151–160 of 236 posts
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Don’t use your intuition developed from grinding out web crap to try and reason about the forefront of human knowledge. Have you tried front end web frameworks recently? String theory has nothing on them.
Now I want my new job title to be string interpolation theorist.
Amusing to see all the pessimistic comments form programmers who have zero understanding beyond high school maths thinking somehow there is a magic solution to all the problems in physics like you can just refactor everything. Quantum field theory is definitely not stuck in the 1920s. Modern physics has a lot more going on than 19th century mathematics. We understand quite a lot about the mathematical structure under…
Now compare that with AI/ML or large scale data processing over the last 20 years. I don’t think you should assume that the smartest people were those that didn’t see this coming and wanted to spend their life on interpretations of double slit experiments and string theory.
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So what is dark matter? This thing that keeps galaxies bound that we cannot see but can only observe the effects… I think the hunt for it will push us into new territory. That being said, as you say there has been nothing yet found that violates GR/QFT.
The leading candidate for dark matter is that it's a soup of particles that interact gravitationally, but not via the electromagnic or strong nuclear force. If we're very, very lucky, it might interact via the weak nuclear force, which means there exists a slim theoretically possibility that we might be able to observe it interacting via the weak nuclear force. That being said, even if it does interact via the weak n…
For some time already we are in an "epicyclean phase" of physics, trapped by the extraordinary predictive success of Quantum Electrodynamics and still using mathematical methods devised in the 19th century (variational calculus). This has lead us to the current situation, with extremely complicated theories at the limit of human understanding that bear no new results. It will take a modern day Copernicus to come up w…
Are more modern information-theoretic and dynamical models not used for quantum mechanics? They're both relatively recent and extremely innovative mathematical models. Granted, I'm not mathematically fluent enough to know if they represent a deviation from variational calculus!
From the point of view of chemistry, QM “works”. It provides results that can be tested experimentally and predictions that can be validated. There are issues with computability but that’s more engineering than science. Determining structure, spectra and other physical properties is quite helpful. What was the cliche? All theories are wrong, some theories are useful. It needs to be rephrased from vector codes into ma…
To me, this always felt like programmers excusing abhorrent code with "but it works". Quantum theory isn't. It's not a single, cohesive, consistent theory.[1] There is no recipe you can apply, it's just a bunch of guessworks and heuristics that happen to produce the numerically correct equations if you keep trying long enough. This isn't secret or some sort of external criticism, you'll find this front-and-centre in…
Amusing to see all the pessimistic comments form programmers who have zero understanding beyond high school maths thinking somehow there is a magic solution to all the problems in physics like you can just refactor everything. Quantum field theory is definitely not stuck in the 1920s. Modern physics has a lot more going on than 19th century mathematics. We understand quite a lot about the mathematical structure under…
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Yes, but go back to philosophy not math. All the evidence suggests the "particle" interpretation of QM is simply wrong, that light or energy really is just a self propagating wave, which explains the double slit experiment cleanly, and is not incompatible with energy levels or quantization if formulated correctly. Experiments that claim to show light consists of particles need to be reassessed wearing a philosopher's…
No. "Particle" and "wave" are analogies. They're not even wrong, because they're not descriptions of what actually happens. The real problem is we don't have an analogy for what actually happens, because - by everyday expectations - the traditional interpretations are beyond weird. And the more recent interpretations are even weirder than that. It's likely - after Bell - that there's something non-local happening. An…
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what is the reality then? when you get down to those scales, there really does seem to be uncertainty when you try to localize parameters. on one hand it's troubling but it's also lovely because we get stuff like the casimir effect, and who knows what other futuristic technology we might end up making, which we all want
There's a viable alternative to this called "superdeterminism", but it makes everyone in the world except Sabine Hossenfelder unhappy if you bring it up because it's even worse than telling them they don't have free will.
Amusing to see all the pessimistic comments form programmers who have zero understanding beyond high school maths thinking somehow there is a magic solution to all the problems in physics like you can just refactor everything. Quantum field theory is definitely not stuck in the 1920s. Modern physics has a lot more going on than 19th century mathematics. We understand quite a lot about the mathematical structure under…
There are many practical applications of quantum mechanics. The one that I remember foremost is tunneling to (dis)charge the floating gates on flash memory transistors, but that just scratches the surface. "Flash memory chips found in USB drives use quantum tunneling to erase their memory cells." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applications_of_quantum_mech... This I did not know: "It even exists in the simple light s…
Even on the macro level there are lots of tricky questions. A bar magnet is surrounded by magnetic flux lines. Apparently it takes no energy to maintain that magnetic field. If I heat the bar in boiling water for long enough, it becomes demagnetized. On the macro level there's no visible/measureable change in the bar. We need a lot of magnification to see that the 'particles are no longer aligned'. On the other hand,…
The energy comes from the incredible magnetic force spent to align the atoms when the magnet was created, and it will be slowly exhausted over time.