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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

#181

Post by dxbydt »

saagarjha wrote: post #152
dxbydt wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pontificate about things that are too small or too dark and far away to see I was bitten by this last week. I am enrolled in an aops physics course, titled Mechanics. So the last time I took any Mechanics was 40 years ago as a high school student in India. Most of the curriculum then was about stuff banging into each other aka collisions, & asking what happens to the result. Like some golf ball rolls down an inclin…

TIL AoPS has physics classes now

i am essentially a rayiner on steroids, in that i believe america has absolutely nothing meaningful to offer to the world at large other than aops and rsm. its such an extraordinary institution. large number of international signups - so tons of indian and chinese kids burning the midnight oil solving woot alongside their american compatriots. just an amazing, spectacular creation all around. if the nobel committee had any brains, rusczyk would have gotten atleast a peace prize by now.

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#182

Post by tzs »

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.

An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are on a train from London to Edinburg. It will be the first time any of them have been to Scotland.

In Scotland the train passes a field and there is a single sheep standing in that field. The sheep is black.

The engineer says, "Look! The sheep in Scotland are black!".

The physicist sighs, shakes his head, and says, "No...at least one sheep in Scotland is black".

The mathematician sighs, shakes his head, and rolls his eyes, and says, "No...at least one sheep in Scotland is black on at least one side at least some of the time".

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#184

Post by aeneasmackenzie »

bee_rider wrote: post #51
aeneasmackenzie wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just say witch hunt. McCarthy was entirely correct that there were a lot of communists and communist sympathizers, so many that many of the people he thought were helping him were themselves communists or communist sympathizers. Witches on the other hand are not real.

He missed most of the actual Soviet agents, though, right? Both seem to have mostly focused building up a lie to suppress some outside-the-norm element that the guy in charge wanted to hunt. That McCarthy also managed to have some real agents to miss is not a big difference.

So you claim it was a total coincidence he went after Soviet agents? The witch analogy here is that there are real witches but they are so powerful/well hidden witch hunters cannot find them and are diverted to patsies. This wouldn't mean witch hunting is bad, just that we needed better witch hunters.

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#185

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

verisimi wrote: post #38
tech_ken wrote: post #29

> Hitchin agrees. “Mathematical research doesn’t operate in a vacuum,” he says. “You don’t sit down and invent a new theory for its own sake. You need to believe that there is something there to be investigated. New ideas have to condense around some notion of reality, or someone’s notion, maybe.” This is kind of it I think. It's not just physics that drives interesting math, and it's not just recently that this rela…

I agree, I think. I would say it like so, that maths is a sort of highly technical, rigorous language, but like any language it will describe what you want it to. It is easy to think that it is describing the underlying terrain, but it is actually working on three (shared) and model which have of the terrain. So, as we consider different things, maths will follow.

Its grammar is limited in ways we don't understand, because the grammar is based on abstractions of our experiences of the world and the relationships between them.

If we can't imagine entire classes of relationship - likely because we do not have limitless intelligence - then the model will always be a partial analogy, not a full and complete abstraction.

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#186

Post by naasking »

seanhunter wrote: post #180
naasking wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Experimental validation of a major theory is major physics. You can't rhetorically gloss over something as important as experimentally validating a 1964 prediction as though it doesn't matter or didn't happen. If your contention is that a validation of something we already suspected to be true doesn't shatter/shift our paradigm, then how often would you expect that to happen? I would expect it a lot in small ways (so…

> You can't rhetorically gloss over something as important as experimentally validating a 1964 prediction as though it doesn't matter or didn't happen.

I'm not, I'm pointing out that theoretical progress has stagnated. Experimentalists are doing great.

> So to expect something like that every decade is not realistic.

I'm not expecting it every decade, but we've had 4 decades of recycling the same ideas using the same failed approaches to try to patch gaps in existing theory using bogus arguments, which ends up funding poorly motivated experiments that then find nothing. I think Sabine Hossenfelder elaborated the problems here in excellent detail (see "Lost in Math").

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#187

Post by slkjdlskjdklsd »

tzs wrote: post #182
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.

An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are on a train from London to Edinburg. It will be the first time any of them have been to Scotland. In Scotland the train passes a field and there is a single sheep standing in that field. The sheep is black. The engineer says, "Look! The sheep in Scotland are black!". The physicist sighs, shakes his head, and says, "No...at least one sheep in Scotland is black". The mat…

Buddhist would say - There is just changing patterns, sensations and thoughts that create an illusion that there is a sheep outside and seperate you watching it. In reality there is just emptiness.

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#188

Post by [deleted] »

tijtij wrote: post #139
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.

Funny joke. Reminded me of this xkcd comic but with the roles reversed. https://xkcd.com/435

[deleted]

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#189

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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…

I think those qualify more as interesting suggestions and experimental confirmations than as breakthroughs.

I suspect "breakthrough" is supposed to mean "huge definitive paradigm shift." We haven't had many of those in all of history, and we certainly haven't had one in the last decade.

Everyone is still very, very confused about quantum fundamentals. Non-local realness is really a Bohmian idea, and that's certainly not new. Universe-as-information is new but there's a huge gap between that and the Standard Model.

And so on. None of these problems are settled in the way that GR and QM settled various issues.

You may say that's too high a bar and things are moving. But there's been more of a history of missteps (string theory, supersymmetry, so far at least) that were sold as potential breakthroughs than genuinely transformative insights.

Re: Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math

#190

Post by trashtester »

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…

Smart theoretical physicists of today should bring their Lie-group algebras and help build better neural nets, and then use those nets to make new discoveries in Physics.
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