Mugwort

Physics doesn't need another Einstein. Einstein explained Brownian motion, the Photoelectric effect, created special relativity and general relativity, the cosmological constant, helped found quantum mechanics, served as an invaluable critic of quantum mechanics. Then he foundered. Einstein never accepted particle physics, refused to follow new developments and became a dinosaur. This sadly is what most "physicists" are doing today, the followed in Einstein's footsteps, mostly the dinosaur part.

What does physics need? The world doesn't know. Nobody knows but someone will do it, someday in a manner no one else thought possible or could really anticipate. In fact, that's not entirely true but new developments will happen and only a handful of people will be in the loop. Lorenz, Poincare etc. e.g. laid some vital groundwork for relativity.

My own two cents on the matter is that we really don't understand our theories well enough and are badly in need of a firmer foundation. The situation is analogous to calculus before Weierstrass, Cauchy, Dedekind and Cantor.

Of course, mathematics wasn't completely stuck just because calculus wasn't fully developed. Probability and non-Euclidean geometry were stunning developments which predated a truer understanding of real numbers.

So it is with physics right now. Unification, strings, etc. isn't working out so well right now. Quantum computing is now a thing and Quantum mechanics is enjoying a second revolution not unlike the General Relativity Renaissance led by Penrose, et. al.

We can't predict the future. We don't know the sequence things we need to take the next step in AI or even if there is one. Will some form of deep learning be all we need? Probably not but possibly yes.

Physics is right where it should be. Frustration is part of the process. We're feeling some pain because our approach isn't working. Instead of having answers to everything maybe we should focus on better questions.

Hilbert and Courant is BY FAR the best mathematical physics book in existence. No contest. Boas and all the others are good, even very good. H & C beats them by a kiloParsec.

Do you think it might be related to this event? (linked below ) I'm going to make a guess, that there might have been a nuclear detonation. It probably wasn't a test. This seems to be an accident. Not all weapons are accounted for, e.g. there a American hydrogen bombs lost in Spain (I know... it sounds crazy but look it up.). Could there have been a bomb laying around someone in a place everyone forgot existed maybe some forgotten relic from the Soviet day?

A GLOBAL MAGNETIC ANOMALY: On June 23rd, Earth’s quiet magnetic field was unexpectedly disturbed by a wave of magnetism that rippled around much of the globe. There was no solar storm or geomagnetic storm to cause the disturbance. So what was it?

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/06/25/weird-out-of-nowhere-...

I disagree that quantum mechanics needs fixing. What it requires is understanding. Many people even ones with PhDs don't really have a deep understanding of QM.

Ask a grad student or even a professor of physics what is essentially different about QM verses classical mechanics.

I almost always get one of two answers.

QM has operators acting on a Hilbert space (rigged HS). It's so mysterious because we have to replace everything with operators. well...

Have they heard of the Koopman–von Neumann formulations of classical mechanics? It's CM formulated using HS and ops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koopman%E2%80%93von_Neumann_cl...

Another answer is uncertainty. QM has uncertainty. Well... so does classical mechanics!

So what is different? That's a very long answer but one thing is the Exclusion principle.

Besides the KvN formulation is it possible to do QM using the equations of CM in the same form?

yes, it is. The Wigner Moyal Weyl formulations of QM. Look it up or Moyal star products.

Lastly, the collapse of the wave function.

Already done long, long ago by John von Neumann in his book on Quantum Mechanics. The correct formulation involves the subtle concept of decoherence. Von Neumann's trace operators are used in extreme cases where standard calculations (which involve a tiny bit of cheating) won't work, e.g. black hole entropy.

What's wrong with QM? So far nothing! It's possible someone might find a flaw but it hasn't happened.

The problem is mostly US. We don't understand all the implications of what we already possess. The enormous amount of myth making and lack of understanding surrounding QM obfuscates what the true problems are which in 99% of cases is the most physicists simply haven't studied von Neumann carefully enough.

Isn't this the tipping point when a company crosses the line, becomes a monopoly, restricts consumer choices, and suffocates competition by leveraging the entire playing field? We've been through that before. Sad to see Apple of all companies turn evil.

Get a copy of Racket, take notes, type in the programs for yourself, experiment. This video is the best most direct introduction I have yet found.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5p8DPbaokE

Learning Lisp, Scheme or Clojure is more about learning ideas than anything else.

Later you might want to learn Alonzo Church's Lambda calculus after learning some set theory and mathematical logic.

I'm definitely going to listen to the Lex Fridman lectures simply because I enjoyed his interview with Judea Pearl so much.

We also passed 400 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere. Best decade ever for sealing peoplekind's fate.

That can't possibly be true, not while Trump is president.

Is Hacker News fake news? Many times people post things that would make a real expert roll their eyes. There are some smart people here but also lots of inaccurate information.

Is anyone out there simply unaware of the "fake news" phenomenon. Are we so inured that we cannot differentiate BS from the real thing and need to be protected? I don't think so. Everyone KNOWS. People aren't that stupid. Why wasn't lying us into the Iraq war considered fake news?

It's a matter of degree. Everything is shades of grey. Google has become a very dark shade of grey.

Google started out as a tech company and then later became a part of the US Deep State (Prism program). I think any good the company was doing will be long overshadowed by this unfortunate relationship. Eric Schmidt bears the greatest responsibility for moving Google in this direction. The revelations of Julian Assange basically demolished the myth of "Don't be evil". Google was revealed as a company that in fact did much evil. Seeing Julian slowly die in prison on false rape charges while Google profited immensely helping destroy whatever was left of our digital rights and privacy certainly didn't help the company's image. I wanted to like Google. I liked Google from the beginning and then the ugly reality chipped away at their reputation until if found myself making awkward excuses for Google and doing all sorts of self deceptions and mental contortions to rationalize what they were doing. Then it became too much. I realized a good company can go bad and that's exactly what they did. Why? Who knows but size and unprecedented success have something to do with it. I don't think you can ignore the Behemoth factor but still, they are responsible for their conduct. I wouldn't want to be either of these men and I can't imagine anybody who loves technology and things that hackers care about like digital freedom and privacy continuing to hold Google if high esteem. Google has become a force for evil. It's an unpleasant truth.

Very nice article. I'm intrigued by the Khovanov homology and its relation to the geometric Langlands program. I don't know any knot theory yet but fortunately I know quantum mechanics, quantum fields theory, statistical mechanics and algebraic topology. So maybe this is a game I can learn to play someday.

A bird in the hand is worth three in the bush. If I could give someone from a non-mathematician background, e.g. programmer, who sincerely wants to get a peek behind the curtain and know what calculus really IS without diluting anything in an unacceptable way I'd show them I. Gelfand et al "Sequences, Combinations, Limits". Once you have the idea of a limit of a sequence down it isn't hard to learn the limit of a function (epsilon, delta) and move on from there. A good second step is Apostol's calculus vol. 1 just the first chapter where he calculates an integral from scratch with no "fluff" (details you don't need just yet). (Yes, learning integration first actually makes more sense than learning derivates.) Once you do that you can continue with Apostol (highly recommended.) or use Spivak's calculus (tougher but even more highly recommended).

To wrap up Gelfand is one bird in the hand, Apostol chapter 1? with integration from stratch is another bird in the hand. That would be a good first two steps to get a sense of what calculus is really about.

Interesting topic.

Non-English based programming languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...

Always. Robin Hartshorne's "Geometry: Euclid and Beyond" is the best book of its kind. It does Euclidean geometry with Hilbert's axioms and cleans up some of the loose ends of Euclid's classical treatment. Hartshorns book also covered the 5th postulate very thoroughly and non-Euclidean geometry. Hyperbolic geometry is treated axiomatically. He also has a nice treatment of axiomatic projective geometry which you can download for free. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.475...

It's a very good start. From there I think the most productive thing anyone could do is make a very thorough study of Classical Mechanics. People underestimate how much a thorough knowledge will help them. Start with an easy book and work your way up. Goldstein and Laundau are excellent intermediate level choices. For a beginner I think Jakob Schwichtenbergs "No Nonsense Classical Mechanics" could work or Leonard Susskind's "Theoretical Minimum Classical Mechanics" . Personally, I really liked Jakob's book. You'll need a friend or a study group online to help you when you get stuck. Classical mechanics is very serious physics and I regard a thorough foundation in say Hamiltonian Mechanics as a solid achievement. a sure sign someone could go on and learn E&M, Statistical mechanics, Quantum mechanics, Relativity and Gauge theories. For a semi advanced book if you know some advanced maths try Spivak's Classical Mechanics and anything by V. Arnold.

Agreed. Hard for some people to appreciate but so true.

There are some really good suggestions here. I would like to add that learning calculus properly is of the utmost importance. It's no exaggeration when I say that this is unquestionably the single best, most profitable action you can take. Any one of these books can change your life.

1. Spivak Calculus

2. Apostol Calculus vol. I and II

3. Courant and Johns, Introduction to Calculus and Analysis vol. I, IIA and IIB

For the more casual computer science or physics major, I'd go with choice 3 which resembles the Feynmann lectures the most. All the rigour of the other two is there but in a more digestible form. It's hard for someone not accustomed to hard maths to digest long proofs, it could give you a bad case of indigestion. It's more a function of patience. Courant and Johns get to the point much more quickly while Spivak and Apostol take their time to do everything thoroughly. Courant and Johns does do everything thoroughly but they are kinder to the reader and delay lengthy rigoourous proofs as long as possible while giving plenty of motivation and intuition.

Also I strongly recommend any books by Ray Smullyan particularly his introduction to mathematical logic. "A Beginner's Guide to Mathematical Logic"

WASM will eventually catch up to the glory days of Flash and far surpass them. It will be amazing.

It's very likely a unified theory will win a prize maybe even the Nobel Prize but it isn't going to happen anytime soon. FWIW I'm about as convinced of the truth of string theory as I am of the truth of General Relativity. Sure a better version of M-theory or something else is sure to be discovered but it will be an outgrowth of the current enterprise. The problem is even if we had the correct theory right now it probably would not do us much good at all. It would be a puzzle box we couldn't even open or get answers from it. People underestimated the difficulties involved and the theory was over hyped. Now begins the long "string theory winter". Decades from now, some diehard whose career is foundering will make a significant breakthrough, enough to compel everyone's attention. Until then, there's plenty of interesting physics problems to work on that have been unjustly neglected for too long.

Einstein's theory of GR could end up being "wrong" but it would live on as a very good approximation to a more fundamental theory.

String theory could very well turn out to be completely wrong but it would fail in a very different manner. If ST is wrong, it's no longer useful. If GR is "wrong" people will still use it.

For various reasons which are by no means proof or even evidence I think ST is basically correct but we're simply unable to make proper sense of it.

Anyway, we're here at the string theory winter. Careers are ruined, people disappointed etc. That's just how it goes. Sometimes, things work out and sometimes they just don't. We didn't exactly walk away from all of this with ZERO but we're very far from the ultimate PRIZE or GOAL. In hindsight we'll probably look back on this and realize we were hopelessly unable to succeed given the tools and ideas of the day. Expert systems were simply unable to deliver and people were crushed. Careers were ruined. Hopes dashed. Naysayers vindicated then along comes this crazy guy who just won't give up on neural networks.

I think the future looks much brighter for unified physics now that string theory as we knew it has clearly failed. I don't want to leave these guys out too so let me add that loop quantum gravity has failed too, much more gracefully I might add. I think these guys were on to something and their ideas aren't going to completely disappear.

I've thrown away about 10,000 hours of my life on this stuff. Thanks for spending 3 minutes on my meager insights.

Haskell basics are easy to learn. Nobody learns Haskell to linger on the basics. Haskell is a useful tool for express a deep ideas which aren't basic and require time, effort, focus and guidance to learn properly. You can still do quite a bit with the basics. I solved many Euler problems using Haskell and prefer it over Python.

I've wanted to study Sanskrit for a while now but nobody around where I live can teach it. So I've been nibbling at at occasionally. Some points of pronunication are a bit vague such as there being two kinds of T's and D's which sound almost identical to me. I've read the Gita and the Uphanishad s in English (Eaknath Easwaran's translation). Here's my impression. It's definitely worth reading through a translation. You can read it not as philosophy or religion but simply to read it. That's why I read it. To climb the mountain of life a little bit higher to see more. To see a tiny bit of what men like Oppenheimer, Ghandi, Thoreau and 1.3 billion others have been inspired. I can now read most Devanagari characters, enough to recognize simple words when they appear to me in stores like "Dharma", "Karma" or "Tantra" etc. That said, I identify more closely with Judaism than anything else. You need a place to call home. Still, the Sanskrit language is fascinating and the Hindu scriptures have made a deep impression on me.

Very enjoyable short read. Almost as soon as Oppenheimer Trinity test was a success, Leslie Groves drove him out, revoked his security clearance, called him a communist and he suffered greatly as a result. Oppenheimer lost many of his friends and his career. Because he was portrayed as a communist he found it difficult to get a job or even get invited to conferences. A very sad end for such a great man. One can only gaze in awe at his career, his accomplishments. He even made an important contribution to General Relativity with Harvard graduate student Ryan Snyder that a collapsing star would indeed form a black hole according to GR. Whatever else could be said of him, He certainly fulfilled his Dharma.

Easily the most autistic person I know. No contest.

Most programmers aren't worth even a pimple on Richard Stallman's ass. Most people too.

Agreed. Few people ever read and follow those proofs. Another related issue is proofs by computer e.g. the four coloring problem. No human will ever understand every step the computer is doing in these proofs but they can understand the program doing the proof and why it must be correct. If we insist on proofs like Euclid's proof that there are infinite primes or sqrt(2) is irrational then these computer proofs are clearly different. If we must use a computer is the proof somehow "ugly"? I don't think so but maybe I'm wrong.

Very much so.

My point is the stuff we already know so well still could use some polishing and everybody should be learning newer and better approaches to classical subjects.