Sometimes when I’m working on a coding or troubleshooting problem I get stuck iterating on an issue when really I need to step back and try to think about solving things a different way. My impression is this is what she’s trying to advocate the physics community to do. I think her overall tone is too negative and is turning a lot of people off but overall I think she is a needed voice just to make sure we’re on the right track.
Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years
181–190 of 326 posts
Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years
#182Doesn't it seem likely that there are important natural phenomena of complexity that simply exceed human ability to comprehend them no matter how long we work to understand them and no matter what evidence we stumble upon? That that evidence will always remain mysterious until we first develop artificial intelligence (for example) capable of interpreting it?
Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"Height field" is mathematical model of land.
Electromagnetic filed is mathematical model of what?
Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If you can come up with 300 different explanations for a random blip, your theory is obviously very flexible. You are probably overfitting.
If your solution to the problem of not being able to generalize your model to new/other data is to add more parameters. You are probably overfitting.
These are the hallmarks of overfitting.
Sorry that you cannot learn from others and only expect them to learn from you.
Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 received hundred of downvotes just asking questions here (like "Why we have right hand rule for current? What must be changed in properties of Nature to make it left hand rule?"). It's sad that I need to use throwaway accounts to talk about physics.
Try not to be discouraged, it's okay to talk about physics. But try to use the right language for it - mathematics. In online forums, physical ideas or questions are often described in words, which is subject to so much imagination that it can be considered philosophy, but not physics. It's almost pointless to talk without mathematical support. Words are words and have no special meaning. In the example above: A better question would be: Why is classical electrodynamics described by Maxwell's equations? Is there a more fundamental theory behind it? Reason: The 'right-hand rule' is not a rule, not a theorem. It can be derived.
Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years
#186The role of this "era" may be in reformulating quantum physics and, separately, general relativity in new ways that make the ideas more accessible to more people, and earlier in their lives. The goal could be to make of modern physics... the new classical physics. That is, we start to let go the crutches we still teach because it is thought that day-to-day life is more readily explained by Newtonian physics. We are n…
One problem is that physicists are not interested in lowering the bar to understanding advanced theories. Some say it's all fairly simple once you spend a decade learning some very advanced math. The art of teaching is in making the material more accessible, and at that I dont think much progress has been made.
I'm trying to explain quantum physics using single photo[0] (in Ukrainian, but you will get it). It has good adoption among regular people. It based on real physical experiment, just labels are added. BUT scientist are insane when they see it. They argue that quantum physics cannot be explained using picture, because the only true way to explain quantum physics is using mathematics.
[0]: https://scontent.fiev21-2.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/79956387_10...
Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years
#187Earlier 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. 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.
> But physicists have given up on figuring out what it IS. It depends on what you mean by that. What they've given up on is trying to find some sort of anthropocentric analogy. It's understandable that this is unsatisfying, since analogies are fundamental to how we understand things. Unfortunately, there's no reason to believe that a good analogy will exist.
We shouldn't be looking for analogies, we should be looking for theories consisting of precise concepts that directly explain what is happening in the universe.
Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
MOND is a better explanation than dark energy.
There was an article linked here just a week or two ago. Its claim was that the distance measurements used in cosmology may be wrong on larger scales. With the correction there is no need for MOND or dark energy. This needs confirmation of course. I have yet to see the "expected" galactic rotation curves that are contradicted by observation a lead to ideas about dark MATTER. I'm mean I've seen the curves but cant fin…
MOND has nothing to do with dark energy, and the article suggested nothing about anything addressed in MOND.
MOND is an attempt to make dark matter an unnecessary assumption.
No opinion on whether some MOND will turn out to work better than dark matter.
Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years
#189Does 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…
I'll take a shot at trying to answer some of your questions:
1. I originally thought the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle was a natural consequence of using particles (photos) for measurement.
That's the observer effect. When quantum mechanics was first constructed, it was believed that the uncertainty principle could be explained that way. As you mentioned, today, it is considered a more fundamental feature of the theory. As an analogy, consider how a signal sharply located in the time domain gets smeared out in the frequency domain, and vice versa. It's kind of like that.
2. What does it even mean to create more space? The universe is expanding. Ok, I can accept that. But what does it mean?
Specific volume (the average volume occupied by a unit of mass) increases. If the universe was spatially finite, so would total volume.
3. I find the models for dark matter and dark energy to be... unsatisfying. I realize there's experimental evidence for unobservable mass but it feels like a fudge.
Shrugs. If dark matter turns out to in fact be just a bunch of yet to discovered particles, that wouldn't be too strange. Dark energy is more of an unknown.
4. Of course we still have no quantum model for gravity.
That's an issue.
5. I don't really understand what a fundamental force really is. Like why does electromagnetism have a repulsive opposite but gravity doesn't? When I tried to look into this I ended up down some rabbit hole of "gauge forces" and got completely lost.
For now, there's a certain amount of arbitrariness involved: We could easily construct universes that worked differently. Furthermore, gravity is special: At the classical level, it's not a regular force, but a pseudo-force (a consequence of Newton's first law). Also note that it can in fact manifest repulsively (eg via the cosmological constant). From the perspective of particle physics, it's also special because the hypothesized force carrier (the graviton) would have spin 2 instead of 1.
Why is the Higgs Field not a force?
To my knowledge, there should be an effect one could call Higgs force. It would be tiny.
6. Why are some predictions of the Standard Model so incredibly accurate (like the magnetic moment of an electron IIRC?) while others are so incredibly inaccurate (eg IIRC the QFT prediction of vacuum energy is off by 120 orders of magnitude).
Quantum Electrodynamics can be solved perturbatively. We know how to do that. Things that can't be handled that way tend to be hard.
Regarding vacuum energy, you'd have to account for every fundamental field there is to get it right, so no surprise we get it wrong. Also, given that we have no quantum theory of gravity, it's not even clear to me that it is even the right approach.
7. Why are there exactly three generations of particles (ignoring the Higgs)?
Figure that out, get a Nobel prize. It could even be arbitrary, like how it's futile to ask why a particular snowflake looks different than another snowflake created in similar conditions: Random chance.
Hope that helps a bit.
Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years
#190Earlier 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.
How about "it's a thing that does not have an analog at the macro scale in which humans exist, therefore any explanation that does not use terminology from our daily lives will be unsatisfactory"