91–100 of 120 posts
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Historically, haven't the more "elegant" models been shown to be correct? The various explanations for planetary motion come to mind as an example.
Elegance is matter of perspective. Epicycles are a very elegant way to explain planetary orbits from a geocentric view point, but they are very wrong.
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What passes the bar for "elegant enough"? Why would laws of nature care about such human principles? And, most of all, why treat elegance as a guiding principle when all it has done is produce models incapable of being accurate outside a narrow range?
Historically, haven't the more "elegant" models been shown to be correct? The various explanations for planetary motion come to mind as an example.
The fundamental theories we have is Quantum Electrodynamics and Quantum Chromodynamics. This new experiment tells you that "modern nuclear forces, including those derived within chiral effective field theory" break down and cannot be used to describe what they observed. Here is the arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.10582 It just tells you that their effective theory is no longer effective in these circumstances. Unle…
I think you're reacting to things the paper doesn't say - they never claim any new physics. EFT is a simpler model than what you'd derive from QCD and it makes sense it'll be wrong in some limits. The paper finds such a limit. That's all? The paper title and abstract seem to be pretty accurate? Or are you objecting to the characterization of EFT as "theory"?
If so, then how about planet formation theory, or solid state physics? Are those also not theories, because they're ultimately just limits of the standard model?
> Instead, at these scales, a new effective force emerges — the strong nuclear force, transmitted between nucleons by the exchange of pions. I'm admittedly ignorant, but I'm not convinced that a lot of theoretical physics is basically curve fitting where you've got a model with enough flexibility that you can make it fit the data. String theory always seemed like an egregious version of this, I think it's less popula…
Experimental physics works a bit differently than most people think. While string theory was/is popular, very few hold it as certainty. From the very beginning the discussions around it were that it was a non-testable theory. While out-group conversations around physics are "physicists believe" in-group conversations are more "the leading theory is". Uncertainty is deeply ingrained in the study and the focus is more…
That could be a call to stop bothering with exploring the domain entirely as infeasible. But I don't understand why string theory gets singled out for finger waggling when any other theory must run into the same problem.
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I would characterize it as the article doesn't have anything overtly wrong with it, but it did make it easy to come away thinking this is revealing some sort of massive fundamental issue with everything, rather than what it is, which is the continuing process of tuning a highly successful theory down in the decimal points. Whether or not you consider that to be part of their job is in the eyes of the reader.
Small discrepancies in the observed orbit of Mercury ended up changing our understanding of space and time in most profound ways.
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The title says that the experiments diagree with "the leading theory of the nucleus", which is chiral effective field theory. I don't see anything wrong or "clickbaity" about this.
I would characterize it as the article doesn't have anything overtly wrong with it, but it did make it easy to come away thinking this is revealing some sort of massive fundamental issue with everything, rather than what it is, which is the continuing process of tuning a highly successful theory down in the decimal points. Whether or not you consider that to be part of their job is in the eyes of the reader.
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The standard model has a number of free parameters [1] but the results of calculations are pretty sensitive to them, and this is what predicted (not just explained post-hoc) the Higgs. It's not incorrect to say there's curve fitting involved, but it severely understates the magnitude of the achievement that is the standard model, and its success in explaining everything that underpins everyday life[2], as well as mos…
If it explains everything then why are experiments still ongoing? What is left to explain?
And then of course as there are complex emergent effects of multiparticle systems that are difficult to calculate accurately.
The fundamental theories we have is Quantum Electrodynamics and Quantum Chromodynamics. This new experiment tells you that "modern nuclear forces, including those derived within chiral effective field theory" break down and cannot be used to describe what they observed. Here is the arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.10582 It just tells you that their effective theory is no longer effective in these circumstances. Unle…
> I can't believe they pick such a clickbaity title for a serious publication and let quanta magazine publish an even more clickbaity article about it. Well, I guess they need more funding. My take from reading the article (not a physicist) is the physics of the nucleus (i.e. the protons and neutrons and strong nuclear force) are treated as emergent phenomena from the quantum theories about fundamental particles (e.g…
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It is factually incorrect in the assertion that the standard model can't explain the reduction in mass (special relativity and quantum mechanics work fine together. It's general relativity that is the problem). In fact mass-energy equivalence is a pretty core part of quantum mechanics.
> In fact mass-energy equivalence is a pretty core part of quantum mechanics. It may be stated as such, and added in to equations as an external piece of knowledge from relativity, but this is cheating a bit. Essentially, when we state that H2O has less mass than H+H+O, what we actually mean is that H2O bends spacetime a little bit less than the three atoms individually that made it up. There's no accepted variant of…
Even in pure QM, the water molecule will have less inertia than unbonded hydrogen and oxygen atoms. This should in principle be measurable by applying a known force to the water molecule and to the three atoms, and measuring their acceleration. The difference should perfectly match the inertial difference predicted by SR and GR.
GR adds the observation that, if the water molecule has less inertia, it should also bend space-time less, and it is this bending of space time that can't be explained by QM.
Though I should add that I've had a reply to a different comment once that explained that QM is actually compatible with the flat-ish but not perfectly flat space times that GR predicts anywhere not very close to a black hole. They were claiming that in fact modern QFTs can even predict things like the gravitational lensing produced by our sun, and that they only break down when near the event horizon of a black hole.
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I would characterize it as the article doesn't have anything overtly wrong with it, but it did make it easy to come away thinking this is revealing some sort of massive fundamental issue with everything, rather than what it is, which is the continuing process of tuning a highly successful theory down in the decimal points. Whether or not you consider that to be part of their job is in the eyes of the reader.
Sorry, but unless you're a physicist, why would you expect to be able to know the significance of the paper? If you walked away misunderstanding the implications, then I gotta ask - assuming you're in software - are you careful to proofread your papers to ensure a geologist doesn't misunderstand them?
Because I expect a news article on the topic to clearly contextualize that answer. That is a core component of their job.
Quanta magazine is pretty good in most things I read, but I feel like they drop this particular ball pretty often. I suppose that concession to clickbaitery is the bare minimum anyone can survive with nowadays. But they are still several cuts above most things I read.