How math is ruining physics

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Philip Thrift

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Apr 29, 2020, 4:10:51 AM4/29/20
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Over the past few decades there is an explosion of people who think the "mathiest" math will help in advancing physics.

This is a typical example:


There are many other examples based on many other areas of advanced mathematics.

None of this stuff helps in understanding nature - supposedly what physics is about, or is any way useful in using physics in real applications (technology).

It can all be interesting pure mathematics, but actually worthless.


Actually it's worse than worthless, It suggests nature (or rather, the best code of nature we have so far) is this stuff.

@philipthrift


 

John Clark

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Apr 29, 2020, 8:50:11 AM4/29/20
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Most physicists are not working at the most fundamental level of reality, they're a solid state physicist or a thermodynamicist or an astrophysicist, but if you are working at that level then you have no choice but to go deeper and deeper into very abstract mathematics. Everybody would prefer it if there were lots of new experimental results to work with that would give hints on which way to go, but there just isn't any. Most thought the LHC would find lots of interesting stuff besides the Higgs, they thought supersymmetric particles would be easier to find than the Higgs, but there is no hint of them or of anything else that is new. Lots of big expensive experiments were set up to detect Dark Matter but they all came up negative; we don't know anything more about what Dark Matter is than we did 20 years ago, the same is true of Dark Energy. You've got to work with what you're given and all we've got right now is math. I mean, ... it's not as if physicists had a choice.

 John K Clark

Brent Meeker

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Apr 29, 2020, 1:06:41 PM4/29/20
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It's a symptom of success.  Physics has done a good job of modeling everything within the scope of experiment and observation.  So now extending theories means going beyond what's testable; i.e. speculation.

Brent
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Lawrence Crowell

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Apr 29, 2020, 2:00:33 PM4/29/20
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How about p-adic K-theory and topology?

This has some possible connection to physics, but physics most likely does not need all the mathematical theorem-proof aspects of this. We physicists after all tend to have a bit of a Babylonian maths perspective, as Feynman put it.

LC

Philip Thrift

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Apr 29, 2020, 3:46:47 PM4/29/20
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Shouldn't that come out of the Wolfram Model?

Probably could.

@philipthrift

Lawrence Crowell

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Apr 29, 2020, 7:36:30 PM4/29/20
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On Wednesday, April 29, 2020 at 2:46:47 PM UTC-5, Philip Thrift wrote:



Shouldn't that come out of the Wolfram Model?

Probably could.

@philipthrift

My look at this is it appears to be combinatorics or graph theory, Also it has features similar to the AI graphs of Nerode and others in the early days of AI. I am not certain how powerful this really is.

Brent Meeker

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Apr 29, 2020, 8:00:54 PM4/29/20
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On 4/29/2020 4:36 PM, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
On Wednesday, April 29, 2020 at 2:46:47 PM UTC-5, Philip Thrift wrote:



Shouldn't that come out of the Wolfram Model?

Probably could.

@philipthrift

My look at this is it appears to be combinatorics or graph theory, Also it has features similar to the AI graphs of Nerode and others in the early days of AI. I am not certain how powerful this really is.

I'd bet it's Turing complete.

Brent



LC

Philip Thrift

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Apr 30, 2020, 6:46:00 AM4/30/20
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I'll be looking at these two articles here:


 (the pdf links are switched, but they are both there).

From what I can tell they are written by a young PhD working at Wolfram.

The "theory: is now officially called the Wolfram Model.

Like the programming language underlying Wolfram's stuff is called the Wolfram Language.

Jesus H. Christ.

@philipthrift



Bruno Marchal

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Apr 30, 2020, 8:49:28 AM4/30/20
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On 29 Apr 2020, at 21:46, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:




Shouldn't that come out of the Wolfram Model?

Wolfram miss the mind body problem. His approach (sort of digital physicalism) is refuted already on the quanta, and it also ignores the qualia.

Bruno



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Philip Thrift

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May 1, 2020, 6:52:21 AM5/1/20
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Sabine Hossenfelder writes:


In the end, Lindley [The Dream Universe: How Fundamental Physics Lost Its Way, by David Lindley] puts the blame for the lack of progress in the foundations of physics on mathematical abstraction, a problem he considers insurmountable. “The unanswerable difficulty, as I hope has become clear by now, is that researchers in fundamental physics are exploring a world, or worlds, hopelessly removed from our experience… What defines those unknowable worlds is perfect order, mathematical rigor, even aesthetic elegance.”

He then classifies “fundamental physics today as a kind of philosophy” and explains it is now “less about a strictly rational understanding of the universe and more about finding a scenario that we deem intellectually respectable.” He sees no way out of this situation because “Observation, experiment, and fact-finding are no longer able to guide [researchers in fundamental physics], so they must set their path by other means, and they have decided that pure rationality and mathematical reasoning, along with a refined aesthetic sense, will do the job.”

I am sympathetic to Lindley’s take on the current status of research in the foundations of physics, but I think the conclusion that there is no way forward is not supported by his argument. The problem in modern physics is not the abundance of mathematical abstraction per se, but that physicists have forgotten mathematical abstraction is a means to an end, not an end unto itself. They may have lost sight of the goal, alright, but that doesn’t mean the goal has ceased existing.

It is also simply wrong that there are no experiments that could guide physicists in the foundations of physics, and I say this as someone who has spent the past 20 years thinking about this very problem. It’s just that physicists are wasting time publishing papers about beautiful theories that have no relevance for nature instead of analyzing what is going wrong in their discipline and how to make progress.

In summary, Lindley’s book is not so much a competition to Lost in Math as a complement. If you want to understand what is going wrong in the foundations of physics, The Dream Universe is an excellent and timely introduction.


(Sabine Hossenfelder also tweeted that she has no interest in delving into the Wolfram Model;  then Sean Carroll tweeted he was at least interested. Funny lot.)

@philipthrift

Bruno Marchal

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May 2, 2020, 7:50:37 AM5/2/20
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On 1 May 2020, at 12:52, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:



Sabine Hossenfelder writes:


In the end, Lindley [The Dream Universe: How Fundamental Physics Lost Its Way, by David Lindley] puts the blame for the lack of progress in the foundations of physics on mathematical abstraction, a problem he considers insurmountable. “The unanswerable difficulty, as I hope has become clear by now, is that researchers in fundamental physics are exploring a world, or worlds, hopelessly removed from our experience… What defines those unknowable worlds is perfect order, mathematical rigor, even aesthetic elegance.”

He then classifies “fundamental physics today as a kind of philosophy” and explains it is now “less about a strictly rational understanding of the universe and more about finding a scenario that we deem intellectually respectable.” He sees no way out of this situation because “Observation, experiment, and fact-finding are no longer able to guide [researchers in fundamental physics], so they must set their path by other means, and they have decided that pure rationality and mathematical reasoning, along with a refined aesthetic sense, will do the job.”

I am sympathetic to Lindley’s take on the current status of research in the foundations of physics, but I think the conclusion that there is no way forward is not supported by his argument. The problem in modern physics is not the abundance of mathematical abstraction per se, but that physicists have forgotten mathematical abstraction is a means to an end, not an end unto itself. They may have lost sight of the goal, alright, but that doesn’t mean the goal has ceased existing.

It is also simply wrong that there are no experiments that could guide physicists in the foundations of physics, and I say this as someone who has spent the past 20 years thinking about this very problem. It’s just that physicists are wasting time publishing papers about beautiful theories that have no relevance for nature instead of analyzing what is going wrong in their discipline and how to make progress.

In summary, Lindley’s book is not so much a competition to Lost in Math as a complement. If you want to understand what is going wrong in the foundations of physics, The Dream Universe is an excellent and timely introduction.


(Sabine Hossenfelder also tweeted that she has no interest in delving into the Wolfram Model;  then Sean Carroll tweeted he was at least interested. Funny lot.)

@philipthrift


Read my papers, or ask question, but this is still to much physicalist to make sense with Descartes’ Mechanism,  or with Darwin foreseen of digital mechanism (before church-thesis!).

The reason why physics is mathematical and more and more a long way from intuition is already understood by Plato, who warns us that the fundamental truth has to be counter-intuitive: the reality primitive are ideas, or with mechanism, simply numbers. 

The people you are citing still confuse “fundamental physical reality” with the apparent (and phenomenologically real) physical reality.

Once you understand that all computations and histories exists, provably, once we assume *any* Turing universal ontology (like a tiny part of arithmetic already) it is up to the physicalist metaphysician to make their case for a ontologically real universe. How could that explains any physical prediction? Physics works because it makes an implicit ontological commitment, but that leads to the mind-body problem, which is basically solved with mechanism, so why add something that nobody has tested until QM (which confirms mechanism and its immaterialism)? It is no better than “God made it, period”.

Matter and consciousness are better explain without adding those ontologies for … no reasons, it seems to me. I don’t see any, even without mechanism.

I defend rationalism and empiricism. We have looked carefully to the physical universe, and up to now, it confirms Mechanism. Materialism was already refuted by Plato, but Aristotle missed the point, and of course, those who like the idea that a creation exist followed him. 

Matter is only a recent invention to make people believe that the bread is God’s body, or God’s son’s body.

What I do see is that many confuse theories and model, which does not help. 

Wolfram follows the tradition of ignoring the hard problem of the relation between the first person experiences and the possible third person theories we can do for explaining them. It is mechanist physicalism, which has been shown inconsistent.

Bruno






On Wednesday, April 29, 2020 at 12:06:41 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
It's a symptom of success.  Physics has done a good job of modeling everything within the scope of experiment and observation.  So now extending theories means going beyond what's testable; i.e. speculation.

Brent

On 4/29/2020 1:10 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:


Over the past few decades there is an explosion of people who think the "mathiest" math will help in advancing physics.

This is a typical example:


There are many other examples based on many other areas of advanced mathematics.

None of this stuff helps in understanding nature - supposedly what physics is about, or is any way useful in using physics in real applications (technology).

It can all be interesting pure mathematics, but actually worthless.


Actually it's worse than worthless, It suggests nature (or rather, the best code of nature we have so far) is this stuff.

@philipthrift


 


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