22 ms·

The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

251 points by mathgenius 8y ago

informatimago 8y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwKT9XqbCI8&list=PLWy9gm0ulp7nvCU4p7BrLlhkTAcA2UL2O https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwKT9XqbCI8&list=PLWy9gm0ulp... https://jp-petit.org/science/scientific_summary.htm https://jp-petit.org/science/scientific_summary.htm
tylermw 8y ago
Love this comment left on the post by Peter Shor (of Shor's algorithm--the algorithm that kicked off the quantum computing frenzy). I assume it's him and not an imposter. "It's not just that scientists don't want to move their butts, although that's undoubtedly part of it. It's also that they can't. In today's university funding system, you need grants (well, maybe you don't truly need them once you have tenure, but they're very nice to have). So who decides which people get the grants? It's their peers, who are all working on exactly the same things that everybody is working on. And if you submit a proposal that says "I'm going to go off and work on this crazy idea, and maybe there's a one in a thousand chance that I'll discover some of the secrets of the universe, and a 99.9% chance that I'll come up with bubkes," you get turned down. But if a thousand really smart people did this, maybe we'd actually have a chance of making some progress. (Assuming they really did have promising crazy ideas, and weren't abusing the system. Of course, what would actually happen is that the new system would be abused and we wouldn't be any better off than we are now.) So the only advice I have is that more physicists need to not worry about grants, and go hide in their attics and work on new and crazy theories, the way Andrew Wiles worked on Fermat's Last Theorem." (new comment right below) "Let me make an addendum to my previous comment, that I was too modest to put into it. This is roughly how I discovered the quantum factoring algorithm. I didn't tell anybody I was working on it until I had figured it out. And although it didn't take years of solitary toil in my attic (the way that Fermat's Last Theorem did), I thought about it on and off for maybe a year, and worked on it moderately hard for a month or two when I saw that it actually might work. So, people, go hide in your attics!"
- gbumakefan 8y ago
  Except you can’t just go hide in your attic. Everyone is more risk averse than ever as the cost of housing, healthcare, and education relentlessly increase faster than wages.
  - nixpulvis 8y ago
    Reminds me a bit of the expression "desperate times call for desperate measures".
  - EGreg 8y ago
    This is one of the best arguments for UBI. Imagine how much humanity would innovate in science, open source and other public gift economies if everyone didn’t have to worry how they will eat and pay rent next month.
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      How about reducing the generally accepted working hours to something like 24 hrs/week? 40 is pretty arbitrary so we could arbitrarily set a lower number. That would free up a lot of creativity.
    - pdonis 8y ago
      The argument you are making assumes two things that strike me as highly implausible: (1) That enough people would use their new free time to innovate instead of just watching TV or playing World of Warcraft or something like that. (2) That enough people would still choose to do the unpleasant but necessary tasks that provide the resources needed for everyone to eat, have housing, etc. Not to mention all the other stuff people seem to want.
      - dv_dt 8y ago
        Right now a fairly tight circle of people decide for others how to spend vast amounts of time. It's not even very efficient as many jobs carry bullshit hours requirements. So after increasing free time by a large amount, a very small number of people start choosing different areas to innovate in, it still ends up as a large growth area for innovation, or social interaction, or whatever humans value individually instead of what old line accounting values.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ackfoo 8y ago
We’re stuck in a paradigm that doesn’t result in any valid fundamental predictions. The idea that running the expanding universe backward makes everything denser and hotter in the past is just dumb. The universe is not like a loaf expanding from dense batter to fluffy bread. Instead, the chaotic vacuum produces, for want of a more accurate concept, particle-antiparticle pairs at random that exert a “pressure” seen as the Casimir Effect and a force that underlies the expansion of space-time. These pairs are mostly ephemeral, but under certain conditions they can randomly transition to a stable state. This eventually results in matter. (It results in a lot of things, but we’re biased toward the minor component, matter, because we’re made of it.) The process happens a lot in very empty space, and almost not at all in space that is constrained by the existence of matter already. This is why “dark matter” exists out there and not down here. The Casimir Effect will give this to you; constrain the available space and some wave equations are excluded, resulting in a measurable inward pressure. Run the expanding universe backwards: space-time contracts and we have exactly what we have right now. Run it forward and space-time expands, again giving us exactly what we have right now. Of course, things are different, but the physics is unchanged. The universe doesn’t get hotter or cooler, there’s no era of total ionization or inflation. The fundamental ground state of the universe is chaos. Anything can arise out of that chaos, but specific events are constrained by probability: some are so unlikely that we never see them; some are so likely that they are certain and they happen all the time. Mathematics, so useful a tool in the past, cannot describe this situation. The only way to describe this system is by using the system itself; there are no shortcuts. Math, philosophy, reason and order are inapplicable because they are only rules-based approximations of a chaotic state.
- teilo 8y ago
  Here's the ether guy again. It's all he can talk about.
  - tree_of_item 8y ago
    Well, that sort of reaction to "out-there" ideas is kind of contributing to stagnation, don't you think?
akvadrako 8y ago
If you are doing theoretical research all your really need is an office, a computer and a basic salary; it's not like university pay is great. If the need for funding from existing sources is hindering your research, try to find another way to support it, like by freelancing 20% of the time or Patreon.
narrator 8y ago
I kind of like the model of the turn of the 19th century where you had great geniuses like Tesla who would just get funding to create whatever kind of cool crap they could think of. Are there still any people like that in physics? Legendary scientists/engineers who run there own lab and just make cool stuff?
- felix_nagaand 8y ago
  Maybe on YouTube. Or the children of Russian/ Chinese mobsters
- canhascodez 8y ago
  Tesla is a bad example for almost any given point, but in this case it's relevant to note that he was not a scientist, and his funding model did not work.
- _Nat_ 8y ago
  > Are there still any people like that in physics? Legendary scientists/engineers who run there own lab and just make cool stuff? That's pretty much what I've been going for. Got my PhD in Chemical Engineering and an MBA, and now I'm starting my lab - or "startup", here - in pursuit of my research, basically into strong AI. Bootstrapping is an interesting process. I mean, I have to keep the lights on somehow, though there's an inherent conflict-of-interests between keeping the lights on and doing the core work that the lights are there for. Still, what can one do beyond keeping at it?
- philipkglass 8y ago
  David E. Shaw. Note that before he returned to his scientific passions he had to make a fortune, because creating new things at the cutting edge is a lot more expensive now than at the end of the 19th century.
adamnemecek 8y ago
Once upon a time, researchers were independently wealthy https://nadiaeghbal.com/independent-research https://nadiaeghbal.com/independent-research
- titanix2 8y ago
  It was also a time when the whole societal landscape was different: peasants farmed because it was their way to survive and the aristocracy lived on the labor of the former without having to work. What changed now it that almost everybody need "a job" and the attention and time of a lot of smart people is distracted by that. That's also the reason why people professionalize themselves by going to the academia. In my case, I would do research and experimenting new ideas no matter what, but joining an PhD program is the way to put bread on the table.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    Today the number of people that don't have to work, both in raw numbers and as a percent, has absolutely skyrocketed. I mean if a person is simply interested in e.g. pursuing research and not so much with material niceties then it's extremely easy to live abroad in developing nations, indefinitely, starting with around $200k. Bump that up to a million and you can live practically anywhere so long as you have the discipline to live far below your means, which is perhaps the hardest part of it all.
    - akvadrako 8y ago
      It's pretty easy to leave below your means if you are really engrossed in research. The hard part is finding the time to spend money.
letitgo12345 8y ago
Well considering that we know everything pretty much about most of everyday physics and new physics requires energies that are almost unreachable and billions of dollars in experimental investment and/or years and decades to collect sufficient data, it's not a surprise at all that foundations of physics progress has slowed. I don't think the physics community is to blame here. Just the nature of reality
- rossdavidh 8y ago
  I agree, although I think it could be argued that a logical outcome of this fact, is that most (although hopefully not all) of the physicists should go work on other things, like maybe the physics of planet formation, where we are getting new data all the time. Or maybe in areas outside of physics altogether, like the social sciences, where again we have orders of magnitude more data than we once did. If the low-hanging fruit is all gone, move on. That's hard news if you've sunk two or three decades into becoming an expert in a particular niche.
  - Sean1708 8y ago
    > Or maybe in areas outside of physics altogether This does actually happen already. I'm not sure how widespread it is, but I've noticed it in a couple of Condensed Matter Theory groups. For example Imperial's group[0] do research on Complexity and Networks including the "application of these principles to a variety of stochastic phenomena, ranging from ant colonies to cardiovascular biology, from sandpiles to earthquakes". [0]: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/condensed-matter-theory/research/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/condensed-matter-theory/research/
  - kgwgk 8y ago
    Physicists: https://www.xkcd.com/793/ https://www.xkcd.com/793/
- peteradio 8y ago
  I studied under a very smart professor who believed that somehow table top particle physics would be a possibility. See http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6355/990 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6355/990 . Maybe the HEP experiment consoritium is just a global grant conspiracy. Wake up sheeple!!
tbabb 8y ago
While I don't like this ~guy's~ woman's disdainful, superior tone, I do think his complaint has merit. Physics is notoriously bad at having curiosity about strange, unconventional, or truly novel ideas. I just finished reading What is Real? by Adam Becker-- a history of modern physics-- and am astonished at how aggressively physicists resisted and suppressed "unconventional" interpretations of quantum mechanics (like the many worlds interpretation) in favor of the obviously-wrong Copenhagen interpretation. There was a taboo for decades around even discussing quantum foundations, and people's careers were ruined simply for trying to publish papers about it. Physics got stuck for a short while on the understanding of QM, and then promptly went into sour grapes mode and decided that it was meaningless to ask any deep questions about what QM actually meant. Since then it has been focused on mathematical formalisms and smashing particles instead of deep questions about what it all means. The stagnation is real, and it's the physics community's own fault.
- brian-armstrong 8y ago
  His?
- krastanov 8y ago
  It is "her" complaint, not "his". This is Sabine Hossenfelder, a well known theorist (mostly for her outreach/popularization work). And you are misrepresenting this"taboo" you are talking about. Thinking about what quantum mechanics "means" is how we got breakthroughs in quantum computing and theoretical computer science. Similarly, there is plenty of exciting deep theoretical work in particle physics beyond the smashing particles together type of experiments.
  - tbabb 8y ago
    Oops, my mistake on the gender- Sabine is not a super familiar name. (Still dislike the tone, though; don't care how famous she is). I also think the taboo has lifted a bit, as it's now possible for mainstream physicists like David Deutsch and Sean Carroll to build their careers on quantum foundations work. But I still think the physics community has a lot of baggage from the second half of the twentieth century to let go of.
walrus1066 8y ago
I think this is excessively harsh. The only guarantees made about the LHC were, that it would prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs Boson. Believe me, experimental physicists are desperate to find the slightest deviation from the standard model. I spent 2 years on one such 'stab in the dark' rare decay analysis! The SM's predictions have been tested to a rigor unparalleled in history. It predicts stuff like mass of W & Z bosons, fine structure constant, the measurements of which exceed an accuracy of 1 part per billion in some cases.
- jsweojtj 8y ago
  It does not predict the fine structure constant, that is an input into the model.
  - T-A 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-structure_constant#Measurement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-structure_constant#Measur...
    - jsweojtj 8y ago
      Exactly. Its value comes from being measured.
      - T-A 8y ago
        It comes from the magnetic moment of the electron being measured and then run through more than 10k Feynman diagrams. The second part wouldn't work if QED didn't.
        jsweojtj 8y ago
        I can't tell whether you are agreeing or disagreeing with me. Let's make it easier. Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: The value of the fine-structure constant is not predicted by any physics theory.
cletus 8y ago
I'm no physicist but this leaves me scratching my head. You have some people saying the university funding system is to blame by not accepting crazy ideas but we have all sorts of ideas in physics like: - String theory. As best as I can tell the only reason string theory exists is because if dimensions=11 the equations for general relativity pop out. Importantly though string theory has made no testable predictions and it's unclear when or even if that will be the case. - Supersymmetry. Interesting idea but no evidence of this yet. Other more interesting ideas to me at least (again, as non-physicist): - Octonion Math underlying the standard model (maybe) [1] And some interesting experimental work: - Possible violations of lepton universality from the LHCb detector [2]. This was, last I heard, still well below statistical significance (5-sigma) and could well disappear (as other bumps have eg at 750GeV) but it's interesting nonetheless. And there are host of open problems with otherwise successful theories. My favourite extremes here is the prediction of magnetic moment of an electron, which is ~12 significant digits in agreement with experimental results. At the other end is QFT predicting the energy density of a vacuum, which is ~120 orders of magnitude off [3]. Anyway, a lot of this exists in the current academic system. [1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-octonion-math-that-could-underpin-physics-20180720/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-octonion-math-that-could-... [2] https://cerncourier.com/beauty-quarks-test-lepton-universality/ https://cerncourier.com/beauty-quarks-test-lepton-universali... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem
- T-A 8y ago
  Depending on how strict you are, you can trace string theory all the way back to the 1940s, or at the very least to the late 60s [1]. Supersymmetry is from the early 70s [2]. They are exactly the mainstream kind of thing which Hossenfelder is referring to when she writes about "physics beyond the standard model which the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was supposed to find". For every lone wanderer exploring a long shot like octonion math, there are thousands writing yet another paper on some variation of the old theme. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_string_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_string_theory [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry#History
- 8y ago
js8 8y ago
As an outsider, I wonder, what happened to Nima Arkani-Hamed and his new ideas about the nature of spacetime? That seemed pretty interesting.. even just as a strategy of what should be researched.
swerveonem 8y ago
We need young people to start their careers with knowledge that only 50+yo physicists have currently. Is such a curriculum possible?
coldtea 8y ago
Btw, something to think on. Consider this slowdown in physics, and the oft-repeated ideas that we'll sure to colonize not just the solar system, but eventually even the galaxy... E.g.: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...
- sliken 8y ago
  Dunno, seems pretty out of date. The mentioned price of $15,000 per kg to the moon is already 3 times cheaper, even if you need to get it to mars. They also mention a wildly optimistic "I'm not holding my breath" $20k per kg to mars, which is already is 4x higher than a SpaceX BFR launching stuff to mars.
Pica_soO 8y ago
The truth is, that science empowers the common men- every device crafted giveth more power to the capable individual. And that scares the upper crust. Thus, knowledge must be reduced and separated, and the increasing of dangerous potential must be subverted. If everyone owns a flying car with a fusion reactor- everyone owns the means to eliminate a city. So, here we are, with leaders who praise innovation, while doing everything they can to sabotage it. And after 9/11 one would be tempted to call them not completely wrong. The human environment altogether is deteriorating so fast that this sabotage will have to cease very soon, or else, there might not be a surveillance state left to protect with a science ban.
enjalot 8y ago
clearly it's the sophons. (reference to the Three Body Problem, an awesome book)
scottlocklin 8y ago
Nobody has mentioned John Horgan's book "the end of science" yet, so I figure it is time to do so. It's even more relevant now than when he wrote it in 1996.
beefman 8y ago
This criticism may have some merit on the particle physics side of things, but from the 'gravity' side I see exciting recent progress. In particular, the AMPS firewall and literature that followed, including the introduction of computational complexity into physics, ER=EPR etc. With LIGO and various space telescopes soon coming online, the experimental future looks bright too.
apo 8y ago
... I have spelled out many times very clearly what theoretical physicists should do differently. It’s just that they don’t like my answer. They should stop trying to solve problems that don’t exist. That a theory isn’t pretty is not a problem. Focus on mathematically well-defined problems, that’s what I am saying. And, for heaven’s sake, stop rewarding scientists for working on what is popular with their colleagues. It seems that some examples might be useful here. Which specific groups are trying to solve problems that don't exist? What are some mathematically well-defined problems that aren't getting enough attention? As for rewarding scientists for working on what's popular, that's a science-wide problem that stems from the way that science is funded and decades of inbreeding. Still, examples of how to break physics out of its funk on this score would also be useful.
buboard 8y ago
> That a theory isn’t pretty is not a problem On what premise? 'Theories' are human constructs, hence why physicist are so adamant about their Truth and Beauty. It's wrong to say that, when most sciences rely heavily on Occam's principle (an aesthetic argument) for reasons unknown. It's pretty likely that the human brain is guided by both principles to model the world, and that should be reflected in the formulation of our theories.
picsao 8y ago
Breakthroughs are not produced by the scientists produced and favored by the current system of inkremental research. For a breakthrough you need the ability to step back from the paradigm without any investment in it.. Thus only academic beginners and outsiders are even incentivized. then you need a miracle, the miracle usually beeing a wrong analogy beeing made and thought to the very end. So you need people who by accident of birth can't stop analogizing.. aka people on the schizophrenic spectrum. Needless to say that integrating chaotic people, who constantly recombine, are notorious bad at planning projects and who perceive normal social interaction as a spy novel they want to run away from - is a challenge. Even worser when they have success and the world worship them for it, while the pursuit the laser eyed pigeons. It's a doable job, as any theater Regisseur will tell you, but the Leviathancyberitics of this kind are definitely not comfortable.
amai 8y ago
Isn’t she just complaining that nobody is listening to her? That sounds a lot like a crackpot to me. Instead of complaining she should better work on a useful new theory explaining the masses of neutrinos or dark matter and dark energy. But of course this is much harder than writing blog posts.
amai 8y ago
Maybe physics is suffering from the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect. Colliders used to produce helpful results for fundamental physics, but maybe it is time to look somewhere else.
- ymolodtsov 8y ago
  Colliders are certainly not the only thing scientists use.
cli 8y ago
I suppose this is as an appropriate time as any to ask for advice: I am a multimillionaire from inheritance, and am about to complete my masters in physics. I wish to work on long term theoretical physics problems that do not seem to be possible under the current publish-or-perish academic system. The plan was to complete a PhD, then leave academia, but lately I have been having severe doubts about continuing onto a PhD, partly due to the cruft that comes with academia. Obviously, future employability due to financial reasons is completely irrelevant to me. I would greatly appreciate any advice.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  It sounds like you are in a good position - you can have total control over what you work on. You could even write your own grants and get other people to research what you want alongside you. Since the traditional PhD path isn't showing that much success, doesn't it make more sense to just research what you want? All the papers are free online and authors will generally discuss their work with you if you have intelligent questions. BTW, this is what I do. I freelance about 20% of the time and spend about 50% of it reading physics papers. So far I haven't produced anything new, but I have greatly increased my intuitive understanding.
- arcadi7 8y ago
  find a small group of people that are excited about what they are doing -- then go from there
- brohee 8y ago
  Completing your PhD would give you credence, being taken seriously even if you are right can be an issue (and justifiably so, evaluating new ideas take time and lots of cranks come up with new ideas). Also making contact in academia certainly can't be bad.
- mikhailfranco 8y ago
  Have a look at Garrett Lisi and PSI: http://www.pacificscienceinstitute.org/ http://www.pacificscienceinstitute.org/
- awwx 8y ago
no_identd 8y ago
I wish physicists would dare blame themselves for (insufficiently dis)trusting their statistician, mathematician & philosopher colleagues. The reason for physics research becoming more wide, limited & shallow instead of more narrow, broad & deep seem to stem from the foundations of mathematics. See here for the foundations of math itself: https://mathoverflow.net/a/25385 https://mathoverflow.net/a/25385 http://math.andrej.com/2016/10/10/five-stages-of-accepting-constructive-mathematics/ http://math.andrej.com/2016/10/10/five-stages-of-accepting-c... (If you struggle with comprehending the above, try drawing Venn diagrams of the logical operations involved to gain a geometric understanding of the matter.) And here for the foundations of probability theory: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-88-470-2107-5_5 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-88-470-2107-... Gian-Carlo Rota - Twelve Problems in Probability Theory No One Likes to Bring Up, The Fubini Lectures, 1998 (published 2001) Two decades old, but the title still rings as true today as it did twenty years ago, unfortunately. And here, for the obligatory philosophy slap fight abound in statistics: https://www.quora.com/For-a-non-expert-what-is-the-difference-between-Bayesian-and-frequentist-approaches/answer/Jason-Eisner https://www.quora.com/For-a-non-expert-what-is-the-differenc... The philosophical solution to which basically boils down to this image macro: https://i.imgur.com/MPAntbK.jpg https://i.imgur.com/MPAntbK.jpg But for which we lack a sufficiently advanced & logically consistent mathematical formalism, both due to people mostly ignoring, out of ignorance [because from where else do you get the action of ignoring!], the philosophical solution, and, more importantly, because we lack a sufficient mathematical formalism for it due to, among other things, the issues with probability theory. And here, a small shimmer of hope in the foundations of statistics: http://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/phofstra/Simpson.pdf http://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/phofstra/Simpson.pdf There exists another, unrelated to the above presentation, avenue of highly interesting research out of Brazil, but their results haven't yet reached a stage of maturity where people throw together easily understandable powerpoint slides, which I'll neglect mentioning here for now, because I'd consider that bad etiquette. Personally, I feel partial to blaming all of this on this Euclid translation error, albeit I say that in partial jest: http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/teaching/dm-reading-assignments/Euclid-Second-Proposition-Math-Intell.pdf http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/teaching/dm-reading-assign... ...which people still fall for, even in 2018, as exemplified in quite a few papers on the foundations of geometry published in recent years. In closing: Physicists don't stand the furthest to the right in this xkcd comic, and out of frame, even further to the right from the already left out philosopher, there exists a recursive boxing match between numerous fields of science conveniently left out of the graphic to maintain a sense of strict hierarchy & order in a reality that lacks such hierarchy: https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/ Also, I'd like to point out that the title of that blog post technically represents a statistically testable hypothesis.
mymythisisthis 8y ago
The stagnation become with the end of the USSR. No need for physics anymore, no one was building missiles, or going to space. Then the Internet happened and smart people made money off that. Looks like the wages for developers is going down. China, Japan, etc., art going to space. Physics will pick up again.
i6mi6 8y ago
Surprised no one mentioned that Einstein’s concept of space-time is wrong which makes me believe the Universe is electric http://www.indjst.org/index.php/indjst/article/view/30369 http://www.indjst.org/index.php/indjst/article/view/30369
xupybd 8y ago
Is there an element to this that the problems left are simply harder than the ones solved by previous generations?
kristianp 8y ago
Two earlier posts of hers that got a lot of commentary on HN (2016).: Why not string theory? Because enough is enough. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11885036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11885036 and The LHC “nightmare scenario” has come true. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12238197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12238197 Very similar theme of lack of verifiable theories. I wonder what the experimental physicists have to say about this topic? I feel like theories are also driven by new observations. However the observations that the theorists have to go on are very indirect compared to those of 100 years ago. "The mass of this galaxy is out by x percent" isn't doesn't give many clues as to what's wrong. Compare that to observations of Mercury's orbit that happened 2 centuries before Einstein published his Relativity theories. ( http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/Cyberia/NumRel/EinsteinTest.html http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/Cyberia/NumRel/EinsteinTest... )
poelzi 8y ago
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/24/7426 http://www.pnas.org/content/112/24/7426 It is proven that physicists are in fact, the most ignorant folks of all scientists. Real, proper physical models are always interdisciplinary, unified theories. The most ignored category of all. I can assure everybody, that the model that might get accepted in 100 years is already here. As I'm personally using one of those fringe models, I can assure you that using this in public will get you mostly negative points online and quite interesting conversations offline. Nice side-note: You will be able to filter out non scientific thinkers quite easily and I can assure you, there are lots of them in the "scene". Interestingly chemists are much more open to different models, in fact, most of them know that our models are rough approximations at best. It is funny when you think in models that explain everything, but are quite far from the standard perspective. It becomes hard to explain effects because the details obviously start to diverge the closer you look. On the other hand, I think every adolescent is capable of thinking the model I'm using. (PS: I'm not the origin of the model I'm using, I seriously would have never been able to come up with such a minimal, absolute logical and elegant solution)

251 points by mathgenius 8y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwKT9XqbCI8&list=PLWy9gm0ulp7nvCU4p7BrLlhkTAcA2UL2O https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwKT9XqbCI8&list=PLWy9gm0ulp... https://jp-petit.org/science/scientific_summary.htm https://jp-petit.org/science/scientific_summary.htm

tylermw 8y ago

Love this comment left on the post by Peter Shor (of Shor's algorithm--the algorithm that kicked off the quantum computing frenzy). I assume it's him and not an imposter. "It's not just that scientists don't want to move their butts, although that's undoubtedly part of it. It's also that they can't. In today's university funding system, you need grants (well, maybe you don't truly need them once you have tenure, but they're very nice to have). So who decides which people get the grants? It's their peers, who are all working on exactly the same things that everybody is working on. And if you submit a proposal that says "I'm going to go off and work on this crazy idea, and maybe there's a one in a thousand chance that I'll discover some of the secrets of the universe, and a 99.9% chance that I'll come up with bubkes," you get turned down. But if a thousand really smart people did this, maybe we'd actually have a chance of making some progress. (Assuming they really did have promising crazy ideas, and weren't abusing the system. Of course, what would actually happen is that the new system would be abused and we wouldn't be any better off than we are now.) So the only advice I have is that more physicists need to not worry about grants, and go hide in their attics and work on new and crazy theories, the way Andrew Wiles worked on Fermat's Last Theorem." (new comment right below) "Let me make an addendum to my previous comment, that I was too modest to put into it. This is roughly how I discovered the quantum factoring algorithm. I didn't tell anybody I was working on it until I had figured it out. And although it didn't take years of solitary toil in my attic (the way that Fermat's Last Theorem did), I thought about it on and off for maybe a year, and worked on it moderately hard for a month or two when I saw that it actually might work. So, people, go hide in your attics!"

gbumakefan 8y ago
Except you can’t just go hide in your attic. Everyone is more risk averse than ever as the cost of housing, healthcare, and education relentlessly increase faster than wages.
- nixpulvis 8y ago
  Reminds me a bit of the expression "desperate times call for desperate measures".
- EGreg 8y ago
  This is one of the best arguments for UBI. Imagine how much humanity would innovate in science, open source and other public gift economies if everyone didn’t have to worry how they will eat and pay rent next month.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    How about reducing the generally accepted working hours to something like 24 hrs/week? 40 is pretty arbitrary so we could arbitrarily set a lower number. That would free up a lot of creativity.
  - pdonis 8y ago
    The argument you are making assumes two things that strike me as highly implausible: (1) That enough people would use their new free time to innovate instead of just watching TV or playing World of Warcraft or something like that. (2) That enough people would still choose to do the unpleasant but necessary tasks that provide the resources needed for everyone to eat, have housing, etc. Not to mention all the other stuff people seem to want.
    - dv_dt 8y ago
      Right now a fairly tight circle of people decide for others how to spend vast amounts of time. It's not even very efficient as many jobs carry bullshit hours requirements. So after increasing free time by a large amount, a very small number of people start choosing different areas to innovate in, it still ends up as a large growth area for innovation, or social interaction, or whatever humans value individually instead of what old line accounting values.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ackfoo 8y ago

We’re stuck in a paradigm that doesn’t result in any valid fundamental predictions. The idea that running the expanding universe backward makes everything denser and hotter in the past is just dumb. The universe is not like a loaf expanding from dense batter to fluffy bread. Instead, the chaotic vacuum produces, for want of a more accurate concept, particle-antiparticle pairs at random that exert a “pressure” seen as the Casimir Effect and a force that underlies the expansion of space-time. These pairs are mostly ephemeral, but under certain conditions they can randomly transition to a stable state. This eventually results in matter. (It results in a lot of things, but we’re biased toward the minor component, matter, because we’re made of it.) The process happens a lot in very empty space, and almost not at all in space that is constrained by the existence of matter already. This is why “dark matter” exists out there and not down here. The Casimir Effect will give this to you; constrain the available space and some wave equations are excluded, resulting in a measurable inward pressure. Run the expanding universe backwards: space-time contracts and we have exactly what we have right now. Run it forward and space-time expands, again giving us exactly what we have right now. Of course, things are different, but the physics is unchanged. The universe doesn’t get hotter or cooler, there’s no era of total ionization or inflation. The fundamental ground state of the universe is chaos. Anything can arise out of that chaos, but specific events are constrained by probability: some are so unlikely that we never see them; some are so likely that they are certain and they happen all the time. Mathematics, so useful a tool in the past, cannot describe this situation. The only way to describe this system is by using the system itself; there are no shortcuts. Math, philosophy, reason and order are inapplicable because they are only rules-based approximations of a chaotic state.

teilo 8y ago
Here's the ether guy again. It's all he can talk about.
- tree_of_item 8y ago
  Well, that sort of reaction to "out-there" ideas is kind of contributing to stagnation, don't you think?

akvadrako 8y ago

If you are doing theoretical research all your really need is an office, a computer and a basic salary; it's not like university pay is great. If the need for funding from existing sources is hindering your research, try to find another way to support it, like by freelancing 20% of the time or Patreon.

narrator 8y ago

I kind of like the model of the turn of the 19th century where you had great geniuses like Tesla who would just get funding to create whatever kind of cool crap they could think of. Are there still any people like that in physics? Legendary scientists/engineers who run there own lab and just make cool stuff?

felix_nagaand 8y ago
Maybe on YouTube. Or the children of Russian/ Chinese mobsters
canhascodez 8y ago
Tesla is a bad example for almost any given point, but in this case it's relevant to note that he was not a scientist, and his funding model did not work.
_Nat_ 8y ago
> Are there still any people like that in physics? Legendary scientists/engineers who run there own lab and just make cool stuff? That's pretty much what I've been going for. Got my PhD in Chemical Engineering and an MBA, and now I'm starting my lab - or "startup", here - in pursuit of my research, basically into strong AI. Bootstrapping is an interesting process. I mean, I have to keep the lights on somehow, though there's an inherent conflict-of-interests between keeping the lights on and doing the core work that the lights are there for. Still, what can one do beyond keeping at it?
philipkglass 8y ago
David E. Shaw. Note that before he returned to his scientific passions he had to make a fortune, because creating new things at the cutting edge is a lot more expensive now than at the end of the 19th century.

adamnemecek 8y ago

Once upon a time, researchers were independently wealthy https://nadiaeghbal.com/independent-research https://nadiaeghbal.com/independent-research

titanix2 8y ago
It was also a time when the whole societal landscape was different: peasants farmed because it was their way to survive and the aristocracy lived on the labor of the former without having to work. What changed now it that almost everybody need "a job" and the attention and time of a lot of smart people is distracted by that. That's also the reason why people professionalize themselves by going to the academia. In my case, I would do research and experimenting new ideas no matter what, but joining an PhD program is the way to put bread on the table.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  Today the number of people that don't have to work, both in raw numbers and as a percent, has absolutely skyrocketed. I mean if a person is simply interested in e.g. pursuing research and not so much with material niceties then it's extremely easy to live abroad in developing nations, indefinitely, starting with around $200k. Bump that up to a million and you can live practically anywhere so long as you have the discipline to live far below your means, which is perhaps the hardest part of it all.
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    It's pretty easy to leave below your means if you are really engrossed in research. The hard part is finding the time to spend money.

letitgo12345 8y ago

Well considering that we know everything pretty much about most of everyday physics and new physics requires energies that are almost unreachable and billions of dollars in experimental investment and/or years and decades to collect sufficient data, it's not a surprise at all that foundations of physics progress has slowed. I don't think the physics community is to blame here. Just the nature of reality

rossdavidh 8y ago
I agree, although I think it could be argued that a logical outcome of this fact, is that most (although hopefully not all) of the physicists should go work on other things, like maybe the physics of planet formation, where we are getting new data all the time. Or maybe in areas outside of physics altogether, like the social sciences, where again we have orders of magnitude more data than we once did. If the low-hanging fruit is all gone, move on. That's hard news if you've sunk two or three decades into becoming an expert in a particular niche.
- Sean1708 8y ago
  > Or maybe in areas outside of physics altogether This does actually happen already. I'm not sure how widespread it is, but I've noticed it in a couple of Condensed Matter Theory groups. For example Imperial's group[0] do research on Complexity and Networks including the "application of these principles to a variety of stochastic phenomena, ranging from ant colonies to cardiovascular biology, from sandpiles to earthquakes". [0]: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/condensed-matter-theory/research/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/condensed-matter-theory/research/
- kgwgk 8y ago
  Physicists: https://www.xkcd.com/793/ https://www.xkcd.com/793/
peteradio 8y ago
I studied under a very smart professor who believed that somehow table top particle physics would be a possibility. See http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6355/990 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6355/990 . Maybe the HEP experiment consoritium is just a global grant conspiracy. Wake up sheeple!!

tbabb 8y ago

While I don't like this ~guy's~ woman's disdainful, superior tone, I do think his complaint has merit. Physics is notoriously bad at having curiosity about strange, unconventional, or truly novel ideas. I just finished reading What is Real? by Adam Becker-- a history of modern physics-- and am astonished at how aggressively physicists resisted and suppressed "unconventional" interpretations of quantum mechanics (like the many worlds interpretation) in favor of the obviously-wrong Copenhagen interpretation. There was a taboo for decades around even discussing quantum foundations, and people's careers were ruined simply for trying to publish papers about it. Physics got stuck for a short while on the understanding of QM, and then promptly went into sour grapes mode and decided that it was meaningless to ask any deep questions about what QM actually meant. Since then it has been focused on mathematical formalisms and smashing particles instead of deep questions about what it all means. The stagnation is real, and it's the physics community's own fault.

brian-armstrong 8y ago
His?
krastanov 8y ago
It is "her" complaint, not "his". This is Sabine Hossenfelder, a well known theorist (mostly for her outreach/popularization work). And you are misrepresenting this"taboo" you are talking about. Thinking about what quantum mechanics "means" is how we got breakthroughs in quantum computing and theoretical computer science. Similarly, there is plenty of exciting deep theoretical work in particle physics beyond the smashing particles together type of experiments.
- tbabb 8y ago
  Oops, my mistake on the gender- Sabine is not a super familiar name. (Still dislike the tone, though; don't care how famous she is). I also think the taboo has lifted a bit, as it's now possible for mainstream physicists like David Deutsch and Sean Carroll to build their careers on quantum foundations work. But I still think the physics community has a lot of baggage from the second half of the twentieth century to let go of.

walrus1066 8y ago

I think this is excessively harsh. The only guarantees made about the LHC were, that it would prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs Boson. Believe me, experimental physicists are desperate to find the slightest deviation from the standard model. I spent 2 years on one such 'stab in the dark' rare decay analysis! The SM's predictions have been tested to a rigor unparalleled in history. It predicts stuff like mass of W & Z bosons, fine structure constant, the measurements of which exceed an accuracy of 1 part per billion in some cases.

jsweojtj 8y ago
It does not predict the fine structure constant, that is an input into the model.
- T-A 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-structure_constant#Measurement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-structure_constant#Measur...
  - jsweojtj 8y ago
    Exactly. Its value comes from being measured.
    - T-A 8y ago
      It comes from the magnetic moment of the electron being measured and then run through more than 10k Feynman diagrams. The second part wouldn't work if QED didn't.
      - jsweojtj 8y ago
        I can't tell whether you are agreeing or disagreeing with me. Let's make it easier. Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: The value of the fine-structure constant is not predicted by any physics theory.

cletus 8y ago

I'm no physicist but this leaves me scratching my head. You have some people saying the university funding system is to blame by not accepting crazy ideas but we have all sorts of ideas in physics like: - String theory. As best as I can tell the only reason string theory exists is because if dimensions=11 the equations for general relativity pop out. Importantly though string theory has made no testable predictions and it's unclear when or even if that will be the case. - Supersymmetry. Interesting idea but no evidence of this yet. Other more interesting ideas to me at least (again, as non-physicist): - Octonion Math underlying the standard model (maybe) [1] And some interesting experimental work: - Possible violations of lepton universality from the LHCb detector [2]. This was, last I heard, still well below statistical significance (5-sigma) and could well disappear (as other bumps have eg at 750GeV) but it's interesting nonetheless. And there are host of open problems with otherwise successful theories. My favourite extremes here is the prediction of magnetic moment of an electron, which is ~12 significant digits in agreement with experimental results. At the other end is QFT predicting the energy density of a vacuum, which is ~120 orders of magnitude off [3]. Anyway, a lot of this exists in the current academic system. [1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-octonion-math-that-could-underpin-physics-20180720/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-octonion-math-that-could-... [2] https://cerncourier.com/beauty-quarks-test-lepton-universality/ https://cerncourier.com/beauty-quarks-test-lepton-universali... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem

T-A 8y ago
Depending on how strict you are, you can trace string theory all the way back to the 1940s, or at the very least to the late 60s [1]. Supersymmetry is from the early 70s [2]. They are exactly the mainstream kind of thing which Hossenfelder is referring to when she writes about "physics beyond the standard model which the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was supposed to find". For every lone wanderer exploring a long shot like octonion math, there are thousands writing yet another paper on some variation of the old theme. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_string_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_string_theory [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry#History
8y ago

js8 8y ago

As an outsider, I wonder, what happened to Nima Arkani-Hamed and his new ideas about the nature of spacetime? That seemed pretty interesting.. even just as a strategy of what should be researched.

swerveonem 8y ago

We need young people to start their careers with knowledge that only 50+yo physicists have currently. Is such a curriculum possible?

coldtea 8y ago

Btw, something to think on. Consider this slowdown in physics, and the oft-repeated ideas that we'll sure to colonize not just the solar system, but eventually even the galaxy... E.g.: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...

sliken 8y ago
Dunno, seems pretty out of date. The mentioned price of $15,000 per kg to the moon is already 3 times cheaper, even if you need to get it to mars. They also mention a wildly optimistic "I'm not holding my breath" $20k per kg to mars, which is already is 4x higher than a SpaceX BFR launching stuff to mars.

Pica_soO 8y ago

The truth is, that science empowers the common men- every device crafted giveth more power to the capable individual. And that scares the upper crust. Thus, knowledge must be reduced and separated, and the increasing of dangerous potential must be subverted. If everyone owns a flying car with a fusion reactor- everyone owns the means to eliminate a city. So, here we are, with leaders who praise innovation, while doing everything they can to sabotage it. And after 9/11 one would be tempted to call them not completely wrong. The human environment altogether is deteriorating so fast that this sabotage will have to cease very soon, or else, there might not be a surveillance state left to protect with a science ban.

enjalot 8y ago

clearly it's the sophons. (reference to the Three Body Problem, an awesome book)

scottlocklin 8y ago

Nobody has mentioned John Horgan's book "the end of science" yet, so I figure it is time to do so. It's even more relevant now than when he wrote it in 1996.

beefman 8y ago

This criticism may have some merit on the particle physics side of things, but from the 'gravity' side I see exciting recent progress. In particular, the AMPS firewall and literature that followed, including the introduction of computational complexity into physics, ER=EPR etc. With LIGO and various space telescopes soon coming online, the experimental future looks bright too.

apo 8y ago

... I have spelled out many times very clearly what theoretical physicists should do differently. It’s just that they don’t like my answer. They should stop trying to solve problems that don’t exist. That a theory isn’t pretty is not a problem. Focus on mathematically well-defined problems, that’s what I am saying. And, for heaven’s sake, stop rewarding scientists for working on what is popular with their colleagues. It seems that some examples might be useful here. Which specific groups are trying to solve problems that don't exist? What are some mathematically well-defined problems that aren't getting enough attention? As for rewarding scientists for working on what's popular, that's a science-wide problem that stems from the way that science is funded and decades of inbreeding. Still, examples of how to break physics out of its funk on this score would also be useful.

buboard 8y ago

> That a theory isn’t pretty is not a problem On what premise? 'Theories' are human constructs, hence why physicist are so adamant about their Truth and Beauty. It's wrong to say that, when most sciences rely heavily on Occam's principle (an aesthetic argument) for reasons unknown. It's pretty likely that the human brain is guided by both principles to model the world, and that should be reflected in the formulation of our theories.

picsao 8y ago

Breakthroughs are not produced by the scientists produced and favored by the current system of inkremental research. For a breakthrough you need the ability to step back from the paradigm without any investment in it.. Thus only academic beginners and outsiders are even incentivized. then you need a miracle, the miracle usually beeing a wrong analogy beeing made and thought to the very end. So you need people who by accident of birth can't stop analogizing.. aka people on the schizophrenic spectrum. Needless to say that integrating chaotic people, who constantly recombine, are notorious bad at planning projects and who perceive normal social interaction as a spy novel they want to run away from - is a challenge. Even worser when they have success and the world worship them for it, while the pursuit the laser eyed pigeons. It's a doable job, as any theater Regisseur will tell you, but the Leviathancyberitics of this kind are definitely not comfortable.

amai 8y ago

Isn’t she just complaining that nobody is listening to her? That sounds a lot like a crackpot to me. Instead of complaining she should better work on a useful new theory explaining the masses of neutrinos or dark matter and dark energy. But of course this is much harder than writing blog posts.

amai 8y ago

Maybe physics is suffering from the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect. Colliders used to produce helpful results for fundamental physics, but maybe it is time to look somewhere else.

ymolodtsov 8y ago
Colliders are certainly not the only thing scientists use.

cli 8y ago

I suppose this is as an appropriate time as any to ask for advice: I am a multimillionaire from inheritance, and am about to complete my masters in physics. I wish to work on long term theoretical physics problems that do not seem to be possible under the current publish-or-perish academic system. The plan was to complete a PhD, then leave academia, but lately I have been having severe doubts about continuing onto a PhD, partly due to the cruft that comes with academia. Obviously, future employability due to financial reasons is completely irrelevant to me. I would greatly appreciate any advice.

akvadrako 8y ago
It sounds like you are in a good position - you can have total control over what you work on. You could even write your own grants and get other people to research what you want alongside you. Since the traditional PhD path isn't showing that much success, doesn't it make more sense to just research what you want? All the papers are free online and authors will generally discuss their work with you if you have intelligent questions. BTW, this is what I do. I freelance about 20% of the time and spend about 50% of it reading physics papers. So far I haven't produced anything new, but I have greatly increased my intuitive understanding.
arcadi7 8y ago
find a small group of people that are excited about what they are doing -- then go from there
brohee 8y ago
Completing your PhD would give you credence, being taken seriously even if you are right can be an issue (and justifiably so, evaluating new ideas take time and lots of cranks come up with new ideas). Also making contact in academia certainly can't be bad.
mikhailfranco 8y ago
Have a look at Garrett Lisi and PSI: http://www.pacificscienceinstitute.org/ http://www.pacificscienceinstitute.org/
awwx 8y ago

no_identd 8y ago

I wish physicists would dare blame themselves for (insufficiently dis)trusting their statistician, mathematician & philosopher colleagues. The reason for physics research becoming more wide, limited & shallow instead of more narrow, broad & deep seem to stem from the foundations of mathematics. See here for the foundations of math itself: https://mathoverflow.net/a/25385 https://mathoverflow.net/a/25385 http://math.andrej.com/2016/10/10/five-stages-of-accepting-constructive-mathematics/ http://math.andrej.com/2016/10/10/five-stages-of-accepting-c... (If you struggle with comprehending the above, try drawing Venn diagrams of the logical operations involved to gain a geometric understanding of the matter.) And here for the foundations of probability theory: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-88-470-2107-5_5 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-88-470-2107-... Gian-Carlo Rota - Twelve Problems in Probability Theory No One Likes to Bring Up, The Fubini Lectures, 1998 (published 2001) Two decades old, but the title still rings as true today as it did twenty years ago, unfortunately. And here, for the obligatory philosophy slap fight abound in statistics: https://www.quora.com/For-a-non-expert-what-is-the-difference-between-Bayesian-and-frequentist-approaches/answer/Jason-Eisner https://www.quora.com/For-a-non-expert-what-is-the-differenc... The philosophical solution to which basically boils down to this image macro: https://i.imgur.com/MPAntbK.jpg https://i.imgur.com/MPAntbK.jpg But for which we lack a sufficiently advanced & logically consistent mathematical formalism, both due to people mostly ignoring, out of ignorance [because from where else do you get the action of ignoring!], the philosophical solution, and, more importantly, because we lack a sufficient mathematical formalism for it due to, among other things, the issues with probability theory. And here, a small shimmer of hope in the foundations of statistics: http://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/phofstra/Simpson.pdf http://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/phofstra/Simpson.pdf There exists another, unrelated to the above presentation, avenue of highly interesting research out of Brazil, but their results haven't yet reached a stage of maturity where people throw together easily understandable powerpoint slides, which I'll neglect mentioning here for now, because I'd consider that bad etiquette. Personally, I feel partial to blaming all of this on this Euclid translation error, albeit I say that in partial jest: http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/teaching/dm-reading-assignments/Euclid-Second-Proposition-Math-Intell.pdf http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/teaching/dm-reading-assign... ...which people still fall for, even in 2018, as exemplified in quite a few papers on the foundations of geometry published in recent years. In closing: Physicists don't stand the furthest to the right in this xkcd comic, and out of frame, even further to the right from the already left out philosopher, there exists a recursive boxing match between numerous fields of science conveniently left out of the graphic to maintain a sense of strict hierarchy & order in a reality that lacks such hierarchy: https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/ Also, I'd like to point out that the title of that blog post technically represents a statistically testable hypothesis.

mymythisisthis 8y ago

The stagnation become with the end of the USSR. No need for physics anymore, no one was building missiles, or going to space. Then the Internet happened and smart people made money off that. Looks like the wages for developers is going down. China, Japan, etc., art going to space. Physics will pick up again.

i6mi6 8y ago

Surprised no one mentioned that Einstein’s concept of space-time is wrong which makes me believe the Universe is electric http://www.indjst.org/index.php/indjst/article/view/30369 http://www.indjst.org/index.php/indjst/article/view/30369

xupybd 8y ago

Is there an element to this that the problems left are simply harder than the ones solved by previous generations?

kristianp 8y ago

Two earlier posts of hers that got a lot of commentary on HN (2016).: Why not string theory? Because enough is enough. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11885036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11885036 and The LHC “nightmare scenario” has come true. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12238197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12238197 Very similar theme of lack of verifiable theories. I wonder what the experimental physicists have to say about this topic? I feel like theories are also driven by new observations. However the observations that the theorists have to go on are very indirect compared to those of 100 years ago. "The mass of this galaxy is out by x percent" isn't doesn't give many clues as to what's wrong. Compare that to observations of Mercury's orbit that happened 2 centuries before Einstein published his Relativity theories. ( http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/Cyberia/NumRel/EinsteinTest.html http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/Cyberia/NumRel/EinsteinTest... )

poelzi 8y ago

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/24/7426 http://www.pnas.org/content/112/24/7426 It is proven that physicists are in fact, the most ignorant folks of all scientists. Real, proper physical models are always interdisciplinary, unified theories. The most ignored category of all. I can assure everybody, that the model that might get accepted in 100 years is already here. As I'm personally using one of those fringe models, I can assure you that using this in public will get you mostly negative points online and quite interesting conversations offline. Nice side-note: You will be able to filter out non scientific thinkers quite easily and I can assure you, there are lots of them in the "scene". Interestingly chemists are much more open to different models, in fact, most of them know that our models are rough approximations at best. It is funny when you think in models that explain everything, but are quite far from the standard perspective. It becomes hard to explain effects because the details obviously start to diverge the closer you look. On the other hand, I think every adolescent is capable of thinking the model I'm using. (PS: I'm not the origin of the model I'm using, I seriously would have never been able to come up with such a minimal, absolute logical and elegant solution)