Comment by rapjr9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rapjr9 | Hacker News Reader

I have a pet conspiracy theory for why there has been so little progress in physics for so long. The invention of the nuclear bomb scared a lot of people, it made them scared of physics. What else might physicists turn up that could change the world in dramatic ways? Anti-gravity? Ray guns? Other dimensions? Travel to other worlds? All bad for business, no one is going to buy your airplanes or air craft carriers if they can buy an anti-gravity machine. So physics was suppressed by both business and government. Physicists were given "safe" work to do (ITER, quants) that would occupy them and keep them from exploring wild stuff. Grant financing was controlled so that only safe research would be conducted. It would be fairly invisible to the world, just a few high level decisions would determine how the funding was directed. I get the impression that if this was indeed a conscious decision that it's starting to fall apart as younger generations take over and become frustrated with the direction of physics. They weren't there when the A-bomb was invented, and nuclear weapons have not been on peoples minds much for a long time, most people have not lived in a time when one was used. So they see interesting topics and want to explore them and encounter resistance from more established scientists. It's a conspiracy theory because it would involve some buy-in from a fair number of physicists to make it work, but a lot of physicists when I was getting my BA in physics were very loudly saying "never again" about atomic weapons and felt it had tarnished the whole profession. It's very difficult to say what humanity would be capable of handling in terms of radical new inventions. Anti-gravity could solve many large problems, but it might make it even easier to destroy Earth. Once new knowledge exists it is hard to suppress it. Stopping it from from ever existing seems easier. I guess we'll find out if physics has been suppressed if the dam breaks and new ideas start proliferating. The nature of the new physics would be a big clue as to whether research in it was suppressed. I'm reminded of Elon Musk, he seems to have had really radical success in some very stagnant industries, just by trying instead of accepting limits, and being able to fund his ideas himself.

The theory stops working imho if you take competition into account. The world is not aligned as a single bloc of power. While it’s not completely unthinkable (but extremely unlikely, imho) that some scientists plus some decision makers from, say, the liberal west might collude to achieve this kind of suppression, their counterparts from one or multiple other blocs might not, because they want to dominate and anti-gravity guns surely give you some nice advantage.

You'd be amazed how quickly powerful discoveries find military purpose.

An important thing to consider here is that the first engineering project which had to make use of Einstein's Theory of Relativity was GPS --- the time/position calculations to triangulate location based on satellites is so exacting that it has to take into account gravimetric distortions based on the receivers being further down in the gravity well than the GPS satellites:

https://xkcd.com/808/

This seems fun

https://www.alternativephysics.org/book/GPSmythology.htm

Why would the receaver need a clock if they are comparing pulses from satelites. All the satelites are all up there.

The desire to dominate can take a weird turn if using your anti-gravity guns reveals them and makes it likely others will soon invent the same. There is precedent for this, say in electronic warfare or cyberwarfare. As soon as you reveal your uber virus, anyone can take it apart and modify it for their own purposes. So you don't reveal it except as a last resort. Competition doesn't come into play then, everyone hides their secret weapons and never uses them unless they have to, and tries to make sure information in that area is suppressed. However, as I say in other comments, this may have been a bottom up conspiracy, not a top down conspiracy, though it may have moved to the top as the scientists themselves gained power. But the fear would still exist at all levels; sure your anti-gravity gun gives you an advantage, but what if it eventually causes random micro black holes to appear near where you use it, obliterating infrastructure before evaporating? We just don't know what the repercussions of new technologies will be, and while the risks have seemed low in areas like software, the risks seem higher with fundamental new physics. People are historically pretty bad at predicting how technology/science will play out in the long term. AI was a joke for a long time, until it wasn't. The internet was hailed as revolutionary, but it seems very different than it did in the year 2000. It's a lot like computer security, you can imagine the possibilities, but you probably can't imagine ALL the possibilities. It takes time and collaboration to scope out what it is that is new that can now be accomplished. That uncertainty scares some people and excites others. Seems kind of like walking through a minefield littered with Christmas presents. Some people might decide to leave the presents where they are.

There are some good comments here, thanks! There has been an international component to physics research cooperation. It seems not inconceivable that physicists in many countries, meeting at paper conventions and such might have agreed and recruited each other to try to prevent the next atomic bomb type invention. So while competition between countries is certainly real, competition between scientists might be somewhat different. You'd think there would be some people who would pursue it regardless, but they'd probably have to work with a team, and not everyone on the team may have supported the goals. It's just a theory, but it has some plausibility. Perhaps there are people everywhere who have decided not to be part of endeavors that could be disruptive and they've done us all a favor or have kept us from discovering the secrets of the universe. Who knows? The ethics of science has been mostly left to chance and individual decisions.

An easier theory is that the Standard Model is so good that it's very difficult to find anywhere it fails. So there's no experimental fuel to propel physics forward.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...

What time frame are you talking about here? Starting in 01950, 01995, 02010?

If we're talking about 01995, it's conceivable that, say, the US and CERN could coordinate to suppress research into hafnium bombs, AVLIS, antigravity, or whatever. If we're talking about research much prior to that point, though, you'd have to include the Russians in the conspiracy. Probably not just any Russians, either; probably Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Tsar-Bomba-era Sakharov, and his successors. And, on the other side, people like J. Edgar Hoover, JFK, McNamara, Kissinger, Johnny von Neumann, and Teller.

I don't want to say it's literally impossible for Brezhnev or his underlings to have made a secret agreement with Kissinger and Teller to suppress the development of theoretical physics in order to keep the world predictable. But I do think it's pretty implausible, and there would have been an enormous incentive to cheat on any such secret agreement.

In the 01990s, though, it could have become plausible. But, remember that that's also when Pakistan became a nuclear weapons state, shortly followed by North Korea in 02006. And the People's Republic of China has had nuclear weapons since 01964, so they evidently had significant physics capabilities that they were willing to use for warfare (which was a huge priority; Mao reorganized the country's economy to resist an anticipated US invasion), and they dominated the TOP500 supercomputer list until this year, when they withdrew from it in apparent protest against the efforts of the USA to reverse their technological progress with a worldwide system of export controls.

So I think there's maybe a ten-year window when this could have happened somewhat, about 01992 to 02002. Both before and after that, there are too many countries with strong physics communities that are too bitterly opposed to make such cooperation plausible.

Reading the comments here my thinking has been revised. I'm no longer suggesting the elites were conspiring, at least initially, I'm suggesting the physicists were conspiring for ethical reasons. Some of them may have moved up the ladder and reached positions of some power. Physics is magic to most people, hiding possibilities in math and technicality seems possible. Anyone who has written code professionally has probably been faced with similar decisions, biases can be encoded, and you have to decide how you are going to approach these things. For example, do you add a race field to the medical database or not? In 1990 it was often left up to the programmer. Sometimes things are decided far below the level of the people running the show. Regardless, I do think my theory is far fetched, innate curiosity seems likely to have caused some people to explore further regardless of the risks, and an overt conspiracy that eventually reached high levels seems likely to have been soon discovered.

I have never seen someone prefix dates with a zero like this. Why are you doing that?

It's from The Long Now Foundation: a nonprofit established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking.

Perhaps this is of interest to you.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yTiztUNrhhM

I'd heard the name LaRouche but I've never read his history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_LaRouche

Quite astounding, he seems to have been both woke in some ways (climate change) and fundamentally misguided. I can see a lot of Trump's playbook in his life. I was imagining a much more passive conspiracy, people refusing to participate for ethical reasons, rather than an elite conspiracy by the Venutians/Illuminati. The video seems unintelligable, he makes so many references to obscure history that may or may not be true (and how would he know?) it becomes meaningless without years of research and even then, the intentions and thoughts of historical figures are difficult to ascertain.

Yeah, would take years to fact check.

Some secrets keep themselves.

> "The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper." —EP

This is why… “science” needs lions ever ready to deploy the quite never old ultraviolence of wit (echoing FWN?)?

[and not awards or nobel prizes: “A good sciencing is its own reward” - not Faora-Ul]

(EP,wrong era, similar to HRV?)

Wit may be the epitaph of an emotion, but it may also be the shem capable of animating a golem...

If PE had been from Krypton, would death have been the moment one left the essential truths of mathsing for the accidental truths of sciencing?

Sounds about right?

EDIT: placeholder for thinking more about this in context of Acemoglu & Restrepo: according to them ai as pointed at science today will not lead to even midterm econ growth

“Why zero-to-one’s cannot be automated”

id=41839542, note that nongoverning glamour-chasing elite Swedes didnt accolade Acemoglu for the institution-agnostic (“weird”er?) parts of his work that we were recently interested in

Edit: on 2nd slightly sleep deprived thought, seems to me that its flipped: sciencing is conerned with the essential and mathsing is the data-to-code..

If sleep deprivation gets you to anything near FAKvS' benzene structure (what did TAE think?) it may yet be useful!

Sounds like we've greatly constrained our IRL hops to {1,2}. Are you familiar with any tulle-clad tensor inventors?

> Another damned thick heavy book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr Gibbon? —P WH, DoG&E

Sleep deprivation might have led to {2->1}, but the almost iambic lines you 404’d on were borne of a restful sleep under fully endogenic (biochemical) influence. (Thats why you 404’d)

Nice you brought up the tensoring, my current work related (& pseudo AMP laced) investigations (thanx to your earlier hint) are cloyingly whispering: that Werner’s unitary designs should be reworked with bright eyed bushy tailism for cases t> X

It's odd how Hollywood goes to extreme lengths to make people's faces visible under/despite helmets. I wonder if this is related to the fact that we've evolved for some reason to have visible sclera?

1. I saw some Planet of the Apes remake tiktok recently, but the huge sclera pretty much squicked me on their costuming.

(then again, I really appreciated the sclera on Khryusha the pig; maybe because he's not supposed to be a realistic character?)

2. Some coats of arms have battle helmets; some have barred-face helmets. I always figured the latter were designed to make it easier to drink at the beer tent, but maybe even they agreed with Hollywood on the visibility issue?

the Roman (allies') sol'n: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emesa_helmet

3. Disney used to have an exercise for animators: make a sack of flour emote. Maybe actors who intend to play hard characters ought to have to do the screen test with a bag over their head?

Are you making an economic argument [pace HRV] that wit is better than distinction for avoiding underproduction of science, if it were to be monetarily compensated solely by its [near-zero] marginal unit returns?

> Je défie qu’on me montre une république ancienne ou moderne dans laquelle il n’y ait pas eu de distinctions. On appelle cela des hochets ! Eh bien ! c’est avec des hochets que l’on mène les hommes. —NB, 18 Floréal X

("Can anyone show me a republic, ancient or modern, without any achievements? They call them swag! OK — swag is how men are led.")

Id have hoped that it isn’t much of any kind of argument, since sharp wits can be an indispensable aid to …

(pace Edward Gibbon — personally, via Feynman*!)

… leading by example (showing >>> telling)

( but also/and by swagger

   (Since wit, appropriately weaponized & singularly demo’d, is its own distinction?
   )
 )

NB hadnt experienced Eurovision, might have expanded his idea of swag..

* >But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous (quoted in TFLiP)

EDIT2: seems like NB had other ways to motivate his men (beside fear & swag)— according to that English historian “Livy” was smacked in this kind of context, but we’ll never know for sure now

EDIT: (material) baubles require a more or less centralized fount of honor (as republics ever had), transmission of (the clear products of) wit.. otoh, needs just… a market (of at least one)

wow, full context from Gibbon is great:

> It has been objected to Marcus, that he sacrificed the happiness of millions to a fond partiality for a worthless boy; and that he chose a successor in his own family, rather than in the republic. Nothing however, was neglected by the anxious father, and by the men of virtue and learning whom he summoned to his assistance, to expand the narrow mind of young Commodus, to correct his growing vices, and to render him worthy of the throne for which he was designed. But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy...

compare (~500 years earlier for MA; a couple of thousand for EG)

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext... et seq. (93c-95a; great foreshadowing by Anytus...)

Glad that helped! Sleeping on it, it was even more likely that NB was correctly quoted by the still unremembered English historian as having taken issue with Tacitus’ (cf the famous convo with Wieland) coverage of one or more of the emperors’ motivational techniques

The major divisions of Tacitean studies seem to be based on whether one rehydrates his dry narrative with anger* or with zeal?

  le rouge  ira
  le noir   studio

(what line might white or green Taciteans take?)

> Gesetze sind wie Würste, man sollte besser nicht dabei sein, wenn sie gemacht werden. —OELvB

> Les empires sont comme des saucisses ; pour les déguster, mieux vaut ne pas savoir comment ils sont fabriquées —not NB

("empires are like sausages: to enjoy them, better not see how they're made")

* The Onion was not supposed to be a how-to guide

EDIT: (in defence of Bonaparte re. Wieland: having both read Linebarger's Psychological Warfare covering the general theory, and myself noted a tendency, in modern US corporations as in ancient chinese imperial tales, to attach great importance to making your predecessor look bad, it's certainly a consistent position for one emperor, in reading about others, to be annoyed less by any red anti-tyrannical subtext, and more by a certain willingness to believe told tales that smacks more of cluelessness than psychopathy. I would not be surprised if Bonaparte would've claimed Bulgakov's Pilate to have been more realistically depicted.)

EDIT2: Tacitus was born (as the web seems to agree) an Equestrian, yet followed the cursus honorum (ought to be in official records), which implies imperial Rome was less vertically stratified than republican Rome?

Voltaire anticipated Bonaparte with the position "could history please have some credible villains?": https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1064250n/f48.image.r=...

[Just as I believe Bonaparte could easily have had ulterior motives in attacking a pro-republican Tacitus, I believe christian monks could easily have had ulterior motives in bothering to make copies of only the most sensational descriptions of roman emperors — especially considering Nero Claudius "never let a crisis go to waste" Caesar Augustus Germanicus had it coming, having framed them for the fire and all]

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ

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