The Laws Underlying the Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood
preposterousuniverse.com
preposterousuniverse.com
What he means is that we have a theory ("Quantum Field Theory") that is mathematically capable of predicting every physical phenomenon we're capable of observing here on earth with any instruments we've invented to date. He's definitely not saying we understand everything about the universe. By analogy, it's like saying we know conceptually what a Turing machine is and how it works, but not everything about computer science and software engineering.
It may also turn out that quantum field theory is somehow wrong, in the same way that we replaced Newtonian physics with relativity and quantum mechanics. But we still use Newtonian physics in engineering because it's only wrong in ways that rarely matter in practice.
I highly recommend watching Sean Carroll's talks and picking up one of his books. A few suggestions:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFMfW1jY1xE - "The Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time"
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrs-Azp0i3k - "Higgs Boson and the Fundamental Nature of Reality"
* http://www.amazon.com/Eternity-Here-Quest-Ultimate-Theory/dp... - "From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time"
This is stronger than "everyday life" claim, and likely false. Note that the article carefully excludes "fancy telescopes": there is a reason.
For example, we can observe supernovae. We don't have satisfactory model of core-collapse supernovae yet. In other words, if you set initial condition to right before explosion and simulate forward, stars don't explode in simulation. And critically, it is seriously entertained that this may be due to physics beyond the Standard Model, unlike life or superconductivity: e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.3112
Toddlers. We don't have a model of toddler collapse either. See her now, in 10 seconds - poof! How can we predict that with our current physics knowledge?
What I am getting at is that we only understand the Low Level laws. We still can't understand, for example, financial markets or the weather. Complex dynamic systems are still beyond our horizon of understanding, even if we know how elementary particles behave.
Another example, and this one is very basic: Predict the state of a system of 3+ bodies moving in space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem
"Mathematically predict" is too strong. For example, we can observe the mass of the electron here on earth, but our theories do not mathematically predict it. There are many similar parameters whose values must be determined empirically.
There's also the converse: properties we can mathematically predict, but for which we do not have a good theory. An example is the mass of the Tau: predicted by the Koide formula, but we don't really know why.
That's reverse of what he is saying. As you say, we understand the Turing machine (the most basic elements), but we don't understand everything it implies.
Whereas in physics, we don't understand the most basic elements, but we do understand what those elements imply (at least, the article asserts that we do).
I think he's saying we fully understand 'the most basic elements' in so far how they underpin the 'domain of everyday life'. It's a little like saying that the underlying physics behind the motion of bilard balls are completely understood with just Newtonian mechanics, even though Newtonian mechanics themselves are incomplete if applied to other domains - like explaining the motion of the planet Mercury.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/science/21ice.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_and_motorcycle_dynamic...
Also, have we figured out gravity? That's a pretty every day thing that I thought we didn't understand yet. Has observing gravity waves given us an answer there?
For example, 150 years ago, radio waves were unknown, but they are all around us, they are fundamental, and when they were discovered, they changed our daily lives.
Another example, imagine a bushman, and asking him if he understands everything. He might say, "Yeah, that's a kangaroo, that's a bush, that's dirt....everything practical, I understand. There are things about God I don't understand, but they are far away." By defining things that you don't understand as 'not important' then you understand everything important by definition.
Another example, this quote from Albert Michelson in 1894, "it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice"
In other words, it is likely that people have always thought these sorts of things, and so far have always been wrong.
And if he's not making that strong claim, the post is pointlessly tautological. ("So - like - the things we already know about everyday reality and technology are the things we, er, already totally know. Wow! Go science!")
Clearly that's always true historically, until it isn't any more, because new science [tm].
What was the point of that post? I honestly don't even.
So you're right, and not just about kangaroos, radio waves, and god.
We're an inventive animal, and we've been discovering new science [tm] for a million years or so.
If it's even remotely practical, it invariably turns into technology which completely transform our everyday experience.
Did that process stop in 2011? I suppose it's possible. But the only rational response to anyone suggesting that is extreme skepticism.
He's not claiming that.
>And if he's not making that strong claim, the post is pointlessly tautological
No quite. The claim is based on experimental evidence we gained from testing the claims of fundamental physics over the last few decades.
>What was the point of that post? I honestly don't even.
To illustrate how powerful Quantum Field Theory.
>We're an inventive animal, and we've been discovering new science
That isn't going to change.
I gave a true historical analogy of how that could not be the case, I gave a hypothetical example of how that could not be the case, and I gave a quote of someone thinking physics was basically solved right before a massive change in our basic understanding of physics.
It's easy to imagine that there is something analogous to radio waves, that are all around us, but we are unable to detect them with current technology (dark matter might be one possibility).
The point is that even if there were some yet undiscovered particles or forces, they wouldn't have any effect whatsoever on the world around us. This we can say with certainty. Even if it turns out that our current understanding of QM or GR are just approximations of the real laws of physics, again, this won't matter, much as GR doesn't matter at the speed of a moving car and thus you wouldn't take time dilation into account when you calculate the time you need to get from point A to point B.
Would you also assert that radio waves have no effect whatsoever on the world around us?
However, their existence was undetected 150 years ago. Similarly, there are likely things that are undetected by us that also will become very important once they are discovered.
What the author meant was that nothing that will be discovered in this domain will shake fundamental physics. Things that will shake fundamental physics won't come from 'everyday life', but rather from extreme environments like those found in particle accelerators, and through study of gravitational waves, CMB etc.
And you don't know that a priori. It's possible that with a hightened level of simulation, and accurate measurement of an unusual phenomenon, some fine structure emerges. I'm not going to hold my breath, but sometimes you are surprised. The yellow color of gold is a consequence of relativisitic effects, so it could have been entirely possible (if seemingly rather unlikely) that humanity discovered relativity from that angle instead.
But nobody said it was 'a priori'. It comes from thousands of experiments which probed relevant energy levels, over a period of decades.
>It's possible that with a hightened level of simulation, and accurate measurement of an unusual phenomenon, some fine structure emerges.
Sure, in fact we know the Standard Model is incomplete because it doesn't take into account dark matter.
If everything was already answered, then why offer $1M to solve an equation? Fun?
Impact on what? On the standard model and QED?
It isn't a contradiction to point out that we seem to have a very, very good model of the universe's most fundamental particle processes, but still can not simply derive from that model to even very simple things of interest. In principle, we could "just" simulate the standard model and "just" simulate a lot of water molecules under the conditions of interest and "just" watch what happens. In reality, that turns out to be many, many orders of magnitude more computation than we can do.
See also protein folding, where even without trying to run things all the way down to the standard model, things that we in principle fully understand require gobs of computation to approximate for what are in the real world simple things happening gazzilions of times per second in every living organism.
In the other direction, witness the difficulty we have trying to improve our understanding of how the universe works at the Plank scale. One imagines that if the smallest things we had were not multiple orders of magnitude larger than the scale we are trying to study that perhaps we'd have made more progress by now, but it's like trying to determine the rules of biology when the only capability you have is the ability to sling planets at each other really hard and see what happens. The miracle is that we've learned anything at all.
On that note, I've often wondered if the standard model really "works". Suppose someone with a lot more simulating power than us actually programmed it in directly and set it running, with a reasonable initial state that resembles our world. (My understanding is that inflation doesn't necessarily come out of it so we can guess that you can't just start from the big bang.) Does it really work? Is the result indistinguishable from the real world without a particle accelerator? Or is there some flaw that only comes out at scale, or does the universe crash if you create a black hole? How close are we, really? If someone waved a magic wand and said "Shazam, the standard model is now what the universe really and truly runs on!", would we notice anything different? Or would we be instantly dead because it turns out chemistry doesn't quite work right? Or perhaps at all?
Thinking about your final paragraph, I guess it gets very much at Carroll's point. I expect that he'd claim we wouldn't notice any difference at all: if we would, that would directly imply that something beyond the standard model was necessary to understand everyday life. But as he explains, we have every reason to believe we've exhaustively explored the relevant range of energies and interaction strengths. If something about chemistry required physics beyond the standard model, we would almost certainly have noticed by now.
"Playing Go", which does not fit this rubric obviously, I think, is conquered by deep learning because there is a discrete matrix of 'moves' which looks awfully lot like an image recognition matrix, and so a move which optimizes score ('classification') can be selected.
Fundamentally one of the problems is that we don't know how to score proteins. We also don't necessarily know how to score go, but it's trivial to generate solutions by running hypothetical matches because the game outcome is deterministic, solvable, and definite. While there is a decent subset of proteins whose known structures could be used to seed a database for scoring, it is very small in comparison to the universe of possibilities (20^n, where n is the length of the amino acid chain).
In short: Given an arbitrary "end-board layout" I can with our existing human knowledgebase tell you which go player has won. Given an arbitrary amino acid sequence and a proposed structure, I cannot with our existing human knowledgebase tell you if the structure is correct. Because of this limitation in creating a scoring system, while I won't say that deep learning won't be used to improve protein folding (maybe it will, indirectly) it almost certainly won't be used directly, because it is not in the same class of problem.
Im a guy that took graduate thermodynamics from the guy who discovered the statistical mechanics of the hydrophobic effect. There may be only 100 people in the world who are qualified to even describe water's molecular structure at varying conditions.
That reduces the doubt.
But we have absolutely no idea how life got here. Pick any starting point in the earth's history and try to spin a hypothesis for how cells came to be from organic molecules and other stuff lying around.
You can't do it at a high enough level of detail to even attempt the most rudimentary experiment.
At a high-level, we have a very good idea how life developed and we have reasonably good ideas how life got started. The details will most likely always elude us because tracing the exact evolution of a chaotic system consisting of immense number of particles over a huge span of time will always be beyond our grasp.
100 years ago, we understood the physical laws surrounding the everyday things like the telegraph, the radio, the bi-plane, the early cars, etc.
And 100 years from now, we will understand the physical laws surrounding everyday things like the holograph, light speed travel, the driverless hover-car, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...
Most of them might arguably not be "Physics of Everyday Life", but - number one on the list is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(arrow_of_time)
We do not know why time moves in the direction that it does! And you cannot get much more "everyday life" than that.
Free Will in a deterministic universe is non-existent so there is no physical capacity for choice, but once we breached the quantum threshold all sorts of fun concepts began emerging (like multiverses for example) that bring that lack of capacity into question.
And superconducting would change our world, yet it's still early days for both the science and engineering of efficient applications.
Maybe a follow-up is needed in 2110.
But you don't even need GR for "everyday life." For that, Newtonian gravity suffices, and the entire theory of Newtonian gravity could easily be grokked by a high school student.
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System
> Special and general relativity predict that the clocks on the GPS satellites would be seen by the Earth's observers to run 38 microseconds faster per day than the clocks on the Earth. The GPS calculated positions would quickly drift into error, accumulating to 10 kilometers per day. The relativistic time effect of the GPS clocks running faster than the clocks on earth was corrected for in the design of GPS.
More details: http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps....
Why don't you read the article? Author's second paragraph starts with: "Obviously there are plenty of things we don’t understand. We don’t know how to quantize gravity, or what the dark matter is, or what breaks electroweak symmetry." - which suggests that he may actually address your point (Hint: he does).