What if String Theory is a Sophon Virus?
Fundamental physics is dying? [video]
111–120 of 245 posts
Re: Fundamental physics is dying? [video]
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> physics is stuck at a local optimum. I think I heard somewhere that the trouble with string theory is it can describe anything if you tune it just in a right way. It reminds me of epicycles, they also had this property, you can add more and more epicycles to describe literally any observation data. > Way (1) is what kicked off quantum mechanics. Way (2) is what kicked off Newtonian mechanics. Hmm... What was the wa…
My understanding as a layman: 1. Copernicus figured out that if you put the sun at the center, then epicycles weren't necessary, and the math got easier --- because epicycles were based on a mis-understanding of the actual state of the universe --- I don't believe that anyone has identified such a non-alignment of fact and reasoning and observation for contemporary physics. 2. The problem is, modern physics is arguab…
1. is a common belief, but mistaken. Copernicus didn't get rid of epicycles: https://farside.ph.utexas.edu/books/Syntaxis/Almagest/node4....
Re: Fundamental physics is dying? [video]
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd be amazed how quickly powerful discoveries find military purpose.
An important thing to consider here is that the first engineering project which had to make use of Einstein's Theory of Relativity was GPS --- the time/position calculations to triangulate location based on satellites is so exacting that it has to take into account gravimetric distortions based on the receivers being further down in the gravity well than the GPS satellites: https://xkcd.com/808/
This seems fun
https://www.alternativephysics.org/book/GPSmythology.htm
Why would the receaver need a clock if they are comparing pulses from satelites. All the satelites are all up there.
Re: Fundamental physics is dying? [video]
#114I have a pet conspiracy theory for why there has been so little progress in physics for so long. The invention of the nuclear bomb scared a lot of people, it made them scared of physics. What else might physicists turn up that could change the world in dramatic ways? Anti-gravity? Ray guns? Other dimensions? Travel to other worlds? All bad for business, no one is going to buy your airplanes or air craft carriers if t…
Some secrets keep themselves.
Re: Fundamental physics is dying? [video]
#115I have a pet conspiracy theory for why there has been so little progress in physics for so long. The invention of the nuclear bomb scared a lot of people, it made them scared of physics. What else might physicists turn up that could change the world in dramatic ways? Anti-gravity? Ray guns? Other dimensions? Travel to other worlds? All bad for business, no one is going to buy your airplanes or air craft carriers if t…
Perhaps this is of interest to you. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yTiztUNrhhM
I'd heard the name LaRouche but I've never read his history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_LaRouche
Quite astounding, he seems to have been both woke in some ways (climate change) and fundamentally misguided. I can see a lot of Trump's playbook in his life. I was imagining a much more passive conspiracy, people refusing to participate for ethical reasons, rather than an elite conspiracy by the Venutians/Illuminati. The video seems unintelligable, he makes so many references to obscure history that may or may not be true (and how would he know?) it becomes meaningless without years of research and even then, the intentions and thoughts of historical figures are difficult to ascertain.
Re: Fundamental physics is dying? [video]
#116John Carlos Baez thinks Sabine has a point. https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/113285631281744111 >Despite the silly clickbait title of this video, Sabine says a lot of interesting stuff in it: her criticism of claimed deviations from Lorentz invariance in loop quantum gravity is about as good as you'll get from anyone who hasn't actually worked on loop quantum gravity. I worked on it for about 10 years, and the…
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Re: Fundamental physics is dying? [video]
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps this is of interest to you. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yTiztUNrhhM
I'd heard the name LaRouche but I've never read his history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_LaRouche Quite astounding, he seems to have been both woke in some ways (climate change) and fundamentally misguided. I can see a lot of Trump's playbook in his life. I was imagining a much more passive conspiracy, people refusing to participate for ethical reasons, rather than an elite conspiracy by the Venutians/Illumi…
Yeah, would take years to fact check.
Re: Fundamental physics is dying? [video]
#118I have a pet conspiracy theory for why there has been so little progress in physics for so long. The invention of the nuclear bomb scared a lot of people, it made them scared of physics. What else might physicists turn up that could change the world in dramatic ways? Anti-gravity? Ray guns? Other dimensions? Travel to other worlds? All bad for business, no one is going to buy your airplanes or air craft carriers if t…
What time frame are you talking about here? Starting in 01950, 01995, 02010? If we're talking about 01995, it's conceivable that, say, the US and CERN could coordinate to suppress research into hafnium bombs, AVLIS, antigravity, or whatever. If we're talking about research much prior to that point, though, you'd have to include the Russians in the conspiracy. Probably not just any Russians, either; probably Khrushche…
Reading the comments here my thinking has been revised. I'm no longer suggesting the elites were conspiring, at least initially, I'm suggesting the physicists were conspiring for ethical reasons. Some of them may have moved up the ladder and reached positions of some power. Physics is magic to most people, hiding possibilities in math and technicality seems possible. Anyone who has written code professionally has probably been faced with similar decisions, biases can be encoded, and you have to decide how you are going to approach these things. For example, do you add a race field to the medical database or not? In 1990 it was often left up to the programmer. Sometimes things are decided far below the level of the people running the show. Regardless, I do think my theory is far fetched, innate curiosity seems likely to have caused some people to explore further regardless of the risks, and an overt conspiracy that eventually reached high levels seems likely to have been soon discovered.
Re: Fundamental physics is dying? [video]
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like this criticism would be valid for fundamental physics but there are many other physics fields with experimental results that become technology.
Yes, there's definitely some interesting fields that are making progress that are still in the purview of "physics". Materials science, or condensed matter physics, is doing a lot of fascinating work with quasiparticles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasiparticle There's a number of fields you could call "quantum engineering" where physics and engineering work together on the cutting edge. Some of the output of that…
> It's particle physics that seems to be stuck in a rut.
You could look at the discovery of tetraquarks and pentaquarks, and high precision tests of the standard model though as a lot of progress.
What it hasn't done though is create some sexy upending of our current models of physics, we keep asking questions and mostly the responses coming back are in line with theories that we knew 40 years ago. But that's still a lot of experimental progress. There just isn't any useful theoretical physics progress. All the beyond-standard-model theories that might have been useful have been falsified, and the ones that remain can be made to predict anything and aren't useful. But we wouldn't know that if there hadn't been a lot of experimental progress. The LHC was an exceptionally useful experiment. It destroyed more dreams of physics theories than any single experiment ever before. Someone should go back and mark up all the published articles and preprints that were falsified by the LHC.
Re: Fundamental physics is dying? [video]
#120This might be too weird to be true, but when I heard that Geoff Hinton got the Nobel prize for Physics, I wondered if the prize committee was having trouble finding "real" physicists who had made fundamental advances....
This is not meant to knock Prof Hinton. These are his own words:
“I’m not a physicist, I have very high respect for physics,” Hinton said. “I dropped out of physics after my first year at university because I couldn’t do the complicated math. So, getting an award in physics was very surprising to me. I’m very pleased that the Nobel committee recognised that there’s been huge progress in the area of artificial neural networks.”