Earlier quoted context omitted.
And Einstein didn't write his breakthrough papers while employed at a university either
He had an easy job at the patent office so he had time and energy to work on other things.
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The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal
61–70 of 218 posts
Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal
#62Nobody has mentioned John Horgan's book "the end of science" yet, so I figure it is time to do so. It's even more relevant now than when he wrote it in 1996.
Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal
#63Well considering that we know everything pretty much about most of everyday physics and new physics requires energies that are almost unreachable and billions of dollars in experimental investment and/or years and decades to collect sufficient data, it's not a surprise at all that foundations of physics progress has slowed. I don't think the physics community is to blame here. Just the nature of reality
Well considering that we know everything pretty much about most of everyday physics [...]
That's true and also not true. Yes, we have a working theory that explains essentially everything with unprecedented accuracy as long as you don't wander too far outside of everyday length and energy scales. But on the other hand we still do not really understand basic quantum mechanics almost a century after its discovery or at the very least there is no consensus about what the theory actually says. Quantum mechanics is not even self-consistent.
Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> What irritated me about it was the assumption that, if most of your predictions are correct, your model is almost entirely correct, and just needs to be tweaked a bit. Haha, no. We wish. Epicycles worked very well and were highly accurate, because, as Fourier analysis later showed, any smooth curve can be approximated to arbitrary accuracy with a sufficient number of epicycles. However, they fell out of favour wit…
> the frame of reference is wrong According to General Relativity, there's no such thing as a "wrong" frame.
True, but there are frames of reference that make understanding (and the math) vastly simpler. I can calculate the orbits of the Saturn's moons using my location on earth as the origin. It will take me a lot of work, but I can do it.
Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal
#65Once upon a time, researchers were independently wealthy https://nadiaeghbal.com/independent-research
It was also a time when the whole societal landscape was different: peasants farmed because it was their way to survive and the aristocracy lived on the labor of the former without having to work. What changed now it that almost everybody need "a job" and the attention and time of a lot of smart people is distracted by that. That's also the reason why people professionalize themselves by going to the academia. In my…
Today the number of people that don't have to work, both in raw numbers and as a percent, has absolutely skyrocketed. I mean if a person is simply interested in e.g. pursuing research and not so much with material niceties then it's extremely easy to live abroad in developing nations, indefinitely, starting with around $200k. Bump that up to a million and you can live practically anywhere so long as you have the discipline to live far below your means, which is perhaps the hardest part of it all.
Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal
#66We’re stuck in a paradigm that doesn’t result in any valid fundamental predictions. The idea that running the expanding universe backward makes everything denser and hotter in the past is just dumb. The universe is not like a loaf expanding from dense batter to fluffy bread. Instead, the chaotic vacuum produces, for want of a more accurate concept, particle-antiparticle pairs at random that exert a “pressure” seen as…
That would imply that there’s an equal amount of matter and antimatter in the Universe. So, where’s the antimatter?
The quantum foam is a shared component, an interface, between our universe and another universe that is majority anti-matter. When particles arise from the quantum foam, what we're observing is the half of a virtual particle pair that ended up on this side of the interface, and it is more likely to be the "matter" particle for some reason.
Lets get hypothetical. Suppose the quantum foam interface is, in fact, the event horizon of a blackhole as observed from the inside. Since we see a bias towards matter, we could expect that the "outside" universe would see a bias towards what we call anti-matter. Further, since we have blackholes in our universe which we can observe, we should see a bias towards matter in the Hawking radiation.
=This post brought to you by a physicist from a not-terribly-accurate sci-fi novella.=
Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal
#67While I don't like this ~guy's~ woman's disdainful, superior tone, I do think his complaint has merit. Physics is notoriously bad at having curiosity about strange, unconventional, or truly novel ideas. I just finished reading What is Real? by Adam Becker-- a history of modern physics-- and am astonished at how aggressively physicists resisted and suppressed "unconventional" interpretations of quantum mechanics (like…
>Physics is notoriously bad at having curiosity about strange, unconventional, or truly novel ideas. Physics of today would be unrecognisable to a scientist at the start of the 20th century. Indeed the physics of 1935 would be unrecognisable to a scientist at the start of the 20th century. Our understanding progressed enormously AND it did so because people put forward radical theories in complete rupture with the es…
> There is nothing "obviously wrong" about the standard Copenhagen interpretation.
Copenhagen interpretation showed up when they were faced with a choice between preserving locality or determinancy.
They chose wrong — we know now QM is non-local, and that the underlying justification for the Copenhagen model is an extraneous philosophical proposition.
But much like an extra dependency in a software project, no one wants to remove it now that it’s used everywhere, and there’s a lot of “good enough” stuff using it.
That said, it seems to be one of the major impediments to a unified theory: by dropping the extraneous assumption, we have fewer things to reconcile with GR, and can start looking for GR geometries that have quantized non-local behaviors.
ie, dropping Copenhagen and giving geons another look is probably worth it. (And is basically what loop quantum gravity people are doing, as far as I can tell.)
Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal
#68While I don't like this ~guy's~ woman's disdainful, superior tone, I do think his complaint has merit. Physics is notoriously bad at having curiosity about strange, unconventional, or truly novel ideas. I just finished reading What is Real? by Adam Becker-- a history of modern physics-- and am astonished at how aggressively physicists resisted and suppressed "unconventional" interpretations of quantum mechanics (like…
'Physics is notoriously bad at having curiosity about strange, unconventional, or truly novel ideas.' There is certainly no shortage of these! What we are short of, are ideas that are: - falsifiable - testable by experiment, with current technology
Maybe we're short on those precisely because the strange ideas aren't given enough attention. Bell's Theorem was a landmark result that didn't come out of the Copenhagen interpretation, but because John Bell was fascinated by the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation.
The point is, unconventional perspectives give you new ways of looking at a problem that can yield new experiments.
Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Physics is notoriously bad at having curiosity about strange, unconventional, or truly novel ideas. Physics of today would be unrecognisable to a scientist at the start of the 20th century. Indeed the physics of 1935 would be unrecognisable to a scientist at the start of the 20th century. Our understanding progressed enormously AND it did so because people put forward radical theories in complete rupture with the es…
> There is nothing "obviously wrong" about the standard Copenhagen interpretation Can you tell me how to calculate whether a system of particles will cause another system of particles to collapse or not? Can you tell me under what circumstances a system of particles will evolve unitarily or not? Can you shade the region of the spacetime diagram of EPR where the wavefunction is collapsed? How about in a delayed choice…
>Can you tell me how to calculate whether a system of particles will cause another system of particles to collapse or not?
You appear to be somewhat mistaken. Copenhagen interpretation does not postulate any specific explanation or mechanism for wave-function collapse, merely that "upon measurement, the wave-function collapses into an eigenstate of the observable being measured". This, of course, is a physically verified phenomenon. Now Copenhagen purposefully leaves the precise meaning of "measurement" undefined, since in my view there is no convincing empirical evidence that supports a specific mechanism for this phenomenon. Other interpretations posit mechanisms (decoherence (doesn't fully account), von Neumann "consiousness" (not empirical), etc.) for this collapse.
My biggest complaint about many-worlds interpretation is how it is in its essence a non-scientific theory, as it makes assertions about an unobservable reality. It postulates other parallel realities that by definition do not communicate. Again, this makes it intrinsically a non-scientific theory.
>Can you tell me under what circumstances a system of particles will evolve unitarily or not?
Everywhere except on measurement, in which the state collapses.
>How about in a delayed choice quantum eraser experiment?
I'm not familiar with this experiment.
>If you tell me "you're not allowed to ask those questions"
By all means, ask as many questions as you want. That's after all the essence of scientific endeavour. But it's not very nice to misrepresent other positions, nor is it to claim everyone else is deluded (without strong evidence on your side at least).
>Bell's theorem should have sent a shockwave through the community which forced everyone to reevaluate fundamental assumptions and self-correct wrong ideas.
Bell's inequalities force no re-evaluation. They simply prove that the search for a local hidden-variable theory is impossible. It certainly raised important ideas for research, but it does not do anything to discredit established QM.
>The claim that "the meaning of QM is outside the scope of science" is exemplary, I think, of that attitude.
If a physical argument can be made about this problem, then it's in the scope of physics. Otherwise, it is not. As simple as that.
Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> What irritated me about it was the assumption that, if most of your predictions are correct, your model is almost entirely correct, and just needs to be tweaked a bit. Haha, no. We wish. Epicycles worked very well and were highly accurate, because, as Fourier analysis later showed, any smooth curve can be approximated to arbitrary accuracy with a sufficient number of epicycles. However, they fell out of favour wit…
> the frame of reference is wrong According to General Relativity, there's no such thing as a "wrong" frame.
I'm sorry, I don't know what General Relativity says, really. I'm not that kind of geek :0
What if I say there are frames of reference that are irrelevant to discovering the process that generates the observations?
Edit: Um, guys? I genuinely don't know what general relativity says and I didn't get the comment above. It'd be nice if someone explained.