
My Grandfather Thought He Solved a Cosmic Mystery - gone35
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/science-full-mavericks-like-my-grandfather-was-his-physics-theory-right/574573/?single_page=true
======
convivialdingo
I certainly understand the harsh reality of seeing a glimpse of a solution and
finding no logical path there.

For me, it's factoring large numbers in short times. I've spent 18 years on
and off of the problem. Most of that time was coming up with novel ideas and
then arriving at the same conclusions as everybody else.

I'm too obstinate and "stupid" to know that the problem is practically
unsolvable - but fortunately I'm not obsessive enough to throw my life into
it. It's basically a hobby I do during my downtime.

I like to call it mathematical finger painting, or nature walks through
obscure numeric systems. Studying topics, geometries, ancient multiplication
methods for fun, and generally scratching under the surface of "why" without
knowing how.

~~~
wesammikhail
I registered an account just to reply to your comment.

After reading the article in question, I was thinking about my own experience.
I too have been working on prime factorization for the past 6 years in the
same fashion that you have and what you just wrote here describe perfectly how
I feel about my progress and journey. Which makes me wonder... How many people
out there are like us, working on the same problem while feeling the same way?

It's like the problem is laughing at you. Baiting you back in with its extreme
simplicity. It truly is a mesmerizing problem that you can't help but feel is
solvable if only one single Eureka moment is reached. Boy do I want this one
solved...

~~~
convivialdingo
Yeah, I’m not even close!! More like the movie Groundhog Day.

So far the journey has been really rewarding though. I’ve recently been
focusing my efforts on remainders and decision paths.

The most invaluable lessons learned have been my understanding of the
complexity of simplicity.

I’ve written some insanely complicated, convoluted and frankly weird ass code
throughout all this.

For example: bignum math libraries, modified Euclidean geometry, imaginary
number libs, fractal factoring, Russian peasant multiplication, 3D volumetric
fluids to triangle area fitting. Multiple geometric shape fitting libraries,
Gallois fields and lots and lots of weird what-if code that popped up in my
head.

I’d always been good at algorithms, but straightforward head-first attacks of
the problem always ends in failure.

Now I’ve learned to build analysis, statistics and proofs by necessity. It’s
completely changed my mindset on design. (Obviously I studied far my comp-sci
than mathematics.)

Other than sieving and brute force, I think the only other general solution to
be a sort of ‘halving’ problem.

The relation between factors and q is essential sum or area. You can subdivide
either into n buckets and remainders building a tree of nodes iteratively. At
many nodes I have found some interesting patterns. I find nodes after some
iterations that sum up to a factor. So now my question is finding the path
every time.

Anyway, best of luck on your journey and enjoy the ride! Maybe in another few
years somebody will finally slay this beast.

~~~
mojomark
Also not the same problem, but I've been doing the same with the Traveling
Salesman Problem for about 8 years now. It's a love hate play date every
Sunday morning.

------
audleman
In high school my friend's Dad thought he had found a flaw in modern Physics
understanding that would change everything. Physicists, he claimed, refused to
see the truth because they were too loyal to Einstein. He sat me down and
showed me flaws in a bunch of equations, which was duly impressive until I
went to college and took Physics 101. Turns out he was ignoring things like
redshift of light; when I plugged in the right equations the classical model
held.

I tried to argue with my friend, but I had just proved that I was brainwashed
by Big Phys. I learned that his Dad cornered anybody he could to evangelize
his theories and had been doing so for years. He developed a theory that women
and children were more receptive to his revolutionary ideas, so was in the
process of writing a book that was more conversational in tone.

Last I heard he was still at it.

~~~
beefok
it's sad that he tries to validate his idea by evangelizing to laymen instead
of trying to convince "big science" of his ideas.

My dad was and is the same way -- everyone is in some massive conspiracy plot
to misguide the public. Typically there are demons or other some suches that
are pulling the puppet strings. A few months ago he was convinced the world
was flat.. It's this whole Dunning-Kruger effect that seems to affect so many
people.

I think there are generations of people who missed out on a proper education
and a healthy skepticism.

~~~
maxxxxx
"I think there are generations of people who missed out on a proper education
and a healthy skepticism. "

I don't think it's education. Most conspiracy theorists I have met seem to
have a deep discomfort with our world and this is their way of explaining it.
I think other people turn to religion for the same reasons.

~~~
msla
I'm going to inject some cynicism and say that what a number of them find
unsettling is how famous they _aren 't_.

They always think they have a big idea. It's never some minor correction to a
big theory, which a PhD would be happy with (as long as it's major enough to
be publishable); no, it's Shatter The Foundations or nothing. Therefore,
they're being done out of their fame and fortune by some grand conspiracy,
which, in itself, proves how important they are: If they weren't right, They
wouldn't be conspiring against them, now, would they? That mindset certainly
sells books, and helps on the lecture circuit, too.

I'm sure there are some honest crackpots, but I wonder how honest you can be
when you come upon a bit of well-accepted physics you can't understand or
simply don't like, and conclude that _everyone else_ is wrong, and _you 're_
the only one who's correct.

------
Isamu
You can go astray without really becoming a crank. A true crank that can't let
the crankery go develops delusions of persecution and conspiracy to keep the
truth out.

Going astray may be as simple as not being able to provide the necessary
clarity, the clear road map that leads from what is familiar, to those in the
field, to the novel thing you are proposing.

I am talking of course of heavily mathematical fields. Not going to comment on
the murkier situation outside of that.

~~~
sp332
The article wonders (in the 5th-to-last paragraph) if a different kind of
rejection might help reduce the number of people who turn into cranks.
Sometimes they have an idea and it seems like they can't communicate it, so
maybe just saying "I understand your point even if I think it's wrong" could
help.

~~~
ssivark
Good point. In my experience, when communicating ideas, it helps to separate
the nuances of “I hear/understand you” and “I agree with you”. For novel
ideas, it takes a significant amount of time after you understand it, to
decide on it. In the mean time it is important to suspend judgement while
exploring the idea and its consequences. Most people genuinely interested in
ideas want to make sure their thoughts have been understood, and will happily
receive a critique if it comes to be. Seeing acknowledgment that they’ve been
understood allows them to relax and start listening. OTOH, being repeatedly
dismissed without being understood leads them to feel persecuted for novelty.

Listening is an art.

~~~
Kalium
You're absolutely right! People genuinely interested solely ideas will be
satisfied to be understood and accept any reasonable critique that comes in
response.

One of the human failure modes that I witness on a regular basis is that
people fail to separate "I hear/understand you" and "I agree with you" within
their own heads. People have a tendency to assume that what they find
convincing will be similarly convincing to another. As a result, if it's not
convincing to another, this other person must not understand it properly and
must just need to be educated on the subject. Or, more cynically, they aren't
paying attention because they don't understand the importance of the work.

My current operating hypothesis is that vanishingly few people are genuinely
interested solely in ideas. Almost everyone has some ego at stake. Being told
that your baby is ugly, no matter how kindly, compassionately, or
empathetically it is done, is rarely a positive experience. This is where
people like Dale Carnegie come in.

Beyond the emotional aspects of it, there are other issues. It can be
_incredibly_ labor-intensive to delve deeply into a paper and determine how
right or wrong it is. If it's wrong, it's even more work to understand
precisely where and how it is wrong, and then give the kind of feedback a
hypothetical egoless author genuinely interested solely in ideas would like.
This can be a great deal to ask, unpaid, of people who have other things they
would like to be doing. This is doubly true when most papers are patently
wrong in some obvious way and the painstakingly handcrafted feedback unlikely
to be taken up in the manner an idealist could hope for. I'm sure you have a
way to handle this with the art of listening, and I'm just not seeing it. Can
you help me understand?

Again, you're completely right. It can definitely help to separate the ideas
of understanding and agreement, and reasonable people interested in ideas will
handle this gracefully! There just might be some room for nuance and perhaps a
careful consideration of costs and burdens might be in order.

~~~
ssivark
> if it's not convincing to another, this other person must not understand it
> properly and must just need to be educated on the subject. Or, more
> cynically, they aren't paying attention because they don't understand the
> importance of the work.

Here's a thumb rule I try to follow: Before having a strong opinion towards
one side, one must be able to be articulate both (opposing) points of view.
So, my goal in any discussion is to reach that stage -- mutually, if possible.
After that point, I'm willing to trust reasonable people to exercise
independent judgement. At least we can get a shared understanding of which
differing assumptions lead us to different conclusions, and see whether there
are any tests which will help us validate those assumptions.

> Almost everyone has some ego at stake.

Aye, we're all humans! All we can do is strive to be a little better each day
:-) The same with regards to listening to someone -- I try to listen carefully
and respond sincerely with what puzzles me. It's up to them what they wish to
do with that.

> It can be incredibly labor-intensive to delve deeply into a paper and
> determine how right or wrong it is. If it's wrong, it's even more work to
> understand precisely where and how it is wrong, and then give the kind of
> feedback a hypothetical egoless author genuinely interested solely in ideas
> would like. This can be a great deal to ask, unpaid, of people who have
> other things they would like to be doing.

Absolutely! I don't mean to imply that one should take every crackpot paper
seriously. I guess each researcher has a circle of respected colleagues whom
one can trust for a little bit of indulgence. Also, this is partly what
professors are paid for -- so I would hope they're willing to spend some time
with their maturing students, and their colleagues, who have proven track
records as researchers.

An interesting related tidbit: Some of my physics professors were very sincere
in asking eager grad students to have some humility and avoid spending much
time on the murky swamp of quantum foundations (which has claimed many decades
of smart researchers' lives)--and definitely not by ourselves, at least till
we had a few manifestly productive years working on other things, and
developed enough of a research sense to understand when to back away from
unproductive lines of inquiry.

------
GuiA
Good article; strikes a nice balance between a loving ode to a grandfather,
and exploring how science is much more conservative than one might think.

Reminds me of this article [0], and specifically this passage, which makes the
point that one metric of judging “crackpot ideas” that seem to come out of
nowhere is by what they enable. Do they lead to the emergence of new results,
or allow for the proof of things other than the direct thing that the theorem
sets out to prove?

 _”Usually when there is a breakthrough in mathematics, there is an explosion
of new activity when other mathematicians are able to exploit the new ideas to
prove new theorems, usually in directions not anticipated by the original
discoverer(s). This has manifestly not been the case for ABC, and this fact
alone is one of the most compelling reasons why people are suspicious.”_

[0]
[https://galoisrepresentations.wordpress.com/2017/12/17/the-a...](https://galoisrepresentations.wordpress.com/2017/12/17/the-
abc-conjecture-has-still-not-been-proved/)

------
it
The linked article at
[https://www.researchers.one/article/2018-10-6](https://www.researchers.one/article/2018-10-6)
seems well-argued, nothing outlandish. It doesn't talk about anything in
quantum mechanics though. I was hoping to find that somewhere.

~~~
SilasX
Yeah, it doesn't seem fair to call someone a crank if they have a lucid point
with a subtle, hard-to-spot flaw; such arguments are typically wrong in
interesting, useful ways.

Edit: At risk of self-congratulation, that's what I feel is happening to me on
HN when I try to meticulously untangle a complicated issue where I feel people
are talking past each other, and then get quickly downvoted but never
responded to. Case in point:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14310444](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14310444)

~~~
DoctorOetker
I agree with you there, pointing out more precisely how people are talking
past each other makes all sides pissed off...

~~~
SilasX
Whoa, after my linking, that old comment went from -2 to -1! I thought it was
way past the point that you could vote on it! (It's ~15 months old.)

------
n4r9
The Oxford physicist mentioned in the article may well be Joy Christian, who
has submitted numerous articles to Arxiv giving what he claims to be a
violation of Bell inequalities using Clifford algebras. You can find them just
by searching Arxiv for his name.

I spent some time reading these articles and the various refutations - and
refutations of refutations - when I was a grad student, as I wanted to nail
down where either he or Bell was fundamentally wrong. I never succeeded, but
since Bell's proof was much simpler and understandable, and involved more
elementary objects, and had been scrutinised for much longer without any
serious flaws forthcoming, whereas Christian's proofs appeared to have some
issues under debate, I came away thinking it likely that Christian was wrong.

Disappointing that I couldn't find the "central" flaw, if there was one. Sad
that a talented scientist should spend so much of their career simply
alienating themselves from the community in this way.

------
Aardwolf
I don't understand what the paradox in the water/wine paradox is, after
checking out its PDF (linked in the article,
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252476141_The_WineW...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252476141_The_WineWater_Paradox_background_provenance_and_proposed_resolutions)).

The problem is defined without giving the distribution(s). Specifying a
distribution makes the problem mathematically solvable.

A uniform distribution for representing a ratio of 1/3 to 3 between two things
does not match reality well because it gives more weight to one than the
other, but I don't see why that's a paradox. You could generate random valid
wine/water amounts (reject invalid combinations) and measure distribution of
many experiments of that? You can define any distribution you want that makes
more sense than those uniform ones. Ultimately though something is not
specified, the distribution of the water amount and the distribution of the
wine amount. Why is that a paradox?

EDIT: the real question is how was the jug filled up. Did someone pour a
random amount of water first, and then after that poured a random amount of
wine within the allowable limit? Or did they pour the wine first instead? Or
did they pour a random amount of both, and discarded it if after that the
ratio was not within the 1/3 to 3 limit? Or some other method? That determines
the distribution. The distribution of the ratio is more like a derived
distribution, derived from the distribution of the wine, the distribution of
the water, and how those two distributions depend on each other based on the
method used to fill it up.

~~~
bhk
The problem is that "uniform distribution" is hard to define. An even
distribution of water/wine values is not the same as an even distribution of
wine/water values.

Thinking in terms of possible states, you can choose an even distribution of x
from 0 to 1 and define:

water/wine = x/(1-x)

wine/water = (1-x)/x

(which avoids being water-biased or wine-biased)

~~~
omazurov
_> water/wine = x/(1-x)

> wine/water = (1-x)/x_

It's symmetrical but not "naturally" uniform. If we consider both quantities
as independent and uniformly distributed over [0..1[, then 1:1 ratio becomes
much more likely to occur than 1:1000000. I find that approach "the most
natural". The probability P(water/wine < 2) is 7/8 in that case.

~~~
bhk
I agree. There are a number of ways to model the process of creating the
mixture that will avoid the water vs. wine bias that is the essence of the
"paradox" as stated.

The main lesson is that the Principal of Indifference is "not even wrong".
(It's nonsense.)

------
bmc7505
"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart
you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong. In that simple
statement is the key to science." -Feynman

~~~
n4r9
Surely this is more relevant to scientific theories, rather than a logical
theory of interpretation of probability?

------
rossdavidh
It seems that, in some ways, a "crank" is not defined by what they believe or
say, nor by whether what they believe or say is true, but by the relation
between themselves and their society. Had Freud been in a society that treated
the idea of the Oedipus complex differently, perhaps he would have become a
crank. Some, like Darwin, were too circumspect to become cranks, but plenty of
respected scientists, whether their main ideas were right or wrong, were not
"cranks" mainly because of the way their peers reacted to them, not because of
anything about them, or their ideas.

~~~
scotty79
Freud was definitely a crank. People back then just didn't know any better so
they never called him on his bs on the spot.

I was interested in psychology in high school trying to understand people
around me. I even considered studying psychology. Then somebody gave me Freud
to read. The horror I felt when I understood that his "theories" were just the
observation of the world but through his deeply disturbed eyes and uniquely
bent mind...

After that I decided that I don't want to have anything to do professionally
with trade that still haven't properly distanced themselves and apologized for
ever considering that this Freud guy had some merit.

Freud, the father of psychoanalysis.

Why not António Egas Moniz, the father of neurology, neurosurgery and
psychiatrics.

~~~
gnulinux
I know absolutely nothing about psychology except I read some Freud. I don't
have any opinions about psychology, or the nature of psychology, or Freud (tbh
I'm not that interested either). But I'm not clear why I'm supposed to believe
you more than psychology community. See, I'm not trying to be skeptical, I'm
just trying to understand who is crank, and you stating Freud crank doesn't
seem to make him crank in my eyes. Am I wrong? Why?

~~~
scotty79
You are not wrong. You shouldn't believe me over anyone else. I'm just sharing
personal experience and opinion.

If you want to form an opinion about Freud please do research what
psychological community thinks about him and why. Basically, "he was asking
interesting questions and giving wrong answers but we remember and value him
for the questions."

> I know absolutely nothing about psychology except I read some Freud.

For me it sounds like "I know absolutely nothing about piloting aircraft
except I read some notes of failed inventor that tried to build a flapping
wings plane before Wright brothers flew, but noone remembers his name because
aviation is not psychology."

Or "I know exactly nothing about solar system except I read some Ptolemy."

If you are interested in Freud, read Freud. If you are interested in
psychology read something way more modern.

What I think distasteful is that psychological society didn't distance their
trade from Freud enough and in 2018 you were under the impression that reading
Freud counts in any way towards learning psychology.

And to address your more general point. How can you know if Freud is the crank
or I'm the crank without knowing anything about the subject and without any
interest in the subject?

You can't but it's ok since you have no interest. And if you are pressed
against the wall you are safer with opinion of majority. Not even majority of
psychological community. Just majority of people. Freud was famous so he can't
be that bad.

------
your-nanny
Just finished reading one of the guys papers. I've read a lot of crack pots,
and this guy's paper exhibited none of the typical features (megalomania,
nonsequiturs, grandiose claims, complaints about persecution or conspiracies
to silence the truth, and. so on). He might be wrong (didn't read carefully
enough to reach my own conclusions, and I'm well aware of my own limitations),
or he might have gone too far from his own expertise to be taken seriously by
the right people, but not a crack pot

------
yters
The basic idea doesn't sound crackpottish. There is only one correct
representation of water to wine ratio, and a uniform distribution over all
possible arrangements of water and wine would only give a single answer.
Sounds like the problem lies in how the principle of insufficient reason is
being applied.

~~~
ajkjk
It strikes me instead as rather trivial.

Burnside's Lemma, a fairly elementary result in group theory / combinatorics,
is regularly used to compute probabilities by enumerating symmetries of the
system under study. It's not a logical stretch at all to extend this to
continuous / infinite-dimensional systems, and I think most theoretical
physicists would be aware of this.

~~~
yters
Very odd that a world renown physicist would be branded a crackpot for making
this observation. Why would making the principle of indifference apply to the
continuous domain be controversial?

~~~
ajkjk
Well, we'd have to read what he was showing people to know. Maybe his
presentation was deeply obfuscated, or maybe he was saying something slightly
more subtle than what I mentioned. I'm just guessing from the hints in the
article.

From some googling I did find this: [https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-
ph/0310073](https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0310073)

~~~
yters
This is an interesting conclusion:

"Probabilities in physics could also be said to be measures of information
interpreted within the framework of a physical theory."

------
gcbw2
So annoying they didn't link to the full articles, in it's various forms.

