Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math • Hacker News Board

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#111

Post by torrefatto » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 8:45 PM UTC

paulpauper wrote: post #76

jjk166 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> justify the inordinate amount of money threw at them They're theorists, you're paying for pencils and paper. String theory may not have produced a theory of quantum gravity yet, but neither has any other line of inquiry.

sorta. the construction of particle accelerators has been justified to test the hypotheses of string theory

You are wrong.

Particle accelerators have been built since way before any string theory was formulated.

The biggest and most powerful existing accelerator (LHC) has been built to fulfill the high energy/high luminosity requirements to explore the Highs boson energy regime (that has been found) and at most the lightest supersymmetric particles (not found as of today).

The Higgs boson is a cornerstone of the Standard Model. Supersymmetry is an extension to it that does not involve strings.

https://home.web.cern.ch/science/physics/supersymmetry

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#112

Post by bluGill » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 8:45 PM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #105

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…

They have probably produced some new maths, maybe as much as if you threw similar amounts of money at the maths department?

And right now we have no reason to think either would produce more useful math. Math at least is honest about studying math for the sake of math (or truth and beauty). Nothing wrong with throwing money at math, but physics is supposed to be about understanding the universe so if we only get math we get a bad return on investment no matter how nice the math is. Even if the math turns out to be useful elsewhere we didn't get what we wanted out of the investment.

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#113

Post by torrefatto » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 8:46 PM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #105

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…

They have probably produced some new maths, maybe as much as if you threw similar amounts of money at the maths department?

At the cost of starving other research lines in theoretical physics (the thing they told are trying to work on).

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#114

Post by failbuffer » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 8:53 PM UTC

lupire wrote: post #12

goatlover wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that mean? Physics is still empirical at the end of the day. Experiments decide what theories best explain the world. Math doesn't have such a requirement. It doesn't need to model natural phenomenon. Your physics lecturer sounds like a Platonist.

It's a very weak loose statement, but I think the idea is that leading scientific and mathematical thinkers (think Newton as a quintessential example) were "natural philosophers" who studied whatever caught their interest and took it wherever it went. Astronomers invented lenses and ground them and studied the starts and developed algebra and calculus to model the observations. Some people were more narrowly focused,…

Add negative numbers to your list as well. Mathematicians used to rearrange terms specifically to avoid them (e.g. before the concept existed).

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#115

Post by mrguyorama » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 8:53 PM UTC

qubyte wrote: post #87

slashdave wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is really interesting to me. It could imply that an ugly theorem is less valuable. What if a theorem is ugly but useful vs a beautiful but esoteric one?

Then you should study Algorithms, where "the perfect answer is impossible, without simply trying all permutations, but this process gets you a close answer 99.9% of the time"

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#116

Post by 77pt77 » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 8:58 PM UTC

zachf wrote: post #93

77pt77 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only cheap thing here is the amount of actual physics that came out of all of this ptolemaic endeavor. And writing ptolemaic is probably too charitable because the Almagest at least predicted movements quite well at the time (apparently it now deviates too much).

Is your preferred remedy that quantum gravity be entirely defunded, or instead that more funding be redirected to any of the other programs to study quantum gravity? If the latter, which ones in your opinion are more likely to be productive than string theory?

I have no remedies.

But I refuse to say "thank you very much" when sand has been thrown at my eyes for decades.

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#117

Post by naasking » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 9:03 PM UTC

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.

Math probably split off a bit because of the attempts at formalization. That was a useful tangent though, arguably giving us computer science via the lambda calculus, Turing machines, etc.

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#118

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 9:07 PM UTC

77pt77 wrote: post #116

zachf wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your preferred remedy that quantum gravity be entirely defunded, or instead that more funding be redirected to any of the other programs to study quantum gravity? If the latter, which ones in your opinion are more likely to be productive than string theory?

I have no remedies. But I refuse to say "thank you very much" when sand has been thrown at my eyes for decades.

[deleted]

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#119

Post by naasking » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 9:21 PM UTC

hughesjj wrote: post #79

alickz wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Absolutely, they're still handing out nobels after all. Personally I think the ER=EPR conjecture and the complexity/action duality hypothesis are incredibly interesting. Technically ER=EPR was formulated in 2000s (maybe 90s?) and CA-duality is approaching if not just past 10 years old, but the thing about asking for breakthroughs is that they take a while to percolate. Ex Hawking radiation wasn't formulated until, li…

The Higgs boson was predicted in 1964. Gravitational waves were predicted in 1916. Bell's theorem was published in 1964. Basically every recent discovery in physics has been observations confirming old predictions and refuting the endless zoo of poorly motivated, imaginary particles that seems to be standard practice these days.

There have been almost no truly significant, novel predictions that have a hope in hell of panning out in like, 40 years or more. The only mildly interesting, novel idea in physics has been quantum computing, and even that was first published in 1980.

> So, in summary, in the late 10 years - we've shown a break in our intuition of physics (nonloca-realness, that 2022 paper)

This paper showed no such thing, it has the same superdeterminism loophole as every other paper attempting to refute local realism.

Physics is stuck in a local QM-GR minimum, and some truly novel ideas are needed to kickstart things again. Oppenheim's postquantum gravity is the first truly novel idea I've seen in awhile.

I also agree that JWST is giving us great data, some of which has placed LCDM on the ropes, but astrophysicists are hard at work adding epicycles to keep it alive.

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#120

Post by naasking » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 9:29 PM UTC

zachf wrote: post #93

77pt77 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only cheap thing here is the amount of actual physics that came out of all of this ptolemaic endeavor. And writing ptolemaic is probably too charitable because the Almagest at least predicted movements quite well at the time (apparently it now deviates too much).

Is your preferred remedy that quantum gravity be entirely defunded, or instead that more funding be redirected to any of the other programs to study quantum gravity? If the latter, which ones in your opinion are more likely to be productive than string theory?

Your suggestion implicitly asserts that string theory was productive, which is exactly the claim that seems to be in contention.

I don't think it's too wild to suggest that, without the constraints of string theory imposed by advisors, lots of novel approaches would have been tried. We have no idea what could have been produced.

As for quantum gravity specifically, arguably not much progress will be made without more data, and we now have some proposed experiments that can be conducted here on Earth to test them.