Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The crisis in physics is not only about physics

backreaction.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 179 posts

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#131

Post by ImaCake »

Balgair wrote: post #92
ImaCake wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was briefly involved in Single Molecule Biophysics, where microscopes push the limits of what you can do with visible light in order to understand protein behaviour, where I heard the often repeated warning: "the microscope is an experiment itself". This was born out of the incredibly fancy and poorly understood microscope, which was experimental, and it was no guarantee that you were measuring the protein and not…

> and it was no guarantee that you were measuring the protein and not some weird light physics effect! My thesis was in fluorescent bio physics at the nano scale (STED). We literally had a PI effect. Normally, the 'PI effect' is that when the professor comes in, the experiment stops working, mostly due to Murphy's law. With our case, it was because the extra body heat caused the mirrors to expand and drift out of pla…

Thanks for your reply! I actually found out one of my current coworkers helped build a single molecule scope, he talked about the use of an air cushion beneath the giant breadboard of lasers to ensure they stayed nm accurate.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#132

Post by Xcelerate »

ColanR wrote: post #61
btrettel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inability to make long-term investments is a major reason I don't intend to stay in academia after my PhD. Government and corporate labs don't seem better in my view either. At present my plan is the following: Keep the amount of time spent making money to the minimum needed to support myself. Then I can invest my own time and money into research. I could make money from research via grants/contracts like normal…

That is almost precisely my own intention. There should be a club. Have you heard of one?

+1. This is my life plan as well — financial independence as soon as possible then start my own research. There really should be a club for this...

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#133

Post by the6threplicant »

whatshisface wrote: post #5
nisuni wrote: post #3

The author is talking about the crisis of a particular subfield of physics, i.e. particle physics. Other subfields are thriving (AMO, quantum information) and maybe it’s just time to accept the relevance of different subfields changes with time.

Actually particle physics is doing just fine, the crisis is within a subfield of particle physics, fundamental beyond-standard-model particle physics.

One could say that particle physics is more a victim of its own success.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#134

Post by pas »

Ma8ee wrote: post #86
baked_ziti wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tried to raise some more philosophical questions with them. Like what? Genuinely interested, not seeking to argue.

This is 10 years ago, so unfortunately I don’t remember details about discussions I never got going. Some were able to argue for their favourite interpretation of QM, or rather, how to resolve the measurement problem, but I mostly got blank stares when I tried to probe a bit more about the ontology. One of the reasons I left academia was that I never found the intellectual and curios environment I longed for. The suc…

Yeah, that's not surprising. Cutting-edge R&D is very boring hyper-parameter tuning basically, and requires a kind of person that is able to do things for a long long time (to gather data) and then to think a bit later.

The same goes on with neuro folks. Consciousness, mind, hello? No, just let's poke rats, thanks.

But this works.

And that's why I don't understand Sabine's viewpoint. She can't just sit in an ivory tower and stare down the cosmos in a contest until it reveals its secrets. We need data, better models, better measurements, etc. Yes, sure, it needs better theorists too, but then why not let the experimentalists do what they do best? It's not like there isn't a bunch of theorists in every serious university on the planet, maybe organize them better?

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#135

Post by pas »

Anon84 wrote: post #82
aplanas wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, detecting gravity waves does move the needle on any of these metrics It will surely do. Those achievements are not possible without staggering advances in technology that can be later applied in different fields. The same technology that we first developed for those expensive colliders is now used in MRI and others diagnosis tools that we have for granted today.

> The same technology that we first developed for those expensive colliders is now used in MRI and others diagnosis tools that we have for granted today. The question is, how much better would "MRI and other diagnosis tools" if that money had been spent actively trying to improve them instead of mostly going to detecting gravity waves? That's the question you need to answer to justify spending billions chasing physic…

If you put a team to make a better MRI, you'll get the same MRI maybe a bit faster or smaller.

If you want the MRI 2.0, you start with something monstrously different, otherwordly, like gravitational wave detection. There you reach metrological precision, DSP, optics, waveguides, EM shielding, thermal noise compensation, and other incremental advancements that taken together gives you MRI 1.5, and then you can bring in those who make it work into a nice and shiny improved MRI.

The problem with moon-shots (eg. AGI) is that you don't know where to go. With physics at least you sort of do. Higher energy. More sensitivity. Better experiments.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#136

Post by pas »

chr1 wrote: post #89
Barrin92 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As usual with Sabine, this article blatantly misrepresents how science is done and how actual scientists think No offence but she is a trained physicist so she too is an 'actual scientist' by the very definition of the term. And she's completely right about the neglect of economic reasoning. The arguments against blowing 40 billion bucks on an accelerator that will likely not surface anything new is valid. Physicis…

> We see diminishing returns everywhere, and if this is not stopped and we don't manage to drastically increase the efficacy of scientific research we'll effectively flatline at some point. Most likely there is no way to increase efficacy, because the problems we try to solve become harder and harder as we go. This is why the predictions of singularity are unrealistic, the self improving AI, and constantly increasing…

It's possible with better models (that make problems look simpler). This part is probably an education issue.

Making "smarter" humans (either via sperm/egg/embryo selection, and/or via brain-computer interfaces) would also help a lot.

And it doesn't look like we're anywhere close to "peak brain", after all we do a lot with just 20W and ~1.5 kg of wetware.

Whatever improvements our potential descendants make will surely look like the big-s-singularity to us.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#137

Post by pas »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #84
knzhou wrote: post #8

As usual with Sabine, this article blatantly misrepresents how science is done and how actual scientists think, and serves mainly to portray herself as the only person in the field capable of rational thought. People in the comments here are picking up on this when it takes an unfair swipe at medicine, but it really applies to the whole article. I am not going to bother doing a line-by-line rebuttal, because I've alr…

Well, she’s out of a job by the end of the year it looks like, so I guess she’s preparing to live on the ads and the book sales? Still, I don’t think Hossenfelder is a reason to be this salty! Just post links to some other physics blogger that contradicts her and move on. That’s how Lubos is handled and it works ok as far as I can tell (I can’t actually tell very well on account of all the ignoring of Lubos I’m doing…

At least Lubos uses/shows some math to diss on other's work. Of course since research math is so ungodly far from rigor we can't check without the full burden of becoming a similar theoretician.

But maybe, one can dream at least, in the future science will be done with smart models, that can at least verify themselves given some assumptions.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#138

Post by pas »

scott_s wrote: post #71
ColanR wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You call the originator of the EM drive a crank; I am proposing that the widespread adoption of your dismissive attitude is in large part the cause of the current scientific stagnation observed by the author. I also suggested that the other large cause of the current stagnation is that we do not have enough scientists pursuing outlandish theories - we should hear about things like the EM drive far more frequently, an…

Your suggestions would lead to absolute paralysis, as you are advocating against using basic plausibility tests before pursuing any hypothesis.

... seeking extremes won't work, otherwise we'd rule out everything that's not supported by current theories. Also we can't let ourselves be deceived by the everyday cold-fusion perpetuum-mobile crackpot.

But we should make it easy for crackpots to test their shtick. So we should invest in better metrology.

And when something actually breaks through, then we should jump on it.

And basically that's what's going on with the "EM drive". Currently even though it goes in the face of basic theories the test bench they used was not sensitive enough to rule it out.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#139

Post by pas »

pdonis wrote: post #43
jonbronson wrote: post #30

"In the foundations of physics, we have not seen progress since the mid 1970s when the standard model of particle physics was completed." This seems to discount the explosion of work in the foundations of theoretical physics. Most notably the many variations of String Theory. Just because the work has not yet produced experiments that can validate them do not mean they are not progress. It's some of the most exciting…

> This seems to discount the explosion of work in the foundations of theoretical physics. Most notably the many variations of String Theory. Hossenfelder is well aware of string theory, as she says right in the article: "All these wrong predictions should have taught physicists that just because they can write down equations for something does not mean this math is a scientifically promising hypothesis. String theory…

Most of those theories have some implications about lower energy ranges. And pushing up energies is a great way to rule out a lot of them.

(And some of those theories have some large scale cosmological implications too, so better telescopes can rule out more.)

But ... there seems to be a lack of (serious) theories that have easily testable predictions. And this is not surprising, because we also lack easily reproducable but yet unexplained data. (For example the high-energy gamma ray busts are very interesting but we have no idea where do they come from really.)

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#140

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Anon84 wrote: post #82
aplanas wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, detecting gravity waves does move the needle on any of these metrics It will surely do. Those achievements are not possible without staggering advances in technology that can be later applied in different fields. The same technology that we first developed for those expensive colliders is now used in MRI and others diagnosis tools that we have for granted today.

> The same technology that we first developed for those expensive colliders is now used in MRI and others diagnosis tools that we have for granted today. The question is, how much better would "MRI and other diagnosis tools" if that money had been spent actively trying to improve them instead of mostly going to detecting gravity waves? That's the question you need to answer to justify spending billions chasing physic…

Isn't the 'problem' (for the wider population) that physicists are motivated towards answering the big questions (that's a valid outlay for $billions IMO, just like, say how we spend billions on football/soccer). So effectively what we're doing is allowing that because we know there are positive repercussions that come along with such exploration.

(Also a BSc in TPhys (& maths), fwiw.)

Post reply on HN