The crisis in physics is not only about physics • Hacker News Board

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#151

Post by mikorym » Thu, Oct 31, 2019, 1:54 PM UTC

> crisis in physics

Me: Hmm... interesting. Personally I think they should spend time consolidating the different mathematical techniques.

> Maybe all these string theorists have been wasting tax-money for decades, alright, but in the large scheme of things it’s not all that much money. I grant you that much. Theorists are not expensive.

> String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There’s math for it, alright. Pretty math, even. But that doesn’t mean this math describes reality.

I don't really understand this part. I am not convinced that her post says much [], because consider this: she is encouraging observation at the expense of speculation and then arguing that observational techniques are more expensive and hence prohibitive in the long run?

Is the real "unhappiness" in academia not just as simple as information overflow and the fact that only a few can be famous, whether there are a few or whether there are many? I don't know if that is what people get at with these kinds of blog posts. In any case, what I have found in mathematics is that the names of people whose work are worth reading are not necessarily the ones that you'll encounter first. OP does actually hint at this as well, but again, is it not just information overflow (and shouldn't be made more complicated than that)?

[] The one good takeaway that I see is "focus on inconsistencies".

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#152

Post by calhoun137 » Thu, Oct 31, 2019, 2:07 PM UTC

This is an extremelly well written and well thought out post. Thank you.

Here is my suggestion: how about for the next LHC scale physics project we get all the governments in the world to put in manhatten project levels of funding to research machines which can control the climate and the weather to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change.

This would be a lot more practical and better for science and the future of the human species than confirming what everyone has known with 99%+ confidence for over 30 years. Just my 2 cents.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#153

Post by pas » Thu, Oct 31, 2019, 2:44 PM UTC

Ma8ee wrote: post #143

pas wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sup…

But.. but... she can't have it both ways.

The current unexplained data is not much, and the best explanations involve a lot of hard to test things.

Why? Because there's not enough unexplained data. The easy to test theories have been already thrown out.

Yes, sure, what she is saying is nice, let's try to explain stuff the simplest way possible. Occam's razor. But theorists already do this.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#154

Post by yummypaint » Thu, Oct 31, 2019, 3:01 PM UTC

mikorym wrote: post #151

> crisis in physics Me: Hmm... interesting. Personally I think they should spend time consolidating the different mathematical techniques. > Maybe all these string theorists have been wasting tax-money for decades, alright, but in the large scheme of things it’s not all that much money. I grant you that much. Theorists are not expensive. > String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There’s math for it, alright. Prett…

For most problems in the history of physics, people have been able to use pre-existing math that had been developed sometimes hundreds of years before. String theory in an exception to this, and the math needed to do what people want doesn't exist yet. This is part of why im willing to give people who do string theory research a pass on not having testable predictions yet. They are still developing the tools, which is why there tends to be alot of collaboration with mathematicians. Even if this line of research doesnt ultimately yield physical insight, its still moving math forward, and that will ultimately benefit everyone.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#155

Post by poelzi » Thu, Oct 31, 2019, 4:07 PM UTC

nisuni wrote: post #3

The author is talking about the crisis of a particular subfield of physics, i.e. particle physics. Other subfields are thriving (AMO, quantum information) and maybe it’s just time to accept the relevance of different subfields changes with time.

Bullshit, crises in astronomy for example. The Big Bang Bullshit has be falsified for years now. http://cosmology.info has links to dozens of papers.

Show me one paper that measured Lorenz contraction, you can't because it does not exist.

The whole standard model is based on wrong assumptions.

In fact If you would actually talk with scientist in the respected fields that don't take every explanation but ask critically, you will see that most of them are stuck.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#156

Post by poelzi » Thu, Oct 31, 2019, 4:15 PM UTC

Ma8ee wrote: post #45

baked_ziti wrote: post #37

> They do not think about which hypotheses are promising because their education has not taught them to do so. Such self-reflection would require knowledge of the philosophy and sociology of science, and those are subjects physicists merely make dismissive jokes about. Accusing working scientists of being insufficiently reflective on any topic, let alone themselves or the field they work in, seems without merit on it…

I have a PhD in physics. Even though I have left the field, I’ve hung around with enough of them, and occasionally tried to raise some more philosophical questions with them. Sabine is unfortunately spot on.

Full Ack. Unfortunately training against confirmation bias (or other ones) is not part of any scientific study. We in general give very little attention to papers that falsify an accepted theory. For example, look at the papers http://cosmology.info has collected. If you have gone through some of them, you can not, at least as a scientist, still think that Big Bang is a true theory. But still, this bulls*t theory pops up all the time.... This is just one of them, in fact, nearly everything is falsified... It does not matter if theory X predict A correct, if prediction B is false your theory X is also not true but at most a model to calculate A. The model I have adopted also perdicted the "Higg-Boson", but it has nothing to do with gravity.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#157

Post by poelzi » Thu, Oct 31, 2019, 4:21 PM UTC

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…

QM is fundamentally not correct. They assume energy and matter is interchangeable, which is not. Build me a proton from energy and I will shut up, you can't. The appearance of positions can be explained much much much much easier, once you got your electron model correct.

When I studied physics I never saw the periodic table as the result of QM model, never made sense for me. Now I understand, thanks to a more advanced, but classical model.

QM and GR can never be unified because GR is a effect of surface pressure and QM has the wrong surface.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#158

Post by poelzi » Thu, Oct 31, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

qnsi wrote: post #9

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…

Seriously, this quote „I am the only physicist who has at least come up with an idea for what to do.” Seemed pretty arrogant. But I have no knowledge of her

Stoyan Sarg understood this problem in the 90 and fixed it by building a model from scratch that actually works :)

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#159

Post by Balgair » Thu, Oct 31, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #149

Balgair wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The lab was in a bio lab, so the AC was set to STP. Well, mostly. Just having a warm person breathing in the tiny room was enough to throw the mirrors off. Since we were doing active tuning and development on the optics, we had to be in there, and it took a bit to get the room to a steady state with us in it. Fortunately, during the summer or winter, the only thing what would change was humidity, not the temperature, and that seemed to not affect things too much.

Also, not a stupid question. We thought of it too and it took us a week to collect enough data to rule out the AC system as a cause.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#160

Post by poelzi » Thu, Oct 31, 2019, 4:26 PM UTC

H8crilA wrote: post #14

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…

One thing that bothers me is that indeed it has been resolving inconsistencies that often lead to progress, as the author points out. What would you say to that? What are the still unresolved inconsistencies in physics? To me it feels more like that we just mostly ran out of the obvious inconsistencies to resolve.

At some point you can't fix a model by adding more stuff to it, if it's already inconsistent. Removing the wrong assumptions first, helps more then adding new mechanisms.