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Comment by peter_d_sherman | Hacker News Reader

"For the past few years, Hartnoll, Sachdev, and other theorists have been attacking the problem using a surprising “holographic duality” that mathematically connects systems of scrambled quantum particles, like those in strange metals, to imaginary black holes in one higher dimension. (The black hole pops out of the particle system like a hologram.)"

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Any time I see this kind of esoteric research I can't quite shake the feeling that secretly they're taking the piss.

I didnt' realize that mathematics was esoteric.

At this level, it offers a near-perfect example of the very definition of esoteric.

You're telling me that mapping "scrambled quantum particles" to "imaginary black holes in a higher dimension" is not esoteric?

From my reading those phrases are actually attempts to use terms a lay person can understand i.e. the opposite of esoteric. "Holographic duality" is the only phrase that is legitimately esoteric, the rest is just baby talk.

There's probably a few thousand people on earth making contributions in this field. Calling it esoteric is probably fair.

Claiming it makes something think that they are taking the piss merely because it's hard to understand isn't really the reaction I'd expect on HN.

>Claiming it makes something think that they are taking the piss merely because it's hard to understand isn't really the reaction I'd expect on HN.

It's not that it's simply hard to understand, it's that the language used is fantastical - "imaginary black holes" is a pretty far out notion for many.

That's not what OP said. Is your claim that no field of mathematics is esoteric?

I was simply commenting in reply to the statement, "Any time I see this kind of esoteric research..."

My education in mathematics goes to calculus, and I am aware of the complexities of higher orders of mathematics such as what is used in physics, but I never had considered the field to be "esoteric".

It started with Pythagoreanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoreanism. Continued with sacred geometry. And also holofractal is popular.

I think its an arrogance of software people that because we had to do partial differential equations at uni we're somehow pretty well versed in the other hard sciences. This may not even be that fringe.

This appears to be more pop-science trying yet failing to provide a succinct translation of what is happening. It sounds like certain researchers are relating a better studied mathematical model from a different field to the problem at hand - the energy transmission speed limit that is the focus of the article - to see if their mathematical machinery from the other field could be useful. I've got a physics and math background that focused on quantum physics studies but I'm still guessing with this interpretation.

It is pretty clear they are describing the Holographic Principle there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle

I'm not even sure whether the science is sketchy and well depicted or whether the journalist's interpretation went off the rocker...

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