3 ms·

The Century-Long Pause in Fundamental Physics

27 points by danieltanfh95 6mo ago

aberzun 6mo ago
I'm new to HN and was initially excited about the various intellectual and technological posts ... but isn't this literally just written by AI? I've read like 5 posts in a row and it's starting to dawn on me that all this might be written by AI. Why tf would you even bother posting slop like that?
- tux3 6mo ago
  It's been really bad the last few months. You'd think people would want to share human blogs written by people. But half of the links are just different themes on different blogs all ghostwritten by Claude.
  - CuriouslyC 6mo ago
    The problem is that we have a bunch of people trying to keep themselves relevant amid a great reshuffle, and there's so much noise that lovingly hand-crafted content gets ignored, so your only rational option if you don't already have an established audience is to slopspam.
- davisr 6mo ago
  Are you AI? You joined HN 5 years ago, dawg.
  - Pay08 6mo ago
    Account creation time may not line up with when someone actually started using the platform.
- surgical_fire 6mo ago
  > but isn't this literally just written by AI? Evidently. > Why tf would you even bother posting slop like that? Maybe low-effort internet point farming? Maybe an attempt to rake in some ad money in the odd chance the post goes viral? > I'm new to HN and was initially excited about the various intellectual and technological posts Ehh... It's marginally above Reddit, but that is a very low bar to overcome. It's decent toilet time.
ogogmad 6mo ago
[flagged]
- ogogmad 6mo ago
  I'm not sure why I got 2 downvotes for this.
  - cwillu 6mo ago
    Copy/pasting shit from an llm is an automatic downvote from me.
    - ogogmad 6mo ago
      Originally, I did not have any content from an LLM. I still got 2 downvotes. I was saying "BRB, checking the book PDF using ChatGPT Pro ($200 per month)". It's also more informative because Pro costs $200 per month. Plus costs $20. An earlier version of GPT Pro solved a well-studied 60-year old conjecture on primitive sets, without human guidance. Short of peer review, which takes a long time, I reckon this is the best way to get an assessment of the author's book, especially compared to HN commenters' vibes.
      - cwillu 6mo ago
        No, I'm saying I downvoted you after I saw the chatgpt content. Have you considered that maybe you got _more_ downvotes after your edit? Edit: nice of you to edit out the vitriol…
sudb 6mo ago
At least not all the author's blog posts seem to be AI-written: https://danieltan.weblog.lol/2023/01/why-most-image-gen-startups-will-die-off https://danieltan.weblog.lol/2023/01/why-most-image-gen-star...
yk 6mo ago
> Senior figures (Smolin, Woit, Hossenfelder, Penrose) Well one of the three is not like the other, three are very accomplished physicists, one is a youtuber who lies about the game to get clicks. (And we know she lies because she used to play the game quite competently.) And sure enough they start talking about interpretations of QM.
CuriouslyC 6mo ago
Physics is so deep in epicycles now, and without observations to force people to sacrifice their numerically accurate dumpster fire on the altar of parsimony, we may never progress.
hypersoar 6mo ago
The author (who is also the submitter; it seems nearly all his submissions are his own blog posts) is not a physicist, so it's hard for me to take seriously his sweeping dismissal of the field. Then I see he links to his own Revolutionary Theory, and it starts to look like outright crankary.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- jpmattia 6mo ago
  > Then I see he links to his own Revolutionary Theory, and it starts to look like outright crankary. But what an AI-generated crankery! Because I enjoy wasting my time, I chose a random point (beginning of ch2) and started reading: > Standard field-theoretic practice selects equations using symmetry, gauge invariance, and conservation. This chapter proposes a cognate selection principle built from three structural demands. A potential that carries energy must appear on the right-hand side of its own equation, because the energy it carries is part of what sources it. A potential that describes the same physics in every frame must have an equation that survives change of observer. A tensor equation must have matching ranks on both sides. I've italicized a couple of items: Cognate selection principle? Really? A tensor equation must have matching ranks on both sides? As opposed to all those tensor equations with differing ranks on both sides? Not exactly the type of thing that makes someone slap their head and shout "Why didn't I think of that?!" The technobabble is interesting in that any single sentence might make sense in the absence of sentences nearby; It that regard, it's much like an Escher painting: Locally sensible, but globally out-to-lunch.
  - danieltanfh95 6mo ago
    [dead]
photochemsyn 6mo ago
The main flaw in this write-up, AI or not, is it ignores the Bohr-Einstein debates on QM and Bell’s Inequality. I suspect the article deliberately ignores that debate. If it was AI-generated, I’d guess the prompt included something like ‘support Einstein’s hidden variables theory with an argument that includes ‘ontology’, ‘machine learning’, ‘Copenhagen’ but specifically excludes any mention of Bell’s inequality, EPR, and also do not mention hidden-variables specifically.’
- jaybrendansmith 6mo ago
  Can you briefly explain how the debates refute the basic argument? It's a somewhat interesting comparison he makes, even if AI was used to write that doesn't necessarily make the argument less interesting. I do agree that the end seems like motivated reasoning.
- danieltanfh95 6mo ago
  I want to make my stance clear. Bell's theorem rules out local hidden variables, not hidden variables. An ontology-first approach to QM (rare in modern physics) takes Bell as the constraint it has to operate inside (same as Bohm-de Broglie) rather than as a settled debate. The Bohr-Einstein debate wasn't adjudicated on substance. Copenhagen won sociologically, and the renewed traffic on it is the field acknowledging that "settled" was always a cultural claim. My analysis is on diagnosing the methodological inversion that produced the impasse, rather than picking sides inside it.
  - photochemsyn 6mo ago
    After a bit of research, here’s a statement that probably reflects your position without ignoring Bell: (1) “Since the consolidation of quantum field theory and the Standard Model, fundamental physics has mostly confirmed and refined an inherited ontology rather than replacing it. Many Beyond-Standard-Model programs have become too flexible, mathematically rich but empirically underconstrained.” (2) “The missing task is not a naive return to pre-Copenhagen realism, because EPR, Bell, Kochen–Specker, and modern contextuality results rule out large parts of the classical ontology Einstein hoped to preserve. The real task is to construct a post-Bell ontology: one that explains quantum phenomena, measurement, entanglement, and spacetime without hiding behind operational formalism or unconstrained mathematical elegance.” This I’d argue says that the tests of the Bell inequality violations are the most important experiments especially Aspect/Dalibard/Roger (1982) and Hensen et al. (2015) and something in 2023 (need to read that one). This implies ontological progress is held up by experimental insufficiencies, and this may not be resolvable without unforeseen technological developments that sit in sci-fi space at present. P.S. A nice explanatory comparison is Bell and Turing (instead of the ML example), as their structural flavor (no-go-theorem vs contradiction) is similar: Turing: no machine can decide the halting behavior of all machines on all inputs. Bell: no theory satisfying the Bell-local assumptions can reproduce all quantum correlations observed in Bell-type experiments. (The difference being that Turing’s theorem is a pure mathematical impossibility result over a precisely defined class of machines, while Bell’s theorem is a mathematical constraint on a physically motivated class of theories, with experiments as source-of-truth instead of mathematical proof. But this supports your position since Turing rules out total computable halting deciders, while Bell only rules out Bell-local hidden-variable theories satisfying measurement independence and ordinary probability constraints.)

27 points by danieltanfh95 6mo ago

I'm new to HN and was initially excited about the various intellectual and technological posts ... but isn't this literally just written by AI? I've read like 5 posts in a row and it's starting to dawn on me that all this might be written by AI. Why tf would you even bother posting slop like that?

tux3 6mo ago
It's been really bad the last few months. You'd think people would want to share human blogs written by people. But half of the links are just different themes on different blogs all ghostwritten by Claude.
- CuriouslyC 6mo ago
  The problem is that we have a bunch of people trying to keep themselves relevant amid a great reshuffle, and there's so much noise that lovingly hand-crafted content gets ignored, so your only rational option if you don't already have an established audience is to slopspam.
davisr 6mo ago
Are you AI? You joined HN 5 years ago, dawg.
- Pay08 6mo ago
  Account creation time may not line up with when someone actually started using the platform.
surgical_fire 6mo ago
> but isn't this literally just written by AI? Evidently. > Why tf would you even bother posting slop like that? Maybe low-effort internet point farming? Maybe an attempt to rake in some ad money in the odd chance the post goes viral? > I'm new to HN and was initially excited about the various intellectual and technological posts Ehh... It's marginally above Reddit, but that is a very low bar to overcome. It's decent toilet time.

ogogmad 6mo ago

[flagged]

ogogmad 6mo ago
I'm not sure why I got 2 downvotes for this.
- cwillu 6mo ago
  Copy/pasting shit from an llm is an automatic downvote from me.
  - ogogmad 6mo ago
    Originally, I did not have any content from an LLM. I still got 2 downvotes. I was saying "BRB, checking the book PDF using ChatGPT Pro ($200 per month)". It's also more informative because Pro costs $200 per month. Plus costs $20. An earlier version of GPT Pro solved a well-studied 60-year old conjecture on primitive sets, without human guidance. Short of peer review, which takes a long time, I reckon this is the best way to get an assessment of the author's book, especially compared to HN commenters' vibes.
    - cwillu 6mo ago
      No, I'm saying I downvoted you after I saw the chatgpt content. Have you considered that maybe you got _more_ downvotes after your edit? Edit: nice of you to edit out the vitriol…

sudb 6mo ago

At least not all the author's blog posts seem to be AI-written: https://danieltan.weblog.lol/2023/01/why-most-image-gen-startups-will-die-off https://danieltan.weblog.lol/2023/01/why-most-image-gen-star...

yk 6mo ago

> Senior figures (Smolin, Woit, Hossenfelder, Penrose) Well one of the three is not like the other, three are very accomplished physicists, one is a youtuber who lies about the game to get clicks. (And we know she lies because she used to play the game quite competently.) And sure enough they start talking about interpretations of QM.

CuriouslyC 6mo ago

Physics is so deep in epicycles now, and without observations to force people to sacrifice their numerically accurate dumpster fire on the altar of parsimony, we may never progress.

hypersoar 6mo ago

The author (who is also the submitter; it seems nearly all his submissions are his own blog posts) is not a physicist, so it's hard for me to take seriously his sweeping dismissal of the field. Then I see he links to his own Revolutionary Theory, and it starts to look like outright crankary.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
jpmattia 6mo ago
> Then I see he links to his own Revolutionary Theory, and it starts to look like outright crankary. But what an AI-generated crankery! Because I enjoy wasting my time, I chose a random point (beginning of ch2) and started reading: > Standard field-theoretic practice selects equations using symmetry, gauge invariance, and conservation. This chapter proposes a cognate selection principle built from three structural demands. A potential that carries energy must appear on the right-hand side of its own equation, because the energy it carries is part of what sources it. A potential that describes the same physics in every frame must have an equation that survives change of observer. A tensor equation must have matching ranks on both sides. I've italicized a couple of items: Cognate selection principle? Really? A tensor equation must have matching ranks on both sides? As opposed to all those tensor equations with differing ranks on both sides? Not exactly the type of thing that makes someone slap their head and shout "Why didn't I think of that?!" The technobabble is interesting in that any single sentence might make sense in the absence of sentences nearby; It that regard, it's much like an Escher painting: Locally sensible, but globally out-to-lunch.
- danieltanfh95 6mo ago
  [dead]

photochemsyn 6mo ago

The main flaw in this write-up, AI or not, is it ignores the Bohr-Einstein debates on QM and Bell’s Inequality. I suspect the article deliberately ignores that debate. If it was AI-generated, I’d guess the prompt included something like ‘support Einstein’s hidden variables theory with an argument that includes ‘ontology’, ‘machine learning’, ‘Copenhagen’ but specifically excludes any mention of Bell’s inequality, EPR, and also do not mention hidden-variables specifically.’

jaybrendansmith 6mo ago
Can you briefly explain how the debates refute the basic argument? It's a somewhat interesting comparison he makes, even if AI was used to write that doesn't necessarily make the argument less interesting. I do agree that the end seems like motivated reasoning.
danieltanfh95 6mo ago
I want to make my stance clear. Bell's theorem rules out local hidden variables, not hidden variables. An ontology-first approach to QM (rare in modern physics) takes Bell as the constraint it has to operate inside (same as Bohm-de Broglie) rather than as a settled debate. The Bohr-Einstein debate wasn't adjudicated on substance. Copenhagen won sociologically, and the renewed traffic on it is the field acknowledging that "settled" was always a cultural claim. My analysis is on diagnosing the methodological inversion that produced the impasse, rather than picking sides inside it.
- photochemsyn 6mo ago
  After a bit of research, here’s a statement that probably reflects your position without ignoring Bell: (1) “Since the consolidation of quantum field theory and the Standard Model, fundamental physics has mostly confirmed and refined an inherited ontology rather than replacing it. Many Beyond-Standard-Model programs have become too flexible, mathematically rich but empirically underconstrained.” (2) “The missing task is not a naive return to pre-Copenhagen realism, because EPR, Bell, Kochen–Specker, and modern contextuality results rule out large parts of the classical ontology Einstein hoped to preserve. The real task is to construct a post-Bell ontology: one that explains quantum phenomena, measurement, entanglement, and spacetime without hiding behind operational formalism or unconstrained mathematical elegance.” This I’d argue says that the tests of the Bell inequality violations are the most important experiments especially Aspect/Dalibard/Roger (1982) and Hensen et al. (2015) and something in 2023 (need to read that one). This implies ontological progress is held up by experimental insufficiencies, and this may not be resolvable without unforeseen technological developments that sit in sci-fi space at present. P.S. A nice explanatory comparison is Bell and Turing (instead of the ML example), as their structural flavor (no-go-theorem vs contradiction) is similar: Turing: no machine can decide the halting behavior of all machines on all inputs. Bell: no theory satisfying the Bell-local assumptions can reproduce all quantum correlations observed in Bell-type experiments. (The difference being that Turing’s theorem is a pure mathematical impossibility result over a precisely defined class of machines, while Bell’s theorem is a mathematical constraint on a physically motivated class of theories, with experiments as source-of-truth instead of mathematical proof. But this supports your position since Turing rules out total computable halting deciders, while Bell only rules out Bell-local hidden-variable theories satisfying measurement independence and ordinary probability constraints.)