanations. So definitely…

> whether quantum simulation is indeed the fastest way to solve the quantum speckle problem on a classical computer.

They give arguments for this in the paper. Intuitively, if there's some fast way to classically sample a random quantum circuit then that means most quantum circuits should be easy to simulate classically. But that doesn't seem to be the case: we don't have algorithms that go fast on most circuits but go slow in highly specialized cases. It's the other way around.

> whether the output of a quantum speckle computer can only be explained by the large state space and quantum mechanics or whether there are alternative explanations.

Given that all the engineering was based on quantum mechanics, it would be very surprising if the machine worked based on something else. It's quite difficult to make things accidentally work like that. It'd be like trying to build a car, confirming it can take you from place to place, then realizing that actually you made a hang-glider by accident.