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Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

nautil.us

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Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#61

Post by janalsncm »

selectodude wrote: post #11
tines wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it wasn't made during the nineteenth century That's because people were totally focused on physics, and math was just a useful tool sometimes. Doing physics was the true goal and observation the final arbiter of truth. Nowadays, that distinction is blurred but for the opposite reason; people think that anything conceived by sound math must be true, and observation has taken a back seat.

To some extent, observation has taken a back seat because we're at the point in our physics journey where we pontificate about things that are too small or too dark and far away to see. We simply can't observe this stuff anymore.

I don’t agree with this. I think there are definitely people like Michio Kaku who have books to sell who spend their time pontificating. People just think that physics looks like pontificating because that’s what it looks like on TV.

But there are also active researchers doing real research. Physics postdocs aren’t just sitting around in a circle making up stories about what the universe is like.

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#63

Post by slashdave »

marcosdumay wrote: post #27

Try to make some innovative software product without talking to any user. You'll see why physics is good at crating new math.

Do you value the quality of a mathematical theory by the number of applications, or the intrinsic beauty of the theory itself?

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#64

Post by janalsncm »

waterhouse wrote: post #57
cjs_ac wrote: post #3

One of my physics lecturers at university made the offhand observation that the distinction between physics and mathematics is a twentieth-century idea : it wasn't made during the nineteenth century or before, and it seems to be disappearing in the twenty-first.

Mathematics is a part of physics. Physics is an experimental science, a part of natural science. Mathematics is the part of physics where experiments are cheap. — V.I. Arnold: "On teaching mathematics" (1997)

Physics is the subset of mathematics with physical application. However mathematics need not have physical applications in order to be valid math.

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#65

Post by elashri »

torrefatto wrote: post #37

This is the well known litany from string theorists to try and justify the inordinate amount of money threw at them to get back nothing of physical value: no falsifiable prediction. Instead of reasoning on the worth of the effort spent in this direction to investigate nature (a very tangible companion) they try to steer the discourse toward this nonsense. We spent >50 years listening to these tales and the time has l…

> no falsifiable prediction

You forgot to add "with our current technology ability to probe the required energy scale".

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#66

Post by hangsi »

whimsicalism wrote: post #19
Onavo wrote: post #4

Physics is also great for machine learning, though the approaches can be rather unintuitive. For example message passing and belief propagation in trees/graphs (Bayesian networks, Markov random fields etc.) for modeling latent variables are usually taught using the window/rainy weather marginal probability analogy and involves splitting out a bayesian/statistical equation into subcomponents via the marginalization ch…

What modern ML uses those techniques? my understanding is ebm is quite rare

The common method for choosing the next output token for an LLM is sampling from a Boltzmann distribution. If you have seen the term "temperature" in the context of language models, that is a direct link to the statistical gas mechanics.

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#67

Post by alickz »

janalsncm wrote: post #61
selectodude wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To some extent, observation has taken a back seat because we're at the point in our physics journey where we pontificate about things that are too small or too dark and far away to see. We simply can't observe this stuff anymore.

I don’t agree with this. I think there are definitely people like Michio Kaku who have books to sell who spend their time pontificating. People just think that physics looks like pontificating because that’s what it looks like on TV. But there are also active researchers doing real research. Physics postdocs aren’t just sitting around in a circle making up stories about what the universe is like.

please forgive my ignorance, has there been notable progress in the field of physics in the last decade? noteworthy breakthroughs i mean

i ask out of layman curiosity

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#68

Post by bee_rider »

tines wrote: post #54
bee_rider wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the result of Philosophers ultimately winning, despite the fact that they are so annoyingly pedantic that we pretend not to care about their work, and also, by ignoring them we can invent iPhones which are really neat. You can’t prove anything by observation. You can gather evidence through repeat experiment and become reasonably confident as your theory continues to not be incompatible with the observed uni…

> Math, of course, is that stuff which can’t be invalidated by observations. This is a misunderstanding of what math is, I think. You can invent a perfectly valid mathematical theory that conflicts with observations. Math is just a sequence of "if this, then this" and if the conclusions follow from the premises, it's math. But if you demonstrate that in the universe we occupy, a premise isn't true , then the mathemat…

I think this is a disagreement about the word invalidate, and maybe it was a bad pick on my part. The observations don’t make the math wrong, maybe less useful.

But, I say the math can’t be invalidated by observations; and you describe some cases where the math is valid but might or might not be applicable to certain physical cases. So actually, I’m not clear as to what you are saying I’m misunderstanding.

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#69

Post by janalsncm »

alickz wrote: post #67
janalsncm wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t agree with this. I think there are definitely people like Michio Kaku who have books to sell who spend their time pontificating. People just think that physics looks like pontificating because that’s what it looks like on TV. But there are also active researchers doing real research. Physics postdocs aren’t just sitting around in a circle making up stories about what the universe is like.

please forgive my ignorance, has there been notable progress in the field of physics in the last decade? noteworthy breakthroughs i mean i ask out of layman curiosity

No worries. I’m (mostly) a layman too, I just happened to have watched this video recently:

https://youtu.be/d_o4k0eLoMI

Maybe a more direct answer to your question would be the discovery of the tetraneutron.

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#70

Post by bee_rider »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #49
bee_rider wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the result of Philosophers ultimately winning, despite the fact that they are so annoyingly pedantic that we pretend not to care about their work, and also, by ignoring them we can invent iPhones which are really neat. You can’t prove anything by observation. You can gather evidence through repeat experiment and become reasonably confident as your theory continues to not be incompatible with the observed uni…

“Prove” could mean many things. For physics, prove what? That a given model is the one and only model that accurately explains the known universe? Then I agree. Observation won’t get you there. Asymptotic at best. But by “prove”, that it accurately or usefully makes predictions with respect to certain constraints (which may not be known)? That’s a more modest use of “prove”, where observation is certainly a key facto…

Maybe proof should be used for that more modest concept. In the sense of “bullet proof.” Similar to a piece of armor with a bullet proof; the ding from where it was shot for testing, a physics theory could be described as “microscope proof,” haha. We hit it with a bunch of microscopes and it didn’t fall apart.
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