121–123 of 123 posts
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sorry, that parsed poorly. It's a bit self serving for me . I operate a science nonprofit outside of traditional academia.
Yeah, I realized later it was possible to interpret that sentence another way. I think my downvoter thought I was making a dumb throwaway snark, but I was actually just confused.
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>I've got a theory that string theory is more of a sociological phenomena than real science. Yes. I have a friend with a PhD in physics, and he says that a generation of string theory people basically just shouted everyone else down in a rather obnoxious way. Other critics (e.g. Lee Smolin) have said similar things, albeit slightly more politely. At some point it stopped being science and became more about careers, r…
It reminds me a little of the phenomena of efficient market theory in economics / finance. Academics were drawn to it partly because it enables them to do a lot of fancy mathematics whereas if you look at inefficiencies like the stuff that went on in the movie The Big Short then the academics don't really have much of an edge against people working in the field. So much academic stuff goes 'assuming efficient markets…
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The idea that the universe runs on a simple program with simple rules hasn't failed us so far. All we have to do is figure out what that simple program is with our capability for abstract symbolic thinking and reasoning; machines are presently very bad at this while humans are less bad at it.
Look up automated proofs. This exists. It's largely useless, due to mathematical properties of logic. Every mathematical system has things which are true but can't be discovered from first principals.
Basically, checking a proof for correctness takes polynomial time in the size of the proof. (Dependending on how you formalize your proofs, that might even be linear.)
Coming up with a reasonable sized proof is much harder. But if we had P=NP, then checking and finding a proof would be about equally hard.