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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

"For more than 100 hundred years, these systems were held back by a limitation that was considered to be fundamental ... But that limitation is now a thing of the past."

We should bear breakthroughs like this in mind every time someone appeals to fundamental limitations of physics (or any other field).

So many times I hear people object that something can't be done because of some fundamental limit. But research like this proves that limits that are considered fundamental sometimes aren't, and we can't know ahead of time which of these limits really are fundamental and which only appear so.

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Let's be clear to differentiate when we're talking about fundamental laws like conservation of momentum or unitarity versus "how much energy can be stored in a fiber", which was really just the derivation someone did on a specific class of fibers and then assumed that every other fiber would be the same thing (some homogenous material, boundary conditions, etc.).

Calling this particular result "breaking a fundamental law" is just typical hyperbolic science PR.

Yeah a more accurate title in these cases is often something like "assumptions of theoretical law don't quite apply in this case or can be otherwise worked around in practice" but that doesn't get clicks.

Another good semi-recent example that comes to mind is the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem being "broken" by compressed sensing.

More importantly, we should be vigilantly suspicious anytime an article says something about breaking a fundamental limit of physics.

It's not really a fundamental law of physics though.. More like an engineering law

> these systems were held back by a limitation that was considered to be fundamental

This is the key distinction: -proven- fundamental is very different from -considered- fundamental.

Overturning Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle would shatter physics as we know it.

Overturning a misconception is far more mundane.

How do you ever prove something in an empirical science?

There are various levels of how rigorous evidence is. Apparently, the law in question was made based on assumptions about the materials involved, and as someone else pointed out there was a ten year gap between the mathematical explanation and actual implementation, so I guess these materials are quite complex.

Also, this does not invalidate the previous law necessarily; we still use Newton's laws because its assumptions hold under most circumstances.

By building things that work.

How exactly would you distinguish between 'proven' fundamental and merely 'considered' fundamental?

I mean, sure, some laws like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle can be proven mathematically from the axioms of a theory, but how exactly would that make it more fundamental than a law that is considered an axiom itself?

I'm not too knowledgeable in these things, but I'd guess it'd really just depend on the same things everything else does in science: supporting data.

Certain things have an immense amount of supporting data.

The famous philosopher of science Karl Popper disagrees, and few disagree with him - science can definitively disprove, but not definitively prove anything.

PS FWIW Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle isn't understood now as it was then - that principle as it was has been overturned.

Fundamental limitations reach expiry near the ten thousand year mark, after the civilization, language, and science used to define the limitation have all disappeared into the forgotten past.

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