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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

#141

Post by janalsncm »

naasking wrote: post #119
hughesjj wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Yes, the Higgs boson is not a new prediction but that doesn’t mean discovering it wasn’t a major breakthrough. There are other theories besides the Standard Model which don’t contain Higgs particles and were ruled out when it was discovered.

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#142

Post by analog31 »

77pt77 wrote: post #30
glenstein wrote: post #26

I understand that one huge reason for Ed Witten's optimism about strong theory is this very fact. That, in his terms, the process of building out string theory has led to the uncovering of so much "buried treasure" in the form of novel developments of maths. Of course it's not anything like a proof but something that bolsters an intuition.

And that amounted to 60 years (and counting) of absolutely nothing in terms of how the physical world works. Even Witten's achievements objectively reduce to an alternate proof of the positivity energy theorem in GR. This is an abject failure by all metrics.

Something I've speculated about is that we just don't know if and when the next answer will arrive. The past few centuries have certainly stoked our expectations for rapid progress, but it's not guaranteed. There's no success-or-failure metric for the search, until an answer is found.

It took humanity something like 1000 years between when the ancient Greeks could formulate general quadratic equations, and someone came along who solved them. And another several centuries before the solution was extended to included complex numbers.

The problem that they tried to solve with string theory: Will it be solved in a decade, a century, a millennium, or ever. Is it possible that bending the rules of scientific methodology, even temporarily, will help us find an answer?

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#143

Post by bryanrasmussen »

jjgreen wrote: post #127

A physicist, walking home at night, spots a mathematician colleague under a street lamp staring at the ground, "something wrong?" he asks; "I've dropped my keys" he replies, "whereabouts?" asks the physicist, keen to help. "Over there" says the mathematician pointing; "So why don't you look over there?" retorts the physicist, "the light is better here" says the mathematician. Disclosure, I'm a mathematician.

Physicist: but that doesn't get you any closer to a solution.

Mathematician: not yet, but if I wait here long enough someone will come by and drop their keys, which will then be retrieved, proving the possibility of retrieving lost keys when light conditions are optimal.

Physicist drops keys.

Mathematician: Eureka!

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#144

Post by hirvi74 »

Ankaios wrote: post #133
mettamage wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t get it. Disclosure: I’m a software developer

Non-software-developer humans often use things called "lamps" to illuminate spaces at night. Unfortunately, illumination inhibits effective nighttime coding.

> humans often use things called "lamps" to illuminate spaces at night

I call those "monitors."

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#145

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

I should also add, this page has a section for previously unsolved physics problems that were solved in the past 30 years:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in...

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#146

Post by fuzzfactor »

MaxPock wrote: post #83
goldfeld wrote: post #81

Obviously, physics never creates any math but discovers it, there are no new things under the sun.

Discovered Vs invented

>Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

Newly devised math also seems to be unreasonably good at creating new particles.

Not out of thin air, nothing like that, truly out of stuff thinner than air!

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#147

Post by NegativeK »

jjk166 wrote: post #50
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…

> 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.

Honest question.

Do string theorists not use models on supercomputers?

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#148

Post by NegativeK »

crazydoggers wrote: post #17

I’m not sure how it could be otherwise. On some level mathematics is a description of reality that we can use to compute things in reality. For example, pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. It’s just what a circle is in two dimensions. The value of pi isn’t any more mysterious or connected to physics than the existence of this thing called a circle. If you have some other Euclidean shapes you’…

Math is informed by physics, but not constrained by it.

Very loosely speaking, pi can take a different values on non-euclidean planes. This ends up becoming relevant on the surface of the earth or, say, the saddle of a horse. I'm not sure if the motivation was from looking at curved surfaces, but it just as easily could've come from the rejection of Euclid's parallel postulate and seeing what results. Similarly, I think imaginary numbers were motivated by the math well before they found applications in reality.

There are also plenty of other mathematical constructions that are informed by reality (since that's what our brains are constrained to,) but I'm pretty sure are far from actually describing reality. Transfinite cardinals/ordinals, fast growing hierarchies, Turing degrees, Goldbach's conjecture, how the hypervolume of a hypersphere eventually decreases as dimension increases...

You can even reject the standard axioms and construct math that can not be compatible with reality. Or argue that the standard axioms permit too much wiggle room to create concepts that have no relation to reality. (But maybe you shouldn't; that sounds like philosophy.)

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#149

Post by dboreham »

naasking wrote: post #119
hughesjj wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

As Frank Yang predicted in 1980 , "the party's over".
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