3 ms·

Any good, comprehensible-to-laymen citations?

• jiggawatts 6y ago
  No, but I wish there were. In the last few decades especially the "publish or perish" culture of academia in general (not just in the physics departments) has lead to a perverse incentive to make mundane topics seem more impressive by deliberately overcomplicating the mathematics. Similarly, if you read through most (95-99%) of high-energy physics papers, they aren't even remotely connected to reality. They're advancing the state of the art for some obscure corner of mathematics for the solution to some simplified model which itself is an abstraction of an abstraction. It is astonishingly difficult to find "down to earth" mathematics for just about anything related to theoretical physics. Meanwhile, a lot of what physics "does" is actually very simple mathematically, it's just that that simplicity is intractable symbolically. (Nonlinear differential equations are notoriously difficult to solve algebraically, but relatively straightforward numerically.) If you think about it, particle physics must be simple because while the Universe contains advanced maths degrees, it doesn't have one. A particle zipping around and bouncing off of things doesn't solve monstrously complicated Feynman Integrals moment-to-moment! The rules it follows can't possibly be that complex.
  • 3np 6y ago
    > The rules it follows can't possibly be that complex Sure, but could it be that Feynman Integrals are one of the least complex measurable predictions/calculation of those simpler, underlying rules, potentially acting in dimensions we can't measure?