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Comment by andrewheins | Hacker News Reader

I may be in the minority, but I'll be slightly disappointed (although extremely impressed) if CERN actually does announce they've sighted the Higgs.

I'll be slightly disappointed because there's something appealing in the possibility that the universe doesn't fit nicely into an equation.

On the other hand, that our great minds were able to see a problem, come up with a solution, test it and then say "Yes, we accurately predicted an unobservable, and yet fundamental principal of our universe" would be damn impressive.

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> I'll be slightly disappointed because there's something appealing in the possibility that the universe doesn't fit nicely into an equation.

iirc, the Standard Model is a few pages of equations. Not nicely at all.

"A few pages of equations" is pretty damn good for the software the universe runs on. Imagine saying "iirc, Portal's physics engine is a few pages of code. Not concise at all".

(In fairness, we can be fairly sure that the Standard Model isn't the whole deal; it doesn't do gravity properly, for instance. And you need more than just the bare equations to explain what's going on -- though I think a lot of that is just impedance matching for the benefit of our not-very-mathematics-tolerant brains. But, still. "A few pages" isn't so bad.)

A couple of issues with your comparison: math is much more succinct than most code--it's more like a few pages of APL than a few pages of C++; also, code has to deal with performance so elegant solutions tend to give way to complicated messes in the face of finite hardware and imperfect optimizing compilers.

That said, you do have a good point. However, extreme complexity arising from a simple input is not that surprising--just look to the r pentomino in the game of life or the Mandelbrot set.

Is this an argument for or against functional programming?

Or in other words if you think the Standard Model is neat and tidy, got another thing coming.

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