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The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

backreaction.blogspot.com

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Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

#31

Post by peteradio »

letitgo12345 wrote: post #12

Well considering that we know everything pretty much about most of everyday physics and new physics requires energies that are almost unreachable and billions of dollars in experimental investment and/or years and decades to collect sufficient data, it's not a surprise at all that foundations of physics progress has slowed. I don't think the physics community is to blame here. Just the nature of reality

I studied under a very smart professor who believed that somehow table top particle physics would be a possibility. See http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6355/990 . Maybe the HEP experiment consoritium is just a global grant conspiracy. Wake up sheeple!!

Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

#32

Post by tree_of_item »

teilo wrote: post #13
ackfoo wrote: post #5

We’re stuck in a paradigm that doesn’t result in any valid fundamental predictions. The idea that running the expanding universe backward makes everything denser and hotter in the past is just dumb. The universe is not like a loaf expanding from dense batter to fluffy bread. Instead, the chaotic vacuum produces, for want of a more accurate concept, particle-antiparticle pairs at random that exert a “pressure” seen as…

Here's the ether guy again. It's all he can talk about.

Well, that sort of reaction to "out-there" ideas is kind of contributing to stagnation, don't you think?

Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

#33

Post by tbabb »

empath75 wrote: post #26
tbabb wrote: post #14

While I don't like this ~guy's~ woman's disdainful, superior tone, I do think his complaint has merit. Physics is notoriously bad at having curiosity about strange, unconventional, or truly novel ideas. I just finished reading What is Real? by Adam Becker-- a history of modern physics-- and am astonished at how aggressively physicists resisted and suppressed "unconventional" interpretations of quantum mechanics (like…

> suppressed "unconventional" interpretations of quantum mechanics (like the many worlds interpretation) in favor of the obviously-wrong Copenhagen interpretation. They’re just interpretations and they all work equally well and produce the same predictions. It makes no sense to call any of them obviously wrong. It’s personal preference.

Copenhagen is wrong to the degree that any theory can be called wrong. It posits specific physical events (collapse) which are not only unsupported by evidence, and not only contradicted by evidence (delayed choice quantum eraser experiments), and not only logically self contradictory (when it is not too vague to make concrete statements about the phenomena it is explaining, it is circular-- our theory of electrons cannot include scientists (or the macroscopic world in general) as a fundamental element, when scientists themselves are explained in terms of electrons), but ontologically inferior to many worlds, which explains all the same phenomena without adding any new suppositions (and no, the extra worlds are not extra suppositions, they are natural predictions that arise by simply following well verified quantum laws to their natural conclusion, by treating the environment as a quantum mechanical system of particles).

Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

#34

Post by aaaaaaaaaab »

ackfoo wrote: post #5

We’re stuck in a paradigm that doesn’t result in any valid fundamental predictions. The idea that running the expanding universe backward makes everything denser and hotter in the past is just dumb. The universe is not like a loaf expanding from dense batter to fluffy bread. Instead, the chaotic vacuum produces, for want of a more accurate concept, particle-antiparticle pairs at random that exert a “pressure” seen as…

That would imply that there’s an equal amount of matter and antimatter in the Universe. So, where’s the antimatter?

Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

#35

Post by twtw »

tbabb wrote: post #14

While I don't like this ~guy's~ woman's disdainful, superior tone, I do think his complaint has merit. Physics is notoriously bad at having curiosity about strange, unconventional, or truly novel ideas. I just finished reading What is Real? by Adam Becker-- a history of modern physics-- and am astonished at how aggressively physicists resisted and suppressed "unconventional" interpretations of quantum mechanics (like…

quote from previous post that is potentially relevant to your dislike of the "superior, disdainful tone":

> later someone sent me a glorious photoshopped screenshot (see above) which shows me with a painted-on mustache and informs us that Sabine Hossenfelder is known for “a horrible blog on which she makes fun of other people’s theories.”

> The truly horrible thing about this blog, however, is that I’m not making fun. String theorists are happily studying universes that don’t exist, particle physicists are busy inventing particles that no one ever measures, and theorists mass-produce “solutions” to the black hole information loss problem that no one will ever be able to test. All these people get paid well for their remarkable contributions to human knowledge. If that makes you laugh, it’s the absurdity of the situation, not my blog, that’s funny.

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/10/dear-dr-b-what-do-y...

Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

#36

Post by cletus »

I'm no physicist but this leaves me scratching my head.

You have some people saying the university funding system is to blame by not accepting crazy ideas but we have all sorts of ideas in physics like:

- String theory. As best as I can tell the only reason string theory exists is because if dimensions=11 the equations for general relativity pop out. Importantly though string theory has made no testable predictions and it's unclear when or even if that will be the case.

- Supersymmetry. Interesting idea but no evidence of this yet.

Other more interesting ideas to me at least (again, as non-physicist):

- Octonion Math underlying the standard model (maybe) [1]

And some interesting experimental work:

- Possible violations of lepton universality from the LHCb detector [2]. This was, last I heard, still well below statistical significance (5-sigma) and could well disappear (as other bumps have eg at 750GeV) but it's interesting nonetheless.

And there are host of open problems with otherwise successful theories.

My favourite extremes here is the prediction of magnetic moment of an electron, which is ~12 significant digits in agreement with experimental results. At the other end is QFT predicting the energy density of a vacuum, which is ~120 orders of magnitude off [3].

Anyway, a lot of this exists in the current academic system.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-octonion-math-that-could-...

[2] https://cerncourier.com/beauty-quarks-test-lepton-universali...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem

Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

#37

Post by Sean1708 »

rossdavidh wrote: post #30
letitgo12345 wrote: post #12

Well considering that we know everything pretty much about most of everyday physics and new physics requires energies that are almost unreachable and billions of dollars in experimental investment and/or years and decades to collect sufficient data, it's not a surprise at all that foundations of physics progress has slowed. I don't think the physics community is to blame here. Just the nature of reality

I agree, although I think it could be argued that a logical outcome of this fact, is that most (although hopefully not all) of the physicists should go work on other things, like maybe the physics of planet formation, where we are getting new data all the time. Or maybe in areas outside of physics altogether, like the social sciences, where again we have orders of magnitude more data than we once did. If the low-hang…

> Or maybe in areas outside of physics altogether

This does actually happen already. I'm not sure how widespread it is, but I've noticed it in a couple of Condensed Matter Theory groups. For example Imperial's group[0] do research on Complexity and Networks including the "application of these principles to a variety of stochastic phenomena, ranging from ant colonies to cardiovascular biology, from sandpiles to earthquakes".

[0]: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/condensed-matter-theory/research/

Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

#39

Post by semi-extrinsic »

ackfoo wrote: post #5

We’re stuck in a paradigm that doesn’t result in any valid fundamental predictions. The idea that running the expanding universe backward makes everything denser and hotter in the past is just dumb. The universe is not like a loaf expanding from dense batter to fluffy bread. Instead, the chaotic vacuum produces, for want of a more accurate concept, particle-antiparticle pairs at random that exert a “pressure” seen as…

> This is why “dark matter” exists out there and not down here.

Nope, everyone thinks that dark matter exists everywhere around us. That's why we are funding and running all sorts of dark matter detectors that are looking inwards, not outwards.

Re: The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

#40

Post by dv_dt »

tylermw wrote: post #3

Love this comment left on the post by Peter Shor (of Shor's algorithm--the algorithm that kicked off the quantum computing frenzy). I assume it's him and not an imposter. "It's not just that scientists don't want to move their butts, although that's undoubtedly part of it. It's also that they can't. In today's university funding system, you need grants (well, maybe you don't truly need them once you have tenure, but…

It's basically another form of premature optimization as it pertains to discovery and research. It stems from the misbegotten idea of permeating the last few decades that cost-benefits accounting and ROI should drive the entire world (and choosing the entirely wrong accounting model to apply uniformly on top of it).
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