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The crisis in physics is not only about physics

backreaction.blogspot.com

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Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#141

Post by pbhjpbhj »

roca wrote: post #94
Anon84 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Do you (always?) realise that need before the product is made?

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#142

Post by cryptica »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #85
cryptica wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked with scientists and mathematicians with PhDs, I can relate to the notion that they could have difficulties when it comes to identifying what is important and what to focus on. Their lack of eagerness to find real-world applications for their substantial skills is perhaps what had allowed them to stay at university and keep studying for so many years in the first place. It's no coincidence that, on the o…

Once upon a time, people spoke about the inherent value of knowledge, not just about if it can help patch your leaky conversion funnel. Please respect those that still think there need not be any base reason for learning about the world

Please respect the people who have to work grueling, repetitive and unpleasant jobs to put food on your table and a roof over your head.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#143

Post by Ma8ee »

pas wrote: post #134
Ma8ee wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is 10 years ago, so unfortunately I don’t remember details about discussions I never got going. Some were able to argue for their favourite interpretation of QM, or rather, how to resolve the measurement problem, but I mostly got blank stares when I tried to probe a bit more about the ontology. One of the reasons I left academia was that I never found the intellectual and curios environment I longed for. The suc…

Yeah, that's not surprising. Cutting-edge R&D is very boring hyper-parameter tuning basically, and requires a kind of person that is able to do things for a long long time (to gather data) and then to think a bit later. The same goes on with neuro folks. Consciousness, mind, hello? No, just let's poke rats, thanks. But this works. And that's why I don't understand Sabine's viewpoint. She can't just sit in an ivory to…

Sabine's point is that the current approach doesn't work any longer.

> She can't just sit in an ivory tower and stare down the cosmos in a contest until it reveals its secrets.

That is a gross misrepresenation of what she is saying. Did you actually read anything she wrote? She is criticising the notion that you can make progress, sitting in the ivory tower, as you exprss it, and coming up ideas about strings and super symmetries without any experimental data or other validation from reality. But she is also critical to the approach: just throw more money and manpower into even bigger experiments before we even know what to look for and hope something interesting reveals itself.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#144

Post by jabl »

Ma8ee wrote: post #86
baked_ziti wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tried to raise some more philosophical questions with them. Like what? Genuinely interested, not seeking to argue.

This is 10 years ago, so unfortunately I don’t remember details about discussions I never got going. Some were able to argue for their favourite interpretation of QM, or rather, how to resolve the measurement problem, but I mostly got blank stares when I tried to probe a bit more about the ontology. One of the reasons I left academia was that I never found the intellectual and curios environment I longed for. The suc…

In my experience the successful ones, yes they are good at grant writing, but also they are singularly laser focused on the tiny little bit that is their specialty.

Yes, that's how science progresses, but doesn't really make for interesting coffee table discussions about the nature of reality.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#145

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

garmaine wrote: post #118
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't yet understand the "underlying mechanics of thought" though.

It depends on what you mean. We understand that it is a mechanical, computational process. As opposed to, say, the reigning theory of mind in philosophical circles which is dualist. (Spiritualism in academia in the 21st century... sigh.) We have not yet mapped out the wiring diagrams of our brains which result in the human experience of consciousness. But that's a technological limitation in brain scanning and simula…

>> We also haven't yet created AI machines that exhibit what we would call consciousness, but we have good ideas of how to do so and are making progress.

That's news to me. What do you mean? What are those good ideas that we have and that we are making progress towards, that will lead us to conscious machines?

Actually: conscious software. Presumably, if we can get to strong AI from where we are right now, then we already have the hardware and we just need to figure out how to write the software?

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#146

Post by mannykannot »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #141
roca wrote: post #94

Earlier 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.

Do you (always?) realise that need before the product is made?

Are you suggesting these spin-offs are (always?) after-the-fact justifications using issues that were not pressing concerns?

The problem with attempting to justify space exploration with spin-off examples like food preservation is that it risks provoking a 'so what?' response. Piling on unimpressive claims does not strengthen one's argument, it dilutes it, and gives the opposition an easy target to dispute.

When Clarke came up with the idea of communications satellites, he, and others, thought he had come up with a before-the-fact justification for space travel, as he expected these relays would need regular maintenance, but another claimed-spinoff-but-not-really, semiconductor electronics, obviated the need.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#147

Post by frumiousirc »

pdonis wrote: post #35
knzhou wrote: post #8

As 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…

> this article blatantly misrepresents how science is done and how actual scientists think Her factual statements, that every high-energy physics experiment since the 1970s has only confirmed an existing theory (the Standard Model) and that every prediction made by physicists about possible extensions to that existing theory has turned out to be wrong, are correct. If you think that the underlying cause for these fac…

Standard Model predicted massless neutrinos. That was demonstrated to be wrong.

Standard Model then implied neutrino mixing would be slight (based on quark mixing). That was also demonstrated to be incorrect.

Standard Model has no good reason to predict that protons are stable, yet so far they apparently are.

There is more to particle physics than Higgs, Horatio.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#148

Post by Ma8ee »

jabl wrote: post #144
Ma8ee wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is 10 years ago, so unfortunately I don’t remember details about discussions I never got going. Some were able to argue for their favourite interpretation of QM, or rather, how to resolve the measurement problem, but I mostly got blank stares when I tried to probe a bit more about the ontology. One of the reasons I left academia was that I never found the intellectual and curios environment I longed for. The suc…

In my experience the successful ones, yes they are good at grant writing, but also they are singularly laser focused on the tiny little bit that is their specialty. Yes, that's how science progresses, but doesn't really make for interesting coffee table discussions about the nature of reality.

Yes, that is how some parts of science progress. And I certainly don't want to diminish those contributions. But that is also the exact reason why we haven't had any mayor breakthroughs in fundamental physics in soon half a century. I don't see how an Einstein, Bohr or even Feyman could get tenure today.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#149

Post by dekhn »

Balgair wrote: post #92
ImaCake wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> and it was no guarantee that you were measuring the protein and not some weird light physics effect! My thesis was in fluorescent bio physics at the nano scale (STED). We literally had a PI effect. Normally, the 'PI effect' is that when the professor comes in, the experiment stops working, mostly due to Murphy's law. With our case, it was because the extra body heat caused the mirrors to expand and drift out of pla…

Stupid question: normally the labs I work in have excellent temperature control for this reason. In fact, some of the labs are actually rooms-within-rooms (with the outer room having AC, and the inner room having another AC). Was this for budget reasons, or were you physically placing your bodies extremely close to the optical equipment while running experiments?

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#150

Post by dekhn »

Anon84 wrote: post #82
aplanas wrote: post #32

Earlier 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…

I think the right way to think about science investment is the multi-armed bandit. There's a lot of uncertainty, but you also know that if you fund a portfolio with a good distribution, you'll have a chance of maximizing the total good science results that come out of it.

I've always been very skeptical of claims that heavy investment in the space sciences advacnced other technologies, more than if we had just invested that money directly in the other technology. I also see a lot of money wasted in space sciences running experiments on the ISS that aren't really that useful (like crystallography- sure, you can grow nice crystals in space and then bring them back down to earth, but for the money you spent on that, you could have funded 10 PIs, and also crystal structures aren't that useful for advancing science).

Interestingly, if you look at modern science funding, it does basically treat it as a multi-armed bandit and there is a portfolio of project funding that includes both large particle physics experiments and individual investigators.

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