Is foundational physics stuck?

[studiot]

17 minutes ago, joigus said:

Evariste Galois is another good example of what I'm saying. I'm well aware of the possibility of a cognitive bias. There are counterexamples, as @studiot pointed out.

I don't think either the untimely demise of either Galois or Abel stopped their genius flowering. They had both achieved much before that.

There were plenty of Frenchmen who started well but lost in one of the many french wars.

4 minutes ago, swansont said:

The reason that all the named geniuses were white European men, is not some innate superiority of being white, European, or male.

I agree with that,

But not this

5 minutes ago, swansont said:

and the vast majority of the population of the world was quite poor until fairly recently.

Depending upon your POV, rampant poverty is still true today.

[dimreepr]

8 minutes ago, studiot said:

I don't think either the untimely demise of either Galois or Abel stopped their genius flowering. They had both achieved much before that.

There were plenty of Frenchmen who started well but lost in one of the many french wars.

I agree with that,

But not this

Depending upon your POV, rampant poverty is still true today.

Wow, how did it get to this?

Is foundational physics stuck? Of course not, that's like asking if potty training is necessary...

[joigus]

20 minutes ago, swansont said:

I’m also considering that the discussion covers the timeline back to Galileo, and the vast majority of the population of the world was quite poor until fairly recently. The reason that all the named geniuses were white European men, is not some innate superiority of being white, European, or male.

Agreed. There's some prevailing wind acting there. Social status is obviously a factor too. I don't expect the next Einstein to emerge from among the homeless either.

What's peculiar is that people working in the IAS, or PIRSA, etc, working under a common umbrella, with all the facilitation that money can buy to fertilise each other's minds (never mind gender or race) seem to have been unable to parallel the high standards of creativity that lone individuals reached in past decades. Noether was one of these geniuses too, she was a woman, and didn't have it easy either.

One would think that putting together an Einstein and a Noether, and throwing in a Fermi, all teleconferencing each other at the touch of a button, would have achieved much more much more quickly. 

It reminds me of the splitting of mayonnaise: If you put too much oil too soon, it fails to emulsify.

[TheVat]

There is also the fruit tree theory for innovative ideas slowing down in a field.  Einstein, Heisenberg, Feynman et al expertly picked the fruit from the lower branches.  Now there's the more difficult process of getting at the higher branches.  Sudden epiphanies don't work as well, and progress is less dramatic.  Hypothesized particles like the Majorana are very difficult to observe, so waiting times get very long.  Axions have been searched for over 40 years, Majorana fermions since 1937.  Of course, someone could come along and shake the tree violently and some massive paradigmatic shift could, say, scrap cold dark matter.

[tylers100]

Five possibilities occurred with searching for a next science genius:

- Be genius.
- Wait for a next genius.
- Work together to be "genius".
- Or genius is overrated, and do what best can do.
- And or all of above.

[DanMP]

On 11/10/2024 at 7:36 PM, TheVat said:

There is also the fruit tree theory for innovative ideas slowing down in a field.  Einstein, Heisenberg, Feynman et al expertly picked the fruit from the lower branches.  Now there's the more difficult process of getting at the higher branches.

Interesting, but, in my opinion, the problem is that most of the physicists are interested in the higher branches (very sophisticated theories), ignoring that the "discovery" of dark matter opened the possibility for new/different "low branch" (simple) theories. This also means that the theories developed before/ignoring DM, like GR, may be misleading and/or a limiting factor, despite the fact that they offered very good results. 

[joigus]

55 minutes ago, DanMP said:

Interesting, but, in my opinion, the problem is that most of the physicists are interested in the higher branches (very sophisticated theories), ignoring that the "discovery" of dark matter opened the possibility for new/different "low branch" (simple) theories.

More than just interesting. I think the point,

On 11/10/2024 at 6:36 PM, TheVat said:

Now there's the more difficult process of getting at the higher branches.  Sudden epiphanies don't work as well, and progress is less dramatic.

is a fair one.

The learning curve of new theories is generally steeper than the one corresponding to old theories.

In the case of physics, foundational or not, students generally have to master sophisticated calculational tools in order to tackle the simplest problems of the most modern theories. 

[swansont]

3 hours ago, DanMP said:

Interesting, but, in my opinion, the problem is that most of the physicists are interested in the higher branches (very sophisticated theories), ignoring that the "discovery" of dark matter opened the possibility for new/different "low branch" (simple) theories. This also means that the theories developed before/ignoring DM, like GR, may be misleading and/or a limiting factor, despite the fact that they offered very good results. 

It’s quite possible that some area of physics is up a blind alley, because there is a more fundamental formulation that looks quite different but reduces to the known case under the conditions we can experience. 

Kinda like how phlogiston worked, until it didn’t. Or the plum pudding model of the atom.

I don’t know how you find the better model without experimental data to push you.

[Genady]

I think that the fruit tree metaphor is wrong. It assumes that physicists are standing now on the same ground level as Einstein, Heisenberg, Feynman et al were standing on, while the branches are farther away. It is not so. The branches reached by Einstein, Heisenberg, Feynman et al are the new ground level, and the "higher" branches are not necessarily farther away.

[DanMP]

21 hours ago, joigus said:

In the case of physics, foundational or not, students generally have to master sophisticated calculational tools in order to tackle the simplest problems of the most modern theories. 

In my opinion, physicists should focus more on actual physics and less in math, because nowadays we have computers, able to run simulations.

 

18 hours ago, swansont said:

I don’t know how you find the better model without experimental data to push you.

I think that a good way to find the better model is to ask yourself why and how exactly things are happening, including things that are covered by the current theories but never really explained, like the invariance of the speed of light in vacuum. Once you have a viable model, one that is both logical and in agreement with all the observations, you must imagine/find ways to test it experimentally. So, yes, new experimental data is required. 

 

18 hours ago, Genady said:

The branches reached by Einstein, Heisenberg, Feynman et al are the new ground level, and the "higher" branches are not necessarily farther away.

Yes, they are not farther away, but what if that tree (path) is not the best one? New information, like the existence of DM, may lead you to a much better tree ... 

 

18 hours ago, Genady said:

I think that the fruit tree metaphor is wrong

Well, maybe, but I like it 😀

[swansont]

32 minutes ago, DanMP said:

In my opinion, physicists should focus more on actual physics and less in math, because nowadays we have computers, able to run simulations.

Where does the math that’s in the code/simulation come from?

[DanMP]

38 minutes ago, swansont said:

Where does the math that’s in the code/simulation come from?

I said to focus less on math, not to forget about math.

 

Even now it's maybe impossible, in the near future AI should be able to create a simulation based on our description of elements and interactions. Until then, we still have to use some math and/or to ask a computer specialist to translate our thoughts into a computer simulation. 

[swansont]

1 hour ago, DanMP said:

I said to focus less on math, not to forget about math.

Coding is the easy part.

1 hour ago, DanMP said:

Even now it's maybe impossible, in the near future AI should be able to create a simulation based on our description of elements and interactions. Until then, we still have to use some math and/or to ask a computer specialist to translate our thoughts into a computer simulation. 

That would require AI developing something that’s not based on what we know, which is not something it currently does

[Mordred]

 

1 hour ago, DanMP said:

I said to focus less on math, not to forget about math.

 

Even now it's maybe impossible, in the near future AI should be able to create a simulation based on our description of elements and interactions. Until then, we still have to use some math and/or to ask a computer specialist to translate our thoughts into a computer simulation. 

We already run very complex simulations example testing our mathematics involved for Cosmology.

https://www.illustris-project.org/

Mathematica is also a very useful tool commonly used by physicists such a the Feycalc extension

Even for  the Saha equations one requires coded simulations thankfully this one doesn't have huge computing power requirements.

None of these require AI.

Edited Wednesday at 04:15 PM by Mordred

[DanMP]

39 minutes ago, Mordred said:

We already run very complex simulations example testing our mathematics involved for Cosmology.

https://www.illustris-project.org/

Wow! Thank you! Very interesting and impressive. Of course, for such simulations math is very important, because simplification is necessary. The scale is too large. 

 

The thing is that we may/should use such simulations to make similar ones. AI may also learn from such simulations. 

 

Anyway, the simulations I have in mind are much much less complex, that's why they may be realized with less math. 

 

42 minutes ago, Mordred said:

None of these require AI.

Ok, maybe now AI is not used, but I'm pretty sure that in the near future it will be used.

 

1 hour ago, swansont said:

That would require AI developing something that’s not based on what we know, which is not something it currently does

AI is crushing humans in Go (the game). We gave/teach it the setup and the rules and it quickly learned to outperform us. Something similar I had in mind when I said 

2 hours ago, DanMP said:

in the near future AI should be able to create a simulation based on our description of elements and interactions

 

[swansont]

11 minutes ago, DanMP said:

AI is crushing humans in Go (the game). We gave/teach it the setup and the rules and it quickly learned to outperform us. Something similar I had in mind when I said 

I’m not seeing how this applies, unless it learned the rules without being told, or observing the game being played. New physics = not knowing the rules.

[DanMP]

The rules were told and this is also what I said/implied. 

17 minutes ago, swansont said:

New physics = not knowing the rules.

One may define/set the rules & model and check them using simulations.

Edited Wednesday at 05:54 PM by DanMP

[studiot]

Hasn't this thread wandered way off topic.

 

What does it matter to the headline question how the next breakthrough arrives ?

Surely the question is about when it will happen.

[DanMP]

On 11/5/2024 at 10:32 AM, Markus Hanke said:

much of current work feels a lot like people randomly and blindly groping in the dark by inventing maths that don’t seem to be motivated by any real-world data points, hoping to just stumble across that next breakthrough. This isn’t really how science should work.

Comments, anyone?

My input was related to that, so I wasn't off topic. We need to focus more on physics and less on math. 

[swansont]

49 minutes ago, DanMP said:

The rules were told and this is also what I said/implied. 

Yes, meaning it’s irrelevant to discovering new foundations in physics 

49 minutes ago, DanMP said:

One may define/set the rules & model and check them using simulations.

Check them against what?

11 minutes ago, DanMP said:

My input was related to that, so I wasn't off topic. We need to focus more on physics and less on math. 

I don’t know what this even means. You have theory (which is math) and experiment. If there’s no experiment, there is only math.

[studiot]

16 minutes ago, DanMP said:

My input was related to that, so I wasn't off topic. We need to focus more on physics and less on math. 

What make you so sure there is more fundamental physics to discover ?

[DanMP]

44 minutes ago, swansont said:

Check them against what?

Against reality (experimental data), of course.

44 minutes ago, swansont said:

meaning it’s irrelevant to discovering new foundations in physics

Why? 

 

39 minutes ago, studiot said:

What make you so sure there is more fundamental physics to discover ?

The fact that current theories are not actually explaining the reality. Can you explain what a field is and how exactly a force is transmitted at a distance? Can you explain the invariance of c? Can you explain how a mass is warping spacetime? And no, I'm not asking how the model works, I'm asking what and how is really happening. 

 

Also, in the string theory, why the strings are vibrating?

 

Anyway, it seems that I'm not the only one to expect more, better, models. 

 

 

Edited Wednesday at 07:16 PM by DanMP

[DanMP]

56 minutes ago, swansont said:

I don’t know what this even means. You have theory (which is math) and experiment. If there’s no experiment, there is only math.

You got it all wrong. The theory is (should be) a physical model. Yes, it usually includes math, but it isn't just math. And who said that "there’s no experiment" ?! I said:

6 hours ago, DanMP said:

Once you have a viable model, one that is both logical and in agreement with all the observations, you must imagine/find ways to test it experimentally. So, yes, new experimental data is required

 

[swansont]

1 hour ago, DanMP said:

Against reality (experimental data), of course.

What experimental data? Did you miss all the discussion about the lack of it?

5 minutes ago, DanMP said:

You got it all wrong. The theory is (should be) a physical model. Yes, it usually includes math, but it isn't just math.

Can you give some examples of modern physics models that are “physical”?

[DanMP]

1 minute ago, swansont said:

What experimental data? Did you miss all the discussion about the lack of it?

There is no experimental data?!? So there is no experimental data to back GR? 😀 What in the world are you talking about?