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‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

quantamagazine.org

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Re: ‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

#21

Post by MichaelBurge »

froggychairs wrote: post #16
yuuuuyu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All soon to be obsoleted by ChatGPT. /s (I agree with your point and share your appreciation.)

Sarcasm aside. Even the output from GPT-4 is quite bland and generic. Very good for performing tasks (I.e convert a blob of text into a knowledge graph or generate X code), but quite awful at the elegant prose we see at play Wonder how long before that’s solved. Hard to believe training on such large swathes of the web doesn’t result a compressed generic representation of language within its weights.

Nobody outside OpenAI/Microsoft has access to the GPT-4 base model yet. Use Bing Creative for a differently finetuned GPT-4 than ChatGPT or "gpt-4".

Re: ‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

#22

Post by simonh »

criddell wrote: post #19
axilmar wrote: post #12

Sincere question: could it be that the underlying structure of the universe is really simple but since we have no idea what it is we have to use exotic mathematics for it?

Some think the underlying structure of the universe is mathematics. That is, the universe isn’t merely describe by mathematics, but it is a mathematical structure.

I see mathematics as a rigorous highly consistent descriptive language. Physics theories expressed mathematically are very precise descriptions of observed behaviour, but calling them laws is deceptive. The fact that they align precisely to observed behaviour just indicates that the behaviour of physical systems is highly consistent.

Well, I hope so. If reality was inconsistent and things happened arbitrarily with no rhyme or reason I think we’d be in big trouble.

I’m not totally unsympathetic to the view that maths is fundamental though. It’s an interesting way to think about it.

Re: ‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

#23

Post by criddell »

simonh wrote: post #22
criddell wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some think the underlying structure of the universe is mathematics. That is, the universe isn’t merely describe by mathematics, but it is a mathematical structure.

I see mathematics as a rigorous highly consistent descriptive language. Physics theories expressed mathematically are very precise descriptions of observed behaviour, but calling them laws is deceptive. The fact that they align precisely to observed behaviour just indicates that the behaviour of physical systems is highly consistent. Well, I hope so. If reality was inconsistent and things happened arbitrarily with no…

I wish I understood it better, but you don’t have to go much below classical mechanics before I’m lost.

But from what I’ve read, the deeper you go, the more it’s difficult to find something other than mathematics. When you ask what is a particle you find out it’s probably an excitation of a quantum field. So what is a quantum field if not a mathematical structure? Is there a physical reality to wave function collapse?

Maybe it doesn’t matter. The shut up and calculate crowd doesn’t seem to care.

Re: ‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

#24

Post by simonh »

criddell wrote: post #23
simonh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see mathematics as a rigorous highly consistent descriptive language. Physics theories expressed mathematically are very precise descriptions of observed behaviour, but calling them laws is deceptive. The fact that they align precisely to observed behaviour just indicates that the behaviour of physical systems is highly consistent. Well, I hope so. If reality was inconsistent and things happened arbitrarily with no…

I wish I understood it better, but you don’t have to go much below classical mechanics before I’m lost. But from what I’ve read, the deeper you go, the more it’s difficult to find something other than mathematics. When you ask what is a particle you find out it’s probably an excitation of a quantum field. So what is a quantum field if not a mathematical structure? Is there a physical reality to wave function collapse…

The deeper we go the more objects we find that we can only describe using mathematics, for sure. That’s not the same as them being mathematics though. We don’t know what the essential nature of these objects is.

It is an interesting speculation, but it’s also possible it’s just confusing the map for the terrain.

Re: ‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

#25

Post by d--b »

axilmar wrote: post #12

Sincere question: could it be that the underlying structure of the universe is really simple but since we have no idea what it is we have to use exotic mathematics for it?

This is Stephen Wolfram’s bet. He thinks the universe is based on simple computation rules.

The emergence of complex traits from simple rules still requires exotic mathematics to describe macroscopically.

Re: ‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

#26

Post by strogonoff »

axilmar wrote: post #12

Sincere question: could it be that the underlying structure of the universe is really simple but since we have no idea what it is we have to use exotic mathematics for it?

The universe could be simpler than the current models suggest, but that would require taking a step back too far for the comfort of today’s STEM-oriented mind. For as long as natural sciences consider philosophy a load of hand-wavy abstract inapplicable hogwash they will be stuck iterating on existing physical models towards local maximum.

Re: ‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

#27

Post by serf »

froggychairs wrote: post #16
yuuuuyu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All soon to be obsoleted by ChatGPT. /s (I agree with your point and share your appreciation.)

Sarcasm aside. Even the output from GPT-4 is quite bland and generic. Very good for performing tasks (I.e convert a blob of text into a knowledge graph or generate X code), but quite awful at the elegant prose we see at play Wonder how long before that’s solved. Hard to believe training on such large swathes of the web doesn’t result a compressed generic representation of language within its weights.

>Wonder how long before that’s solved.

creative prompting gets most of the way there, already.

'Tell me the current weather as if you were Marcel Proust'

Re: ‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

#28

Post by hilbert42 »

pa7x1 wrote: post #11
adastra22 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is t the problem of quantum gravity related? Does this being us closer to a grand unified theory?

It's related in the sense that the vanilla attempts to quantize gravity lead to infinities as described in the article. But the nature of these infinities is more troubling in the case of quantum gravity than those found in the rest of the theories that compose the Standard Model. Infinities appear very early in the series expansion of quantized gravity, at second order of the series expansion for the free theory. An…

I recall reading a book on String Theory in the late 1990s edited by Ed Witten where he mentions the problems with physics and the limits of mathematical techniques. It's long ago so I can't paraphrase his words accurately but he did so with such eloquence that I've long remembered the fact. He pitched the problem in terms of both existing physics and of new '21st Century' ideas inklings of which had somehow trickled down into the 20th Century and that physicists needed new mathematics to deal with them (I hope I've not mangled his words too much).

Nevertheless, I'm still in awe of Schwinger, Feynman et al who actually made renormalization work despite—according to Feynman—it being a 'dippy process'. These guys were truly physics and mathematics 'magicians'.

Re: ‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

#29

Post by sesm »

The way I read this: this method of finding non-pertrubative terms requires calculating perturbative terms first, that’s why it can’t be applied to QED and other more-or-less realistic theories. But of course string theorists can use this method to write more papers.

Re: ‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

#30

Post by esperent »

simonh wrote: post #18
axilmar wrote: post #12

Sincere question: could it be that the underlying structure of the universe is really simple but since we have no idea what it is we have to use exotic mathematics for it?

That’s quite possible. A lot of what we think of as fundamental physics might turn out to be emergent behaviour. In fact that’s pretty much the story of the development of physics. It turns out Newtonian mechanics is emergent from Relativity. Maxwells equations are emergent from quantum mechanics. The behaviour of bosons is emergent from the behaviour of quarks. As I understand it there are theoretical reasons to sus…

> It turns out Newtonian mechanics is emergent from Relativity.

However relativity is far more complex than Newtonian physics.

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