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Physicists attempt to prove the Riemann hypothesis
- eastWestMath 10y agoWhen all you have is a golden hammer...
- socmag 10y agoFor Seven years I tried talking to God. He finally replied. Told me everyone is an asshole, He is trying to deal with the situation but his inbox is full of spam right now and He will get back to me, also what's with the "Alt-Right?" I sent him a text back saying things are not what they seem and he shouldn't give up... also sent him these links for Him to check out. https://youtu.be/ypEaGQb6dJk https://youtu.be/ypEaGQb6dJk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thus_Spoke_Zarathustra https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thus_Spoke_Zarathustra About twenty minutes later he sent me a reply saying St. Peter was "Out of Office", that he was outsourcing everything to India right now and in case of emergency to please call 1-800-BITE-ME; and btw, can you please let everyone know that when I said "Praise Me", I actually meant to have a bit of "Empathy" (since he's a pretty busy guy and is currently working on some Graphene experiments). Just FYI...
- harveywi 10y ago>Told me everyone is an asshole God told me the same thing. I started arguing with him about inheritance vs. composition. It has been a challenge to acquire hard evidence to back up my support for composition, though. Sometimes the best one can do is assume a "has-a" relationship and proclaim oneself a Bayesian.
- socmag 10y agoI assume "It's Complicated"
- socmag 10y agoOh dear, comments with a sense of humor are strictly not allowed here. Guess I'm the only one who can appreciate Douglas Adams. Downvote myself!
- mindcrime 10y agoMost humorous comments are downvoted into oblivion, but occasionally something humorous will strike a chord with the mob and it'll get upvotes. But if there's a pattern regarding what gets a favourable response, versus what doesn't, I've never been able to identify it.
- socmag 10y agoSo was the downvote on this one actually saying that a sense of humor is allowed?
- gjm11 10y agoI expect it was saying that complaining about being downvoted is one thing that automatically attracts downvotes.
- jwilk 10y agoFrom the HN guidelines: Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or proclaim that you expect to get downvoted.
- socmag 10y agoPlease see my above comment. As for boring reading, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I realize this is a "Professional" forum for "Professional" "Computer Scientists", but if we can't take the piss out of ourselves, that is not "Humanity"
- euyyn 10y agoConsider that now that the original joke isn't visible anymore, all these other comments of yours about why you got downvoted are boring to read indeed.
- socmag 10y agoEleventh Commandment: "Thou Shalt Not Make Jokes on Hacker Nudes.. take it to /."
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- emucontusionswe 10y agoThese physicists observations won't achieve anything other than to corroborate the existing hypothesis. Proof requires a lot more than just observation.
- beaconstudios 10y agoyeah, physics proofs (and the scientific method in general) rely on empirical data whereas mathematical proofs rely on deductive reasoning from existing proven statements. It's literally the opposite approach.
- cvoss 10y agoThe article makes no mention of any proposed experiments. It sounds like the physicists are just using their understanding of the mathematics of quantum physics along with their intuition about such physical systems to guide the search for a rigorous proof. (cf. the article's discussion of PT-symmetric matrices)
- beaconstudios 10y agogood point, I just re-read the article and you're right. They must be approaching the problem from a theoretical basis.
- giomasce 10y agoThere are no physicists' observations here, as I get it, it is all theoretical work, which is essentially mathematics. It is not rigorous mathematics, otherwise we would actually have a proof, but just a proposed reasoning that in time might be made rigorous and become a real proof. Future will tell us.
- bike4beer 10y agoPhysics Person Here, Let's see U throw 1,000 bags of shit at the wall, hoping one will stick, and call that the solution? ( Actually there is a name for this process, its called the INTEL methodology ) I concur if the RH could have been solved with 'physics' it would have been solved 50+ years ago, one of the first thing Von Neumann did with the machines was tackle this problem. The question beg's to ask is this news? Physicists Tackle RH? How about Garbage Men? There are youtube sites promising virtually anybody on the street one million USD cash to solve this problem, as if nobody has yet to date bothered. Given the age of this problem, and given that computational monte-carlo (physics) isn't going to solve this problem; Lots of super-smart ( >200 IQ ) people R working on this problem, and have been for years; Good Luck people. Great problem to give a super smart kid, to put him in his place.
- jordigh 10y agoYou have to be very careful with these "plausibility arguments" that physicists like to make. It may well happen, for example, that there are counterexamples to the Riemann hypothesis, but that they are so rare that they have probability zero (similar to, for example, the zero probability that a random real number in some interval is a rational number). So, a plausibility argument saying how unlikely counterexamples are would prove nothing. Or, it could happen, like the famous disproved Riemannian conjecture on the crossing of pi(x) and Li(x) (see: Skewe's number) that the counterexample exists but it is ridiculously large. The usual kind of ethos in physics is to be a bit too loose with approximations or to disregard very extreme cases. I don't understand the particulars of the spectrum of this operator that they have constructed, but I have heard others describe this approach as a simple reformulation of one hard problem in terms of another equally hard problem.
- hn_throwaway_99 10y agoI'm not a mathematician, nor a physicist, but I don't understand this statement: similar to, for example, the zero probability that a random real number in some interval is a rational number. Is it just a consequence of rational numbers being countable and real numbers not being countable? Seems like an odd way to define probability in this instance.
- alextheparrot 10y agoIt comes from how we define infinity/the number line. Any number divided by infinity is 0, that's easy. But between any two points there is an infinite number of rational numbers and between any two rational numbers you can derive an infinite number of irrational numbers. I know this isn't kosher, but it is pretty much infinity/(infinity ^ infinity). That leads us back to the probability of picking a rational number as 1/infinity, because for every rational number there are infinity irrational numbers that we also could have chosen. David Foster Wallace had a really good book called Everything and More where he explored the history of infinity. Might be of interest to you.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
- jesuslop 10y agoNow and since decades ago also, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%E2%80%93P%C3%B3lya_conjecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%E2%80%93P%C3%B3lya_con...
- akeck 10y agoThis reminds me of story I heard about a pure math PhD student who wrote a deep proof for their dissertation. Unfortunately, they relied on certain math shortcuts that only work in a physics context. Their advisor didn't catch it, and I recall it ended badly for both the student and the advisor.
- heimatau 10y agoThat sounds bizarre. Pure Math is more theoretical and has less limitations than that of Theoretical Physics. Maybe this person you knew just went down the wrong path and should've focused on Theoretical Physics and not math.
- thanatropism 10y agoIf I understand the parent comment correctly, this is the advanced version of "proofs" of propositions in economics that just assume that dy/dx is defined in such a way that dy/dz = (dy/dx)(dx/dz). A mathematician would say "Let y: U\to V where U,V are open subsets of R^k and y\in C^1 (or C^\infty). Then..." and define clearly what's a function, what's a variable/number/vector and so forth.
- justifier 10y ago> As mathematicians have attacked the hypothesis from every angle, the problem has also migrated to physics. eyeroll.. loose use of 'every' is the kind of overreaching probability mathematical rigor eschews quantum mechanics still relies heavily on probability theory and reimann has been probably correct since its inception it is my intended inference that a mathematical model that maps qm will be mappable to reimann, and without any forgiveness of strict symmetries
- posterboy 10y agoWhat's the motivation for your intention? What is a reimann? The mathematician was called Riemann. Do you mean the Zeta function and it's variants?
- justifier 10y agoi'm sorry if i was unclear.. i am aware of who bernhard reimann is and was using his name as shorthand for the hypothesis originating in his 1859 paper(o): .."and it is very probable that all roots are real."; of which this entire article is about what's my motivation for my intention? I am unsure exactly.. personally? I derive significant joy from working on mathematics; socially? to solve the problem would solidify assumed validity across a varying subset of mathematics and its consequents (o) http://www.claymath.org/sites/default/files/ezeta.pdf http://www.claymath.org/sites/default/files/ezeta.pdf
- heimatau 10y agoI don't understand why Quanta magazine keeps getting promoted on HN. Guys, it's sensational writing. Not scientific. Please understand this. Quanta is like Wired. Poor academic quality and sensational writing. Neither are based in scientific rigor. I'm majoring in Pure Maths and this is annoying to see yet another poor scientific article on Math.
- soVeryTired 10y agoHow would you improve it? The the heuristic linking the Riemann hypothesis to a quantum system is actually taken pretty seriously as an avenue of attack on the problem.
- thanatropism 10y agoWas that article on symplectic geometry in Quanta? My work is with algorithms that simulate conservative systems and that sounded pretty good to my ears. Of course they were with the human angle by the end, but still they did a damn good job in explaining what a "cotangent bundle" is.
- adyavanapalli 10y agoFrom what I've read on quanta, they write remarkably clear articles for their target audience. And I've even read the referenced paper by Bender et al. I think the author has done a good job in describing what the heck the paper was about.
- heimatau 10y agoMy bad. Hopefully this [1] comment and this [2] one helps clear up my position. They are accurate, yes. But poor in the sense that it's all conjecture, not evidence based. 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14046334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14046334 2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14046131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14046131
- bvv 10y agoIt's most certainly not scientific writing. But I think that is not the point of these publications -- they are meant for a wide audience. So I think I should interpret your criticism as saying that quanta does a poor job in maintaining rigor while trying to explain advanced topics in mathematics and theoretical physics to a wide audience. My impression, on the other hand, is that their reporting on these topics beats similar publications hands down. I am therefore happy to recommend it to interested laypeople, for example to my (few...) friends outside of academia and to people here on HN. By the way, I hope you realize that these two viewpoints are not completely orthogonal.
- ngcc_hk 10y agoThe article is very interesting and serve one purpose very well - trigger my curisoity of what is that. Both heard of. Not understand much. But somehow it is linked. And strangely talked in a way not totally out of reach. If someone like me with only some basic maths/stats/QM background and interest to know more, any pointer to understand this.