Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math
https://nautil.us/why-physics-is-unreasonably-good-at-creating-new-math-797056/Disclosure, I'm a mathematician.
Disclosure, I'm a software developer
That's because people were totally focused on physics, and math was just a useful tool sometimes. Doing physics was the true goal and observation the final arbiter of truth.
Nowadays, that distinction is blurred but for the opposite reason; people think that anything conceived by sound math must be true, and observation has taken a back seat.
But there are also active researchers doing real research. Physics postdocs aren’t just sitting around in a circle making up stories about what the universe is like.
i ask out of layman curiosity
Personally I think the ER=EPR conjecture and the complexity/action duality hypothesis are incredibly interesting. Technically ER=EPR was formulated in 2000s (maybe 90s?) and CA-duality is approaching if not just past 10 years old, but the thing about asking for breakthroughs is that they take a while to percolate. Ex Hawking radiation wasn't formulated until, like, 50-70 years after the "basis" (schwarzshild, Schrodinger) was formed.
There's also been a ton of productive research integrsting computer science and physics lately ( on hn last week: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.16850 and 2022 novel prize; https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-universe-is-n...)
Also JWST just keeps on giving, and gravitational waves were only confirmed in 2017. If you extend a bit further higgs was in the 2010s
So, in summary, in the late 10 years - we've shown a break in our intuition of physics (nonloca-realness, that 2022 paper) - proposed some novel yet elegant theories (CA-duality, and I'd hope you'd begrudge me er=EPR) - confirmed some insane provings to the underlying reality (gravitational waves)
If those aren't noteworthy, I'd ask what you consider noteworthy any why you consider it noteworthy
There have been almost no truly significant, novel predictions that have a hope in hell of panning out in like, 40 years or more. The only mildly interesting, novel idea in physics has been quantum computing, and even that was first published in 1980.
> So, in summary, in the late 10 years - we've shown a break in our intuition of physics (nonloca-realness, that 2022 paper)
This paper showed no such thing, it has the same superdeterminism loophole as every other paper attempting to refute local realism.
Physics is stuck in a local QM-GR minimum, and some truly novel ideas are needed to kickstart things again. Oppenheim's postquantum gravity is the first truly novel idea I've seen in awhile.
I also agree that JWST is giving us great data, some of which has placed LCDM on the ropes, but astrophysicists are hard at work adding epicycles to keep it alive.
You can't rhetorically gloss over something as important as experimentally validating a 1964 prediction as though it doesn't matter or didn't happen.
If your contention is that a validation of something we already suspected to be true doesn't shatter/shift our paradigm, then how often would you expect that to happen? I would expect it a lot in small ways (so almost every person working in some niche area has probably had some "niche breakthrough" happen in their area that has really changed things) but not a lot in really fundamental overarching ways which for physics I think you could reasonably say has happened about 4 or 5 times in the last 400 years maybe idk: Newton, GR/SR/ quantum mechanics and then whichever ones you want to count out of Maxwell's equations and whatnot.
So to expect something like that every decade is not realistic.
I'm not, I'm pointing out that theoretical progress has stagnated. Experimentalists are doing great.
> So to expect something like that every decade is not realistic.
I'm not expecting it every decade, but we've had 4 decades of recycling the same ideas using the same failed approaches to try to patch gaps in existing theory using bogus arguments, which ends up funding poorly motivated experiments that then find nothing. I think Sabine Hossenfelder elaborated the problems here in excellent detail (see "Lost in Math").
Higgs/Bell/GW were experimental results, I was indeed trying to show that there's a huge lag between prediction and observation.
Imo the paradigm shift that we're slowly undergoing is thinking about physics from a information theoretic perspective instead of a kinematics one. I'd argue that's even more fundamental of a change than Newtonian physics to early GR & QM.
CA-duality is again mathematically interesting, but physically dubious because it's based on anti-de Sitter space, which does not describe our universe.
Information theoretical formulations of QM are mildly interesting, but I don't think they will be revolutionary, and I don't think they are tackling the core problem, which is QM's linearity where we classically observe a non-linear universe.
Of course it's not anything like a proof but something that bolsters an intuition.
Even Witten's achievements objectively reduce to an alternate proof of the positivity energy theorem in GR.
This is an abject failure by all metrics.
Much of Witten's own point above is that advancements in string theory have cashed out in revolutionary new mathematical approaches that would be of lasting value even string theory itself never receives any experimental confirmation.
I think article highlights something very beautiful about how physics, including string theory, have lead to the creation of new math, and how that is suggestive of an unmet promise. To ignore that just to come in and repeat for the 1000th time the world's most repeated thing about string theory, and take a completely unnecessary cheap shot at Ed Witten is the perfect embodiment of why comment sections can too often be a depressing waste of time.
And writing ptolemaic is probably too charitable because the Almagest at least predicted movements quite well at the time (apparently it now deviates too much).
I don't think it's too wild to suggest that, without the constraints of string theory imposed by advisors, lots of novel approaches would have been tried. We have no idea what could have been produced.
As for quantum gravity specifically, arguably not much progress will be made without more data, and we now have some proposed experiments that can be conducted here on Earth to test them.
I'm sorry, but string theorists absolutely do prevent funding other research because funding is finite, grad students have to research something their advisors think is worthy, and their advisors have their heads full of "beautiful math" so that's what they tell their students to work on if they want their PhDs, and that's what they hire their post grads to work on if they want a job.
Only now as the strong theory haze has started dissipating are we starting to see novel approaches, like Oppenheim's post quantum gravity theory.
By the way, I know Oppenheim personally. He gets funding from string grants. Nobody is angry about that. Anybody can do this. I don’t think his theory is going to pass any experimental validation (it requires a really severe violation of a physical principle we have tested over and over) but the entire community has always supported and listened. He gives talks at major universities. He’s not an outcast or renegade or something.
Which makes it an interesting mathematical construct, but in what way does that actually help physics? I included a link to one critique of Ads/CFT in another post, and others have critiqued its applications to QCD and other alleged "successes" because the important properties to do meaningful work in those domains just aren't there.
The versions of this correspondence that are easy to work with also depend on supersymmetry, for which every experiment has failed to find any evidence in the expected regimes. In the old days we'd call this "refuted", but these days it just means reworking it (adding a new epicycle?) to get "new bounds".
Ads/CFT is a mildly interesting mathematical derivation, but its actual utility for physics is questionable.
> He gets funding from string grants. Nobody is angry about that. Anybody can do this.
Maybe anybody can do this now, and I think that's because, as I said, string theory's stranglehold has weakened because of well-motivated criticisms over the past 15 years or so. The evidence of string theory's former dominance is right in what you said: string theory grants.
> but the entire community has always supported and listened.
I think some physicists are open minded, and some are not. You need only look at how physicists who work MOND are treated to see how not open minded some physicists are. MOND is not a final theory, but it and the people who work on it are scorned despite it's unreasonably good predictive success over the last 40 years.
This is a preposterously uncharitable characterization of something that again, was I think a triumph of string theory, the likes of which cannot be claimed by any competing theory. It is a framework for understanding black hole information loss, and it even has specific applications in condensed matter physics for modeling high temperature superconductors.
https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/66/4/9/414412/Stra...
Like I said, Ads/CFT's alleged "successes" are overblown.
As for it being a framework for understanding black hole information loss, it's merely one idea that has questionable application to our universe. We'll see if anything actually useful comes from it.
Instead of reasoning on the worth of the effort spent in this direction to investigate nature (a very tangible companion) they try to steer the discourse toward this nonsense. We spent >50 years listening to these tales and the time has long passed since we are required to stop playing with these smoke and mirrors.