4 ms·
What Is Constructor Theory?
- skulk 5y agoHow is this different from Lagrangian mechanics? It seems as though the author is substituting "action" in Lagrangian mechanics for "task" and calling it a new theory.
- wrnr 5y agoDunno, but I wonder if there are even "tasks" in CT that don't use energy. I think even a proton will lose energy through redshifting.
- jonsen 5y agoI think they are trying to explain the connection between the past and the future. Classical models only describes the effect of the past into the future.
- nielsbot 5y agoMaybe a good start to something, but this page doesn't get deep enough into it to show why this is a worthwhile framework.
- jonsen 5y agoDid you see the Research page? The menu icon didn’t show up until I turned my iPad to portrait. The Research page takes a long time to load.
- qart 5y agoSo weird! I'm on a desktop. The research page looks like it has loaded, and looks as if they still don't have anything to report... for several seconds.
- carterschonwald 5y agoIs it just my browser or is the research page empty?
- jonsen 5y agoI didn’t know it was there. The menu didn’t show in landscape on my iPad. ‘Research’ takes some time to fill the page.
- gre 5y agoClickbait
- whatshisface 5y ago>Its fundamental statements are about what tasks are possible, what are impossible, and why. This allows one to incorporate more of physical reality, including entities, such as information, that have inherently been regarded as approximate and derivative as a result of the traditional physics take on things. This is a typical crank website that tries to pass off metaphysics as physics. >The researchers are David Deutsch, Chiara Marletto, and collaborators in Oxford Physics, Wolfson College, ISI Turin and CQT Singapore. Great, now Oxford is running crank websites...
- jamesrcole 5y agowhy? You don’t explain.
- ajkjk 5y agoI'd agree that at first glance this reads like crank material and the question to answer is "why not?" instead of "why?". It is extremely vague and doesn't parse into anything that seems meaningful.
- jamesrcole 5y agoIf something seems that way to you, and you want to say to others that it seems that way, you could explain why. It’s not like it was developed by random nobodies, and it’s not like the default assumption should be that some work is the result of cranks (the default assumption should be agnosticism towards it) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch
- ajkjk 5y agoThe implication is that almost any practicing physicist would parse this as crank-ish, so we can discuss it operating from the shared position that it needs to be defended to be worth spending time on. Similar to how most physicists are not going to spend any time responding to random crank emails, because they parse as cranks; the burden of credibility is on the writer. Credentials offer some credibility, but imo not enough to make this seem worth spending time on. Anyway, if I had to put the criticism into words: the entire page is weird jargon that doesn't appear to solve any problems that we have, puts a simple problem into inscrutable metaphysical terminology, and the authors didn't feel like they needed to provide any examples of their model being useful or providing any insights. So my reaction is to ignore it until they do the work of showing why we should care.
- hermitcrab 5y agoFrom a brief read (there aren't many details on the website) it sounds like they are trying to reformulate physics along the lines of object orientation. I'm not sure how this is going to handle fields (such as gravitational fields) or how this is supposed to be better. "With support of the Templeton World Charity Foundation". The Templeton is highly controversial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Templeton_Foundation#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Templeton_Foundation#Rece...
- k_bx 5y agoApologies for a stupid question, but how can you roll a dice without using any energy yourself? Or is it meant to work in some model where there is no such thing as energy (as opposed to the one when you need to lift it)
- ajuc 5y agoAfter a quick skim the constructor theory seems like restating laws of physics as logical relations instead of functions. So instead of saying f(3)=4 you say relation f is fulfilled for arguments 3 and 4. Is this all or did I miss something? Relations are more general and expressive, but ultimately you can always turn a relation into a function of 1 more dimension, so don't think it's a breakthrough.
- PeterWhittaker 5y agoI recently read an interview with one of the website creators and it was fascinating: the basic premise is to reason about physics from the perspective of what is impossible/fixed. The example given in the interview was relativity, which arose when Einstein asked the simple questions “what if c IS fixed?” (it was an open question at the time) and “what if only light can travel at c?” Mathematical treatment of those questions led to SR and SR led (eventually) to GR. It’s an intriguing approach: posit a fixed limit or impossibility and see where the math takes us (inventing/applying new math as necessary). Some avenues will be useless, others may be fruitful.
- eggy 5y agoAt first I thought it was Constructal Theory, a theory that is about flow of anything, people, heat, etc., by Andre Bejan [0], a well-known engineer at Duke. Constructor Theory has piqued my interest in terms of solving problems or framing problems by what is possible as opposed to what is impossible or excluded by a physical law. [0] https://mems.duke.edu/faculty/adrian-bejan https://mems.duke.edu/faculty/adrian-bejan
- wdpk 5y agoQuanta also had a recent article about this: https://www.quantamagazine.org/with-constructor-theory-chiara-marletto-invokes-the-impossible-20210429/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/with-constructor-theory-chiar...