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The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

backreaction.blogspot.com

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Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

#111

Post by konschubert »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #70
Koshkin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think your "I'm not that kind of geek" comment came off as condescending. It also makes you sound like you're not really interested in understanding the other side's argument.

Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

#112

Post by konschubert »

rthomas6 wrote: post #104
tylermw wrote: post #3

Love this comment left on the post by Peter Shor (of Shor's algorithm--the algorithm that kicked off the quantum computing frenzy). I assume it's him and not an imposter. "It's not just that scientists don't want to move their butts, although that's undoubtedly part of it. It's also that they can't. In today's university funding system, you need grants (well, maybe you don't truly need them once you have tenure, but…

I wonder if some rich people could start a form of charity where they just pay a few incredibly brilliant people a good salary to go do whatever research they want for the rest of their lives. Sort of like patronage. Just bypass the whole grant funding cycle and work on whatever you want, because you're a genius and want to study things other people don't like or understand.

The problem with education/science/welfare by charity is that it doesn't scale as well and isn't as stable as societal contracts.

A developed country can be recognised by the fact that the society doesn't rely on the goodwill of the rich.

Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

#113

Post by pdonis »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #79
andrepd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A theory can explain observations even perfectly well and still be wrong- because the frame of reference is wrong. The worse thing is that you can't figure that out until you've figured out what the correct frame of reference is, and looked at your obsrevations in a new light. Well strictly speaking, it wasn't wrong . It explained the observations perfectly well. What a heliocentric description brought was a simpler…

It was wrong in the sense that epicycles are an entirely imaginary math artefact, and reality works on different principles. Revolutions happen when a new mental model - or frame of reference, or whatever you want to call it - can generate new kinds of math. The old model is certainly wrong in the sense that it's not a good picture of how reality actually works. If you really want to, you can still use epicycles for…

> It was wrong in the sense that epicycles are an entirely imaginary math artefact, and reality works on different principles.

How do you distinguish "an entirely imaginary math artifact" from the "principles" that "reality works on"?

(Hint: planetary orbits are not ellipses once you take GR effects into account.)

Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

#114

Post by philipkglass »

narrator wrote: post #7

I kind of like the model of the turn of the 19th century where you had great geniuses like Tesla who would just get funding to create whatever kind of cool crap they could think of. Are there still any people like that in physics? Legendary scientists/engineers who run there own lab and just make cool stuff?

David E. Shaw. Note that before he returned to his scientific passions he had to make a fortune, because creating new things at the cutting edge is a lot more expensive now than at the end of the 19th century.

Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

#115

Post by pdonis »

EGreg wrote: post #43
gbumakefan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you can’t just go hide in your attic. Everyone is more risk averse than ever as the cost of housing, healthcare, and education relentlessly increase faster than wages.

This is one of the best arguments for UBI. Imagine how much humanity would innovate in science, open source and other public gift economies if everyone didn’t have to worry how they will eat and pay rent next month.

The argument you are making assumes two things that strike me as highly implausible:

(1) That enough people would use their new free time to innovate instead of just watching TV or playing World of Warcraft or something like that.

(2) That enough people would still choose to do the unpleasant but necessary tasks that provide the resources needed for everyone to eat, have housing, etc. Not to mention all the other stuff people seem to want.

Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

#116

Post by [deleted] »

mannykannot wrote: post #52
tbabb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oops, my mistake on the gender- Sabine is not a super familiar name. (Still dislike the tone, though; don't care how famous she is). I also think the taboo has lifted a bit, as it's now possible for mainstream physicists like David Deutsch and Sean Carroll to build their careers on quantum foundations work. But I still think the physics community has a lot of baggage from the second half of the twentieth century to l…

It is not clear to me in what way the tone of your post differs from that of the article.

[deleted]

Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

#117

Post by kgwgk »

tbabb wrote: post #107
kgwgk wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author says: "Note: in this work, we will not make any reference to why this (apparent) collapse occurs. Not only is this a much harder issue, it is simply not relevant to discussion we will present." Also: "It is important to note that arriving at our conclusions did not require introducing new physics. We only relied on elementary quantum mechanics: not on novel ‘backwards time’ concepts, nor on any particular…

That language is why I think the authors aren't aware that they are advocating many worlds. Also, this is a fantastic example of the "don't ask questions" attitude I think is so shameful. If they had bothered to take the small step of asking, they'd have come to a clear, evidence-based refutation of Copenhagen! There are regions of spacetime after the measurement, where the wavefunction is not collapsed, which the au…

The point is that the order of the measurements is irrelevant: QM predicts the same probability distribution of outcomes. So the problem can be solved using either order and the response is the same. I am not sure what premise of Copenhagen is being contradicted.

Edit: solving the problem in the "natural" order would give the same probabilities but is much more difficult to handle. You need to get a probabilistic outcome for the position of each single photon on the screen, which "collapses" the state and determines the wave function of the other photon. At this point, the first photon has been detected somewhere but it can only be labeled as "interference" or "not interference" later after the detection of the second photon. The probability of being labeled as "interference" or "not interference" does depend on the position (because the collapsed wave function depends on what the outcome of the previous measurement was). When everything is said and done, looking at the subset of events labeled "interference" there is an interference pattern and looking at the subset of events labeled "not interference" there is not an interference pattern. There is no mystery.

Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

#118

Post by pdonis »

cletus wrote: post #36

I'm no physicist but this leaves me scratching my head. You have some people saying the university funding system is to blame by not accepting crazy ideas but we have all sorts of ideas in physics like: - String theory. As best as I can tell the only reason string theory exists is because if dimensions=11 the equations for general relativity pop out. Importantly though string theory has made no testable predictions a…

> As best as I can tell the only reason string theory exists is because if dimensions=11 the equations for general relativity pop out.

This gets at the essential feature that seems to be driving string theory research (or at least a major one), but I think it's an overstatement as you state it. String theory is popular because it appears to hold out the hope of a theory of quantum gravity. But to my knowledge nobody has shown that the equations of general relativity pop out from an 11-dimensional string theory model; that is still vaporware. There are results which suggest (at least to string theorists) that that should be possible, but nobody has actually done it yet.

Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

#119

Post by InclinedPlane »

syncsynchalt wrote: post #84
gbumakefan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you can’t just go hide in your attic. Everyone is more risk averse than ever as the cost of housing, healthcare, and education relentlessly increase faster than wages.

Human productivity is at its highest point in human history, so one can't help but wonder why we must all work harder than our ancestors to exist.

It's almost as though much of that productivity on an individual level is not making it back to those individuals, and going somewhere else, perhaps to others.

Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

#120

Post by [deleted] »

letitgo12345 wrote: post #12

Well 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

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