81–90 of 236 posts
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Hmm, a new kind of science.
Due to the mixed reviews, I haven't bothered to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science even though I assume that the target audience is more or less people who were fascinated with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos:_Making_a_New_Science
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The person you are replying to is either wrong or has stated it very badly. The idea of their being both a wave and particle based description of photons that don't mix well is basically physics as known in the 1920s. The modern theoretical framework of light is quantum field theory (special relativity + quantum mechanics, but actually not quite that for [insert qft textbook] reasons...), which doesn't fit into eithe…
We need to go back to the 1920s and start again. As the article explains, modern QM has hit a dead end, and it's little more than mathematical games that have not helped us understand reality.
i dont think that's true. A lot of people would assume that this "mathematical game" is like theories with air pressure. The statistical methods used for computing heat and pressure can be "explained" as little particles of atoms moving about due to their vibrations, and the ultimate observed behaviour is just that - a lot of particles pushing and shoving dependent on the temperature of these particles. this simple explanation can be understood without the maths - after all, the maths is only there to tackle the large numbers and statistical inferences needed. The statistical methods "isn't the theory".
However, such views restricts the mind imho. To seek a simple, understandable explanation that is not mathematical is probably a wrong goal. A lot of people have tried to explain laws such as gravity using such simple rules - a particle that moves and hits in all directions, but bigger bodies will block certain direction (thus resulting in a net force from the opposite side - aka, gravity).
For some time already we are in an "epicyclean phase" of physics, trapped by the extraordinary predictive success of Quantum Electrodynamics and still using mathematical methods devised in the 19th century (variational calculus). This has lead us to the current situation, with extremely complicated theories at the limit of human understanding that bear no new results. It will take a modern day Copernicus to come up w…
That makes the assumption that there exists a simpler view of physics that will result in more productivity. IMO, some of the smartest people that have ever lived, live right now. Mainly because we have more humans alive than ever before. The amount of brain power working to find these simpler models is breath taking, yet we aren't seeing the elegant simple solutions fall out like we once did. I don't think that's a…
It is a hard balance to strike because on the one hand you want to be constantly challenged by your fellow scientists but on the other hand also just take the foolish liberty to fully develop your (most likely flawed) intuition.
So even if I'm highly sceptical of Wolfram he gets my full respect and also Hugh Everett [0] who wrote a letter to Einstein as a 12-year old with Einstein answering: Dear Hugh: There is no such thing like an irresistible force and immovable body. But there seems to be a very stubborn boy who has forced his way victoriously through strange difficulties created by himself for this purpose. Sincerely yours, A. Einstein And later in life courageously confronted Nils Bohr with the [...] idea that the universe is describable, in theory, by an objectively existing universal wave function (which does not "collapse") i.e. Many-Worlds-Interpretation.
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It will take a modern day Copernicus We might already have a modern day Copernicus. Could be string theory, could be something else. The problem is that we don't really have any experimental data that can't be explained by the Standard Model. What we really need is a modern day Galileo that can perform some sort of observations, like finding Jupiter's moons, that don't fit in with the existing conventional physics.
> we don't really have any experimental data that can't be explained by the Standard Model What was the evidence Copernicus saw that epicycles didn't explain? (Honest question.)
It wasn’t until Kepler that a geocentric model involving ellipses actually was more predictive.
Might be worth returning to the Pythagorean interpretation (which Bohr discussed): All is number. The world is made of math, not stuff.
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I used matrix math as a hand wavey example of how one might purely numerically describe the angles in a structure. What don't we understand? We know the forces of all the atoms that act on each other, what is the mystery at this point other than calculating it is hard?
"We know the forces of all the atoms that act on each other, what is the mystery at this point other than calculating it is hard?" might be true, but it's computationally intractable and even if you did find a way around it you'd just learn that your force field was inaccurate, or that proteins don't actually fold to their energy minimum. Not just hard, but NP-hard. In fact, the "protein folding problem is NP hard" i…
Whether it is QM, or Dark M/E, etc. A lot of these constructs feel strained to me at times.
But. having said that, I am guessing, that back when the cutting edge was Maxwell, and Lorentz, and along came a burst of genius, named in the article, Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg, and I would include Pauli, Godel and probably a bunch of others.
My prediction is that there will be a burst of insight and innovation, these things tend to come in clumps, when a lot of people start "riffing" off of each other.
There is no way to predict when, but I only hope I am still breathing to witness it!
Amusing to see all the pessimistic comments form programmers who have zero understanding beyond high school maths thinking somehow there is a magic solution to all the problems in physics like you can just refactor everything. Quantum field theory is definitely not stuck in the 1920s. Modern physics has a lot more going on than 19th century mathematics. We understand quite a lot about the mathematical structure under…
> Quantisation is a nearly well understood process The layman’s explanation I received for this, perhaps incorrectly, is that you fill in variables for factors that you don’t understand or can’t measure with whatever value makes the rest of the theory / equation work. Is that at all correct?
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It will take a modern day Copernicus We might already have a modern day Copernicus. Could be string theory, could be something else. The problem is that we don't really have any experimental data that can't be explained by the Standard Model. What we really need is a modern day Galileo that can perform some sort of observations, like finding Jupiter's moons, that don't fit in with the existing conventional physics.
Could the would-be modern-day Copernicii be being stymied by modern-day academic funding structures and grant review committees?
Amusing to see all the pessimistic comments form programmers who have zero understanding beyond high school maths thinking somehow there is a magic solution to all the problems in physics like you can just refactor everything. Quantum field theory is definitely not stuck in the 1920s. Modern physics has a lot more going on than 19th century mathematics. We understand quite a lot about the mathematical structure under…
The one that I remember foremost is tunneling to (dis)charge the floating gates on flash memory transistors, but that just scratches the surface.
"Flash memory chips found in USB drives use quantum tunneling to erase their memory cells."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applications_of_quantum_mech...
This I did not know:
"It even exists in the simple light switch. The switch would not work if electrons could not quantum tunnel through the layer of oxidation on the metal contact surfaces."
From the point of view of chemistry, QM “works”. It provides results that can be tested experimentally and predictions that can be validated. There are issues with computability but that’s more engineering than science. Determining structure, spectra and other physical properties is quite helpful. What was the cliche? All theories are wrong, some theories are useful. It needs to be rephrased from vector codes into ma…
To me, this always felt like programmers excusing abhorrent code with "but it works". Quantum theory isn't. It's not a single, cohesive, consistent theory.[1] There is no recipe you can apply, it's just a bunch of guessworks and heuristics that happen to produce the numerically correct equations if you keep trying long enough. This isn't secret or some sort of external criticism, you'll find this front-and-centre in…