New Math Proof Could Help Us Describe the Earth's Interior | Hacker News Reader

New Math Proof Could Help Us Describe the Earth's Interior

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82 pointsselimthegrim8 comments

Not to insult this important work, but the headline makes this sound a lot more important than it is, although "math proof" should have clued me in otherwise.

I was expecting something that'd actually explain why our planet's core is still hot, without using the thermonuclear crutch, given how it is nearly solid iron (not liquid) at such temperatures; such as properly integrating plasma physics (ie, Birkeland currents) into the math.

It's synonymous with the Nature headline: "Long-awaited mathematics proof could help scan Earth's innards"

http://www.nature.com/news/long-awaited-mathematics-proof-co...

I fail to see how either headline is not an accurate representation of the result.

The problem is that it's unclear the maths result lines up exactly with reality -- as I understand it, this is that a "perfect scan" lines up exactly with one model of reality. What we want is that some kind of "nearly accurate scan" produces a "nearly accurate reality". From my (limited) reading, the proof doesn't seem to demonstrate that (maybe I scanned it too quickly)

I agree that's a limitation of the proof, but this is a thread about journalism tone. What alternative headline would you or the OP prefer? How much weaker does it need to be? Is "could theoretically help" weak enough, or do we need to go all the way to "could hypothetically, maybe, possibly help"?

Forgive me, but it's frustrating to see Monday morning quarterbacking on a huge, important result that was the culmination of decades of work by the authors. Prior to this, the most general result in boundary rigidity was https://arxiv.org/abs/1205.6425, which only works on simple metrics.

I'm not sure your inflated expectations were a result of the headline.

The headline explicitly says "could" and "describe", not "will", "explain" and "integrate".

I'm all for clear headlines, but demanding that they don't also raise unrealistic expectations is a bit much.

I am pretty sure that the work depends on the speed of sound being tied to just density. But it isn't. Sound travels faster in some directions than others.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170213124312.h...

Does this provide a new constructive way of mapping a space (which would be exciting) or just a proff to a known conjecture which is already being used to map spaces? (also cool but not as much)

I work in related areas of math but don't know anything about the applied side of this stuff. The general rule of thumb though is that whatever algorithm the mathematicians are proving correct is chosen so that it is easy to analyze and isn't going to have the best convergence properties for actual use. After this result, though, expect others to tackle questions like faster converging algorithms, stability, etc. There are exceptions though: Newton's method was both ridiculously fast and easy to work with mathematically and is still used in both applied and pure contexts today.

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