Has a surfer Ph.D. rewritten physics? Maybe. • Hacker News Board

Re: Has a surfer Ph.D. rewritten physics? Maybe.

#41

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 28, 2008, 3:12 PM UTC

bootload wrote: post #40

gaika wrote: post #6

Have a pleasure of knowing Garrett, his foot once helped bring traffic to my site: http://joe.jaanix.com/22679-nuke-cerenkov-glow :) You might also soon hear about his friend mentioned in the article, Brandyn. He's working on a problem that is just as important as ToE. They had a running joke: who would find ToE first, Garrent by math and thinking or Brandyn by inventing AI that would do it for him.

*"... Have a pleasure of knowing Garrett, his foot once helped bring traffic to my site: http://joe.jaanix.com/22679-nuke-cerenkov-glow :) ..." Hey Joe thanks for reminding me of jaanix again. I seem to remember it being reviewed in HN a long while ago. Looking at it again the sig/noise is pretty good. Is the site pulling HackerNews from RSS?

[deleted]

Re: Has a surfer Ph.D. rewritten physics? Maybe.

#42

Post by aswanson » Mon, Jul 28, 2008, 3:55 PM UTC

DaniFong wrote: post #38

aswanson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No references and I may be going down the wrong path here, but wasn't there some relatively recent activity with respect to the quantization of space, with the Planck length being the minimal quantum?: http://www.scienceandresearchdevelopmentinstitute.com/planck...

As far as I know the question is completely theoretical: we haven't been able to use the idea to produce any predictions which we might use to measure whether the universe is this way or isn't. Also, that linked paper seems to be nothing other than numerology. It is interesting that the numbers are so close, but that could be a pure coincidence.

Numerolgy, hilarious. I have to use that one someday, hope you don't mind. At any rate, I meant to post a Smolin paper on LQG that posited quantized space, and if I recall there was supposed to be some data coming in from an observatory that could lend some weight to the theory (back in 2005?).

Re: Has a surfer Ph.D. rewritten physics? Maybe.

#43

Post by d0mine » Mon, Jul 28, 2008, 5:05 PM UTC

wheels wrote: post #39

d0mine wrote: post #5

No, he has not. http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/001505.htm...

I find that blog post characteristic of what's wrong with academia. Lisi's obviously not a nutjob, and obviously not an idiot, and he's treated with contempt for proposing a big idea that might be wrong; might even be spectacularly wrong. Academia as a whole would usually rather see people get back in line and go on solving irrelevant problems. I found it encouraging that in the originally linked article that he at l…

There are "big ideas" which look interesting and fresh for a general public, but they are boring and plain wrong for any professional in the field.

I'm sure you can find such things in your area of expertise.

All that glisters is not gold.

Re: Has a surfer Ph.D. rewritten physics? Maybe.

#44

Post by Asmodeus » Mon, Jul 28, 2008, 5:12 PM UTC

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #13

brentr wrote: post #11

I don't remember where I read it, nor the exact wording, but there is a quote that is perfect for this. It went something like this, "Godel proved incompleteness. Anyone who thinks there is a theory of everything laughs in the face of Godel." My point is that physics does not exist in a vacuum. It is built up from observational data found in nature and taken from experiments. If mathematics can't come to complete tru…

I'm with you about 80% of the way here. Godel showed (and guys tell me if I mess this up) that formal self-consistent systems have both statements that are true that cannot be proven and false statements that cannot disproved. In other words, complete systems are incomplete. This does not mean that complete systems cannot model reality to a high degree -- there's no reason why a ToE could pop out from some rotation o…

It will be incomplete in the sense that it will contain axioms with no formal proof. Technically speaking the TOE is this axiom.

However, you can even prune these axioms by selecting for the simplest one that conflicts with the least data.

Re: Has a surfer Ph.D. rewritten physics? Maybe.

#45

Post by wheels » Mon, Jul 28, 2008, 7:27 PM UTC

d0mine wrote: post #43

wheels wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that blog post characteristic of what's wrong with academia. Lisi's obviously not a nutjob, and obviously not an idiot, and he's treated with contempt for proposing a big idea that might be wrong; might even be spectacularly wrong. Academia as a whole would usually rather see people get back in line and go on solving irrelevant problems. I found it encouraging that in the originally linked article that he at l…

There are "big ideas" which look interesting and fresh for a general public, but they are boring and plain wrong for any professional in the field. I'm sure you can find such things in your area of expertise. All that glisters is not gold.

Sure, but boring and correct isn't a whole lot more interesting, and academia seems to produce a seemingly endless stream of such in my field of expertise. Many of the breakthroughs would have seemed naïve prior to having become dominant. Incidentally, some of my most productive research while in college was sparked by reading a paper that was patently wrong, but off-kilter enough to get me to look into some previously unexplored corners for new models.