Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by SiempreViernes » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 6:43 PM UTC

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.

Eh? You can’t point a telescope at an event that happened (here) years ago! Also, if it ever came out you’ve wasted good night skies on fake events, preventing other astronomy from being carried out by interrupting it with too’s that are known to be fake?! Like non-transient observers get their time sniped enought already?!!! You wouldn’t have friends left in the funding agency at best.

Anyway most events are BHBH mergers with no EM counterparts, so non-detection of those mean nothing.

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

#172

Post by peteradio » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 6:47 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #158

Scarblac wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>> A photon isn't both a particle and a wave. It's something else that happens to share some features with both. But physicists have given up on figuring out what it IS. They have decided that having math that can predict the outcome of experiments is enough. They're not wrong, but it feels rather unsatisfying. IMHO there have been a couple avenues worth exploring that are being largely ignored.

Its not satisfying because its not intuitive. Its not intuitive because our billion years of evolution never exposed use to such experiences to observe. If we limit ourselves to only whats intuitive it will be necessarily limiting to our ability to make new discoveries.

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

#173

Post by ISL » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 6:49 PM UTC

maxharris wrote: post #161

ISL wrote: post #86

I strongly disagree that the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years. We have been looking really hard for answers to persistent questions. While we have not found affirmative answers, physicists have systematically ruled out option after option after option. We have not yet discovered a unified-theory-of-everything, but we know a whole lot more about what that theory is not . Furthermore, the past 40…

Lee Smolin deals with this question in Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum. He relies on the same facts, makes many of the same points you do, and he comes to the exact opposite conclusion (assuming, of course, that I actually understand your position fully, and his as well). That's interesting to me because I think it might point to a philosophical disagreement between your…

Part of the difference may stem from the fact that I am an experimentalist, and he is a theorist. Theoretical progress has been slow, in large part because Nature has been unwilling to show any new experimental deviations from the Standard Model.

Experimentally, people continue to hammer away at the Standard Model (and gravity, my specialty), and the paradigm continues to hold. With few exceptions, most ideas from 40 years ago have been put to significant tests and turned out not to be how Nature operates.

From a theory standpoint, without new guidance from us, theorists are forced to attempt to out-think Nature, which is extremely hard to do. Smolin may be bummed, but theorists can take solace in the fact that the problem is extremely difficult.

In the particular case of quantum-mechanics, the day that theorists divine a compelling way that one interpretation of QM makes a prediction that differs from that of another interpretation is the day that an experimentalist starts building a test to find out which one is true.

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

#174

Post by vkou » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 6:50 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #164

Does anyone else feel like the abstractions and models in physics have gone passed the point where the casual outsider (even a technically and scientifically minded one) can no longer intuitively understand it? Because that's how I feel. There are so many things I just don't understand now like: 1. I originally thought the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle was a natural consequence of using particles (photos) for meas…

The casual observer hasn't been able to understand the forefront of physics for a very long time. Maxwell's equations have been known for 150 years[1], but the average high school physics student hasn't the foggiest idea of what a differential equation is. At best, they have a vague understanding that electricity and magnetism are more-or-less interchangeable.

Once you get into invisible forces acting across very small distances, nothing about how the world works is 'intuitive'. The most precise description of it is... A bunch of math, and not the kind of math that people learn in their K-12.

[1] As has entropy, and the laws of thermodynamics. Yet even educated people often have no idea of what the laws of thermodynamics actually imply! You'd figure that people would take a little bit of an interest in them, given that they live in a society powered by combustion engines...

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

#175

Post by SiempreViernes » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 6:55 PM UTC

nonbel wrote: post #169

SiempreViernes wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that’s what it sounds like then that is a failure of my description: the problem is nothing at all like overfitting, and casting it in that light would be pointless.

How many free parameters do "the foundations of physics" allow? I was concerned a few years back when a "blip" at CERN resulted in theoretical physicists publishing 300+ different theories to explain it in a short period of time. All of these theories were presumably consistent with "the foundations of physics". And I guess that "blip" got rejected as a not something worth explaining anyway. Sounds like post-hoc over…

Calling it ”overfitting” is actually you overfitting your model of how theory works on this one concept from machine learning.

The actual events of the 750 GeV peak are much closer to neural networks hallucinating, and the diversity of models created doesen’t strike me as evidence of overfitting...

Anyway, you clearly didn’t trust my summary, and I no longer trust you have an honest interest in learning more, so I’ll stop here.

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

#176

Post by seemslegit » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 6:55 PM UTC

senderista wrote: post #159

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…

I think she’s bitter and aggrieved but I’ve never seen evidence of her playing the gender card.

I don't think she does per se, but I can't imagine even a blog post publication with this ratio of materiality to self-promotion being received well for a white-cishet phycisist in her position, maybe its more about the times than the gender.

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

#177

Post by SAI_Peregrinus » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 6:58 PM UTC

ibeckermayer wrote: post #157

Scarblac wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Fair point, so then let me reframe the inconsistency as: there’s a phenomena that appears exhibits properties of both a particle and a wave but it can’t be both. So what is it? And the criticism of mainstream thought in physics would be: its wrongfully dismissive of my question, and ignoring the important job of looking for the answer.

No, the mainstream physics reply is "It's a quantized excitation of the electromagnetic field." since that's a perfectly reasonable reply to a perfectly reasonable question.

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

#178

Post by devcpp » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 7:03 PM UTC

scottlocklin wrote: post #85

strangescript wrote: post #47

I have become a bit more pessimistic about it the state of discovery. Things have slowed despite the current generation having abundant access to overwhelming compute power and the internet, things that did not exist even 30 years ago. There has never been a better time to collaborate or prove out theoretical models, yet there has been a decrease in needle moving discoveries.

Maybe the internet is an impediment to doing science. It certainly seems to shorten people's attention spans.

More importantly, the most brilliant minds (and there are still a LOT of them) are working for large companies on unimportant problems instead of doing research. Academia has lost all of its prestige, and companies pay ridiculously more.

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

#179

Post by danharaj » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 7:09 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #144

danharaj wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not general and vague if you're a practicing physicist and know what those inconsistencies are. For example, the Standard Model assumes neutrinos don't have mass, but they do.

> the Standard Model assumes neutrinos don't have mass No, it doesn't. The original Standard Model from the 1970s did, but then neutrino masses were discovered and the Standard Model was modified to include them.

By which mechanism do neutrinos gain their mass?

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

#180

Post by carapace » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 7:13 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #158

Scarblac wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>> A photon isn't both a particle and a wave. It's something else that happens to share some features with both. But physicists have given up on figuring out what it IS. They have decided that having math that can predict the outcome of experiments is enough. They're not wrong, but it feels rather unsatisfying. IMHO there have been a couple avenues worth exploring that are being largely ignored.

I was thinking about this just last night.

One of my favorite books is called "Architecture of Matter", it's a history of ideas about matter. One early idea was that matter is made of little tiny bits of stuff and that qualities of these little bits (such as being smooth or spikey) leads to macroscopic phenomenon (like spikey bits being acidic.)

The problem with this idea (and almost all others) is that it's just pushing the problem down a level: If matter is made out of little bits of matter, what are the little bits of matter made of?

FWIW, the wave-particle duality gets around this self-reflexive problem. Matter is made out of some other kind of stuff. But then, as you say, we still have the essential problem of "wtf is this stuff?" but we don't worry about that so much as long as our math describes the behavior of the stuff.

> They're not wrong, but it feels rather unsatisfying. IMHO there have been a couple avenues worth exploring that are being largely ignored.

What avenues? (Genuinely curious, not trolling.) It seems to me that the ultimate, existential question of what "stuff" actually is, is unanswerable (within the logical/scientific framework.)