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For some time already we are in an "epicyclean phase" of physics, trapped by the extraordinary predictive success of Quantum Electrodynamics and still using mat

For some time already we are in an "epicyclean phase" of physics, trapped by the extraordinary predictive success of Quantum Electrodynamics and still using mathematical methods devised in the 19th century (variational calculus). This has lead us to the current situation, with extremely complicated theories at the limit of human understanding that bear no new results. It will take a modern day Copernicus to come up with a new view of physics, that will result in simpler, more productive models, to take us out of the local maximum we are in.

floxy 5y ago
Hmm, a new kind of science.
- aeternum 5y ago
  Wolfram has a proposal, by that very name. Hasn't yet made useful predictions though.
- vba616 5y ago
  Due to the mixed reviews, I haven't bothered to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science even though I assume that the target audience is more or less people who were fascinated with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos:_Making_a_New_Science
  - OneLeggedCat 5y ago
    I read this humongous damn thing around 2004. It's not worth it.
beaconstudios 5y ago
Are more modern information-theoretic and dynamical models not used for quantum mechanics? They're both relatively recent and extremely innovative mathematical models. Granted, I'm not mathematically fluent enough to know if they represent a deviation from variational calculus!
- PartiallyTyped 5y ago
  There is constructor theory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYc97J2MZIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYc97J2MZIo
- ravi-delia 5y ago
  They are, and you see them used sometimes (my friend is actually using something like that in her thesis), but for the Grand Theory type stuff it seems like this blog is talking about they aren't as useful. They reduce to the same math as before, and on a fundamental enough level the shortcuts they let you take just aren't useful.
lacker 5y ago
It will take a modern day Copernicus We might already have a modern day Copernicus. Could be string theory, could be something else. The problem is that we don't really have any experimental data that can't be explained by the Standard Model. What we really need is a modern day Galileo that can perform some sort of observations, like finding Jupiter's moons, that don't fit in with the existing conventional physics.
- ricksunny 5y ago
  Could the would-be modern-day Copernicii be being stymied by modern-day academic funding structures and grant review committees?
  - Qem 5y ago
    I also have this impression. I think the current system lacks intellectual diversity. Lots of people pursuing the same few popular lines of inquiry, because if they get away from the herd, they have a hard time joining a big research group, getting funds and getting more people to read and cite their papers.
    - samus 5y ago
      That problem is kind of inherent in the domain. In the past, significant research could be done with the meager stipends from generous nobles. Cutting-edge physics labs and supercomputers for astrophysical simulations are significantly more expensive.
- bricemo 5y ago
  27% of the universe is totally unknown (dark matter) and another 68% is totally unknown (dark energy), leaving only 5% of our universe that is explained by the standard model. Feels very epicycle-ish and ripe for a major shift.
  - Iwan-Zotow 5y ago
    they are both called dark for a reason not very observable
cogman10 5y ago
That makes the assumption that there exists a simpler view of physics that will result in more productivity. IMO, some of the smartest people that have ever lived, live right now. Mainly because we have more humans alive than ever before. The amount of brain power working to find these simpler models is breath taking, yet we aren't seeing the elegant simple solutions fall out like we once did. I don't think that's a problem with the ingenuity, I think that's a problem with the problem.
- dav_Oz 5y ago
  If the brain power is focused in the "wrong" direction or all the smart people are constantly looking under the same set of "street lamps" it doesn't matter how many there are. Unconventional thinking is hard you can't force it solely with numbers arguably quite to the contrary: a large agglomeration of scientists can systematically enforce a proportionally larger conformity pressure. It is a hard balance to strike because on the one hand you want to be constantly challenged by your fellow scientists but on the other hand also just take the foolish liberty to fully develop your (most likely flawed) intuition. So even if I'm highly sceptical of Wolfram he gets my full respect and also Hugh Everett [0] who wrote a letter to Einstein as a 12-year old with Einstein answering: Dear Hugh: There is no such thing like an irresistible force and immovable body. But there seems to be a very stubborn boy who has forced his way victoriously through strange difficulties created by himself for this purpose. Sincerely yours, A. Einstein And later in life courageously confronted Nils Bohr with the [...] idea that the universe is describable, in theory, by an objectively existing universal wave function (which does not "collapse") i.e. Many-Worlds-Interpretation. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Everett_III https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Everett_III
  - ravi-delia 5y ago
    I think it's easy to underestimate the extent to which the greatest minds have also turned to every weird permutation you could think of. Personally I figure we'll probably find some deeper theory just since the Standard Model still has its issues and gravity isn't rolled in yet, but there's every reason to think that this problem is hard, not just untried. Much of the most interesting work in the last century has been ruling things out. There are lots of nifty ideas that are explored until insurmountable holes are found in them. The two main nonstandard lines of thought that have had any real progress are decoherence, which I'd call a success, and string theory, which I'll avoid rating because I have string-theorist friends but am not a liar. There are plenty of others, and maybe one will bear fruit, but honestly when the next big break comes it'll probably be really obvious.
nwallin 5y ago
Copernicus' model had the planets orbiting the same in circles at uniform speed. This does not match reality, so Copernicus just chucked in some epicycles to correct the error. Copernicus's model had all the complexity of epicycles, but he hard coded the first epicycle into the system by having the planets orbit the Sun instead of the Earth. We wouldn't need a Copernicus to solve this problem, we would need a Copernicus, then a Kepler, (ellipses & non-uniform speed) then a Newton, (gravity causes ellipses and non-uniform speed) and then an Einstein. (gravity is warping of space-time) If quantum field theory is as wrong as Ptolemy's geocentric model was, we're hopeless. Because QFT very well predicts the observations; our observations have no ellipses in them that invalidate circular orbits, our observations have no anomalous Mercury precession that invalidates Newtonian gravity, no speed of light being consistent in all directions to invalidate luminiferous aether. To say that we simply need a smarter theoretical physicist is simply wrong -- our current theories do not contradict the things we are able to observe. We know that general relativity and quantum mechanics do not play nice at small scales and high local gravity. But we cannot observe this conflict. And that's nothing to go on. We would need an observation which shows that general relativity or QFT is wrong about something before we could conceivably make foundational progress on making new or different theories. And every few months there's a new article about "Einstein is proven right again" or "LHC experiment shows all readings are nominal".
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  So what is dark matter? This thing that keeps galaxies bound that we cannot see but can only observe the effects… I think the hunt for it will push us into new territory. That being said, as you say there has been nothing yet found that violates GR/QFT.
  - nwallin 5y ago
    The leading candidate for dark matter is that it's a soup of particles that interact gravitationally, but not via the electromagnic or strong nuclear force. If we're very, very lucky, it might interact via the weak nuclear force, which means there exists a slim theoretically possibility that we might be able to observe it interacting via the weak nuclear force. That being said, even if it does interact via the weak nuclear force, there's nothing to say it doesn't interact in a way which gives us the power to differentiate it from, say, neutrinos. And if it doesn't interact via the weak nuclear force, then we cannot every make any characterizations of it ever, not even with arbitrarily advanced technology. If that's true we're hosed. There would be no insights, no way to theory ourselves out of it. Only nerds wailing futilely about dark matter on the internet. And sadness. And we wouldn't know it's because all our theories are correct, but we don't have the complete picture of the extra-Standard Model dark matter particles, or if it's because some variation of MOND is true, (although it's extremely unlikely to be a MOND variation) or if we're as wrong as epicycles vs curved fabric of spacetime.

floxy 5y ago

Hmm, a new kind of science.

aeternum 5y ago
Wolfram has a proposal, by that very name. Hasn't yet made useful predictions though.
vba616 5y ago
Due to the mixed reviews, I haven't bothered to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science even though I assume that the target audience is more or less people who were fascinated with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos:_Making_a_New_Science
- OneLeggedCat 5y ago
  I read this humongous damn thing around 2004. It's not worth it.

beaconstudios 5y ago

Are more modern information-theoretic and dynamical models not used for quantum mechanics? They're both relatively recent and extremely innovative mathematical models. Granted, I'm not mathematically fluent enough to know if they represent a deviation from variational calculus!

PartiallyTyped 5y ago
There is constructor theory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYc97J2MZIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYc97J2MZIo
ravi-delia 5y ago
They are, and you see them used sometimes (my friend is actually using something like that in her thesis), but for the Grand Theory type stuff it seems like this blog is talking about they aren't as useful. They reduce to the same math as before, and on a fundamental enough level the shortcuts they let you take just aren't useful.

lacker 5y ago

It will take a modern day Copernicus We might already have a modern day Copernicus. Could be string theory, could be something else. The problem is that we don't really have any experimental data that can't be explained by the Standard Model. What we really need is a modern day Galileo that can perform some sort of observations, like finding Jupiter's moons, that don't fit in with the existing conventional physics.

ricksunny 5y ago
Could the would-be modern-day Copernicii be being stymied by modern-day academic funding structures and grant review committees?
- Qem 5y ago
  I also have this impression. I think the current system lacks intellectual diversity. Lots of people pursuing the same few popular lines of inquiry, because if they get away from the herd, they have a hard time joining a big research group, getting funds and getting more people to read and cite their papers.
  - samus 5y ago
    That problem is kind of inherent in the domain. In the past, significant research could be done with the meager stipends from generous nobles. Cutting-edge physics labs and supercomputers for astrophysical simulations are significantly more expensive.
bricemo 5y ago
27% of the universe is totally unknown (dark matter) and another 68% is totally unknown (dark energy), leaving only 5% of our universe that is explained by the standard model. Feels very epicycle-ish and ripe for a major shift.
- Iwan-Zotow 5y ago
  they are both called dark for a reason not very observable

cogman10 5y ago

That makes the assumption that there exists a simpler view of physics that will result in more productivity. IMO, some of the smartest people that have ever lived, live right now. Mainly because we have more humans alive than ever before. The amount of brain power working to find these simpler models is breath taking, yet we aren't seeing the elegant simple solutions fall out like we once did. I don't think that's a problem with the ingenuity, I think that's a problem with the problem.

dav_Oz 5y ago
If the brain power is focused in the "wrong" direction or all the smart people are constantly looking under the same set of "street lamps" it doesn't matter how many there are. Unconventional thinking is hard you can't force it solely with numbers arguably quite to the contrary: a large agglomeration of scientists can systematically enforce a proportionally larger conformity pressure. It is a hard balance to strike because on the one hand you want to be constantly challenged by your fellow scientists but on the other hand also just take the foolish liberty to fully develop your (most likely flawed) intuition. So even if I'm highly sceptical of Wolfram he gets my full respect and also Hugh Everett [0] who wrote a letter to Einstein as a 12-year old with Einstein answering: Dear Hugh: There is no such thing like an irresistible force and immovable body. But there seems to be a very stubborn boy who has forced his way victoriously through strange difficulties created by himself for this purpose. Sincerely yours, A. Einstein And later in life courageously confronted Nils Bohr with the [...] idea that the universe is describable, in theory, by an objectively existing universal wave function (which does not "collapse") i.e. Many-Worlds-Interpretation. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Everett_III https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Everett_III
- ravi-delia 5y ago
  I think it's easy to underestimate the extent to which the greatest minds have also turned to every weird permutation you could think of. Personally I figure we'll probably find some deeper theory just since the Standard Model still has its issues and gravity isn't rolled in yet, but there's every reason to think that this problem is hard, not just untried. Much of the most interesting work in the last century has been ruling things out. There are lots of nifty ideas that are explored until insurmountable holes are found in them. The two main nonstandard lines of thought that have had any real progress are decoherence, which I'd call a success, and string theory, which I'll avoid rating because I have string-theorist friends but am not a liar. There are plenty of others, and maybe one will bear fruit, but honestly when the next big break comes it'll probably be really obvious.

nwallin 5y ago

Copernicus' model had the planets orbiting the same in circles at uniform speed. This does not match reality, so Copernicus just chucked in some epicycles to correct the error. Copernicus's model had all the complexity of epicycles, but he hard coded the first epicycle into the system by having the planets orbit the Sun instead of the Earth. We wouldn't need a Copernicus to solve this problem, we would need a Copernicus, then a Kepler, (ellipses & non-uniform speed) then a Newton, (gravity causes ellipses and non-uniform speed) and then an Einstein. (gravity is warping of space-time) If quantum field theory is as wrong as Ptolemy's geocentric model was, we're hopeless. Because QFT very well predicts the observations; our observations have no ellipses in them that invalidate circular orbits, our observations have no anomalous Mercury precession that invalidates Newtonian gravity, no speed of light being consistent in all directions to invalidate luminiferous aether. To say that we simply need a smarter theoretical physicist is simply wrong -- our current theories do not contradict the things we are able to observe. We know that general relativity and quantum mechanics do not play nice at small scales and high local gravity. But we cannot observe this conflict. And that's nothing to go on. We would need an observation which shows that general relativity or QFT is wrong about something before we could conceivably make foundational progress on making new or different theories. And every few months there's a new article about "Einstein is proven right again" or "LHC experiment shows all readings are nominal".

spookthesunset 5y ago
So what is dark matter? This thing that keeps galaxies bound that we cannot see but can only observe the effects… I think the hunt for it will push us into new territory. That being said, as you say there has been nothing yet found that violates GR/QFT.
- nwallin 5y ago
  The leading candidate for dark matter is that it's a soup of particles that interact gravitationally, but not via the electromagnic or strong nuclear force. If we're very, very lucky, it might interact via the weak nuclear force, which means there exists a slim theoretically possibility that we might be able to observe it interacting via the weak nuclear force. That being said, even if it does interact via the weak nuclear force, there's nothing to say it doesn't interact in a way which gives us the power to differentiate it from, say, neutrinos. And if it doesn't interact via the weak nuclear force, then we cannot every make any characterizations of it ever, not even with arbitrarily advanced technology. If that's true we're hosed. There would be no insights, no way to theory ourselves out of it. Only nerds wailing futilely about dark matter on the internet. And sadness. And we wouldn't know it's because all our theories are correct, but we don't have the complete picture of the extra-Standard Model dark matter particles, or if it's because some variation of MOND is true, (although it's extremely unlikely to be a MOND variation) or if we're as wrong as epicycles vs curved fabric of spacetime.