4 ms·
Note: the title is not the conclusion or the content of the article. The article attempts to be less dismissive to some of the direct claims of the author of a
by acqq 8y ago
Note: the title is not the conclusion or the content of the article. The article attempts to be less dismissive to some of the direct claims of the author of a book a comment on which the article is, and the title maybe corresponds to the content of the book which is "provocative" (but it can be the intervention of an editor too). And according to the article the book's logic is something like "because we don't have starting conditions we can't have formulas which would allow an exact derivation of how life evolves, therefore it's beyond physics."
But that doesn't mean that the evolution didn't happen exactly following the physical laws, only that you can't have "nice" formulas. But, realistically, nobody should expect "nice formulas." Not everything that happens can be reduced to a nice formula. The motion of two bodies due to the gravitation they have can be reduced to a nice formula since Newton. But the motion of three bodies?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem
"Unlike two-body problems, no closed-form solution exists for all sets of initial conditions, and numerical methods are generally required."
Is it "beyond physics"? No. It's just "there's no nice formula." And if it's so hard only with three bodies, and considering the immense scale at which molecular events happen (atoms and molecules having their own laws of interaction which are simpler for two but again immensely more complex for more), of course not too much simplicity to predict everything together should be expected.
The article author also disagrees with the "beyond physics" formulation.
"New" physics in the language of the physicists means specifically "the new particles which don't fit to our existing theory." And "the scale of the known interactions is too big for nice formulas" doesn't lead to that. So the claims of "new physics" in the article are simply "non sequitur." No new particles are needed.
- Gatsky 8y agoPhysics is at the end of a day a human construct which quite obviously reflects reality, but is not equivalent to that reality, and is useful to the extent it helps us understand and predict natural phenomena. Their choice of terminology could be better, but strictly is compatible with the definition of physics.
- mnl 8y agoYes and no. Physics is done by humans, but at the end of the day this Higgs from the convoluted construct is actually there, go figure. Maybe physics is onto something, maybe aliens can't get here because conservation of momentum is a universal law indeed, they're bounded by it like every other speck of dust, and their alien construct about it has to look pretty much like ours, the only difference being notations. It's not so clear cut to me anymore we're making models that by definition can never hit the jackpot. I guess we can't even be sure about that.
- acqq 8y ago> Maybe physics is onto something It is indisputable that the natural sciences objectively improve our overall understanding of the world. Those who don't accept that much are simply giving up rationality and claiming "miracles" where there are rational explanations. Typically, there's some very specific agenda that such entities have.
- acqq 8y ago> Their choice of terminology could be better, but strictly is compatible with the definition of physics. Even if you'd argue that "everything can be called physics", which is not how the natural sciences are organized, using some specific terminology that has a very exact meaning in the physics as it is seen today, but giving it the opposite and misleading meaning is plainly wrong, unless one wants to support the misleading of the casual readers. The article title and terminology are misleading, messaging the public completely the opposite of what the natural sciences agree of.