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Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

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Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#91

Post by brummm »

dnautics wrote: post #79
SiempreViernes wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've followed it for years, but I think lately (last ~year) she's become somewhat clickbait-y in some articles. In particular the posts where she keep highlighting the misguided fools that claim gravitational waves aren't real; she wrote a forbes contribution that made a big deal the LIGO people didn't respond to questions over facebook and saw it as suspicious, and awarded points to the GW denialists as a consequenc…

I believe in gravitational waves, but specifically with LIGO I wish they did a better experiment with the multimodal observations. An easy one would be:. For an [n] month period blind all of the results, and mix them with 3X fake data. Then instruct traditional EM astronomers to search for EM phenomena corresponding to these signals. If only 25% of them correlate, we know the multimodal search is not working.

There is no believing in them. Gravitational waves have been observed and you can't "believe" or "not believe" in them anymore than you can "believe" or "not believe" in electricity.

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#92

Post by senderista »

“They do not think about which hypotheses are promising because their education has not taught them to do so.”

Pretty rich coming from someone who’s written a bunch of papers on doubly-special relativity and similarly unpromising hypotheses.

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#93

Post by nablaoperator »

jml78 wrote: post #82
nablaoperator wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> But physicists aren't probing QM anymore Physicists are probing the heck out of every theory. However, QM has proven to be _extremely_ reliable, even some 'Gedankenexperimente' by Einstein trying to make it look wrong turned out to be true ('geisterhafte Spukwirkung'). >> There is a lot to be explored there but academia tells people to avoid it. I don't think so. I mean just look at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)…

By probing, I mean looking beyond predictions, the underlying nature of it. The equations of QM give us great results but it is very much an oracle type situation. We ask a question and we get a good answer. But why? Theoretical physicists are told not to look behind the equations and figure more out. Why is it this way? Let me be frank I am getting way outside my true understanding and parotting what I have read. Bu…

I'm sure physicists already put a lot of effort in trying to derive Schrödinger's equation, the basis of QM, out of a simpler theory. It's not easy and would for sure deserve a nobel price. There is no consortium hindering anyone from persuing this.

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#94

Post by crimsonalucard »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #71

Personally I find it amusing Hossenfelder is now invoking the need for learning philosophy of science, given how hostile she's been to it before. See for instance http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-unbearable-ligh... that begins with: "Philosophy isn’t useful for practicing physicists. On that, I am with Steven Weinberg and Lawrence Krauss who have expressed similar opinions." Though to be fair, she clarifi…

The philosophy of science is different from philosophy.

The philosophy of science is really a meta field for science while philosophy itself encompasses things the philosophy of religion and other things core to the human experience.

When studying something of scientific nature the human experience like religion, art or that kind of thing is the domain of the humanities and entertainment and not of the universe in general.

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#95

Post by jagged-chisel »

d--b wrote: post #87

Short version, without the anger and bitterness: Theoretical physicists' way of working is to put forward baseless mathematical models and build $40bn machines to prove them wrong. They should instead work on theoretical inconsistencies that have been known for a while.

thanks for the tl;dr.

I'd argue back to the author that "putting forward 'baseless' mathematical models" is "working on theoretical inconsistencies." When you're testing a black box for the content of the box without the ability to open the box, one may have little basis for an idea that might, maybe, could possibly provide useful results. That testing will definitely provide information, even if it's the basis of ruling out an entire class of tests.

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#96

Post by celticmusic »

ocfnash wrote: post #78
celticmusic wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how you missed it, but she did give a recommendation. Attempt to resolve inconsistencies as a means of discovery.

I did not miss this statement; for me this does not constitute a recommendation. Indeed I think many of the researchers of whom she is critical could claim that this is what they're doing.

more than a tad unfair to accuse her of not offering suggestions by claiming her suggestion isn't a suggestion.

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#97

Post by kosievdmerwe »

nonbel wrote: post #83
SiempreViernes wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, Hossenfelders great fight has been with the concept of "naturalness", a fight that has now been won by the LHC killing off all the theories based on that concept. And it wasn't ever so simple as "chasing mathematical elegance instead of trying to explain observations", the problem has been that there was a theory that could explain almost perfectly everything within a certain region of physics, but can't ea…

>"the problem has been that there was a theory that could explain almost perfectly everything within a certain region of physics, but can't easily be extended." Sounds a lot like overfitting.

Sounds more like a formula that needs more terms.

Compare the classical physics formula for momentum, p=mv, vs relativistic formula, p=γmv. γ is almost 1 for most low velocities, it only starts jumping up to infinity when we get close to c.

The point being that the classical formula is pretty good in it's zone of low velocities, but as soon as you get too far out of the implicit term's "constraints" the formula breaks down and you need to add more to it to get it working for both low and high velocities. Which doesn't sound easy.

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#98

Post by micmil »

seemslegit wrote: post #53

I really really want a reason to not dismiss this as vapid demagoguery running on the "Woman scientist challenges predominantly male establishment on stagnant paradigms" ticket because this is absolutely what it reads like. "But for all I can tell at this moment in history I am the only physicist who has at least come up with an idea for what to do. " This is one heavy claim (two actually), is there some place where…

If your primary takeaway from this is "woman write thing" then you may need to read it again.

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#99

Post by chopin »

celticmusic wrote: post #32
ocfnash wrote: post #8

I dare say the author is right on many points but statements like: "But for all I can tell at this moment in history I am the only physicist who has at least come up with an idea for what to do." make it hard for me to share her point of view, especially as these ideas are not mentioned.

I'm not sure how you missed it, but she did give a recommendation. Attempt to resolve inconsistencies as a means of discovery.

But that's like telling me "run faster" if I am complaining that I can't run 100m in 10sec. I would think that almost all theoretical work revolves around resolving inconsistencies (such as between quantum field theory and general relativity). This advice is too generic.

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#100

Post by Scarblac »

ibeckermayer wrote: post #90
Redoubts wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We just need to innovate" K.

In this case, though, the idea that we need to resolve inconsistencies is the correct diagnosis and shines a light on the incredible failure of the prevailing institutions. Take for example the idea that a photon is both a particle and a wave. This dogma has been force fed to students for decades without the glaring inconsistency being resolved, or even pointed to as a thing that needs resolving — something is either…

A photon isn't both a particle and a wave. It's something else that happens to share some features with both.
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