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The crisis in physics is not only about physics

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Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#161

Post by Balgair »

ImaCake wrote: post #131
Balgair wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Most optics tables are floated on air pistons these days, they aren't super expensive. It helps with vibe issues and with shock absorption (there is a lot of slamming your head on the table when doing optics alignment :P ).

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#162

Post by ben_w »

poelzi wrote: post #157
Ma8ee wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

QM is fundamentally not correct. They assume energy and matter is interchangeable, which is not. Build me a proton from energy and I will shut up, you can't. The appearance of positions can be explained much much much much easier, once you got your electron model correct. When I studied physics I never saw the periodic table as the result of QM model, never made sense for me. Now I understand, thanks to a more advanc…

> Build me a proton from energy and I will shut up, you can't

We’ve been doing that since 1955 every time we make antiprotons.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#163

Post by andy-x »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #111

>> But for all I can tell at this moment in history I am the only physicist who has at least come up with an idea for what to do. What, in the whole world? That sounds a bit messianic, if I may.

With that kind of ego she will soon claim "in the known or visible universe" :)

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#164

Post by trixie_ »

nxpnsv wrote: post #66
trixie_ wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is the research using these tools coordinated? Or are these tool created and then independent researchers schedule time to use them?

I worked many years in particle physics. It is coordinated within each experiment. You can’t just publish as a lot of people stand behind the work there must be consensus. There are abundances of physics sub groups, article review boards, research strategies, etc.q

Is it coordinated across experiments?

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#165

Post by friendlybus »

garmaine wrote: post #113
mellosouls wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. A quick Google of the subject will demonstrate it is still an (maybe, the ) outstanding subject of philosophy and perhaps ultimately physics. Check any online encyclopedia, but if you have any respectable references that disagree, I'd be genuinely interested. Eg: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness

I never said there was broad consensus among all philosophers and physicists, etc. It takes generations for these ideas to truly die, just as it did with other widely believed falsehoods. No one really attacked consciousness from a mechanistic perspective until Turing, and that work wasn't followed up on outside of the AI community until the 70's and 80's, and it wouldn't be until very recent advances in AI that othe…

The phlogiston is an elegant argument in this context that regresses the discussion. The use of the phlogiston as a criticism is elegant because it allows you to think of consciousness as an element that inhabits the brain and then proclaim that to be wrong, leaving at the end of the story only the physical brain and no room for imagining anything else in that space, without having proven the case.

A phlogiston is not the correct analogy for grounding consciousness in science. An easier fit would be the software/hardware split you find in computing, where the abstractions and meaning we perceive to be real is a set of built layers of computational or logical abstraction.

I am on the side of not thinking you can scientifically ground consciousness with the understanding we have. I don't think either analogy fits and the argument will forever be pinned in debate between characters that prefer their own worldview.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#166

Post by poelzi »

ben_w wrote: post #162
poelzi wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QM is fundamentally not correct. They assume energy and matter is interchangeable, which is not. Build me a proton from energy and I will shut up, you can't. The appearance of positions can be explained much much much much easier, once you got your electron model correct. When I studied physics I never saw the periodic table as the result of QM model, never made sense for me. Now I understand, thanks to a more advanc…

> Build me a proton from energy and I will shut up, you can't We’ve been doing that since 1955 every time we make antiprotons.

Those mangeled protons are not anti-protons. They are not stable but only a Proton with damaged outer shell (the one that breaks at 5 MeV). Get it stable like the Proton and we talk again.

When real antimatter gets destroyed it looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Jupiter_impact_event

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#167

Post by ColanR »

Xcelerate wrote: post #132
ColanR wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

If we're nearby to each other, we could get it started. You in the DC area?

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#168

Post by Ma8ee »

pas wrote: post #153
Ma8ee wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sabine's point is that the current approach doesn't work any longer. > She can't just sit in an ivory tower and stare down the cosmos in a contest until it reveals its secrets. That is a gross misrepresenation of what she is saying. Did you actually read anything she wrote? She is criticising the notion that you can make progress, sitting in the ivory tower, as you exprss it, and coming up ideas about strings and sup…

But.. but... she can't have it both ways. The current unexplained data is not much, and the best explanations involve a lot of hard to test things. Why? Because there's not enough unexplained data. The easy to test theories have been already thrown out. Yes, sure, what she is saying is nice, let's try to explain stuff the simplest way possible. Occam's razor. But theorists already do this.

Of course she can have it both ways. Don’t be stupid. There’s plenty to do in physics without building an even bigger collider which likely won’t teach us more than the current one.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#169

Post by ben_w »

poelzi wrote: post #166
ben_w wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Build me a proton from energy and I will shut up, you can't We’ve been doing that since 1955 every time we make antiprotons.

Those mangeled protons are not anti-protons. They are not stable but only a Proton with damaged outer shell (the one that breaks at 5 MeV). Get it stable like the Proton and we talk again. When real antimatter gets destroyed it looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Jupiter_impact_event

Sigh. For your benefit more than mine, I’d like to make you aware that you sound like a Markov chain trained on science-sounding words, because those words don’t fit together in the order you have combined them.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#170

Post by mikorym »

mikorym wrote: post #151

> crisis in physics Me: Hmm... interesting. Personally I think they should spend time consolidating the different mathematical techniques. > Maybe all these string theorists have been wasting tax-money for decades, alright, but in the large scheme of things it’s not all that much money. I grant you that much. Theorists are not expensive. > String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There’s math for it, alright. Prett…

Wow, forgot about the \asterisk being a reserved character.
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