
Has elegance betrayed physics? - okket
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4022
======
analog31
>>> In my view, the slow pace of new discoveries in fundamental physics is to
a large extent the natural outcome of our earlier, spectacular success. It’s
been hard to make improvements. Patience may be required.

One of my favorite analogies is that it took humanity more than 1000 years to
invent algebra. Now we teach it to schoolchildren.

The lesson is that no matter how proud we are of our progress in a field, the
next problem might just be a stumper, and we have no idea how long it will
take to solve.

Sometimes I like to bring up the lesson of algebra when talking with managers
about project estimates. ;-)

~~~
amelius
Or maybe reality just isn't elegant.

An analogy would be psychology. The evolutionary path our brains took to
develop to their current state is ... ugly. Why should things be different in
physics?

~~~
mycall
Does evolution affect physics?

~~~
epistasis
There's two different things called physics: first there's the set of
concepts, equations, techniques, and models that we as humans use to
understand the world. Second, there's the way the actual physical world works.

As a human endeavor to have our brains predict things about the physical
world, physics has to "run" on the human brain. In that sense, evolution
shapes the physics that humans can conceive and understand. Evolution doesn't
change what actually happens physically, so it doesn't affect physics that
way.

~~~
Radim
The tricky part is that your first "physics" (human models) is also a part of
the physical world. The human concepts and equations affect what humans do,
which changes the physical world. There's a bit of a feedback loop.

Concepts, ideas, equations and models absolutely _do_ change the world, in a
very real and physical sense. They do not (probably) affect the fundamental
laws of physics, though.

~~~
okket
A good example of such a feedback loop are computers. It is impossible to
think of modern physics without them, on the experimental side at least.

Another example are computers themselves. You can't build computers without
computers, so they are already kind of building themselves, with us humans
using as evolutionary slaves/hosts.

~~~
whatshisface
Computers are involved in the practical side of modern physics, but not in the
conceptual side. When it is demonstrated that an algorithm will produce a
trust-able result, no reference is made to any "real" aspect of computers.
Instead, the algorithms are designed based on symbol manipulation and could
just as well be carried out by a platonic physicist writing notes in the
Mediterranean sand. The specific details of how computers are actually made
impacts the implementation but not the results.

------
shawn
_Feynman 's Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and Life_ is a good read:
[https://www.amazon.com/Feynmans-Rainbow-Search-Beauty-
Physic...](https://www.amazon.com/Feynmans-Rainbow-Search-Beauty-
Physics/dp/0307946495)

Minor spoiler alert.

Feynman had a strong dislike for string theory, even going so far as to shout
at someone "I don't want to talk about string theory!" Presumably, Feynman
could sense that this kind of "search for beauty" was against empiricism. I
always found it interesting that even back then, when empirical observation
seemed to rein supreme, there were those who eschewed it and searched for
meaning beyond what nature presents to us.

~~~
Avshalom
Beauty... isn't the usual concept associated with String Theory.

~~~
mcherm
But to a disturbing extent, arguments for and against particular claims in
string theory are often made on the grounds of beauty.

------
noobermin
As I get older I just get more cranky and tired. The LHC returned a negative
result for SUSY, it's time to stop and to just accept that. For heaven's sake,
the moment MM started thinking the earth was dragging the ether they should
have realized they should stop, and at least history could remember them more
fondly.[0]

And we're getting to a point where philosophers are reconsidering Poppler's
Criterion? It's time to stop. Every day these people continue publishing about
SUSY is a day Young Earth Creationists and Climate Change Deniers can notch
down as evidence in their favor.

[0] I think it actually isn't widely known that Michaelson and Morley didn't
publish their experiment as evidence against a static ether and instead
claimed it validated the "ether dragging" hypothesis.

------
deepnotderp
I always found the bias towards "beautiful physics" to be odd.

Yes, it's true, Maxwell's equations are simple and elegant and the Lagrangian
of the standard model is, well, not. But that does not necessarily mean it's
wrong! Nature's ugly sometimes...

~~~
tomjakubowski
Huh? I'm new to much of this but keep thinking the Lagrangian is incredibly
elegant: a tool which boils the determination of a physical system's behavior
down to minimizing a single definite integral. That takes my breath away.

~~~
whatshisface
You're talking about the _idea_ of the Lagrangian, the parent was talking
about the specific Lagrangian that describes the standard model of particle
physics. If you write it all out it takes about a page.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
It's a Frankentheory - a collection of reanimated theory body parts sewn
together. I totally get why physicists want something more elegant.

The problems are social. Financialisation means a lot of smart PhDs get
hoovered up by Wall St to do (effectively useless) work as quants. At the same
time, pressure in academia - also created ultimately by financialisation - has
made genuinely original creative work an extremely risky career move.

So PhD advisors are far more likely to say "Don't do that" when a hot prospect
says "I want to explore this unusual thing which i found from way back which
no one else is looking at."

And the idea that a patent clerk without a formal academic affiliation could
publish papers that transform physics has become ridiculous.

Conversely mainstream ideas of questionable value - like string theory - which
should only ever have remained a fringe interest have become absolutely
central, because they're a relatively easy way for ambitious PhDs aiming for
tenure to produce plausible physics-like content.

Science was working pretty well around the turn of the century. Now there's
sand in the gears, and the entire machine is in danger of seizing up.

~~~
whatshisface
What do you mean by "financilisation?"

------
hyperpallium
Surely the problem is lack of inexplicable data? e.g. relativity had constant
speed of light in all directions.

Sure, we _could_ come up with theories without suc data, but the search space
is just too inconceivably big to explore. We need constraints to narrow it
down... and to have a reason to think it might be true.

Empirical precedes theoretical.

------
dang
A couple other threads about Hossenfelder's book:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17434430](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17434430)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17326642](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17326642)

------
SiempreViernes
That’s a decent review from Wilczek, who years after LHC started grimly ruling
out SUSY models gave a talk about the next hundred years of physics and would
speak of nothing but SUSY.

If I wrote a book about theorists who just kept working on the same elegant
ideas, Wilczeck would be a source of inspiration.

------
seltzered_
Sabine's recent lecture at SFI is worth the watch:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdhKfzABsEQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdhKfzABsEQ)

------
quantum_state
The recent claims on math misled physicists is a bit over blown ... as
everyone would agree, a true physicist uses math only as a tool for trying to
get at the physics in nature ... though a physicist may try to stretch an
existing math model of the theory, but that is it ... only as a way to explore
... the final say will still come from how well it fits the behavior of nature
...

~~~
TangoTrotFox
Perhaps you're just being incomplete in your final thought there, but I think
what you've said as is really exemplifies the problem. Science is not just
fitting something to data. Science is about predictions, testability,
falsifiability, and more. Give any set of input/output data and you can create
some sort of model or regression that fits to that data. But that model does
not inherently mean so much, especially as the inputs start to become more
complex -- meaning the output might not even be mapping to anything
fundamental. I think the article hit most strongly on that with this comment:

 _" Hossenfelder’s real target, when you strip away some unfortunate
terminology, is not beauty but self-satisfaction, which encourages
disengagement from reality. That attitude reaches its theoretical apex in the
doctrine of “postempirical science,” which argues that social consensus, not
experimental evidence, determines scientific validity. Here she quotes
physicist George Ellis, rebuking physicists and philosophers who adopt that
attitude: “There are physicists now saying we don’t have to test their ideas
because they are such good ideas. They’re saying—implicitly or explicitly—that
they want to weaken the requirement that theories have to be tested. To my
mind that’s a step backward by a thousand years.”_"

Much of 'science' now a days has started to veer down the path of
pseudoscience, and the path there is paved with regression mapping and
'science' by consensus.

------
Animats
_“In the temple of knowledge, we are the ones digging in the basement, probing
the foundations…. And when we find ourselves on to something, we call for
experimentalists to unearth deeper layers. In the last century, this division
of labor between theorists and experimentalists worked very well. But my
generation has been stunningly unsuccessful.”_

That's a modern viewpoint. Historically, experimental results preceded theory
in physics. That was certainly true for classical physics. The early years of
subatomic physics were trying to put some structure around experimental
results. Somewhere around 40 years ago, though, things got stuck. Experimental
results became much harder to get, as the reachable areas had been explored.

Theory not verified by experiment is useless. Science is prediction, not
explanation. (Fred Hoyle, the physicist, wrote that, but he was writing an SF
novel at the time.)

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electricslpnsld
> Frank Wilczek is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT in
> Cambridge, Massachusetts; founding director of the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute
> and chief scientist at the Wilczek Quantum Center in Shanghai, China;
> Distinguished Origins Professor at Arizona State University in Tempe; and a
> professor of physics at Stockholm University and Nordita, also in Stockholm.

How does one simultaneously hold three professorships?

~~~
mnl
Earning a Nobel prize helps.

------
choonway
there might even be something more beautiful that we have not discovered yet.

