241–250 of 342 posts
I'm going to try to merge the other thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867707 ) hither. Please stand by. Edit: that's done. I adopted the other title, in the hope that it will have less of a flamebait effect. All: no more Wolfram Derangement Syndrome comments, please. They're off topic because they're always the same, and they compose into a weird counterversion of the very thing they're deriding. https:…
As much as the guy can be annoying, the associated "Project Announcement" is a fascinating 20,000-word-ish article. [1] I've long assumed that the basic structure of the universe must be some kind of graph, simply because it's the most elementary structure there seems to be, and so easily gives rise to dimensionality. So seeing someone try to tackle this bottom-up and see if it can ultimately give rise to quantum mec…
"I've long assumed that the basic structure of the universe must be some kind of graph, " Do you mean this literally, or rather: "the basic structure of the universe CAN BE DESCRIBED by some kind of graph"?
Then particles and energy are patterns in the graph -- that we can describe useful physics in terms of the graph, but that the graph just is, it's not a description or approximation of something deeper.
Unless there's a semantic difference you're getting at that I'm not aware of?
I don't see anything of substance here, besides a lot of pretty graphs. Just like Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science", we have the problem that there is a vast gulf between what you need to make flashy popsci and what you need to make a real physical theory. In increasing order of difficulty, you need to: 1. make a set of dynamical rules that matches general relativity in the low energy limit, such as recovering Lorent…
(1) We certainly do have formal derivations of Lorentz covariance and the Einstein field equations, given in detail here: http://wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/some-re... (2) The article above already discusses the derivation of the matter contribution to the Lagrangian density, the derivation of energy-momentum tensor, and Lorentz transformations for elementary particles. (3) Both Hawking radiation an…
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It's not dead in the sense that we've done a better job of experimentally confirming things like general relativity and aspects of quantum mechanics, due to being able to accurately perform more precise observations (like with LHC and LIGO). I'd say this is a triumph of advances in experimental physics, though, rather than theoretical physics. There doesn't seem to have been any widely accepted fundamental theoretica…
This is pure speculation on my part so take it for a grain of salt. But I generally don't find that fields just stop advancing or go cold. It seems to me that usually what is happening is there is a lot of work going on at a level that does not make a lot of sense to report to a lay audience or at leas the media which covers the subject does not think a lay audience could understand or would be interested in it. Co S…
Human genome editing using CRISPR-Cas9 a few years ago was pretty big tbh.
I'm pretty sure that this would violate Bell's theorem, and I'd love an explanation of why it wouldn't. It looks to me like a system of local, hidden variables, unless there's some sense in which changes in the hypergraph can propagate faster than the speed of light.
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"I've long assumed that the basic structure of the universe must be some kind of graph, " Do you mean this literally, or rather: "the basic structure of the universe CAN BE DESCRIBED by some kind of graph"?
Literally, i.e. the fabric of space-time. Then particles and energy are patterns in the graph -- that we can describe useful physics in terms of the graph, but that the graph just is, it's not a description or approximation of something deeper. Unless there's a semantic difference you're getting at that I'm not aware of?
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Reading through the paper in (3) above. If I understand the text on page 26 correctly, you predict that quantum computers will not be more efficient than classical computers: "The class of problems that can be solved efficiently by quantum computers should be identical to the class of problems that can be solved efficiently by classical computers: More precisely, we predict in this appropriately coarse-grained case t…
I'm not sure if that is the case or not but if that is the prediction then they are in good company. Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft also has a cellular automaton theory and one of his conclusions is: "If engineers ever succeed in making such quantum computers, it seems to me that the CAT is falsified; no classical theory can explain quantum mechanics." By "such quantum computers" he means computers that can run Shor'…
> no classical theory can explain quantum mechanics."
Not sure I can agree with 't Hooft on this. A GR-based theory with closed timelike curves can easily have particles travelling through time to interfere with themselves, and thus reproduce the quantum phenomena like the double-slit experiment. There's been some work on this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/1gjekn/the_logic_o...
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I'd like to see that. Although honestly I find him and his brother to both be frustratingly vague and abstract at times.
At times, Eric has quite the way with words; yet on Lex Fridman's podcast, he really struggled to communicate Geometric Unity in a way that's even slightly accessible to a layperson, despite Lex's patient prodding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIAZJNe7YtE I actually find his brother Bret to be the opposite in his manner, far more measured and comprehensible: though he'll occasionally forget that you might not know…
What irks me most is when Bret starts talking about how our society isn't sustainable and that we need to rethink society by incorporating insights from game theory and evolutionary biology. On that score, he is frustratingly vague. I don't even think I would likely agree with him, but without something more concrete there's nothing there for me to analyze. Perhaps I just haven't found the right podcast or whatever where he goes into exactly what he means by that.