271–280 of 282 posts
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I don't see how the claim that our universe is simulated is related to metaphysics in the first place.
You don't understand how the simulation hypothesis is related to "the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space."?
Well this is kind of funny and I mostly agree so TLDR: > "I’m afraid all of this sounds rather negative. Well. There’s a reason I left particle physics. Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal progress or for progress in any other discipline of science. The only reason we still hear so much about it is that a lot of funding goes into it and so…
> string theory this and god particle that, and it's really not very satisfying or illuminating I think what would be interesting would be a study of why researchers are drawn to string theory. I remember reading about it in OMNI magazine as a teen back in the 80's. During my studies at university, I learned about many proposals in physics that failed after people spend decades trying to hammer into reality (like the…
I don't think any subsequent new big theory like string theory accomplished that and Einstein-emulation seems a dead end. However theorist don't give up on the approach and quite a lot of them seem to argue that beauty without testability is good enough, while that is really really iffy.
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I don't think there are textbooks on this stuff, it is too much of a niche, you probably need to read journal papers. A place to start might be the classic "What is liquid?" review paper by Barker and Henderson: https://link.aps.org/pdf/10.1103/RevModPhys.48.587?casa_toke... ... and then the classic review paper on liquid crystals by Stephen and Straley: https://link.aps.org/pdf/10.1103/RevModPhys.46.617?casa_toke...…
Yes, I'd love to read it, if you have time to find the DOI. Thanks!
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> better telescopes, better sky coverage, better redshift resolution, better frequency coverage And all of this is being built currently or already exists (ELT, ASSN, Vera Rubin, SKA, CTA), so it's not clear what she's advocating.
Presumably "more of that." Would cosmologists really turn away even more funding? I can't imagine so.
So "more of that" isn't a very useful position, science output isn't a linear, or even monotonous function of dollars spent.
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> Have you heard how the military makes a lot of technology that benefits society? I’ve heard that, yes, as well as NASA inventing velcro and zippers and teflon, and all of it has a faint tinge of “not actually true at all” to it.
You don’t see how NASA has pushed technology and science forward? The inspiration it provides for people becoming engineers and scientists is alone probably worth a non-trivial fraction of the US GDP.
What they do seem to question what immediate, house hold, benefit you get from putting people on the moon. Common examples such as vecro and teflon turn out to be wild hyperbole based on at most "NASA made their own version of existing technology".
This is a fair remark and something I actually had in mind when I made the comment originally: science doesn't provide very much direct and immediate benefit, all the concrete examples are actually sort of boring things of the "this existing thing is now better (for a surprising reason)" type.
But there are also lots of indirect benefits as you say, from the inspiration and philosophical satisfaction (tricky thing to put a monetary value on) to just the plain old developing of technical skill that transfers to other specialised areas of society.
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I think your comment is far behind the times. Directly from QCD we have: computed the low-lying parts of hadronic spectrum, computed the proton-neutron mass splitting, made _pre_dictions about hadronic masses that were then found at the LHC, computed the nucleon axial coupling g_A, vacuum polarization and light-by-light, and so on. It requires supercomputers. But so what? Nobody promised that physics should be easy.…
The values that you mention, e.g. the proton-neutron mass splitting, have been computed only with a precision much lower than such values can be measured experimentally. That means that such computations have little, if any, practical importance. With the current QCD, it is not possible to compute the ratio between the mass of the neutron and the mass of a proton with a useful precision. The mass ratio between the pr…
> QCD would need revolutionary improvements to achieve such goals.
Make the computers 10x faster and the algorithms / libraries 10x faster and all the things you wish for are within reach. Much more plausible than _overthrowing the standard model with something that offers easier calculations_.
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You don't understand how the simulation hypothesis is related to "the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space."?
Tangentially sure it is, but it seems like a more concrete matter than what I would think of as a typical metaphysical topic.
If anything, the simulation hypothesis seems to be an attempt to partially shed light on those traditional metaphysical questions. I would say the hypothesis is not tangential but directly bears on metaphysics.
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> No, there was basically no empirical input into the development of special relativity either There is a myth of Einstein that just isn't credible, which is that Einstein, while working as a patent clerk just came up with Special Relativity out of the blue without anyone's input, without the benefit of history. But Special Relativity was in the air. Henri Poincare was already writing about relativity, and so were ot…
This has been on my mind for a while now. Heroes, such as Einstein, are good in that they motivate certain people, me included, to go into natural sciences, but once you start grasping more of historical context of scientific breakthroughs you begin to wonder why some scientists were elevated to that rank in general public's mind. I would say that this is some kind of PR type selection. It's natural that general publ…
I don't know how it was in Riemann's, Einstein's or Feynman's times, but today, most of the actual original research in sciences and math (and CS) is done not by the big prof but by the lower tiers, all the way down to PhD students. Those are doing the footwork, write the papers, work long hours with ridiculous pay. Sure you need some visionary at the top, but the actual results are not produced by those.
Everybody is well aware that Elon Musk didn't personally build the first Tesla or the first SpaceX rocket. But big theorems or theories are still named after by the big prof instead of the person who actually did the work.
I dunno why this blog keeps be voted to the top. Yeah, current physics research is lacking in some areas .since when was it perfect?