[HN Gopher] Has Physics Lost Its Way?
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Has Physics Lost Its Way?
Author : pseudolus
Score : 41 points
Date : 2020-03-19 11:49 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| 609venezia wrote:
| Reading this review, I can't tell what Lindley hoped to
| contribute with this book or why Al-Khalili found it noteworthy
| enough for a NYTimes book review (which itself is so brief that
| it doesn't seem to say much beyond something like "despite the
| claim to the contrary, Physics is more than math, and maybe in
| the future we'll be able to test some of the untested ideas that
| came from mathematical beauty.")
|
| What am I missing here?
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| All the hang-wringing about elegant mathematics misses the point.
| An elegant theory is one that captures a lot of complexity with a
| minimal description. That some small number of assumptions goes
| on to describe a multitude of phenomena is the mark of a good
| theory. Given the choice between an elegant theory and an
| inelegant one that describes the same data, the elegant one is
| more likely to be true.
|
| If there are problems with modern physics, its not that we're
| spending time looking for elegant theories.
| heavyarms wrote:
| I think this book [1] makes a similar argument, but in more
| concise and direct terms. The gist of the argument is theoretical
| physicists have wasted too much time and effort trying to come up
| with elegant math and grand theories that sound plausible but
| can't be tested or, when they can, fail the test. And rather than
| acknowledging that, the field as a whole keeps digging in without
| making much progress.
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36341728-lost-in-math
| orbots wrote:
| This book is quite good. Suggesting we follow the historical
| trend where advances in physics almost always reduce the number
| of magic numbers in the model.
| https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Reality-Space-Time-Illus...
| jandrese wrote:
| I wonder if it is the same thing that stalled AI research for
| decades? After the initial burst of hacks that seemed really
| impressive (ELIZA for example), the field focused on finding
| formal mathematical solutions to the problems and effectively
| stalled for 30+ years. It's only in the past few years with a
| shift to doing statistical things on large sets of data--
| something that feels a lot more like the hacky original efforts
| --that it feels like we're making any progress again.
|
| This is from a outsider's point of view so it may be completely
| wrong. But I did try to take an AI course in the late 90s and
| it was so far divorced from computer hardware that I joked it
| should have been in the math department.
| friendlybus wrote:
| Neural nets had been in development since the 80s. The
| hardware became powerful enough to take advantage of the
| research quite recently.
| selestify wrote:
| AI today is still pretty divorced from hardware-level
| details, unless you're working directly with GPU code. When I
| took a machine learning course, it was much more math than
| coding
| ghaff wrote:
| CS has historically been associated with the math department
| at many schools. At many others, it's in the engineering
| school but that's by no means universal.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| IANAP but my understanding is we've reached a point where it's
| very difficult to test anything in physics. Eg, we've picked
| all the low-hanging fruit and everything left is something that
| requires large expenditures to test (more powerful particle
| colliders, etc).
|
| Is there some alternative direction available where testing and
| verification are easier and cheaper?
| adamc wrote:
| This is the right question, although I don't know if there is
| a happy answer. If we need ever more expensive experiments to
| learn anything, progress is going to become very slow.
|
| Maybe that's why there is so much math; math is cheap. And
| there is always the hope of coming up with something
| testable.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >when they can, fail the test
|
| I'm not seeing why this is a bad thing. Every new idea we learn
| to test for, even if we test it and it comes back false,
| advances our knowledge and understanding.
|
| Could it just be the case we are so far from our everyday
| experiences of the natural world that advancing further in our
| understanding requires taking small steps?
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| And there are also at least two other somewhat older books in
| the same general vein: Not Even Wrong and The Trouble with
| Physics. To the comments in a couple of other posts, it's not
| clear to me why one would write yet another book on this topic
| unless they're also proposing useful alternative approaches.
| throwaway_pdp09 wrote:
| > wasted too much time and effort trying to come up with
| elegant math and grand theories that sound plausible but can't
| be tested
|
| Einstein did not believe the gravitational waves he predicted
| could ever be detected. Or so I recall. But stuff like many-
| worlds interpretation appears fundamentally untestable (add
| same disclaimer here).
| knzhou wrote:
| As with most of what Sabine writes, the book is very one-sided,
| in that it gives the reader the impression that a free-thinking
| person can only come to one reasonable conclusion, i.e.
| complete agreement with the book. It also gives the false
| impression that the field is much more single-minded than it
| actually is.
|
| And honestly, even if you do agree with the book in every
| detail, "just make correct predictions, bro" is not at all
| helpful advice for actual physicists. There is a massive set of
| possible predictions, only a tiny fraction will be right, and
| everybody is _already_ incentivized to look as hard as possible
| for that tiny fraction, in as many different ways as possible.
| You might as well show up at a floundering startup 's office,
| lean back in a comfy chair, and say "just make more money,
| bro".
|
| Sabine acts as if the correct approach is obvious, but on the
| very rare occasions where she actually does mention what ideas
| she thinks are promising, they're just as contrived or
| difficult to test as everybody else's, and often more so.
| anon102010 wrote:
| Totally agree that in general the endless naval gazing in physics
| (multi-verse / string theory etc) seems like a colossal waste of
| time.
| chaps wrote:
| Anyone have a non-paywall copy?
| unixhero wrote:
| Isn't this what Eric Weinstein is on about in his podcast as
| series The Portal?
| angel_j wrote:
| Academia lost its way, not Physics.
| woodandsteel wrote:
| Many words in the English language have more than one meaning.
| One of the common meanings of the term "physics" is the
| academic physics community. Did you really not know that?
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| It seems unfair to criticize some physicists for the fact that
| they haven't subjected their theories to experiment, when we know
| that testing certain theories would require access to vast levels
| of energy that the human race doesn't yet have at its disposal
| (and may never have).
| adamc wrote:
| I think it is entirely fair to criticize the value of theories
| that cannot be tested in the forseeable future.
| dnautics wrote:
| No but I think it's fair to criticize any physicist who
| establishes a theory to be beyond testability and continues
| work on it, or who works on another physicists theory that is
| established to be beyond testability.
|
| Especially if they are using public money, because public
| monies need to be accountable.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >it's fair to criticize any physicist who establishes a
| theory to be beyond testability and continues work on it
|
| Would the same apply to people who further explore questions
| like P = NP and what happens if it is true or false or what
| happens if the Riemann hypothesis is true? Sometimes digging
| more into something that doesn't seem testable results in a
| finding that is testable or into knowledge that helps advance
| a related field.
|
| I think the deeper question is, how do we make sure that
| public money is spent in a justifiable fashion. And when it
| comes to science that is a hard question to answer,
| especially if one considers that science works a bit
| differently than the way the average voter thinks about
| things when it comes to notion such as proven or disproven.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| It might apply if P=NP or the Riemann hypothesis were
| remotely the same thing. An open mathematical conjecture
| has uncertainty about whether effort into cracking it will
| produce fruit. That's entirely different from a physical
| theory where it certainly cannot be tested.
| chr1 wrote:
| Any physical theory that cannot be tested is a
| mathematical theory that can produce results useful in
| other places.
|
| In general all of theoretical physics is mathematics that
| takes inspiration from experiments, and takes shortcuts
| when proving theorems:).
| woodandsteel wrote:
| One problem is that some string theorists think this situation
| means that this type of physics should simply abandon empirical
| testability as a criterion for evaluating the truthfulness of
| theory.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Another good interview on this topic:
|
| https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/physicist-g...
| iamaelephant wrote:
| This isn't even a review, it's just a description of the book. It
| says nothing about the quality of the writing or arguments except
| one fragment of one sentence in the very last paragraph:
|
| > Lindley is engaging
|
| That's it.
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