Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fantastic mondegreen ("knit pick", like picking at stitching with knitting needles, as opposed to "nit pick", which is picking off lice eggs to prevent future annoyance)
"Mondegreen" is a word I've needed but didn't know existed. Thanks for sharing. All intensive purposes. Get down to brass tax. There's a lot of these that I've uttered or heard and they last a long time because they sound kind of sensible.
The crisis in physics is not only about physics
101–110 of 179 posts
Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics
#102There is alot going on in physics besides things directly related to the standard model. Running out of important things to study is of no concern. As a random example check out the microscopy work by recent nobel prize winner Eric Betzig. I think people fail to appreciate the many frontiers that exist in just understanding how matter interracts with itself. The past was exciting because we got to discover new buildi…
Yeah, sure, but she's writing about the foundations of physics. I'm in biophysics in part because I want to have an impact in < 1 kiloyears.
Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Arguments for "spinoff benefits" from research always seem really weak to me. If you want lighter, imperishable food, invest in food preservation , not a space program that might happen to produce freeze-dried food.
I'm not 100% convinced. I think it's hard to get really smart people to work on problems that aren't interesting. Asking a team to make food preservation 10% better won't invite the creativity and determination that asking them to preserve food to Mars would. I think, when you take humans into account, you're better off setting interesting and challenging goals, with many useful byproducts.
That is the best argument for "spinoffs" that I've heard. Well done.
I still think it's pretty weak though; the inspiration benefit seems unlikely to overcome the lost efficiency, in general. And different people find different problems inspiring; some people can be inspired by practical problems (e.g. "how can we lighten the backpacks of trampers").
Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics
#104There is alot going on in physics besides things directly related to the standard model. Running out of important things to study is of no concern. As a random example check out the microscopy work by recent nobel prize winner Eric Betzig. I think people fail to appreciate the many frontiers that exist in just understanding how matter interracts with itself. The past was exciting because we got to discover new buildi…
I was briefly involved in Single Molecule Biophysics, where microscopes push the limits of what you can do with visible light in order to understand protein behaviour, where I heard the often repeated warning: "the microscope is an experiment itself". This was born out of the incredibly fancy and poorly understood microscope, which was experimental, and it was no guarantee that you were measuring the protein and not…
Not sure how to say it, but however brief your involvement was, I'm glad to read your comment here on Hacker News.
Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics
#105As usual with Sabine, this article blatantly misrepresents how science is done and how actual scientists think, and serves mainly to portray herself as the only person in the field capable of rational thought. People in the comments here are picking up on this when it takes an unfair swipe at medicine, but it really applies to the whole article. I am not going to bother doing a line-by-line rebuttal, because I've alr…
Not being familiar with this author, the biggest reason I dismissed it is because I didn't see any kind of honest discussion that, well, maybe fundamental particle physics is just harder now, in that that next step of what can be probed by experiments isn't actually possible by humans, now or really ever (e.g. requiring a particle accelerator with the radius of Pluto's orbit, etc.) So instead you get all this hand-wr…
>>> particle physics is just harder now
This is something I've thought about. I'm a physicist, but am now happily working in industry. My job is to solve problems, and for most part I do, but it always seems possible that one fine day, someone will walk into my cubicle with a problem that I just can't solve. I'm always faced with the fact that I can't honestly predict how long the next problem will take. Maybe a day, maybe a week, maybe... forever?
Despite a string of successes, we never know for sure when physics will be hit with a problem that takes a decade, or a century, or even a millennium, to solve. As I understand the history, the ancient Greeks could formulate quadratic equations that they couldn't solve, and it wasn't until something like a millennium later that Al-Khwarizmi cracked it, at least for real roots. Now we teach it to children in middle school.
Finding a testable theory of quantum gravity might be the problem that takes a millennium.
Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a good point, but I think a strong counter-example would be anything we get from satellites. We went to space for political reasons, but let's just say it was for the sake of science because it sure didn't solve any immediate problems for mankind. But it did create the technology for satellites, which allow us to better predict the weather and gives us GPS tracking, and other things as well. But imagine you wa…
I think that is a weak counter-example. The applications of rocketry and satellites were obvious by the end of WW2. In 1945 Arthur C. Clarke had already published an article explaining how useful it would be to have communication satellites in geostationary orbit, and it didn't take much imagination to suppose that a big enough rocket could put them there.
It's easy to think of it as a possibility, but the amount of effort to put a satellite into space is still extraordinary (space travel is still far from a commodity all these decades later). My point was they would not go through the trouble of first creating satellites as it would be considered too exotic of an idea. It would be like thinking of Uber 15 years ago before smartphones were ubiquitous, and deciding you first need to invent the smartphone rather than shelve the idea.
Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For example, detecting gravity waves does move the needle on any of these metrics It will surely do. Those achievements are not possible without staggering advances in technology that can be later applied in different fields. The same technology that we first developed for those expensive colliders is now used in MRI and others diagnosis tools that we have for granted today.
> The same technology that we first developed for those expensive colliders is now used in MRI and others diagnosis tools that we have for granted today. The question is, how much better would "MRI and other diagnosis tools" if that money had been spent actively trying to improve them instead of mostly going to detecting gravity waves? That's the question you need to answer to justify spending billions chasing physic…
Why is the general public wasting millions of dollars on an opioid epidemic? Why does shrekli's 710$ medicine still cost 700$ after he left and was charged?
There is plenty of wasted money in the pharma sector that can be spent and profited from in crispr technologies. I'm not sure why you're taking physics money for that.
The physics funding programs have already moved on from big budget tags in some spaces. ITER will probably be the last big white whale project in fusion. There are a bunch of smaller fusion projects being funded at smaller scales to prove their efforts before going big. The iterative tech model is bleeding over into science funding.
Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consciousness :trollface:
Go read some a Daniel Dennett and/or Max Tengmark. Consciousness is a conceptual problem, not a physical one. It merely goes away once you start asking the right questions.
Aka "Consciousness Explained Away"
Consciousness is still an extant and very unexplained phenomenon.
Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go read some a Daniel Dennett and/or Max Tengmark. Consciousness is a conceptual problem, not a physical one. It merely goes away once you start asking the right questions.
Aka "Consciousness Explained Away" Consciousness is still an extant and very unexplained phenomenon.
That's a bit like saying phlogiston is an unexplained part of physical theory. Once you understand the underlying mechanics of thought, it stops being mysterious and really stops being a problem at all.
Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aka "Consciousness Explained Away" Consciousness is still an extant and very unexplained phenomenon.
That's a bit like saying phlogiston is an unexplained part of physical theory. Once you understand the underlying mechanics of thought, it stops being mysterious and really stops being a problem at all.
Not at all.
A quick Google of the subject will demonstrate it is still an (maybe, the) outstanding subject of philosophy and perhaps ultimately physics.
Check any online encyclopedia, but if you have any respectable references that disagree, I'd be genuinely interested.
Eg: