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Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

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Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#281
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what people miss about the industry of Science is that, logically, if a paper says "A=Foo" then we'd expect it to be true. And if another comes out that says, "A=Bar" then it's confusing, are both wrong, are both right. But instead, the way it works is a consensus is built. Researcher Bob - "We see that A=Foo." Researcher Sally -"Well, I see that A=Bar." Researcher Timmy - "Well, I see that A=Far." Researcher…

> We see that A=Foo. I think part of this is that scientists don't "see" as in observe these things. Instead they "think that" something is the case. And, they have math and ideas to back that up. If we had repeatable observation of the things it would be much harder to make disagreeing arguments.

You're putting a lot of unstated assumptions into what "observation" is.

If you see a shimmer in a desert, does that mean there's an oasis?

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#282
post #263
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the difference may stem from the fact that I am an experimentalist, and he is a theorist. Theoretical progress has been slow, in large part because Nature has been unwilling to show any new experimental deviations from the Standard Model. Experimentally, people continue to hammer away at the Standard Model (and gravity, my specialty), and the paradigm continues to hold. With few exceptions, most ideas from 40…

The original article as I understood it is breaking a lance for more rigorous selection of experiments based on how much more information the experiments can yield. With increasing costs in experimentation it makes sense to prioritize for impact. In a way it is a meta-science because you need to find a methodology to evaluate which theory, when proven or disproven has the most impact. I would imagine that the current…

Honestly why is popularity not a good mechanism to determine how we allocate experimental investment?

If a large cadre of highly educated people find a particular theoretical mechanism sufficiently compelling to dedicate their careers and time to it, then surely that's a good basis on which to develop experiments to try and confirm whether it's right? Because the benefit of proving it wrong means they'll reallocate their resources.

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#283
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse, they're snidely dismissive. I've been interested in GA for years now because it helps me visualise and understand otherwise inscrutable mathematics. Nobody, literally nobody mired in the traditional mathematics of theoretical physics can explain why the Universe is best represented using matrices of complex numbers with constraints on them. "Shut up and calculate" or some variant is the common response to such…

I 100% agree with you in all respects — I don't come from a physics background but I hear you loud and clear. I think the 'why' is deep and psycho-historical in nature: - we're exiting the "industrial" mindset where everyone is the same making the same products, to a wider topology of knowledge and skills (more and wider horizontals, more and bigger verticals, 'average' profiles become 'scattered'). This clearly driv…

GA is just "strongly typed" vector algebra. It recognises and embraces the inalienable fact that areas and volumes are fundamentally different to vectors and scalars.

The reason Physics "went wrong" is that in 3D space (only!) the mathematics of areas and vectors is coincidentally isomorphic, so it's possible to cheat and use only vectors and scalars and then everything "works". Similarly, volumes and scalars are easily confused as well, and appear to work fine.

GA has no such restrictions and the same formulas work in all dimensions, including high-dimensional or with degenerate metrics. Problems from classical geometry such as finding tangent lines to circles can be trivially extended to finding tangent hyperplanes to hyperspheres, even for very complex problems.

The formalities of GA force you to include things like the square of the unit pseudoscalar in some physics formulas that were accidentally dropped in the traditional form because in 3D this is just "1" and hence easily overlooked. This makes some formulas weirdly difficult to extend to become relativistic, when in fact the problem was just the "weak typing" of vector algebra.

Vector calculus also inherently requires a basis, which is an easy way to get bogged down in the weeds and get confused by issues with the algebra itself instead of the truly "hard" aspects of the problem.

Generally, the "lightbulb" moment for me was that Geometric Algebra has various subsets that are also closed algebras in their own right. For example, the "even" subset of a 3D GA is isomorphic to Quaternions, and the even subset of a 2D GA is basically the same thing as a Complex number. The various "named matrices" are just other subsets of 3D or 4D GAs. Physicists tend to avoid the full general case and simplify their algebras down to the special subset cases, using the historical names and greek symbols. We have to keep the symbols, you see, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to read 2000-year-old ancient greek texts, or... something.

University Physics is actually a study of the History of Physical Philosophy. The computer science equivalent would be learning about abacuses for the entire first semester, then progressing to mechanical calculators in the second semester, vacuum tubes in the second year, and so forth, only to briefly touch on transistors by the end of the third year. Postgraduate research students would be finally told about modern silicon chips and software development, but by this point they're so used to wiring up breadboards manually that it's too late to teach them how to do anything properly.

Starting with something elegant like pure functional programming in the first year is how I studied Computer Science, but I only found out about Geometric Algebra existing after I graduated Physics. It's nuts.

For background reading:

David Hestenes is one of the few physicists trying to reformulate physics in terms of GA: http://geocalc.clas.asu.edu/html/Overview.html

There's lots of papers around: http://geocalc.clas.asu.edu/html/GAinQM.html

Wikipedia is an okay starting point, but not amazing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_algebra

Enkimute's "Ganja.js" online demos are amazing, unfortunately the source was written by one of those crazy maths people who think that terseness helps readability: https://enkimute.github.io/ganja.js/examples/coffeeshop.html...

Real industrial use is few and far between, but at least a few folk have discovered that GA is ideal for robotics. Unfortunately, not everyone got the message, and most robotics software libraries are firmly vector/matrix based and have all the usual issues like numerical instability and gimbal-lock. Fun stuff.

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#284
post #234
post #164

Does anyone else feel like the abstractions and models in physics have gone passed the point where the casual outsider (even a technically and scientifically minded one) can no longer intuitively understand it? Because that's how I feel. There are so many things I just don't understand now like: 1. I originally thought the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle was a natural consequence of using particles (photos) for meas…

Yes. First, intuition depends on your experience. If you never studied physics, most things will be nonintuitive (heavy bodies don't fall faster than light ones? really?) Second, modern 20th century physics education (courses, textbooks) suffered sustained corruption of methodology by scientific authorities, where the quest for understanding was renounced in favor of "modelling" and "prediction" (e.g. authors of orth…

Yeah, if the author of the parent comment is willing to put in work to get the understanding they claim to want, this is the way to go

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is getting a lot of attention Not really. People look at it, marvel, and move on.

Worse, they're snidely dismissive. I've been interested in GA for years now because it helps me visualise and understand otherwise inscrutable mathematics. Nobody, literally nobody mired in the traditional mathematics of theoretical physics can explain why the Universe is best represented using matrices of complex numbers with constraints on them. "Shut up and calculate" or some variant is the common response to such…

If you haven't used it already, Versor[0] is nice to play with. GA is simple enough that even normal-ish teenagers can understand it and produce useful results (my sons are using it in a game they're building). Math isn't even close to my strong suit, but Dual numbers and GA make sense to me, and have made it a lot easier for me to do (seemingly, to me anyway) advanced stuff. :-)

[0] http://versor.mat.ucsb.edu/

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#286
post #5

I don’t get it. What does she want people to do?

If we've completely chewed over the particle physics data we can currently produce so thoroughly it probably makes sense to stop employing so many theoretical physicists and instead shift resources into areas that are making progress whether that's pure math or biology or what-have-you.

If theoretical physics is going nowhere in particular, and we're diverting funding to "pure math" maybe the physicists should put on hats that say "pure mathematicians"?

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These theories have a very precise mathematical formulation and very weird unintuitive consequences. If you try to teach them without math, you only keep the weird unintuitive part and it's more unintelligible. For quantum mechanics you have to know eigenvalues and eigenvectors. This is studies in the first years of the university in a technical career. I'm not sure if it can be teach much earlier. For Special Relati…

We can keep math, but switch to better theories, with plausible explanations. A kind of Pilot Wave can explain quantum weirdness to layman people with ease. We can ditch theory relativity and calculate speeds relatively to CMB, which is much easier to understand. We can ditch Big Bang theory and, instead, accept that light is not immortal, because it ages with time. IMHO, Dipole Repeller and Shapley Attractor are muc…

All three examples you gave have problems or inconsistencies and this is why they are not used. You are being downvoted because you are suggesting teaching formalisms that are known to be insufficient simply because they fulfill your personal criteria of intuitiveness.

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We just need to innovate" K.

In this case, though, the idea that we need to resolve inconsistencies is the correct diagnosis and shines a light on the incredible failure of the prevailing institutions. Take for example the idea that a photon is both a particle and a wave. This dogma has been force fed to students for decades without the glaring inconsistency being resolved, or even pointed to as a thing that needs resolving — something is either…

We have a pretty good and intuitive explanation of what a photon (or other particles) is. It is an excitation of a quantum field and quantum fields stem from the underlying symmetries of space and time. It is incredibly powerful, incredibly simple, and incredibly illuminating idea, but it requires you to learn a couple of new words that humans did not need in their vocabulary when they were inventing agriculture. I am very comfortable claiming this is much simpler than any particle-related intuition as it requires way fewer "axioms". The difference is that you arbitrarily happen to have a mental image of what a particle is, but that does not make particles simpler. As a mental exercise, try to rigorously define what a particle is according to your intuition and explain why we should expect them to even exist.

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#289
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things you mention may be useful to science and even help in evolving foundations of physics, but that hasn't happened yet. Ms. Hossenfelder talks about things such as internal consistency of quantum methodologies, consistency of QT and GRT and particle physics. There is no breakthrough in these questions for decades.

What if there aren't any breakthroughs left to be made in those areas?

That is possible, time will tell. It is quite possible (and at this point, even desirable) that breakthrough will be made elsewhere in foundations of physics.

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#290
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can come up with 300 different explanations for a random blip, your theory is obviously very flexible. You are probably overfitting. If your solution to the problem of not being able to generalize your model to new/other data is to add more parameters. You are probably overfitting. These are the hallmarks of overfitting. Sorry that you cannot learn from others and only expect them to learn from you.

Look at this: theorists come up with something like 300 different models, and you declare they all used the same theory to do it? Of course they didn't! Why would you assume they all did the same thing?! Further, of the various frameworks used, many will have been created by imposing some further symmetry on the standard theory, in effect decreasing the number of free parameters!

Can you point out one that was inconsistent with the foundations of physics? I suppose it is possible some were that radical.
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