4 ms·

The Standard Model

54 points by gus_leonel 3y ago

jiggawatts 3y ago
I noticed a pattern in the pedagogy of certain difficult fields: often, the entire world gets "stuck" on a single teaching approach, a single method, or a single point of view. This happens when the subject is difficult enough by itself that reframing it is decidedly non-trivial, so people don't bother. They slog through the one path available, get to a point of understanding, and then they're so exhausted and relieved that they got there at all that they cling to their mountaintop of success for dear life and refuse to contemplate re-taking that journey by some different path. My pet peeve is asymmetric numeral systems (ANS), which used the exact same too-busy diagram in literally every explanation of it I've ever seen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_numeral_systems#Basic_concepts_of_ANS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_numeral_systems#Bas... I've seen diagrams like this before, made by two of my fellow students who's brains were... rather odd, let's just say. I can't grok diagrams like this. They're too busy. Animations would help, or labels, or even just a legend explaining the random and meaningless colour choices. But there aren't any other diagrams. There's this one, and only this one. It was the one in the original paper, and was copied into every blog, every other paper, and Wikipedia as well. The Standard Model is the same kind of thing. Its maths is atrocious: a horrific blend of Einstein summation convention, matrices chosen out of thin air, and complex numbers sprinkled on top just for fun. Then it gets worse. There's a reason for this: history. The linked article walks through the steps we took over the last century building up to the Standard Model. The problem is that those steps were the pinnacle of human thought. The greatest minds climbed to each of those peaks through decades of effort. Nobody can just wave their hand and reframe the maths, or explain it a different way -- rotating the topology to show a difference face to new students. It's just too hard. It's Everest, not the local forest path. If you keep at it long enough, you'll see some partial attempts. I've seen most (but maybe not all?) of the associated maths rephrased into the language of Geometric Algebra. Most of the complexity just evaporates. The magical matrices disappear, and the reason for their historical usage becomes clear. The complex numbers disappear. The summation convention vanishes. Etc... But nobody flies the helicopter to the top of Mount Everest, even though we can do that now. The point is to climb up there. So we suit up students every year, and make them go through each base camp, suffering through altitude sickness and frostbite on the way up.
- maxbond 3y ago
  This was interesting, thanks for sharing. > They slog through the one path available, get to a point of understanding, and then they're so exhausted and relieved that they got there at all that they cling to their mountaintop of success for dear life and refuse to contemplate re-taking that journey by some different path. Alternative hypothesis: We've selected a group overrepresenting people for whom that particular approach was effective, and that's precisely the group of people least equipped to come up with a different framing. (These aren't really in contradiction though, both could be true.)
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    Personally, I doubt that. We throw essentially a random set of people at various university courses. I studied Physics and Computer Science, but I very nearly pricked Chemistry and was tempted by some form of Engineering as well. My fell students were all above some watermark required for entry, but were very "neurodiverse" in an abstract sense of the word.
- jarekd 3y ago
  Hi, I am the author of ANS and of these diagrams you don't like - made more than a decade ago. Sure, animations are nicer, but you cannot put them into articles ... and indeed somebody else could make them through this decade. Regarding the Standard Model, its development is mostly new experimental surprises and fitting new corrections to the Lagrangian - currently more than a hundred. It would be great to see them as kind of Taylor expansion of some simpler more fundamental model, not guessing but deriving new terms. Where to search for such more fundamental model? Maybe in topological defects like recently growing in popularity skyrmion models. For charge quantization: by interpreting curvature of some deeper field as EM field, Gauss law counts topological charge - which has to be quantized. I am developing this kind of approach since 2009, and seems quite promising, e.g. naturally unifying EM+QM+GEM gravity vacuum dynamics, has 3 leptons, baryons e.g. with proton lighter than neutron ... Slides with links: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9dl2g9lypzqu5hp/liquid%20crystal%20particles.pdf https://www.dropbox.com/s/9dl2g9lypzqu5hp/liquid%20crystal%2... Invited Wolfram introductory article "Framework for Liquid Crystal Based Particle Models": https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/2856493 https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/2856493
auggierose 3y ago
Interesting magazine! Here is another article from it, by Graham Priest, involving another kind of "Standard Model" (a logical notion, not related to the physical one): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36832916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36832916
cperciva 3y ago
No process has yet been observed that violates the conservation of baryon number, but the search continues. There is strong evidence that the big bang is such a process, but perhaps the author doesn't consider it to have been observed.
- msla 3y ago
  It's also not replicable. (A Universe may violate baryon number conservation once, as a treat.)
  - jarekd 3y ago
    Indeed baryogenesis is one example of baryon number violation, another is Hawking radiation - baryons forming stars and finally ending as massless radiation. In both these examples conditions are completely extreme - what might be the missing factor for human attempts to directly observe it: in room temperature water. I would rather expect it e.g. in the centers of some neutron stars - especially those thousands times brighter than possible with standard explanations, like: https://www.space.com/bizare-object-10-times-brighter-than-sun https://www.space.com/bizare-object-10-times-brighter-than-s... While electric charge is ultimately conserved due to Gauss law, there is no Gauss law for baryon number.
swyx 3y ago
this started off well enough but quickly descended into unintelligible jargon. i fear that quantum physics will never be accessible to the common person, and that all this was mapped out only 50-100 years ago. i want to skip the next 1000 years of theory hardening and see what happens.
- xeonmc 3y ago
  "If you can't explain it simply, you simply don't understand it."
  - mr_mitm 3y ago
    That statement is often quoted and usually attributed to Einstein. He never said it, though. I also think it's wrong. Feynman said something similar, yet different: "I couldn't break it down to freshmen level, which means we haven't really understood it yet."
    - codethief 3y ago
      I have never heard this quote being attributed to Einstein. DuckDuckGo can't find the quote in the first place; Google does yield a few results and yes, one or two websites indeed attribute the quote to Einstein, but others attribute it to other people. In any case, are you sure you're not thinking of the much more famous quote > Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler which is also wrongly(?, [0]) attributed to Einstein? [0]: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/34599/did-albert-einstein-say-make-everything-as-simple-as-possible-but-not-simpler https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/34599/did-alber...
      - mr_mitm 3y ago
        It's clearly often and falsely attributed to Einstein: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8742/did-einstein-say-if-you-cant-explain-it-simply-you-dont-understand-it-well-en https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8742/did-einste... https://www.google.com/search?q=%22If+you+can't+explain+it+simply%252C+you+don't+understand+it+well+enough.%22++Albert+Einstein https://www.google.com/search?q=%22If+you+can't+explain+it+s... (60k results)

54 points by gus_leonel 3y ago

I noticed a pattern in the pedagogy of certain difficult fields: often, the entire world gets "stuck" on a single teaching approach, a single method, or a single point of view. This happens when the subject is difficult enough by itself that reframing it is decidedly non-trivial, so people don't bother. They slog through the one path available, get to a point of understanding, and then they're so exhausted and relieved that they got there at all that they cling to their mountaintop of success for dear life and refuse to contemplate re-taking that journey by some different path. My pet peeve is asymmetric numeral systems (ANS), which used the exact same too-busy diagram in literally every explanation of it I've ever seen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_numeral_systems#Basic_concepts_of_ANS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_numeral_systems#Bas... I've seen diagrams like this before, made by two of my fellow students who's brains were... rather odd, let's just say. I can't grok diagrams like this. They're too busy. Animations would help, or labels, or even just a legend explaining the random and meaningless colour choices. But there aren't any other diagrams. There's this one, and only this one. It was the one in the original paper, and was copied into every blog, every other paper, and Wikipedia as well. The Standard Model is the same kind of thing. Its maths is atrocious: a horrific blend of Einstein summation convention, matrices chosen out of thin air, and complex numbers sprinkled on top just for fun. Then it gets worse. There's a reason for this: history. The linked article walks through the steps we took over the last century building up to the Standard Model. The problem is that those steps were the pinnacle of human thought. The greatest minds climbed to each of those peaks through decades of effort. Nobody can just wave their hand and reframe the maths, or explain it a different way -- rotating the topology to show a difference face to new students. It's just too hard. It's Everest, not the local forest path. If you keep at it long enough, you'll see some partial attempts. I've seen most (but maybe not all?) of the associated maths rephrased into the language of Geometric Algebra. Most of the complexity just evaporates. The magical matrices disappear, and the reason for their historical usage becomes clear. The complex numbers disappear. The summation convention vanishes. Etc... But nobody flies the helicopter to the top of Mount Everest, even though we can do that now. The point is to climb up there. So we suit up students every year, and make them go through each base camp, suffering through altitude sickness and frostbite on the way up.

maxbond 3y ago
This was interesting, thanks for sharing. > They slog through the one path available, get to a point of understanding, and then they're so exhausted and relieved that they got there at all that they cling to their mountaintop of success for dear life and refuse to contemplate re-taking that journey by some different path. Alternative hypothesis: We've selected a group overrepresenting people for whom that particular approach was effective, and that's precisely the group of people least equipped to come up with a different framing. (These aren't really in contradiction though, both could be true.)
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Personally, I doubt that. We throw essentially a random set of people at various university courses. I studied Physics and Computer Science, but I very nearly pricked Chemistry and was tempted by some form of Engineering as well. My fell students were all above some watermark required for entry, but were very "neurodiverse" in an abstract sense of the word.
jarekd 3y ago
Hi, I am the author of ANS and of these diagrams you don't like - made more than a decade ago. Sure, animations are nicer, but you cannot put them into articles ... and indeed somebody else could make them through this decade. Regarding the Standard Model, its development is mostly new experimental surprises and fitting new corrections to the Lagrangian - currently more than a hundred. It would be great to see them as kind of Taylor expansion of some simpler more fundamental model, not guessing but deriving new terms. Where to search for such more fundamental model? Maybe in topological defects like recently growing in popularity skyrmion models. For charge quantization: by interpreting curvature of some deeper field as EM field, Gauss law counts topological charge - which has to be quantized. I am developing this kind of approach since 2009, and seems quite promising, e.g. naturally unifying EM+QM+GEM gravity vacuum dynamics, has 3 leptons, baryons e.g. with proton lighter than neutron ... Slides with links: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9dl2g9lypzqu5hp/liquid%20crystal%20particles.pdf https://www.dropbox.com/s/9dl2g9lypzqu5hp/liquid%20crystal%2... Invited Wolfram introductory article "Framework for Liquid Crystal Based Particle Models": https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/2856493 https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/2856493

auggierose 3y ago

Interesting magazine! Here is another article from it, by Graham Priest, involving another kind of "Standard Model" (a logical notion, not related to the physical one): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36832916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36832916

cperciva 3y ago

No process has yet been observed that violates the conservation of baryon number, but the search continues. There is strong evidence that the big bang is such a process, but perhaps the author doesn't consider it to have been observed.

msla 3y ago
It's also not replicable. (A Universe may violate baryon number conservation once, as a treat.)
- jarekd 3y ago
  Indeed baryogenesis is one example of baryon number violation, another is Hawking radiation - baryons forming stars and finally ending as massless radiation. In both these examples conditions are completely extreme - what might be the missing factor for human attempts to directly observe it: in room temperature water. I would rather expect it e.g. in the centers of some neutron stars - especially those thousands times brighter than possible with standard explanations, like: https://www.space.com/bizare-object-10-times-brighter-than-sun https://www.space.com/bizare-object-10-times-brighter-than-s... While electric charge is ultimately conserved due to Gauss law, there is no Gauss law for baryon number.

swyx 3y ago

this started off well enough but quickly descended into unintelligible jargon. i fear that quantum physics will never be accessible to the common person, and that all this was mapped out only 50-100 years ago. i want to skip the next 1000 years of theory hardening and see what happens.

xeonmc 3y ago
"If you can't explain it simply, you simply don't understand it."
- mr_mitm 3y ago
  That statement is often quoted and usually attributed to Einstein. He never said it, though. I also think it's wrong. Feynman said something similar, yet different: "I couldn't break it down to freshmen level, which means we haven't really understood it yet."
  - codethief 3y ago
    I have never heard this quote being attributed to Einstein. DuckDuckGo can't find the quote in the first place; Google does yield a few results and yes, one or two websites indeed attribute the quote to Einstein, but others attribute it to other people. In any case, are you sure you're not thinking of the much more famous quote > Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler which is also wrongly(?, [0]) attributed to Einstein? [0]: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/34599/did-albert-einstein-say-make-everything-as-simple-as-possible-but-not-simpler https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/34599/did-alber...
    - mr_mitm 3y ago
      It's clearly often and falsely attributed to Einstein: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8742/did-einstein-say-if-you-cant-explain-it-simply-you-dont-understand-it-well-en https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8742/did-einste... https://www.google.com/search?q=%22If+you+can't+explain+it+simply%252C+you+don't+understand+it+well+enough.%22++Albert+Einstein https://www.google.com/search?q=%22If+you+can't+explain+it+s... (60k results)