Comment by PeterWhittaker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PeterWhittaker | Hacker News Reader

I don't know where to begin....

Physics simple?

Physical intuition?

The single most successful program of physics is quantum mechanics, and it is neither intuitive nor simple. Relativity, while conceptually simple, isn't so simple either and is far from intuitive (consider that momentum is conserved during a relativistic near-miss collision only if one considers the entire collision over a sufficiently length period, since at any moment the force vector between the bodies does NOT align with separation vector, since the force acting at one moment was exchanged, at c, when the bodies were in different positions).

There are a lot of simple concepts in physics, many of them basically teaching aids to get people started. When one gets deep into the field, simple and intuitive go by the wayside.

Why would you even bother responding based on just the headline of the article? The author is not using 'simple' as a synonym for 'easy to learn'.

Because it is awful.

Titles have to be short, and as such they can't hope to represent the contents of the article completely accurately. If you wanted to do that you would have to make the title equal to the article's contents.

Based on the parts which I've read so far, a more accurate title would be 'Why some currently hot parts of AI not well understood, and some parts of Physics well understood?'

I think the original title is an ok approximation of this.

TBF it's a terrible title and the overview isn't exactly enticing in it's implication:

Let's get physicists to look at AI so we might make some progress, btw here's a new book that tells us how

I'm not saying that's what the article is actually about but that's what I read from it and it's crass enough that I didn't read further.

It's a risk any catchy headline takes. Seems like the same property that entices people to click also entices people to engage the headline itself.

I read TFA, hence the reference to intuition. There is nothing in the article that makes a compelling case of physics being simple, other than rhetoric.

We forget at our peril the Michelson-Morley Experiment and the Ultraviolet Catastrophe, and if we forget these, we may assume now too that we have it all figured out.

Of course, active researchers in the subject, both theoretical and experimental, do not forget.

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