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Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

#361

Post by galaxyLogic »

dgfl wrote: post #354
Paracompact wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it’s completely impossible to even imagine what the answer to a question is, as is the case here, it’s probably the wrong question to pose. Is there any answer you’d be satisfied by? I would be very satisfied to have an answer, or even just convincing heuristic arguments, for the following: (1) What systems experience consciousness? For example, is a computer as conscious as a rock, as conscious as a human, or s…

I think most of them are valid questions! (1) is perhaps more of a question requiring a strict definition of consciousness in the first place, making it mostly circular. (2) and especially (3) are the most interesting, but they seem part of the easy problem instead. And I’d say we already have indications that the latter option of (4) is true, given your examples from (5) and things like sleep (the most common reason…

I much agree, especially on the importance of defining what we mean by the word "conscicousness", before we say we cannot explain it. Is a rock conscious? Sure according to some deifinition of the word. Probably everybody would agree that there are different levels of consciousness, and maybe we'd need different names for them.

Animals are clearly conscious in that they observe the world and react to it and even try to proactively manipulate it.

The next level of consciousness, and what most people probably mean when they use the word is human ability to "think in language". That opens up a whole new level, of consciousness, because now we can be conscious of our inner voice. We are conscious of ourselves, apart from the world. Our inner voice can say things about the thing which seems to be the thing uttering the words in our mind. Me.

Is there anything more to consciousness than us being aware that we are conscious? It is truly a wondrous experience which may seem like a hard problem to explain, hence the "Hard Problem of Consciousness", right? But it's not so mysterious if we think of it in terms of being able to use and hear and understand language. Without language our consciousness would be on the level of most animals I assume. Of course it seems that many animals use some kind of language. But, do they hear their "inner voice"? Hard to say. I would guess not.

And so again, in simple terms, what is the question?

Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

#362

Post by dgfl »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #357
adrian_b wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hydrogenoid atoms and ions, with a single electron, are the exception that proves the rule, because anything more complex cannot be computed accurately. The spectrum of hydrogen (ignoring the fine structure) could be computed with the empirical rules of Rydberg before the existence of quantum physics. Quantum physics has just explained it in terms of simpler assumptions. Quantum physics explains a great number of…

> The hydrogenoid atoms and ions, with a single electron, are the exception that proves the rule, because anything more complex cannot be computed accurately. Rather: there is no known closed-form solution (and there likely won't be any).

If you let the computer run for long enough, it will compute any atomic spectrum to arbitrary accuracy. Only QFT has non-divergent series, so at least in theory we expect the calculations to converge.

There’s an intrinsic physical limit to which you can resolve a spectrum, so arbitrarily many digits of precision aren’t exactly a worthy pursuit anyway.

Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

#363

Post by dgfl »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #361
dgfl wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most of them are valid questions! (1) is perhaps more of a question requiring a strict definition of consciousness in the first place, making it mostly circular. (2) and especially (3) are the most interesting, but they seem part of the easy problem instead. And I’d say we already have indications that the latter option of (4) is true, given your examples from (5) and things like sleep (the most common reason…

I much agree, especially on the importance of defining what we mean by the word "conscicousness", before we say we cannot explain it. Is a rock conscious? Sure according to some deifinition of the word. Probably everybody would agree that there are different levels of consciousness, and maybe we'd need different names for them. Animals are clearly conscious in that they observe the world and react to it and even try…

This is precisely the matter, I wholeheartedly agree. The metacognition that we have, that only humans are likely to have, is the root behind the millennium-long discussions on consciousness. And the hard problem stems from whatever was left of traditional philosophers getting hit by the wall of modern scientific progress, not wanting to let go of the mind as some metaphysical entity beyond reality, with qualia and however many ineffable private properties.

The average person may not know the word qualia, but “is your red the same as my red” is a popular question among kids and adults. Seems to be a topic we are all intrinsically curious about. But from a physical point of view, the qualia of red is necessarily some collection of neurons firing in some pattern, highly dependent on the network topology. Knowing this, then the question (as it was originally posed) is immediately meaningless. Mutatis mutandis, same exact argument for consciousness itself.

Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

#364

Post by squeefers »

albatross79 wrote: post #353
drdeca wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes nature tells us that the questions we are inclined to ask, are flawed questions. The “What path did the photon take?” question is one of those times. The answer to the question is Mu. Similar to the questions “How much phlogiston is there in iron?” or “Does sulphur have more earth than air, or more air than earth?”.

But the question is "what is the universe made of?", and the answer given is "mathematical abstractions that fit the data".

exactly. i yearn for more.

Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

#366

Post by kingstnap »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #332
kingstnap wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on what you mean, specifically on your distance metric. If you mean nearest neighbours search like autocorrect then LLMs are extrapolative. You can easily generate combinations not seen before. I mean you can prove this with parametric prompting. Like "Generate a poem about {noun} in {place} in {language}" or whatever. This is a simplistic example but it doesn't take much to come up with a space that has q…

It is interpolation but that is what human thinking is as well. Interpolation is so broad it can cover agi conceptually. But I get it, the interpolation you’re talking about is limited. But I think you missed this insight: human interpolation is limited too. In the short term everything we do is simply recombination of ideas as you put it. But that’s the short term. In the long term we do things that are much greater…

A chatbot is exactly and only a short term recombination of existing ideas is exactly my point.

Even if an LLM came up with a theory of quantum gravity in some random chain of thought via chance, once the context is wiped everything is gone.

Expanding the frontier of knowledge (true extrapolation) requires iteration and layering of sinpler ideas. If you loose the layers and have to start from scratch every time then you fundamently will never move further out then what you already know (the interpolation).

Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

#367

Post by alpineidyll3 »

mattlangston wrote: post #71

Experimental particle physicist here. It's just hard. I measured the electron's vector coupling to the Z boson at SLAC in the late 1990s, and the answer from that measurement is: we don't know yet - and that's the point. Thirty years later, the discrepancy between my experiment and LEP's hasn't been resolved. It might be nothing. It might be the first whisper of dark matter or a new force. And the only way to find ou…

But.. are you saying your vector coupling isn't explained by the existing standard model, that the measurement lacked sufficient resolution, or that existing calculations don't agree with your measurement?

Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

#368

Post by longfacehorrace »

drdeca wrote: post #360
longfacehorrace wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what they were saying. Systems can hypothesize about themselves but they cannot determine why the rules they can learn exist in the first place. Prior states are no longer observable so there is always incomplete history. Conway's Game of Life can't explain its own origins just itself. Because the origins are no longer observable after they occur. What are the origins of our universe? We can only guess wit…

If they had a correct point, the appeal to Gödel’s results did not help to justify it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46955821

"The universe is not required to appeal to your aesthetic tastes."

Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

#369

Post by threethirtytwo »

kingstnap wrote: post #366
threethirtytwo wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is interpolation but that is what human thinking is as well. Interpolation is so broad it can cover agi conceptually. But I get it, the interpolation you’re talking about is limited. But I think you missed this insight: human interpolation is limited too. In the short term everything we do is simply recombination of ideas as you put it. But that’s the short term. In the long term we do things that are much greater…

A chatbot is exactly and only a short term recombination of existing ideas is exactly my point. Even if an LLM came up with a theory of quantum gravity in some random chain of thought via chance, once the context is wiped everything is gone. Expanding the frontier of knowledge (true extrapolation) requires iteration and layering of sinpler ideas. If you loose the layers and have to start from scratch every time then…

>A chatbot is exactly and only a short term recombination of existing ideas is exactly my point.

You missed my point. I'm saying humans have finite context windows as well.

Look at how claude keeps passing it's context window down the chain. It creates a summary. It can spend thousands of tokens to coalesce on a conclusion, and only that conclusion needs to be passed on to the next context window. The research can be tossed. That's how human discovery works. We don't need the whole context window, we produce major discoveries because we pass the conclusion down the chain.

LLMs can do it too. We just never fully tried it.

Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

#370

Post by __patchbit__ »

verzali wrote: post #297
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The field of Elon Musk has been promising shit for years, what do you think?

To be fair, he has delivered a lot of (bull)shit

How SpaceX and Tesla patent new industrial scale techniques and technologies for any competitor to use is the bullcase for bringing the future forward faster. Lookup at Starlink.
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