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Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

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Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#71

Post by worldthruword »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #52
Diogenesian wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, fair enough - I checked Wikipedia. My mind completely erased the "sophon" bit or whatever it was called, it just got erased again. Not a fan of that particular fairy dust. I thought they were referring to the inability of the aliens to make an accurate calendar.

No, I was referring to the human scientists' reaction to the sophons' interference. But I thought that the Trisolarians' inability to predict their planets' path also seemed weird. Yes, the three-body problem isn't analytically solvable, but you can brute force it, and I would imagine that a species that is capable of creating sophons and starships with hulls made out of the Strong-force could calculate their planet'…

Trisolarans had advanced technology which means they knew about probability. Probability immediately implies Lying and the two types of scientific error we have. ie false positives and false negatives

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#72

Post by d0mine »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #52
Diogenesian wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, fair enough - I checked Wikipedia. My mind completely erased the "sophon" bit or whatever it was called, it just got erased again. Not a fan of that particular fairy dust. I thought they were referring to the inability of the aliens to make an accurate calendar.

No, I was referring to the human scientists' reaction to the sophons' interference. But I thought that the Trisolarians' inability to predict their planets' path also seemed weird. Yes, the three-body problem isn't analytically solvable, but you can brute force it, and I would imagine that a species that is capable of creating sophons and starships with hulls made out of the Strong-force could calculate their planet'…

The error grows exponentially. For example, for equal-mass triple with Earth sized orbit initially, the prediction limit is just a few hundreds years even if you know initial conditions up to the plank length (LLM estimate of ~135 Lyapunov times).

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#74

Post by tatjam »

touisteur wrote: post #59
ordu wrote: post #49

Hmm... The Reality changed itself when guys in Siberia changed the sensor? Some years ago I was playing with the idea that the Reality might invent new laws when people look for them, and doesn't bother with laws when no one observes them. It would be in the style of Copenhagen interpretation, though even with regard to it, the idea seems too weird to be true. But now we have an experimental evidence. In any case it…

You might want to read Dan Simmons' Ilium and if you can stomach some weird post-9/11 shit, Olympos. One of the overarching themes is what you describe... or similar.

Also read Greg Egan's short story Luminous :)

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#76

Post by randomImmigrant »

radicaldreamer wrote: post #21
storywatch wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good for the world but terrible for the practitioners in academia. Imagine you are in your last year of your PhD and then something new comes out and completely invalidates/obsoletes your results. Cough natural language processing PhDs during COVID when GPT-3 came around..

This happens in biology all the time. PHDs will spend years mastering some intricate multi-day long procedure to do some thing and a new discovery will obviate the need for the procedure completely.

Preach. The way out is to find truly basic problems that you’re attacking at a fundamental level.

That rarely gets funded. And even more rarely handed off to grad students. In a sense the failure of a bunch of grad students is priced in to the way science is done.

Which makes it so perverse their lives and careers depend on success as newcomers.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#77

Post by dieselgate »

whatsThisBtn4 wrote: post #68

9 years of philosophy and I'm over platonic realism and reading contemporary philosophy of science. The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions. Everyone knows about the copernican revolution. But when it first happened, the old models(earth at the center of the solar system) were more accurate at predicting where the plenets would be. Scientists pragmatically spend their time doing best…

> The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions

I understand where you're coming from but this is a very cynical take. String theory is a strawman compared to the empirical "discoveries" of items like black holes or the Higgs boson.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#78

Post by allenrb »

kazinator wrote: post #73

I bet you that old results still add up in the parallel universe in which the muon mystery has not yet been solved!

I was thinking someone must have fixed a bug in the simulation (in which we live) between when the old results were generated and now.

Only 1/2 :-)

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#79

Post by jambalaya8 »

dieselgate wrote: post #77
whatsThisBtn4 wrote: post #68

9 years of philosophy and I'm over platonic realism and reading contemporary philosophy of science. The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions. Everyone knows about the copernican revolution. But when it first happened, the old models(earth at the center of the solar system) were more accurate at predicting where the plenets would be. Scientists pragmatically spend their time doing best…

> The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions I understand where you're coming from but this is a very cynical take. String theory is a strawman compared to the empirical "discoveries" of items like black holes or the Higgs boson.

Aye, but we only sorta kinda "know" what things like black holes might be. We have models that make sense to us based on our understanding of science, and we think our instruments can faithfully report on what they can be with measurements we believe we are making correctly, but we have no clue what we don't know, and no real way to prove it, just theorize, and sort of bundle up what we believe is data supporting it.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#80

Post by jambalaya8 »

xprnio wrote: post #50
ordu wrote: post #49

Hmm... The Reality changed itself when guys in Siberia changed the sensor? Some years ago I was playing with the idea that the Reality might invent new laws when people look for them, and doesn't bother with laws when no one observes them. It would be in the style of Copenhagen interpretation, though even with regard to it, the idea seems too weird to be true. But now we have an experimental evidence. In any case it…

I love how the closer we get to “the edge of the Reality”, the more it sounds like the ramblings of someone that got their hands on some of that GOOD stuff

I suspect the universe is very very strange.
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