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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

Wolfram's ego really is a parody of itself at this point. Here we can read a grand tour of particle physics over 35 years and the only specific figure Wolfram manages to mention and give accolades to is Stephen Wolfram. His links to his own publications, his book, his his his, me me me, I I I. Unbelievable.

Edit: Higgs gets a mention, but just to highlight Wolfram's complaints to him about his theory, which turned out to be correct!

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That's how Wolfram usually is, but I do find him to be intelligent and have some interesting things to say, if you can get past the style. For example, I think there really are some interesting things in A New Kind of Science about philosophy of computation, if you read it as a Regular Book and pretend all the hype and Book To End All Books positioning isn't there.

To be fair: (1) he actually worked in the field and knows the material, and (2) it's a blog post, not a corporate communication.

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.

I agree that the Higgs mechanism feels like a hack. Something in my intuition raises a flag. Even more so when I was learning about theoretical particles called "gravitons" back in grade school. It's always seemed forced (no pun intended) the way many scientists shoehorn gravity in with the other three forces (weak strong and EM), which share much more in common with each other than with gravity. One of these things is not like the other...

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....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity

Wolfram and you both make the mistake of thinking that there is any value in saying that an established natural fact 'feels like a hack' or 'disagrees with your intuition'. One of the most important lessons of modern physics is that intuition is a terrible guide when it comes to understanding the physical world at its most fundamental level.

Ha! I remember reading somewhere that Einstein refused to acknowledge Big bang theory and accelerating universe, because eventual heat death of universe was too depressing or something. I'm sure we'd all like a subspace communication channel, a warp drive, etc. but things are the way they are, we can just observe them, for now.

Einstein introduced the cosmological constant lambda Λ in an attempt to produce a steady state model of the universe -- in his view the most elegant solution to the problem of our existence was a universe infinite in age.

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.

Can you provide further reading on that? I'd love to find out more about how exactly dark energy "absorbed" Einstein's ideas, and I'm sure I'm not alone here.

The other way around; the cosmological constant "absorbs" dark energy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy#Cosmological_consta...

To me, 'hack' and 'unintuitive' carry different meanings. 'Hack' indicates some kind of ad-hoc patch to fix the model. Even if it fits the data, there could be a theoretical irregularity. I suspect that programmers experience this quite often when making a change that keeps the program working. Sure, it is possible that ultimately the hack is indeed how nature works, but its still worth exploring and making precise the nature of the irregularity.

The Higgs mechanism feels indeed like a hack, but the ( at the moment not significant ) clues, that we have an enhanced photon ratio gives some hope, I think. ( Likewise the absence of an signal in the tau-tau channel.)

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.)

It's _definitely_ too early to dismiss all but the Standard Model - there's definitely a lot more exciting stuff to come from CERN... hang in there!

So it has a name! +1 for entropic gravity.

Gravity is in the unique position of directly affecting everything. No other field (unless I'm mistaken) does this. Most people say there is a gravitational force between two objects that have mass. Mass (rest-mass/invariant mass) is just another form of energy. Photons don't have rest mass, yet they are affected by gravity. Every type of thing we've ever observed is affected by, and contributes to the gravitational field, because everything we've ever observed involves energy. A gravitational field that has energy even interacts with itself.

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.

My pet theory, based on pure conjecture: gravity is interwoven with space-time, and a few decades from now we'll call it space-time-gravity.

"At some level I'm actually a little disappointed." That same sentiment was shared by Stephen Hawking...

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