Why the Higgs Boson Discovery Is Disappointing
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Edit: Higgs gets a mention, but just to highlight Wolfram's complaints to him about his theory, which turned out to be correct!
Talking about stuff you've done in a blog post isn't really notable. Obviously there's more to the story, and I wouldn't point anyone to it for a general overview of 70's physics. But I read it and was interested.
Likewise, and related, dark matter/energy is a total hack. It's a shortcut contrived to sweep something we don't fully understand under the rug.
The idea of gravity as an emergent force, related to inertia, has been more appealing:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/science/13gravity.html?pag....
Later on when the Big Bang was firmly established it came to be seen as an unnecessary mistake.
In a twist of fate, when we discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe in the 90s -- also known as dark energy -- Einstein's cosmological constant Λ was the perfect place to 'absorb' it.
My personal opinion is that we'll eventually find that gravity is something completely different than the other three fundamental interactions, and can't be lumped in with an analogous theory. It has a unique relationship with spacetime.
On the other hand, we have good reason to believe in the graviton, since gravity is a field and if all fields are fundamentally quantum then we need a field-quanta, the graviton.
For dark matter we actually know quite a lot from the cosmic microwave background and from astronomical observations like the bullet cluster. And these point in the direction of a kind of particle. ( Dark energy is of course more of a hack.)
First, it's based on a Wolfram blog, which should have been submitted instead of this. Perhaps it was. I don't know.
Second, cue up the "I hate Wolfram because he has a big ego" chorus which always runs on ad infinitum whenever the man's name comes up.
Third, it's a post from The Atlantic -- yet again. Can a day go by without multiple posts from that place appearing on HN? Is The Atlantic so incredible to not even get the mandatory blogspam comment that any other attempt like this would receive here? </rant>
Come on guys. We can do better than this.
That's just perfectly backwards.
This is great for physics - now humanity knows that much more about the reality in which we live.
Bad for physicists, becuase now they will have a harder time getting grants.
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/07/a-moment-for-particle...
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> Was it worth spending more than $10 billion to find this out? I definitely think so. Now, what’s actually come out is perhaps not the most exciting thing that could have come out. But there’s absolutely no way one could have been sure of this outcome in advance.
> Perhaps I’m too used to the modern technology industry where billions of dollars get spent on corporate activities and transactions all the time. But to me spending only $10 billion to get this far in investigating the basic theory of physics seems like quite a bargain.
> I think it could be justified almost just for the self-esteem of our species: that despite all our specific issues, we’re continuing a path we’ve been on for hundreds of years, systematically making progress in understanding how our universe works. And somehow there’s something ennobling about seeing what’s effectively a worldwide collaboration of people working together in this direction.
> That in fact there’s no reason all the richness we see in our universe couldn’t arise from some underlying rule—some underlying theory—that’s even quite simple. There are all sorts of things to say about what that rule might be like, and how one might find it. But what’s important here is that if the rule is indeed simple, then on fundamental grounds one shouldn’t in principle need to know too much information to nail down what it is. But what I suspect is that from the experimental results we have, we already know much more than enough to determine what the correct ultimate theory is—assuming that the theory is indeed simple.
Also remember that there is the Standard Model Higgs boson, the one predicted by theory, and what's just being seen in experimental data. The team doing the announcement the other day were very explicit in saying that they've found a Higgs-like particle, but it may not be exactly the one in the Standard Model. i.e. There may be multiple types of Higgs bosons. Its going to take years of more research to really nail down what's just now being glimpsed.
Another good thing to keep in mind is the place of Newtonian physics in the Standard Model. Up until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Newtonian physics were very well understood, and some scientists thought that may well have been all there was to know. Newtonian physics fits nicely inside the Standard Model. Its entirely possible, though who's to say if probable or not, that the current Standard Model will itself fit into an entirely new overarching branch of physics in the decades to come.
The LHC will be operating for 3 more months so that even more data can be collected, then will be shut down for about 2 years for repairs and upgrades. When it comes back on line, it will be much, much more powerful and who knows what might be discovered yet.
I heard similiar pessimistic claims from physicist in my lab: there is nothing much left to discover in high energy physics. Maybe it's like a post partum depression thing. Just after a major and popular question has been answered, and before a new one, with a new theory, has been settled, some researcher may feel lost.
From my father's work, many of which is not published yet, I know that there is still allot to be discovered and tested. They just need a new theory. That's all.
... First Cause is inexplicable. Get over it.
Ironically, I'd consider myself a believer, but some arguments are flat out cringe-worthy.
Would people who know the book or the man say this is accurate? It's all I associate with the name now.
You know, when I was a teenager I was very excited about Stephen's book. Then I found and read Shalizi's review, and reluctantly changed my mind. At the time I didn't have enough background knowledge or intellectual confidence to really see it for what it is, which is a kind of weird character assassination masquerading as a scientific critique (it is interesting to note that Shalizi's PhD advisor and Stephen go way back).
Much later, after some pure math and a bit of industry, I actually met Wolfram, talked to him at length, did some science in the NKS style, and in fact I found the whole thing so stimulating (and the other people so cool) that I applied for a job at Wolfram Research, where is where I now work. In fact, at this exact moment, I'm acting as an instructor at the Wolfram science summer school, supervising students around the world ranging from gifted high-school to PhD. It's a lot of fun.
NKS -- both the book and the methodology -- isn't perfect, and hasn't delivered on some of its promises. However, I think it does represent a really cool network of ideas and insights, if you take the trouble to understand them, especially in their historical context. Many of them familiar, of course, but Wolfram puts them in a new light and unifies various ideas.
And I think in the next few decades it will really come into its own, when we get memristor arrays that need to be programmed, universal constructors that need simple rules to operate, algorithmic drugs that have to be both simple and effective, and so on. "Watch this space", etc.
/me runs
But it's the unexpected that are the most exciting, no?