11 ms·

Physics in 100 Years

127 points by jeffreyrogers 12y ago

subnaught 12y ago
Frank Wilczek is both a highly accomplished physicist and an exceptional writer, two things that don't often go together. You can find all of his 2014 writings here: http://frankwilczek.com/2014 And 2015 in progress: http://frankwilczek.com/2015
ianes 12y ago
I like his suggestion to replace 'Standard Model' with the name 'Core Theory' "The quantum revolution gave this revelation: we’ve finally learned what Matter is. The necessary equations are part of the theoretical structure often called the Standard Model. That yawn-inducing name fails to convey the grandeur of the achievement, and does not serve fundamental physics well in its popular perception. I’m going to continue my campaign, begun in The Lightness of Being, to replace it with something more appropriately awesome: Standard Model → Core Theory"
- melling 12y ago
  Is this a joke? Sounds like some bureaucratic decision where you'd create a committee to come up with New Coke. Most people aren't going to care.
  - morenoh149 12y ago
    You'd be surprised. Yes it must be grounded in soundness but a cool name never hurts.
  - tomelders 12y ago
    I bet the folks who coined the term "global warming" sure wish they'd thought of "climate change" first.
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
      You do know the history of those terms and the replacement of one by the other, right?
      - evanb 12y ago
        Science Sparring Society had an interesting (and short) episode on this recently: http://www.acmescience.com/2015/02/sss-14-global-warming-vs-climate-change/ http://www.acmescience.com/2015/02/sss-14-global-warming-vs-...
chaosfactor 12y ago
This is an exercise in paradigm paralysis. How about: I predict that if I were teleported 100 years into the future, I would have no fucking clue what was going on, you wouldn't be able to explain it to me and I would probably die from the culture shock. You have evolve and develop and turn into the future. You can't just go there willy-nilly, nor, at this point, can you confidently make predictions about it. That too is a prediction, though. For all I know Rudy Rucker is right and we will be a black hole in 100 years. But even if that prediction is right, our guesstimate of the phenomenology is all wrong.
- Chinjut 12y ago
  It doesn't seem to me that if someone from 1915 was transported to the present day, it would be impossible to explain to them what was going on and they would die from the culture shock. What's so hard to explain? Airplanes and cars? You had them then, they're just more common now. TV? Yeah, it's like radio and movies combined. Cellphones? Ok, phones are portable now. Computers? Alright, just tell them what a computer is. They can handle it. They were human then too, not some alien species of comparative primitive idiots. (If the argument were instead that it's unreasonable to expect someone to accurately predict the world of 100 years hence, I would agree; long-term prediction has not historically been something anyone has been all that good at. But the difficulty of predicting the future doesn't mean one couldn't handle exposure to it.)
  - guard-of-terra 12y ago
    I expect them to die in approximately five minutes from culture shock. Ah, and also getting hit by a car.
    - andrewflnr 12y ago
      I guess a vehicular injury could be considered an extreme case of culture shock.
  - JadeNB 12y ago
    > Computers? Alright, just tell them what a computer is. Do you really believe that it would be so simple? I think that it's hard to appreciate how much computers have changed the shape of our lives in large and small ways. For example, imagine bringing Turing to the present day. Would he have any trouble understanding what a computer is, as a mechanical or mathematical device? Probably not. Would he be baffled by, and initially uncomprehending of, the way that computers have changed our lives? I'd say almost certainly. (I often am, just thinking back on the way things were as recently as 20 years ago, and I lived through the change.)
dheera 12y ago
My speculation for the next 100 years, that Wilczek does not propose, is that a notation revolution will happen. The standard way of representing mathematics today is tedious to write and extremely non-intuitive in many ways. Unfortunately alternative representation systems of physical processes (e.g. block diagrams, Feynmann diagrams, etc.) don't yet provide a way for the user to operate on higher-level objects while staying on an abstracted level. One has to tear open all the black boxes, rewrite them as integral/sigma/matrix/bra/ket soup before they can be operated upon. Most of the time when I read a physics paper, even in my own field of research, I spend abount 95% of my time and brain power parsing and 5% of the time understanding. This should be reversed. In addition, a startling problem is that it now takes about 25-30 years of education from birth to the time before any individual can be productive to society in physics research. They are subsequently only productive for another 30-40 at most. As fundamental science continues to become more advanced, the increasing number of required education years to catch up with all of human history, even for a highly narrow, specialized field, is not a sustainable trend. Either modifying the brain or adopting a new framework of thought will be necessary to sustain progress; a notation revolution may facilitate the latter.
- gfodor 12y ago
  I don't know if I'd predict it, but I agree that it's hard to imagine a more transformative technology than a dramatically improved notation for something as broad as mathematics. It might mean that "notation" is actually a higher fidelity, more dynamic medium for communicating mathematical ideas only possible within computing. (See Bret Vector, etc.) One has to wonder what the world would be like if physics knowledge (at all levels) were disseminated via a medium beyond static text.
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    Sussman tried to use scheme as a mathematical notation (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/sicm/book.html http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/s...) to avoid ambiguities. I don't know how many people saw this, and what the critics were. The traditional static symbolic notation of math may be the most efficient one, It's constrained, but forces abstraction to emerge. If people had Excel before, we'd never know Gauss sequence sum formula, we'd let the system help us.
mr_overalls 12y ago
Brett Victor also has some interesting ideas about the symbology of math: http://worrydream.com/KillMath/ http://worrydream.com/KillMath/
noobermin 12y ago
I was at first upset that he seemed to focus heavily on fundamental particle physics. I was delighted however, that he did mention other discoveries we'd like to see happen in other subfields of physics, like the hope for the realization of the quantum computer. One thing that is rather hot now and likely will become a richer field over the next decade or so (and will likely leave it's imprint in future technology and life in 100 years) is the merging of physics with biology. Mainly, the use of physics and quantitative methods in biology is the next area of innovation for this century, in my opinion. That might fall more under "Biology in 100 years," however.
- cozzyd 12y ago
  He's a particle theorist, so it's not too surprising he focuses on things he knows more about.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
sgt101 12y ago
I know that English is the wrong way of expressing the ideas, but the text on page 6 about bleaching and colours and the tasteful application of rules producing a scheme is straight out of 16th Century alchemy.

127 points by jeffreyrogers 12y ago

Frank Wilczek is both a highly accomplished physicist and an exceptional writer, two things that don't often go together. You can find all of his 2014 writings here: http://frankwilczek.com/2014 And 2015 in progress: http://frankwilczek.com/2015

ianes 12y ago

I like his suggestion to replace 'Standard Model' with the name 'Core Theory' "The quantum revolution gave this revelation: we’ve finally learned what Matter is. The necessary equations are part of the theoretical structure often called the Standard Model. That yawn-inducing name fails to convey the grandeur of the achievement, and does not serve fundamental physics well in its popular perception. I’m going to continue my campaign, begun in The Lightness of Being, to replace it with something more appropriately awesome: Standard Model → Core Theory"

melling 12y ago
Is this a joke? Sounds like some bureaucratic decision where you'd create a committee to come up with New Coke. Most people aren't going to care.
- morenoh149 12y ago
  You'd be surprised. Yes it must be grounded in soundness but a cool name never hurts.
- tomelders 12y ago
  I bet the folks who coined the term "global warming" sure wish they'd thought of "climate change" first.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
    You do know the history of those terms and the replacement of one by the other, right?
    - evanb 12y ago
      Science Sparring Society had an interesting (and short) episode on this recently: http://www.acmescience.com/2015/02/sss-14-global-warming-vs-climate-change/ http://www.acmescience.com/2015/02/sss-14-global-warming-vs-...

chaosfactor 12y ago

This is an exercise in paradigm paralysis. How about: I predict that if I were teleported 100 years into the future, I would have no fucking clue what was going on, you wouldn't be able to explain it to me and I would probably die from the culture shock. You have evolve and develop and turn into the future. You can't just go there willy-nilly, nor, at this point, can you confidently make predictions about it. That too is a prediction, though. For all I know Rudy Rucker is right and we will be a black hole in 100 years. But even if that prediction is right, our guesstimate of the phenomenology is all wrong.

Chinjut 12y ago
It doesn't seem to me that if someone from 1915 was transported to the present day, it would be impossible to explain to them what was going on and they would die from the culture shock. What's so hard to explain? Airplanes and cars? You had them then, they're just more common now. TV? Yeah, it's like radio and movies combined. Cellphones? Ok, phones are portable now. Computers? Alright, just tell them what a computer is. They can handle it. They were human then too, not some alien species of comparative primitive idiots. (If the argument were instead that it's unreasonable to expect someone to accurately predict the world of 100 years hence, I would agree; long-term prediction has not historically been something anyone has been all that good at. But the difficulty of predicting the future doesn't mean one couldn't handle exposure to it.)
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  I expect them to die in approximately five minutes from culture shock. Ah, and also getting hit by a car.
  - andrewflnr 12y ago
    I guess a vehicular injury could be considered an extreme case of culture shock.
- JadeNB 12y ago
  > Computers? Alright, just tell them what a computer is. Do you really believe that it would be so simple? I think that it's hard to appreciate how much computers have changed the shape of our lives in large and small ways. For example, imagine bringing Turing to the present day. Would he have any trouble understanding what a computer is, as a mechanical or mathematical device? Probably not. Would he be baffled by, and initially uncomprehending of, the way that computers have changed our lives? I'd say almost certainly. (I often am, just thinking back on the way things were as recently as 20 years ago, and I lived through the change.)

dheera 12y ago

My speculation for the next 100 years, that Wilczek does not propose, is that a notation revolution will happen. The standard way of representing mathematics today is tedious to write and extremely non-intuitive in many ways. Unfortunately alternative representation systems of physical processes (e.g. block diagrams, Feynmann diagrams, etc.) don't yet provide a way for the user to operate on higher-level objects while staying on an abstracted level. One has to tear open all the black boxes, rewrite them as integral/sigma/matrix/bra/ket soup before they can be operated upon. Most of the time when I read a physics paper, even in my own field of research, I spend abount 95% of my time and brain power parsing and 5% of the time understanding. This should be reversed. In addition, a startling problem is that it now takes about 25-30 years of education from birth to the time before any individual can be productive to society in physics research. They are subsequently only productive for another 30-40 at most. As fundamental science continues to become more advanced, the increasing number of required education years to catch up with all of human history, even for a highly narrow, specialized field, is not a sustainable trend. Either modifying the brain or adopting a new framework of thought will be necessary to sustain progress; a notation revolution may facilitate the latter.

gfodor 12y ago
I don't know if I'd predict it, but I agree that it's hard to imagine a more transformative technology than a dramatically improved notation for something as broad as mathematics. It might mean that "notation" is actually a higher fidelity, more dynamic medium for communicating mathematical ideas only possible within computing. (See Bret Vector, etc.) One has to wonder what the world would be like if physics knowledge (at all levels) were disseminated via a medium beyond static text.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  Sussman tried to use scheme as a mathematical notation (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/sicm/book.html http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/s...) to avoid ambiguities. I don't know how many people saw this, and what the critics were. The traditional static symbolic notation of math may be the most efficient one, It's constrained, but forces abstraction to emerge. If people had Excel before, we'd never know Gauss sequence sum formula, we'd let the system help us.

mr_overalls 12y ago

Brett Victor also has some interesting ideas about the symbology of math: http://worrydream.com/KillMath/ http://worrydream.com/KillMath/

noobermin 12y ago

I was at first upset that he seemed to focus heavily on fundamental particle physics. I was delighted however, that he did mention other discoveries we'd like to see happen in other subfields of physics, like the hope for the realization of the quantum computer. One thing that is rather hot now and likely will become a richer field over the next decade or so (and will likely leave it's imprint in future technology and life in 100 years) is the merging of physics with biology. Mainly, the use of physics and quantitative methods in biology is the next area of innovation for this century, in my opinion. That might fall more under "Biology in 100 years," however.

cozzyd 12y ago
He's a particle theorist, so it's not too surprising he focuses on things he knows more about.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

sgt101 12y ago

I know that English is the wrong way of expressing the ideas, but the text on page 6 about bleaching and colours and the tasteful application of rules producing a scheme is straight out of 16th Century alchemy.