4 ms·

What awful AI-generated illustrations. Anyway, is there any justification for treating spacetime as a smooth manifold, except for mathematical tractability?

• staunton 3y ago
  Yes. GR does it and GR gives good descriptions for a lot of observed phenomena.
  • hoseja 3y ago
    Except, you know, all the elementary particles. I have this intrusive thought those are just bits of non-smoothly kinked/knotted spacetime but have neither the physics background or sense where to even start to look further into that.
    • fsckboy 3y ago
      >> Yes. GR does it and GR gives good descriptions for a lot of observed phenomena. >Except, you know, all the elementary particles. except, you know, all the elementary particles don't do a good job of explaining what GR explains
      • TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
        Hardly an expert, but it seems more likely to me that GR is the smoothed-out limit of a lot of much smaller stuff happening, than QM is somehow low-level wrinkles in an otherwise perfectly smooth spacetime. I don't think a smooth anything is physically tractable. You need infinite resolution for perfect smoothness - essentially an infinite amount of information at every point. Except there are no points. So somehow you have equations that define curvature floating in some kind of metaphysical space which somehow gets mapped to observable phenomena. And if it's a noisy smoothness - where does the noise come from?
    • showlife 3y ago
      Maybe what you're looking for is a "geon"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geon_(physics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geon_(physics)
      • hoseja 3y ago
        >held together in a confined region by the gravitational attraction of its own field energy Hm, not quite, they'd be held together topologically but the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometrodynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometrodynamics is interesting.
• vore 3y ago
  They're not AI generated, there's literally artist credits in the picture captions.
  • hoseja 3y ago
    Perhaps they're post-edited somewhat but there isn't a way you're convincing me those are fully handmade. Look at the nonsensically warped tiles. Look at the rods suspending some of the globes but not others in a random fashion, look at the illegible "writing".
    • jug 3y ago
      Yeah and the style has the default DALLE-3 style written all over them. Isaac Young may be credited but I think Isaac is using DALLE-3 and I hope they are aware they have hired a "prompt wizard". :)
      • fl7305 3y ago
        I think they even put the prompt as the image caption?
    • spuz 3y ago
      I think you're right. I don't really have a problem with AI generated art being used in articles like this. After all, what kind of alternative visual can you put alongside an article about fundamental theories of nature? If AI art helps to reduce the cost of scientific journalism (without decreasing the quality) then I'm ok with it. Having said that, to produce art that actually works is clearly not easy. If you've ever used Midjourney or DALL-E, you'll know it's a challenge to get the tool to output exactly what you have in mind. It's also clearly hard to produce images that physically realistic. If mismatched tiles and unrealistic perspectives are noticeable then they'll be a distraction and detract from the reader's experience.
      • hoseja 3y ago
        But these add nothing to the article but confusion. That's not how doing interference works. That's not any sort of weighting device. Could have been a generic galaxy-brain stock art and I'd be less annoyed.
• ben_w 3y ago
  I'm more annoyed with the captions. > … Carbon-60, one of the largest known molecules.
  • hoseja 3y ago
    Eh, C₆₀, one of the largest molecules with observed quantum interference, close enough.
• denton-scratch 3y ago
  The illustrations looked like some sort of steampunk drawings from a fantasy book.