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"...mindless production of mathematical fiction..." This derisive comment betrays the authors own hypocritical stance, claiming physicists are too close-minde

"...mindless production of mathematical fiction..." This derisive comment betrays the authors own hypocritical stance, claiming physicists are too close-minded, while simultaneously ridiculing the role of advanced mathematics in formulating new physics hypotheses, arbitrarily declaring them mindless fiction.

CuriouslyC 7y ago
Nope. The criticism is of searching for new physics by chasing mathematical elegance, instead of trying to explain observations.
- PeterisP 7y ago
  I find it hard to put together her criticism of "chasing mathematical elegance, instead of trying to explain observations" with her criticism of the large and expensive colliders. The way I see it, the whole reason why the expensive experiments are needed is that the current theories do explain all the 'local' and (comparatively) low energy observations that we can do here on earth in ordinary conditions; we know that there are discrepancies between our theories and large scale / high power processes that we can observe in astrophysics, but if we actually want to probe and explore these discrepancies between theory and observations, then we need to make some discrepanct events to look at.... which we can't do without the very expensive experiments that she shuns; e.g. the Higgs boson is not going to show up on a low-power particle accelerator, no matter how smart physics you do.
- SiempreViernes 7y ago
  Actually, Hossenfelders great fight has been with the concept of "naturalness", a fight that has now been won by the LHC killing off all the theories based on that concept. And it wasn't ever so simple as "chasing mathematical elegance instead of trying to explain observations", the problem has been that there was a theory that could explain almost perfectly everything within a certain region of physics, but can't easily be extended. Thus you work on crazy schemes to extend the existing theory (all the sensible ones already having failed), or you are forced to make an entirely new framework, and that takes a lot of work before it's finished enough to even reproduce the results of the limited theory. If you take the second route, you are very vulnerable to the "chasing mathematical elegance" slander, but it's not like the other guys are doing any better: there aren't actually any unexpected observations that need explaining within the reach of the existing theory.
  - nonbel 7y ago
    >"the problem has been that there was a theory that could explain almost perfectly everything within a certain region of physics, but can't easily be extended." Sounds a lot like overfitting.
    - kosievdmerwe 7y ago
      Sounds more like a formula that needs more terms. Compare the classical physics formula for momentum, p=mv, vs relativistic formula, p=γmv. γ is almost 1 for most low velocities, it only starts jumping up to infinity when we get close to c. The point being that the classical formula is pretty good in it's zone of low velocities, but as soon as you get too far out of the implicit term's "constraints" the formula breaks down and you need to add more to it to get it working for both low and high velocities. Which doesn't sound easy.
      - nonbel 7y ago
        Adding more terms sounds like more overfitting.
        jfengel 7y ago
        It sounds like that only because scientists reformulate their models in terms that people are familiar with. Actual physicists don't work in terms of the gamma correction factor; they work in tensor fields that don't look anything like conventional arithmetic. But they can pare all that down to something expressed in terms people are familiar with. And that has the bonus purpose of helping them understand why the familiar terms were familiar: the "correction factor" is small under circumstances we encounter, and only becomes large under circumstances we rarely do. If that intrigues somebody enough to learn the actual physics, they'll encounter a completely different and more-encompassing formulation which looks not at all like overfitting. One that turns out to be more elegant, in fact, cramming more information into less notation. But it's information nobody needs until they're doing fairly advanced physics, so we're not going to be teaching it in elementary school any time soon.

CuriouslyC 7y ago

Nope. The criticism is of searching for new physics by chasing mathematical elegance, instead of trying to explain observations.

PeterisP 7y ago
I find it hard to put together her criticism of "chasing mathematical elegance, instead of trying to explain observations" with her criticism of the large and expensive colliders. The way I see it, the whole reason why the expensive experiments are needed is that the current theories do explain all the 'local' and (comparatively) low energy observations that we can do here on earth in ordinary conditions; we know that there are discrepancies between our theories and large scale / high power processes that we can observe in astrophysics, but if we actually want to probe and explore these discrepancies between theory and observations, then we need to make some discrepanct events to look at.... which we can't do without the very expensive experiments that she shuns; e.g. the Higgs boson is not going to show up on a low-power particle accelerator, no matter how smart physics you do.
SiempreViernes 7y ago
Actually, Hossenfelders great fight has been with the concept of "naturalness", a fight that has now been won by the LHC killing off all the theories based on that concept. And it wasn't ever so simple as "chasing mathematical elegance instead of trying to explain observations", the problem has been that there was a theory that could explain almost perfectly everything within a certain region of physics, but can't easily be extended. Thus you work on crazy schemes to extend the existing theory (all the sensible ones already having failed), or you are forced to make an entirely new framework, and that takes a lot of work before it's finished enough to even reproduce the results of the limited theory. If you take the second route, you are very vulnerable to the "chasing mathematical elegance" slander, but it's not like the other guys are doing any better: there aren't actually any unexpected observations that need explaining within the reach of the existing theory.
- nonbel 7y ago
  >"the problem has been that there was a theory that could explain almost perfectly everything within a certain region of physics, but can't easily be extended." Sounds a lot like overfitting.
  - kosievdmerwe 7y ago
    Sounds more like a formula that needs more terms. Compare the classical physics formula for momentum, p=mv, vs relativistic formula, p=γmv. γ is almost 1 for most low velocities, it only starts jumping up to infinity when we get close to c. The point being that the classical formula is pretty good in it's zone of low velocities, but as soon as you get too far out of the implicit term's "constraints" the formula breaks down and you need to add more to it to get it working for both low and high velocities. Which doesn't sound easy.
    - nonbel 7y ago
      Adding more terms sounds like more overfitting.
      - jfengel 7y ago
        It sounds like that only because scientists reformulate their models in terms that people are familiar with. Actual physicists don't work in terms of the gamma correction factor; they work in tensor fields that don't look anything like conventional arithmetic. But they can pare all that down to something expressed in terms people are familiar with. And that has the bonus purpose of helping them understand why the familiar terms were familiar: the "correction factor" is small under circumstances we encounter, and only becomes large under circumstances we rarely do. If that intrigues somebody enough to learn the actual physics, they'll encounter a completely different and more-encompassing formulation which looks not at all like overfitting. One that turns out to be more elegant, in fact, cramming more information into less notation. But it's information nobody needs until they're doing fairly advanced physics, so we're not going to be teaching it in elementary school any time soon.