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

#321

Post by dang » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 12:31 AM UTC

wallace_f wrote: post #25

Physics has made a lot of progress in social justice and representation and these kinds of comments putting down "her point of view" is the type of toxic masculinity that will send us back 100 years.

Would you please stop taking HN threads into ideological flamewar? This was a clear violation of the site guidelines, which say: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

We've had to ask you a ton of times not to post like this. If you keep doing it we're going to have to ban you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22034356 and marked it off-topic.

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

#322

Post by mikhailfranco » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 4:00 AM UTC

hhas01 wrote: post #34

7532yahoogmail wrote: post #2

I've read several of Sabine's blogs over several months. I think she has very good ends in mind, has courage to push back on corporate/academic inertia ... such inertia comes with any human organization ... On the negative side she's big on complaining but small on alternatives. She's also a bit too blunt/dismissive of people -- this from a person who also dislikes corporate happy talk. As such it's not clear if she'…

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…

You should open a diner: TZIF

When I lived in the Middle East, I imagined a chain of dry bars called: TAIT

(Up until about 6 years ago, the Omani and Saudi outlets would have been called TAIW)

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

#323

Post by Nition » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 8:32 PM UTC

dorusr wrote: post #301

Nition wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's that same quote translated by Google instead of by a human.

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

#324

Post by frenchyatwork » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 8:40 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #273

frenchyatwork wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>> Unfortunately, there's no reason to believe that a good analogy will exist. That's no reason not to try. If there IS an objective reality I think it deserves a better description than just the math which characterizes its behavior.

If would be tremendous if someone can come up with one, I'm sure they'd be quite popular, but good analogies don't grow on trees.

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

#325

Post by carapace » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 4:27 AM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #274

carapace wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pus…

>> What avenues? Pilot wave theory is one. The other was a paper - forgive this explanation - the found equivalence between particle physics and fluid dynamics. Suggesting the objects in physics might be modeled as say vorticies in some kind of fluid (aether). The equivalence was IIRC only to first order, but the work to get there must have been a lot. I'm sure there are others.

Cheers!

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

#326

Post by K0SM0S » Sun, Jan 19, 2020, 1:56 AM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #283

K0SM0S wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% agree with you in all respects — I don't come from a physics background but I hear you loud and clear. I think the 'why' is deep and psycho-historical in nature: - we're exiting the "industrial" mindset where everyone is the same making the same products, to a wider topology of knowledge and skills (more and wider horizontals, more and bigger verticals, 'average' profiles become 'scattered'). This clearly driv…

GA is just "strongly typed" vector algebra. It recognises and embraces the inalienable fact that areas and volumes are fundamentally different to vectors and scalars. The reason Physics "went wrong" is that in 3D space (only!) the mathematics of areas and vectors is coincidentally isomorphic, so it's possible to cheat and use only vectors and scalars and then everything "works". Similarly, volumes and scalars are eas…

Hey there. I'm not sure you'll ever read this, but for the record. THANK YOU, so much.

So.. I've been dabbling with GA since we talked and it is an incredible framework!! I now understand your post loud and clear. It's a new dawn of math for me, I really mean that; Clifford is my new prophet (and I think this one's a keeper possibly for life, I don't know and can't imagine something better for the problem space). So much had not clicked with linear algebra for me, so much of matrices was obscure and had no representation in my mind... And GA's base objects and concepts are so, so elegant, and exquisitely intuitive.

Looking for a short conceptual intro I stumbled upon this channel/playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpzmRsG7u_gqaTo_vEseQ...

Turns out he's an outstandingly good teacher. Strong recommend.

I'll probably take a more "serious" course/book (with problems!) next — if anyone has a recommendation, please do!

Then make progress by working on actual stuff (I guess Hestenes' reformulations are a great starting point, retracing some of these following his reasonning).

And the penultimate goal would be to reformulate stuff myself, if I could — haha, that would be so great. More realistically use GA for research in designing models and representations.

___

TL;DR: you brought Math back into my life. We were on a break (but kept calling each other..) for the last decade and a half. GA is really, really strong. Remind me again, why don't we teach children like that for a century? /s (sigh)

Much thanks again