Dirac, Penrose, and Wolfram | Hacker News Reader

Dirac, Penrose, and Wolfram

kirstenhacker.wordpress.com

27 pointsnixtaken9 comments

I invoke Poe's law on this. It's meaningless not-even-wrong physics written with a narrative structure that would be best modeled as a random walk.

I honestly can't tell if it's satire or bunk.

For something in this vein that I find quite delightful, check out https://www.reddit.com/r/VXJunkies/ -- I definitely know which side of Poe's law it's on.

agreed, I can't discern anything concrete in here

OK, now I'm really confused.

The author has published papers in the past, such as:

https://journals.aps.org/prab/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevSTAB.1...

My work happens to be related to accelerator physics, though I don't know much about free-electron lasers (the subject of the paper). But here's the thing: The paper looks pretty normal, though I don't understand chunks of it. It only has one author, which is a bit weird, but nothing jumps out at me as bunk.

Gosh. I hope she's OK.

That's an applied physics (aka engineering) paper. It is perfectly possible to be an expert on some narrow applied topic, yet have no understanding at all of the theoretical foundations.

it reads like a somewhat disconnected piece of how different fields of physics relate to roughly the same thing by using different language, I can't really judge the physics analogies because all I got is undergrad maths

Ignoring the article's other issues, reading "Math is, of course, a product of geometry and physics" was completely unbearable. Reading that actually physically hurt me, and must have every philosopher of mathematics from Russell on down rolling in their graves. Yikes yikes yikes

I find it an enjoyable read. Written by a novelist not unfamiliar with physics. Makes you think.

The author talks about three people, two of whom are accomplished mathematicians and one of whom draws pretty pictures. I don't quite understand where they are headed; they're researching for a novel, which is a path that I've been on for a few years as well, but I'm not sure what they've actually drawn on from physics in order to write their linguistics-focused story.

This is absolute nonsense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com