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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

#301

Post by dorusr »

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.

Sounds like this quote (posted elsewhere in this thread):

Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;

It is the center hole that makes it useful.

Shape clay into a vessel;

It is the space within that makes it useful.

Cut doors and windows for a room;

It is the holes which make it useful.

Therefore profit comes from what is there;

Usefulness from what is not there.

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu - chapter 11

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

#302

Post by hhas01 »

brutt wrote: post #119
hhas01 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, string theory and multiverse aren’t theories . Heck, they’re not even hypotheses (since they offer no means to test them). They’re simple speculation; what philosophers right back to the ancient Greeks were only too happy to rest on for 2000 years, until Persian protoscientists, during their own all-too-brief golden age, annoyingly said “but wait, don’t you think we should at least test our beliefs before we…

> († So no Warp Drive either, kids… sorry!;) Warp drive will be real when we will crack vacuum. Maybe we will be able to condensate vacuum, or make a supercavitating shield, or something else. I have idea of an engine, but a) it must be supertiny, b) the only possibility to feed enough energy into engine is to launch it through Sun.

Causality’s the pig. Outracing your own light cone presents a problem, to say the least.

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

#303

Post by pas »

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…

Everything you touch on - except the Heisenberg uncertainty (which is due to fundamental property of any finite signal, shown through a Fourier transform) - is a big (really mind-boggling) anomaly of current contemporary physics/cosmology.

Just the other day right here on HN was a link posted about dark energy, and how maybe it's just measurement calibration error. Poof, solved. Or not, we shall see.

Reading about the statistics and epistemology behind the experiments (Andrew Gelman's blog) and models (eg why preferably hierarchical Bayesian models) will help a lot to cut through the problem of understanding and satisfaction. (Rarely we can have both for complex issues.)

Oh, and everything is a field. Fields are coupled (coupling constants, running couplings). Some fields' have non-null base energy state. (So vacuum energy is non-zero. Maybe. It depends how many and which fields your model deals with.)

Some kind of energy wiggle in some fields translates to one/two/a-lot of wiggles in other/the-same fields. (See the Feynman diagrams, how there are infinite number of possible but decreasingly probable interactions between "particles".)

What is a force? It's just one well separated aspect of the whole model. Ultimately we think all of them are coupled into one big interaction that involves every field. See the electro-weak unification.

Why gravity doesn't seem to be able to attract? Because maybe it's not a field, it's just the shape of spacetime warped by energy and we haven't found negative energy. (Einstein's General Relativity) Or it's just based on entropy and thus it's a very strange emergent property of our universe. ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity - bonus, it explains dark matter too, so maybe it's simpler - but it's just the ugly MOND (modified Newtonian) in disguise, noooo!) Okay, so maybe back to higher dimensions and branes and loops and strings? But nobody understands that! So we wait.

Why three? Because so far we found three and thus our models reproduce exactly that many.

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

#304

Post by hhas01 »

achillesheels wrote: post #123
hhas01 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aye, it’s easy to make criticisms (and Zeus knows the price of good science is eternal vigilance), but the easiest and most satisfyingly Ockhamite explanation of the slowdown in physics remains: all its low-hanging fruit is long since taken. And while there’s no harm in pondering the philosophical origins of the scientific method while debating where to go next, we should take care not to go backwards either, as that…

It’s amusing you jocularly employ Zeus in this conversation. Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Maxwell, etc. did not have Zeus on their minds, maybe it would be wise for you not to either?

https://comb.io/dqaqWp

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

#305

Post by ramblerman »

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…

> 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.

I feel this answer is a bit of a self justifying cop-out. A lot of the value of physics from the perspective of society has been generating understanding about the world that actually translates into manipulating the world.

Reaching the moon, superfast internet, gps, microwaves, etc... etc..

You are not wrong of course, but knowledge for the sake of knowledge is not always useful, and also not always worth funding imo.

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

#306

Post by SiempreViernes »

nonbel wrote: post #290
SiempreViernes wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at this: theorists come up with something like 300 different models, and you declare they all used the same theory to do it? Of course they didn't! Why would you assume they all did the same thing?! Further, of the various frameworks used, many will have been created by imposing some further symmetry on the standard theory, in effect decreasing the number of free parameters!

Can you point out one that was inconsistent with the foundations of physics? I suppose it is possible some were that radical.

So now you demand that a new theory shouldn't describe what the old theory describes? Just what do you put into the concept of "overfitting"?!

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

#307

Post by seemslegit »

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.

Not sure why the original response got flagged but: I think that her being a woman in this context provides this kind of output with more amplification than if she hasn't been while at the same time diminishing her opportunities for honest collegiate feedback. That's not her fault or an advantage that she's deliberately taking, or an advantage all for a researcher, maybe for an author/pundit.

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

#308

Post by brutt »

nablaoperator wrote: post #299
brutt wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what need to be changed in properties of Nature to switch EM with Right Hand Rule into EM with Left Hand Rule? Can you explain this using a formula? Where we can expect to see EM with LHR? Can we see it in our Laniakea? Or at opposite side of Shapley Attractor - Dipole Repeller? Or at perpendicular one? Do we have void between RHR and LHR? Can we cross it? What is nature of EM? Is it because of nonlinear trajector…

I can't take you seriously anymore.

You are not alone - nobody can. I'm struggling to find just anybody to talk about these problems.

How photons are formed? IMHO, FTL speed is required to form a photon.

How photons are consumed? Can we make a macro model for this?

Can we cool/condensate/warm up vacuum? How this will affect speed of light?

What will see if we will zoom in to zoom level below Planck scale?

How long photon can travel? 100B years? 100T years? What will happen at EOL? Where lost energy is going?

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

#309

Post by brutt »

hhas01 wrote: post #302
brutt wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> († So no Warp Drive either, kids… sorry!;) Warp drive will be real when we will crack vacuum. Maybe we will be able to condensate vacuum, or make a supercavitating shield, or something else. I have idea of an engine, but a) it must be supertiny, b) the only possibility to feed enough energy into engine is to launch it through Sun.

Causality’s the pig. Outracing your own light cone presents a problem, to say the least.

Causality is not a problem for physic. For example, electron can move faster than speed of light in a medium without violating of anything.

The problem with FTL engine is that Cherenkov radiation alone will convert any FTL object into ball of plasma.

The only way for material object to survive FTL speed is to travel in the it own space-time "bubble". The only natural object with properties of such bubble is black hole. So, warp drive is possible to create, in theory, if we will be able to create an artificial black hole like shield.

Moreover, the only way to reach FTL speed is to throw something back at FTL speed. It's not possible to create any material fuels with FTL exhaust velocity. The only way to throw something at FTL speed is to throw it in it own space-time bubble.

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

#310

Post by axilmar »

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…

Personally I am not convinced a particle is a wave until collapsed. There is nothing in the double slit experiment that definitely proves that. It may be that light particles bounce off something and change trajectory and create the illusion of there being a wave.

In the double slit experiment, if you rotate the slit 90 degrees, the interference pattern is rotated 90 degrees in the same direction. Doesn't this prove there is no wave involved?

If you make the slits larger, the pattern changes, and then vanishes.

If you make the slits circular, the interference pattern becomes circular.

If you make the slits triangular, the inteference pattern becomes triangular itself.

All these things tell me that particles are not waves at any point, they just bump to something and take a different trajectory.

When, in the same experiment, a light detector is placed, and the interference pattern disappears, this does not mean the wave goes away and there is a collapse to a single particle; it means the detector produces particles that don't bounce off something. What if the detector is placed near the particle beam emitter? has it ever been tried? I don't know. If placing the detector near the emitter makes an interference pattern reappear, then we certainly have no collapsing of any wave.

What if we put the slits very close to the emitter? do we get the same inteference pattern? what if we put the slits further away from the emitter? does the interference pattern change? if yes, then we certainly have no wave.

And something else regarding quantum entanglement: how can we be sure that the particles are not created with their properties in such a state that they appear entangled when they are measured? why do we assume there is a communication between the particles on the fly rather than the two particles having relatable but not connected properties? we just assume that due to the other assumption that particles are waves and they collapse.

Finally, how do we know that matter attracts matter and it is not the void that pushes matter into clumps? how do we know that the actual distance between the furthest points in the universe is the same as it ever was, and simply new positions are created within the same distance? and these positions are what push matter to clump together?

I'd love to sit down with an honest physicist to research these types of questions, a physicist that cares more about answering these types of questions than hunting for grants and fearing to go against the status quo, but it seems only crackpots are willing to do that.

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