71–80 of 94 posts
This is a frustrating era for physicists. In the mid 20th century they were like gods, giving the world the atomic bomb and the semiconductor. Today many branches of physics are stuck. The cosmologists can't find "dark matter", and aren't even sure it's necessary. The string theorists have pretty but un-testable theories. The fusion guys can't make fusion power work. Quantum mechanics and general relativity still hav…
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> manipulate life ... at will Cure for cancer? Cure for any genetic disease? Antibiotic resistant bacteria?
Do you genuinely believe this is an insightful response? Without knowing your background, this makes it seem rather likely you are arguing from the 'larger population' point of view. Given the forum, let's assume you're a little more familiar with tech: Perfect encryption? NLP that understands meaning? Do you see now how it's a fallacy to take cutting edge scientific breakthroughs and demand instantaneous application…
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> The multiverse approach Why, isn't that un-testable as well, even more so than stringtheory, pretty much by definition?
Perhaps it's testable the Sherlock Holmes way of eliminating everything else and being stuck with that as the only answer you can think of. Not a very convincing test of course, but better than saying "we can't think of any possible way this might work".
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Ok, so I propose (for the sake of argument) the following model: any message posted on an electronic message board that casts aspersions on "The Establishment" was actually written by an AI running on a computer in Siberia. Let's suppose that many people find this model useful, because it allows them to dismiss such posts without having to critically engage them. They downvote/flag all such messages, and they feel go…
Useful in that context is typically used to refer to being able to make accurate predictions about the future.
I think a model can be bad at the former but good at the latter.
From reading the articles the author cited as examples of "Fake Physics" I have the impression that their authors simply took the analogies they used too far, thereby saying things that are simply not true. And while this surely is problematic I wouldn't call those articles "fake", as there seems to be no malicious intent behind the misleading analogies.
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Is there any scientific theory outlandish enough that you are willing to call it nonsense on its face?
A better indicator of quality of a model is to ask, "is this model useful?". At the end of the day, models are representations of another system. Like tools, some are more useful than others.
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I think this assessment is magnificently incorrect. Over the past 30 years there have been very important experiments, many of which have reached the mainstream. This includes anything from the Higgs experiments to the LIGO experiments. What about things closer to the HN crowd, like communications infrastructure like the Internet? The discovery of the transistor didn't bring an iPhone overnight. Same with many other…
Higgs and LIGO are big nothingburgers compared to anything that happened in physics in any given year between 1910 and 1950 or so. Meanwhile "physicists" spend their careers doing piffle like writing programs for quantum computers that arguably will never exist in the corporeal world. Yeah, I coulda been one of those guys: I even had a pretty good idea for an imaginary QC platform and a position in a major research i…
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> manipulate life ... at will Cure for cancer? Cure for any genetic disease? Antibiotic resistant bacteria?
Do you genuinely believe this is an insightful response? Without knowing your background, this makes it seem rather likely you are arguing from the 'larger population' point of view. Given the forum, let's assume you're a little more familiar with tech: Perfect encryption? NLP that understands meaning? Do you see now how it's a fallacy to take cutting edge scientific breakthroughs and demand instantaneous application…
(background: PhD in Biophysics, I've cloned genes and run huge simulations of protein folding, as well as worked in genomics and pharmaceutical chemistry).
Interesting; I didn't know that Nautilus was backed by a religious organization, but in retrospect I am not surprised at all. They get a lot more credit and traction here than they deserve. Nautilus is usually full of bull but pretending to be intellectual.
http://nautil.us/about (heading "Nautilus has received financial support from")
Seems a little unfair to only mention the philosophical outlier.
I see the list of "advisors" on that page has some pretty respectable names, too. That may not be worth much - who knows how much influence they have over the content - but having some venerable academics willing to associate their names with your output like that is surely at least a small signal in favour of legitimacy.
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Higgs and LIGO are big nothingburgers compared to anything that happened in physics in any given year between 1910 and 1950 or so. Meanwhile "physicists" spend their careers doing piffle like writing programs for quantum computers that arguably will never exist in the corporeal world. Yeah, I coulda been one of those guys: I even had a pretty good idea for an imaginary QC platform and a position in a major research i…
Why is it stagnating though? Lack of talent? Lack of funding? Is it that all the lowest hanging fruit is gone and the problems are becoming intractable to solve?
Considering that the only way to even observe Higgs is to build a multi billion dollar collider I'd bet on that one.