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Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray?
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Just want to comment, that physics dont have to be beautiful minimalistic which is also discussed in the science community and also found its way into popular books like Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.
Imo it is quite unscientific to rule out solution which are not "mathematically beautiful" or "simple and elegant". Or not searching for solutions which do not meet this criterias.
Might want to recommend this. Beauty is not something to be desired in understanding.
https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Math-Beauty-Physics-Astray/dp/0465094252
> Holography has provided rich insights into the study of strongly correlated quantum matter without quasiparticle excitations, advances in the nonperturbative bootstrap approach are inching toward a complete reformulation of quantum field theory in a nonlagrangian framework, quantum information perspectives have generated totally novel schemes for understanding entropy in field theories ...the very concept of symmetry has been generalized to higher-form gauge fields and higher-dimensional charged objects (allowing for symmetry-breaking perspectives on topological phases, previously thought to be beyond the Landau paradigm), and for the first time in over a century theoretical physics is generating deep new insights into the most ambitious mathematical programs like Geometric Langlands and Morse theory.
Finding a dozen new ways to reach the same old conclusions, or discovering a slightly different way to describe a field, is precisely what I mean when I say spinning wheels. What is dark matter? What is beyond the standard model? How does gravity operate on the quantum level? We have no idea, and what's worse our best hope of finding even a hint of a direction to go in for real answers fell apart.
Once upon a time physicists rocked the world with every discovery, changed how people perceived everything around them from sunlight to matter to time itself. To say we have not entered a period of relative stagnation compared to the halcyon days of yesteryear, especially with regards to "big" discoveries that get laypeople excited, just doesn't seem to be accurate.
>If the LHC had detected superpartners or signatures of dark matter it would definitely have been among the biggest discoveries of early 21st century physics, but theoretical physics has gotten along just fine without it.
I'm only an undergrad, so you may well be right. I'm just describing my perspective as I saw things when I looked into whether I wanted to continue my studies into graduate school, and it's quite possible I read the wrong blogs and looked at the wrong books. But what do you think about posts like this one:
http://backreaction.blogspot.ca/2016/08/the-lhc-nightmare-scenario-has-come-true.html
Or more broadly I suppose her claim (which she wrote a book about that's soon to be released) that theoretical physics' obsession with mathematical beauty and sophistication is to blame for the modern period of failure to innovate? That theoretical physicists have just been re-arranging the mathematical deck chairs rather than doing real work?
I agree that you can't just accept the notion that things work as they are, and entire fields can lock themselves into a rut. I actually read recently a book by Sabine Hossenfelder on how this seems to be the case for modern particle physics, Lost in Math, and I tend to agree with her on that. But I'm also really wary of anything that suggests that I should take at face value the idea that this thing that looks simple to crack is actually that simple and everyone else is just too stuck in their own assumptions and can't think outside the box.
To make an example, I do have a feeling that medicine suffers from some of these problems. Seen from the outside, a lot of the field seems stuffy, locked into practices and habits (especially in terms of how things are taught and learned) that seem more the product of its historical tradition than of sensible didactic practice. The gap between the state-of-the-art researchers and your common GP seems immense. It seems hardly believable that there could be anything beyond simple gut-level decisions or optimism-biased assumptions going on when a doctor hears you describing a bunch of symptoms and rules out that it's just some trivial thing in three minutes without even touching you. I don't think there is, in fact. But the problem is also, while I do have these suspicions (and the right to express them, I think), every time I talked with people who actually are doctors about them I always got the answer that basically the whole shebang is just such a convoluted fucking mess that these sort of heuristics are still the only effective way we seem to have to navigate them. Of course, one could argue, maybe they just say that because they're doctors; they've been trained a certain way and can't see beyond the habits and prejudices that have been drilled into them together with the knowledge. That can be true. But either way, I can't imagine any serious reform coming from anyone but a doctor who still understands the knowledge sufficiently to realise what could be done to amend the way it's applied, because mine are just surface level feelings. There's too many things I ignore to actually make any kind of constructive proposal.
And when EY for example makes the Bank of Japan example in his book (just started reading), he does mention the opinion of professional economists. It's not something out of thin air. Rather, you get actual experts who don't have the sort of ties that will coax them into a socially-reinforced or biased position ("I don't want to criticise my senior colleagues, therefore I will not openly question their decisions even if I think they're wrong), and develop a contrarian opinion. It's not literally just one person.
More elegant but not necessarily better
Okay thats fair.; Exact category is often debated.
The less debated fields don't have a replication crisis per se: They have a falsifiability crisis.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/how-physics-lost-its-fizz/
All gamma ray flares propagate with the same speed across Universe - or not?
This behaviour leaves quantum gravity theorists a tad annoyed - with compare to string theorists they don't assume that speed of lights remains invariant but they even predict that it should propagate slower with increasing frequency. The gamma ray bursts thus should propagate significantly more slowly than the light, X-ray and even radio waves and neutrino bursts which routinely accompany them.
Actually similarly to string theory the competitive quantum gravity theory has nothing much to predict and in this regard it failed in similarly spectacular way, like the string theory. It's just that quantum gravity theory community is much smaller than string theory lobby, so that its failure merely evaded attention of public. And most agile/opportunist members of quantum gravity group even utilized this disproportion for making money with further smearing of string theory in the eyes of laymen public, despite that their own theory failed as well.
Her book is amazing! https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465094252/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_8EztFb1ZKPMK0 I really think she's one of the most important thinkers of our era.
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She also wrote a book.
i didn’t say it was defunct, that’s your own reading. i don’t think political systems are right or wrong, they are different principles for organising the state. for example, neo-liberalism is trying to take liberal principles to their logical end, a part of this end is getting rid of as much bureaucracy as possible because bureaucracy often impedes on the individuals freedom and right to choose for themselves. ofc there is nothing wrong with that principle but the result has been that this principle organises a society in a way that overloads poorer citizens with stress as opposed to rich citizens who have the capital to farm out their labour, think of nannies and au pairs as examples. so there’s a result of that organisation and it’s rightness or wrongness is up to the principles of the person evaluating that outcome.
liberals don’t challenge their beliefs, that’s the entire point. destiny will never challenge steven pinker’s “best timeline ever” theory for example. a part of that is because it’s an ideological pillar of liberalism just like fukuyama‘s “end of history”.
i also didn’t say that he’s an ideologue for promoting rational discussion, i said he’s an ideologue because a part of the liberal project is thinking your political system, even when it’s emprically shaky like rational choice theory or neoclassical economics as I said before, is based on reason and that other political systems are irrational. here I’ll get you started: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/#
you’ll notice that neoclassical economics is mathematically consistent and not empirically consistent, see laffer curve etc. liberals are okay with this because according to rationalism math has the deeper truth embedded in it. sabine hossenfelder touches on this in her “beauty leads physics astray” book: https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Math-Beauty-Physics-Astray/dp/0465094252
so the point stands, a part of liberal ideology is thinking you are rational/truth seeker/a political (i realise now I should have said “anti-ideology” instead of “apolitical, my bad) and those of other ideologies are irrational. you’re doing it right now, you’ve taken “ideology” as a slur because liberals are supposed to be anti-ideology by definition. im not using ideologue in the way you are using it.
im not making a value judgement on whether or not hussan’s principles are better than destiny’s or vice versa, I’m saying that both are ideological and pointing out the ways in which destiny’s displays his ideology.
if you’d like me to critique soclaism and hasan’s idealogical bent i can but maybe dm me as it has nothing to do with this discussion.
sorry for all the edits, I’m trying to use as many examples as I can so I’m not jargoning past you
The End of Theoretical Physics As We Know It Computer simulations and custom-built quantum analogues are analogy of inquiry based "research" in psychology: they tend to produce results expected during their design.
In its present stage mainstream physics suffers with overproduction of overly conservative and dogmatic proponents of unitary theories based on (self-imagined indeed) beauty rather than adherence with experiments in the same way like with overly liberal phenomenological approach, which resigned to whatever attempt for unification with attitude: "every opinion can be equally right here".. The most loud apologists of both groups of physicists used to fight wildly each other (1, 2) - but at the end both approaches spectacularly failed in the same way. Whereas the actually effective theories are still heartily ignored with both groups at the same moment, because both attitudes are occupationally motivated at their very end.
The fundamental thing about quaternion, octonions etc. is, they involve extradimensions of sort. The quaternion-based Maxwell theory anticipated quantum and scalar wave effects, which the current Maxwell theory cannot. So there are good reasons for utilizing the octonion math within contemporary physics. The opposite problem is, such a vector math is too dependent on right-angled Cartesian system. And once the number of dimensions increases, the things stop to become right angled anymore - the extradimensions violate Euclidean geometry too. The octonion-based theory will be still usable, but overly complicated, over-parametrized and as such suboptimal.
This is btw also the fact, which ruined string theory too and a general problem of every hyperdimensional theory: they apply only in flat 3D space-time following the Cartesian system and their validity scope is thus constrained to very subtle phenomena, which don't violate the dimensionality of space-time in which they reside too much (i.e. dark matter fluctuations). Even the best brains on the planet don't know what to do with it (a renormalization problem of switching extrinsic and intrinsic perspectives). As famous blogger L. Motl noted the octonion based math is the same case of fancy but void formal approach, like this one criticized recently by Hossenefelder - who indeed had the string theory of L. Motl on mind instead... ;-)
The fundamental thing about quaternion, octonions etc. is, they involve extradimensions of sort. The quaternion-based Maxwell theory anticipated quantum and scalar wave effects, which the current Maxwell theory cannot. So there are good reasons for utilizing the octonion math within contemporary physics. The opposite problem is, such a vector math is too dependent on right-angled Cartesian system. And once the number of dimensions increases, the things stop to become right angled anymore - the extradimensions violate Euclidean geometry too. The octonion-based theory will be still usable, but overly complicated, over-parametrized and as such suboptimal.
This is btw also the fact, which ruined string theory too and a general problem of every hyperdimensional theory: they apply only in flat 3D space-time following the Cartesian system and their validity scope is thus constrained to very subtle phenomena, which don't violate the dimensionality of space-time in which they reside too much (i.e. dark matter fluctuations). Even the best brains on the planet don't know what to do with it (a renormalization problem of switching extrinsic and intrinsic perspectives). As famous blogger L. Motl noted the octonion based math is the same case of fancy but void formal approach, like this one criticized recently by Hossenefelder - who indeed had the string theory of L. Motl on mind instead... ;-)
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