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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

#261

Post by jiggawatts »

Koshkin wrote: post #245
whatshisface wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> physicists are not interested in lowering the bar to understanding advanced theories That is not true, geometric algebra is an example of a recent pedagogic improvement that is getting a lot of attention. The problem is that physics will never be easy enough for someone who is not prepared to think deeply, because it is one of the few areas where truly new ideas can be found. Virtually every area of learning involv…

> is getting a lot of attention Not really. People look at it, marvel, and move on.

Worse, they're snidely dismissive.

I've been interested in GA for years now because it helps me visualise and understand otherwise inscrutable mathematics.

Nobody, literally nobody mired in the traditional mathematics of theoretical physics can explain why the Universe is best represented using matrices of complex numbers with constraints on them.

"Shut up and calculate" or some variant is the common response to such probing questions.

More often, it's some variant of "Well, I can understand it, you need to study more.". This is usually stated just politely enough not to be outright insulting. But if you keep asking probing questions, it turns out that they don't really understand either, the "study" didn't help them either. They only got better at pushing the symbols around on paper They're dismissive of such questions because they're too proud to admit their own ignorance.

Geometric Algebra (GA) was my "lightbulb" moment where I finally understood where Dirac matrices, Pauli matrices, and the like come from and why they have the structure that they do.

My logical conclusion was that GA is the far more elegant, clear, understandable mathematical structure that brings a wide range of Physical phenomena under a unified formulation. So clearly, it should be used for pedagogy.

Nobody agrees with that. The attitude is "well, that's nice, but it's mathematically equivalent so there's no benefit." which is just the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

Imagine if you saw a function called "add_num(a,b)" that computed the sum of two integers using the full bit-by-bit adder digital logic circuit simulated in software using boolean logic. Absolutely bonkers, insane code, right? Clearly this ought to be scrubbed from the codebase and replaced with a simple "+" operator, because we're not maniacs. Physicists would argue "no", it's equivalent, it's "working", so shut up, leave it and just move on.

Drives me batty.

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

#262

Post by cynusx »

ProblemFactory wrote: post #231
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…

> Or am I just a lemur trying to figure out how an airplane works? Unfortunately yes, all of us are. This is not a problem with physics or abstractions. It's a problem with our intuition. Our intuition is based on evolution and life experience, which is all formed based on mostly solid objects from 1cm to 100m moving at 1m/s to 100m/s. The universe however does not care what meatbags can experience with our senses. I…

You are looking at it from the wrong way.

It is not nature that describes itself in math, it's people who describe in math what their current understanding is of how nature works. The more mathematical simplicity in the formula, the better we understand it.

Organic chemistry is harder because our powers to observe it are computationally and experimentally limited at this point.

Human intuition is based on limited sensors, boundaries which we have overcome with science and applied science over time. Our intuition had to be collectively replaced with rigorous mathematical methodology to incorporate these foreign sensors.

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

#263

Post by cynusx »

ISL wrote: post #173
maxharris wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The original article as I understood it is breaking a lance for more rigorous selection of experiments based on how much more information the experiments can yield. With increasing costs in experimentation it makes sense to prioritize for impact.

In a way it is a meta-science because you need to find a methodology to evaluate which theory, when proven or disproven has the most impact.

I would imagine that the current working method would be to look at how often theoretical physicists cite a specific theoretical result/paper and hence "popularity" is the prioritization mechanism.

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

#264

Post by shpeedy »

Koshkin wrote: post #259
shpeedy wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel also air field (wind), height field (land), light field (photons), and so on.

My point exactly - fields are real, they are not merely mathematical models. (It's just that some words acquire a more precise meaning, being formalized as part of a model, and while it's true that models may contain an additional "scaffolding" that has no analogue in reality, field is not one of those.)

Field is mathematical abstraction, used in mathematical model, to represent a physical thing.

Physical things are real. Mathematical abstractions are not. OpenGL is not real too, but it looks very real and accurately predicts reality. In OpenGL, field is array, e.g. "float[][][] field;".

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

#265

Post by tim333 »

hhas01 wrote: post #66
tim333 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think setting AI on it may be the way forward.

AI is not some magical pixie dust or golden retriever chasing a stick. It may have its applications in pattern matching, particularly in chewing the exabyte datasets we increasingly have now, but it isn’t going to fetch the answers for us. Heck, it won’t even tell us the questions.

We shall see. Not today but give it 20 years and you may be surprised.

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

#266

Post by [deleted] »

Nition wrote: post #204
jxy wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

「三十輻，共一轂，當其無，有車之用。埏埴以為器，當其無，有器之用。鑿戶牖以為室，當其無，有室之用。故有之以為利，無之以為用。」

Google Translate on this fails almost completely but somehow turns it into a critique on the Internet Of Things: Thirty spokes, there is a hub. When it is free, it is used for cars. I think it is a device, when it is free, it is used for devices. Profit, useless.

[deleted]

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

#267

Post by catalogia »

brummm wrote: post #91
dnautics wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe with exceptionally high degrees of confidence that the sun will rise tomorrow. I have this belief because the sun has been observed to rise every day for something like a few million times in a row and I've never once witnessed it not rise. This belief is so strong I could comfortably call myself certain of it, but it's still nevertheless a belief. For most practical purposes, 'certainty' means an exceptionally high degree of confidence, where the margin for doubt becomes too small to bother ourselves with. But true certainty seems like something that can only arise from pure mathematics, not through observations of the world. I am truly certain that triangles have three sides, whereas I am 'merely' exceptionally confident that gravity exists.

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

#269

Post by wnissen »

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…

Certainly the complexity of the experiments shows why theories are so complicated. The neutron wasn't even observed until 1930, with an experiment that fits on a tabletop. Even into the 1940s you could put together a cyclotron in a lab and discover a new particle. Or observations of the cosmic background radiation, which were made with a 6 meter radio dish in suburban New Jersey. Now most research requires a facility that only governments are willing to fund. If it were easy, it would have been discovered by now.

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

#270

Post by beamatronic »

Nition wrote: post #204
jxy wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

「三十輻，共一轂，當其無，有車之用。埏埴以為器，當其無，有器之用。鑿戶牖以為室，當其無，有室之用。故有之以為利，無之以為用。」

Google Translate on this fails almost completely but somehow turns it into a critique on the Internet Of Things: Thirty spokes, there is a hub. When it is free, it is used for cars. I think it is a device, when it is free, it is used for devices. Profit, useless.

I got this one:

"Thirty spokes, there is a hub. When it is free, it is used for cars. I think it is a device, when it is free, it is used for devices. Profit, useless. "

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