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But some of the fancy math in this area is turning out to be helpful for QFT calculations, and it's becoming clear that we need more powerful math to even formu
by civilized 4y ago
But some of the fancy math in this area is turning out to be helpful for QFT calculations, and it's becoming clear that we need more powerful math to even formulate proper quantum field theories. Check this article out for a briefing:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-mystery-at-the-heart-of-physics-that-only-math-can-solve-20210610/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-mystery-at-the-heart-of-p...
- hermitcrab 4y agoNot sure that is much of a return on investment for the millions (?) of person-years of research that was spent on string theory.
- civilized 4y agoCompared to what? Civilization spends on a lot of speculative stuff. Venture capital is the art of investing in failures 999 times out of 1000. And personally I'd rather have tens of billions spent on speculative theory research than on, say, Meta's VR boondoggle.
- hermitcrab 4y ago>I'd rather have tens of billions spent on speculative theory research than on, say, Meta's VR boondoggle. We can certainly agree on that!
- alexvoda 4y agoI believe the lesson here is not that we shouldn't invest in speculative theory research. It's that we need more breadth, we need to not get stuck researching only one option.
- FridgeSeal 4y agoI for one would much rather seen millions of person-years spent on plumbing the depths of various bits of theory, than have that same energy directed towards making ads/social-media/consumerism better. Not exactly the same “circles”, but the point still stands.