51–60 of 65 posts
Question for physicists: Are the G-2 results more groundbreaking than discovering the Higgs particle to moving physics forward?
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This is a deep philosophical debate: Is mathematics invented or discovered? https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/great-math-mystery/
I think it's a bit less deep than that. It's more, "is the language we use to describe mathematics invented or discovered", which I would put myself (and most people) firmly in the invented camp.
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> You have to appeal to some principle to sort out such theories from good descriptions of how the world works. Yes: testable predictions followed by experimental evidence. Beyond that I don't see how what you're talking about is anything other than an appeal to aesthetics.
> Yes: testable predictions followed by experimental evidence. But there are an infinite number of theories matching the current evidence. Some predictions of the theories might not be testable, what do you do then?
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Nature doesn't care how complicated it is. A bias towards beauty is a trap that any serious scientist will not fall for. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFKgIOX8IRE
A bias towards "beauty" or simplicity of some form is inevitable and part of good science. For every theory, you can generate a more complicated theory with more moving parts that generates the exact same predictions. For instance, my theory of gravity is the same as general relativity, except that at 3 PM April 9th, 2021, all gravity will be reversed. You have to appeal to some principle to sort out such theories fr…
> For every theory, you can generate a more complicated theory with more moving parts that generates the exact same predictions.
I agree with the second point, but disagree with the first.
Yes, by Occam's razor, a simpler theory with fewer moving parts should be preferred over a complex theory, if both produce correct answers. But the most accurate theory might not be "beautiful".
What matters most is if the theory correctly predicts reality. If it has a weird arbitrary format, but correctly predicts everything, it's better than a theory that's beautiful but incorrect.
Most of science has been using "beauty" as a way to help guide it to the correct answers. For example, there's been a lot of work on string theory because it has a kind of mathematical beauty. But it may turn out that a search for "beauty" in this sense was misguided. Beauty is not the goal, truth is.
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It's too bad we'll almost certainly never be able to answer the meta question of how or why we ended up with the rules we did.
These questions are more metaphysics than science. I, personally, am partial to the idea that the anthropic principle has a pretty big role to play, at least in terms of the fundamental constants.
There have been a bunch of articles near the top of HN on this result, but I found this one from Quanta magazine to be one of the best non-technical explanations. Particularly interesting was the focus on an alternative theoretical calculation for the muon magnetic moment: the “BMW” approach, which uses a numerical lattice model and produces a number much closer to the Fermilab experiment. For an outsider, one of the…
PBS Spacetime just released a video on this experiment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4Ko7NW2yQo
So did Fermilab ;) https://youtu.be/ZjnK5exNhZ0 Definitely worth checking out the rest of the videos on both those channels. While we’re at it, check out 60 Symbols’ channel for great physics discussions that hardly ever (thanks Brady!) include equations https://youtube.com/user/sixtysymbols
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A bias towards "beauty" or simplicity of some form is inevitable and part of good science. For every theory, you can generate a more complicated theory with more moving parts that generates the exact same predictions. For instance, my theory of gravity is the same as general relativity, except that at 3 PM April 9th, 2021, all gravity will be reversed. You have to appeal to some principle to sort out such theories fr…
> A bias towards "beauty" or simplicity of some form is inevitable and part of good science. > For every theory, you can generate a more complicated theory with more moving parts that generates the exact same predictions. I agree with the second point, but disagree with the first. Yes, by Occam's razor, a simpler theory with fewer moving parts should be preferred over a complex theory, if both produce correct answers…
Welcome to Biology! :-)
(Except DNA -> RNA -> Protein, but it's still sloppy along the way)
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I think the safest answer regarding the Big Bang is that we don't really understand the mechanism. In particular, anything regarding inflation stands on truly dubious ground (It gets the necessary outcomes right, but we have no presently-testable theory regarding the mechanism. Any mechanism that does must defy the laws of physics as we know them). I can't pretend to be an expert here, but the quantum-fluctuations in…
What do you feeling is wrong with "the universe having won the lottery of all lotteries in order to exist at all"? Our existence seems consistent with some multiverse picture where we just end up observing one out of many universes that was capable of supporting life. After all, if any of a number of fundamental constants gets tweaked by a small amount, then we end up in situations like e.g. hydrogen being the only n…
If you elect to believe in the anthropic principle, one might continue to delve into fundamental research in order to ask the question, "What configuration of all possible universes is required in order to win the lottery of all lotteries?" That is a pretty awesome question, too. It is the lottery of all lotteries, after all.
In either case, deeper research is likely to turn up new and deeply-interesting surprises. Those surprises are likely to be resolved with improved theories with greater predictive power regarding the universe in which we live.
There have been a bunch of articles near the top of HN on this result, but I found this one from Quanta magazine to be one of the best non-technical explanations. Particularly interesting was the focus on an alternative theoretical calculation for the muon magnetic moment: the “BMW” approach, which uses a numerical lattice model and produces a number much closer to the Fermilab experiment. For an outsider, one of the…
The class of integrals that QCD solutions belong to is known to be NP-hard. It is not known specifically that QCD itself is NP-hard but it is suspected to be by many.