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Fundamental physics is dying? [video]

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Re: Fundamental physics is dying? [video]

#141

Post by zarzavat »

hggigg wrote: post #30
nabla9 wrote: post #2

John 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…

30 years ago I spoke to a fairly well known and regarded physicist who said something rather interesting along the same lines. Quoting as accurately as I can "physics looks sexy from the outside due to some celebrities but inside it's mostly worse than anyone wants to admit." . He also suggested I go and study mathematics instead because at least there will likely be some applications for it. I did and I am glad I di…

IANAP but it seems that fundamental physics suffers from a lack of monotonicity of knowledge. Although physics does its best to explain things, those explanations are more like guesses than known facts. A theoretical physicist can have their life's work undone simply because someone else comes up with a better guess, or experiment says no. You spend your life working on SUSY and then... nope. Even very established knowledge can be overturned.

People will say "that's science" and indeed that's fundamental physics, but other fields don't really work like that.

In chemistry and biology, certainty isn't in such short supply. Nobody is asking "but is DNA a double helix?" Researchers take a problem, they attack it, then they publish the results, it gets replicated (or not), and the set of knowledge grows.

Mathematics is more similar to chemistry and biology insofar as mathematical knowledge takes the form of an ever-growing set of proven facts generated by research. Take a problem, prove it, other mathematicians check it, the set of knowledge grows.

Fundamental physics has issues because the "check" stage now often costs millions or billions of dollars (build a particle accelerator, neutrino detector, gravitational wave detector, satellite, etc), and even then it might not give a definitive answer. Just look at the g-2 situation where they notice a discrepancy, they spend millions of dollars trying to determine if this single discrepancy is real, and then someone publishes a paper "haha I recalculated it, you just wasted your time".

Not a criticism of fundamental physics because clearly that's just how it is. I'd rather have guesses than ignorance. The gravitational wave research seems to be doing okay at least.

Re: Fundamental physics is dying? [video]

#142

Post by btilly »

andsoitis wrote: post #128
btilly wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that we need an ego to be healthy. Attempts to destroy it can wind up compromising your mental health. The first part of the solution is to be careful what's in your ego. See https://paulgraham.com/identity.html on this topic. See https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-ten-commandments-of-egoles... for how careful choices in what we value in ourselves, can lead to thinking better. This of course still leave…

> The problem is that we need an ego to be healthy. Attempts to destroy it can wind up compromising your mental health. You only need to destroy it temporarily. When you do it using certain tools or techniques, it will reconstitute by itself once the effect of the tool or technique has passed. This temporary ego death can open your eyes without creating a permanent void where your ego used to be.

Anecdotally I've seen such claims, but have seen mixed results as well. I've also encountered people who clearly had an ego about how little ego they had. Yes, it was just as ridiculous as it sounds.

I've never seen anything that looks like solid research on the topic.

Re: Fundamental physics is dying? [video]

#143

Post by XorNot »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #132
XorNot wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since people on the internet frequently seem to operate on the silly theory that someone pointing out a problem has some sort of obligation to propose a solution The issue with Sabine is she tends to yell about anyone proposing any solution. CERN would like to build a bigger particle accelerator, but since it's not her favored variant of accelerator they are obviously lying to the public and wasting your tax payer…

> CERN would like to build a bigger particle accelerator Sabine has a point though. There isn't any specific thing thing that a larger accelerator is likely to yield a positive answer on. Unlike the current biggest, which was at least explicitly constructed to find the higgs. And before you say dark matter, there's zero evidence that dark matter particles will be in any given mass range nor is there a solud model tha…

The topic of this video is that people are struggling to find new paths forward due to a lack of experimental data and a lack of results from theoretical approaches - which ultimately is contingent on finding some new experimental data they can predict.

So one way or another, it's quite likely you will need a larger accelerator. Moreover, logistically, not building that accelerator means you quite likely never have it - CERN's timelines go beyond 2050. The people who would be operating the next generation of accelerators haven't been born yet. If nobody is building anything, the knowledge and know how to do it is likely to be lost.

Like I said: it's a false dichotomy. It's one thing to frame the problem as "we should spend some money on these approaches which look promising". It's quite another to frame it as "those people are stealing all the money which should be spent on obviously correct alternative".

There is more then enough money to build everything, provided a solid case can be made for it - and not "we should do this" but "how we will do this". CERN tends to win bids because they're not delivering a concept, they're delivering a timeline and plan of exactly how they will get there.

Re: Fundamental physics is dying? [video]

#144

Post by Enk1du »

btilly wrote: post #39
ricksunny wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is beautifully articulated. And reinforces my general below-the-line (layperson) fear about the state of physics today (as reinforced ofc by the likes of Sabine Hossenfelder & Eric Weinstein).

Thank you for the compliment. I've been working on how to formulate that idea clearly for a while. It is a problem that goes well beyond physics. For example I believe that the same cognitive error is behind the fact that experts do significantly worse than chance in actually predicting the world, and the more certain the expert sounds, the less likely they are to be right. See https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political…

Some more reading on cognitive errors and expertise for you https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Spot-Solution-Right-Front/dp/00...

>Depressingly, this means that we consistently put public policy in the hands of people who are demonstrably incompetent.

You could depress yourself further by thinking that we get the government we deserve or you could re-assess your role in making good progress.

"A community is like a ship, everyone should be prepared to take the helm." - Henrik Ibsen

Re: Fundamental physics is dying? [video]

#145

Post by reshlo »

btilly wrote: post #73
phkahler wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> For example that list in the case of quantum mechanics was Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and Erwin Schrödinger. Those were not the only people working in that field at the time. Not by a long shot. In order to have pioneers in a field, there has to BE a field with a bunch of people in it.

You're right that these were not the only people working on the set of problems that lead to QM. Lots of people were thinking about the same problems at the same period of time. And lots more added to it later. But what key concept underlying how we now think about QM doesn't go back to this list of people? OK, add Richard Feynman if you want to include the second breakthrough to QED. Ideas that look like conceptual…

> What key concept underlying how we now think about QM doesn’t go back to this list of people?

Off the top of my head: quarks, and therefore the existence of the colour charge quantum number; and the Higgs field.

All of the people in the list were also building on prior research by the likes of James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann. Einstein himself said “I stand on the shoulders of Maxwell.”

There are other obvious candidates for inclusion like Henri Poincaré, Hendrik Lorentz, Satyendra Nath Bose…

Re: Fundamental physics is dying? [video]

#146

Post by Timwi »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #87
dang wrote: post #88

If you want to reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41811140 or say something Sabine-adjacent, please do it here. (This is so https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41808143 doesn't get too offtopic)

I don't like Sabine Hossenfelder's videos because they're too short. When I want to relax after work by playing a game while listening to someone drone on on youtube on a deep and esoteric subject, her videos end way too soon, and with an advertisement for her sponsor. I just want to hear some rambling boffin expound for an hour in the background on some matter that can't possibly raise more than a few hundred views.…

> When I want to relax after work by playing a game while listening to someone drone on on youtube on a deep and esoteric subject

Angela Collier is the answer to your plea.

Re: Fundamental physics is dying? [video]

#147

Post by zepolen »

lamontcg wrote: post #119
jerf wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think this guy has hit the nail on the head: https://energywavetheory.com/subatomic-particles/

Take a look at how stupidly complex the standard model is compared to the other: https://energywavetheory.com/equations/theory-comparison/

Everything in the universe on that site is eloquently and simply explained, including gravity as a shading effect (think an eclipse/water waves acting on an obstacle: https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/attachment.php?attachmentid...) ie. When a large mass causing the shading effect (eg earth) absorbs energy waves acting on us it causing less energy to reach you from the earth's direction and that means energy from above us pushes us down to Earth. All the math checks out too.

Yes, the entire theory is based on the fact that aether exists, which has supposedly been disproved, but what if that's incorrect and launched an entire wild goose chase of alternative physics (string theory, standard model) all based on a flawed assumption.

I think this reddit comment describes the situation beautifully:

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/comments/14o41lc/why_doe...

Re: Fundamental physics is dying? [video]

#148

Post by mnky9800n »

This seems like a narrow view given that there are plenty of unanswered questions in chaos theory, etc. but physicists who think about quantum stuff typically don't like to consider the other physics Revolution of the 20th century as equivalent to theirs.

Re: Fundamental physics is dying? [video]

#150

Post by 082349872349872 »

carapace wrote: post #114
rapjr9 wrote: post #86

I 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.

> "The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper." —EP
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