6 ms·

Sadly, the joke's lost on me. Is he making fun of the other "hedron" and this Unitarihedron is a joke too? Which is too bad. I was having high hopes for the fut

by msie 13y ago

Sadly, the joke's lost on me. Is he making fun of the other "hedron" and this Unitarihedron is a joke too? Which is too bad. I was having high hopes for the future and I wasted time reading an inside joke.

krapp 13y ago
I was actually wondering whether the amplituhedron might possibly have some impact on quantum computing... but I'm not even smart enough with the math to know whether that's a stupid question. Now I don't even know if what I just read was satire.
derefr 13y ago
I think he's genuinely suggesting that if journalists are getting so excited about the amplituhedron, they should get even more excited about this, and probably can only do that if they have a fun word for it. No joke. (If it was a joke, the paper he linked to -- http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/pp.pdf http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/pp.pdf -- probably wouldn't be exactly what he described it as.)
- acadien 13y ago
  It is 100% a joke. He seems to be pointing out that you can get the press to over hype a scientific/mathematical advance by giving it a neat name, e.g. dark matter, anti matter, god particle, quantum-anything, electro-anything, super-anything, hyper-anything.
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    But wasn't the point of the other one that representing it as a multi-dimensional volume was novel? That had nothing to do with the name. What's the point of mocking the name?
    - acadien 13y ago
      He's not mocking the name or the finding, he's mocking the press coverage. This seems clear to me from the opening paragraph, maybe I'm missing something?
      - Dylan16807 13y ago
        I don't see how he's mocking the coverage and not the concept itself. Shrug.
- scythe 13y ago
  If you read some of the links in the first paragraph you'll get a feel for the intent of the article. Aaronson probably expects his audience to follow traditional physics sources. See for example: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6260 http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6260 Yesterday in QFT class the professor [0] explained the name by saying that the guy who came up with it was a "very good salesman". The reality is that probabilities can in a great deal of cases be expressed as the volume of something in some phase space, for a trivial example, consider the area under the curve between two x-values on the normal distribution's probability density function -- it's the 2-volume of a section of the Gaussiohedron. So after branding quantum information science as the study of the "unitarihedron", Aaronson dragged out one of his more miraculous results, which is that PP is closed under union and intersection as a direct result of PP = PostBQP, where PostBQP is a complexity class derived from BQP using an idea called postselection. That proof was actually in his dissertation (if I recall correctly), written in 2006, and it was an extremely impressive proof which did not use a word like "unitarihedron" to describe its methods. So, while it was a joke, if you read the article in the context of the physics community's reaction to the amplituhedron story, the included proof really just helps to drive the point home. The methods now called "amplituhedron" have been under continuous development for the past ten years or so. My QFT professor[0] seemed sort of enthusiastic about the development. They do seem to represent a step forward in our understanding of quantum field theory, though the reaction of the media has been, in the eyes of some commentators, characteristically buzzword-driven. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predrag_Cvitanovic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predrag_Cvitanovic
  - acqq 13y ago
    Also interesting: http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/05/earning-a-phd-by-studying-a-theory-that-we-know-is-wrong/ http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/05/earning-a-phd-by-stud...
  - carlob 13y ago
    Are you sure your professor authorised you to quote him on calling one of the most powerful persons in his field: 'a very good salesman' on a public forum of sorts?

by msie 13y ago

krapp 13y ago

I was actually wondering whether the amplituhedron might possibly have some impact on quantum computing... but I'm not even smart enough with the math to know whether that's a stupid question. Now I don't even know if what I just read was satire.

derefr 13y ago

I think he's genuinely suggesting that if journalists are getting so excited about the amplituhedron, they should get even more excited about this, and probably can only do that if they have a fun word for it. No joke. (If it was a joke, the paper he linked to -- http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/pp.pdf http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/pp.pdf -- probably wouldn't be exactly what he described it as.)

acadien 13y ago
It is 100% a joke. He seems to be pointing out that you can get the press to over hype a scientific/mathematical advance by giving it a neat name, e.g. dark matter, anti matter, god particle, quantum-anything, electro-anything, super-anything, hyper-anything.
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  But wasn't the point of the other one that representing it as a multi-dimensional volume was novel? That had nothing to do with the name. What's the point of mocking the name?
  - acadien 13y ago
    He's not mocking the name or the finding, he's mocking the press coverage. This seems clear to me from the opening paragraph, maybe I'm missing something?
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      I don't see how he's mocking the coverage and not the concept itself. Shrug.
scythe 13y ago
If you read some of the links in the first paragraph you'll get a feel for the intent of the article. Aaronson probably expects his audience to follow traditional physics sources. See for example: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6260 http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6260 Yesterday in QFT class the professor [0] explained the name by saying that the guy who came up with it was a "very good salesman". The reality is that probabilities can in a great deal of cases be expressed as the volume of something in some phase space, for a trivial example, consider the area under the curve between two x-values on the normal distribution's probability density function -- it's the 2-volume of a section of the Gaussiohedron. So after branding quantum information science as the study of the "unitarihedron", Aaronson dragged out one of his more miraculous results, which is that PP is closed under union and intersection as a direct result of PP = PostBQP, where PostBQP is a complexity class derived from BQP using an idea called postselection. That proof was actually in his dissertation (if I recall correctly), written in 2006, and it was an extremely impressive proof which did not use a word like "unitarihedron" to describe its methods. So, while it was a joke, if you read the article in the context of the physics community's reaction to the amplituhedron story, the included proof really just helps to drive the point home. The methods now called "amplituhedron" have been under continuous development for the past ten years or so. My QFT professor[0] seemed sort of enthusiastic about the development. They do seem to represent a step forward in our understanding of quantum field theory, though the reaction of the media has been, in the eyes of some commentators, characteristically buzzword-driven. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predrag_Cvitanovic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predrag_Cvitanovic
- acqq 13y ago
  Also interesting: http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/05/earning-a-phd-by-studying-a-theory-that-we-know-is-wrong/ http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/05/earning-a-phd-by-stud...
- carlob 13y ago
  Are you sure your professor authorised you to quote him on calling one of the most powerful persons in his field: 'a very good salesman' on a public forum of sorts?