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Comment by lokimedes | Hacker News Reader

In all honesty, this gives a delightful if frightening look into how physicists are thinking amongst themselves. As a (former) particle physicist myself, I can’t remember the number of times an incredulous engineer has confronted me with “the truth” about physics. But you see, for practicing physicists, the models and theories are fluid and actually up for discussion and interpretation, that’s our job after all. The problem is that the official output is declared to be immutable laws of nature, set in formulae and dogmatic conventions. That said, I agree that he is trading one possible fallacy for another here, but the beauty of the thing is that the “stiffness” explanation is invoking less assumptions than the quantum one - which physicists agree is a “good thing” (Occam’s razor).

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There definitely seems to be a modern trend of over complication in physics along with the voodoo-like worship of math. Humbly enough, people have only come to understand the equations for an apple falling out of a tree within the last 500 years, and that necessitated the invention of Calculus.

What's more distressing than the insular knowledge cults of modern physics is the bizarre fixation on unfalsifiable philosophical interpretation.

That just makes it incomprehensible to outsiders when they quibble over the metaphors used to explain the equations that are used to guess what may happen experimentally. (Rather than admitting that any definition is an abstraction and any analogies or metaphors are merely pedagogical tools.)

My kneejerk reaction: Give me the equations. If they are too complicated give me a computer simulation that runs the equations. Now tell me what your experiment is and show me how to plug the numbers so that I may validate the theory.

If I wanted to have people wage war over my mind concerning what I should believe without evidence, I would turn back to religion rather than science.

Anyway, I hope this situation improves in the future. Maybe some virtual particle will appear that better mediates this field (physics).

Having studied undergraduate physics, I think this viewpoint is inverted from the realities of the matter. It is less that the math is complicated and more so these are the relevant tools invented for us to model the experimental results we obtain post discovery/formalization of SR/GR/Quantum experiences. There are computers that can run these simulations but they are infeasible to model large scale processes. That is the reason people are looking for more than numerical solutions to problems, but laws and tools that can simplify modeling large scale emergent behavior that it would be infeasible or unnecessarily complicated to do with numerical simulation. These tools are the more straightforward approach

It's evident and obvious in any of these explanations that the equations and properties of math are taken as true a priori, not grounded on observation (in their invocation).

If I write a partial differential equation that I came up with randomly and ask you to find all the potential solutions that really doesn't tell you anything about the natural world.

I think that's more your interpretation/experience rather than the intention of the tools. Those constants and coefficients are there because the math is describing the shape of the solution based on logic, mathematical object rules, and symmetry/conservation laws and needs to be "grounded" to make them physical.

The Lagrangian is just "conservation of energy" (L = T[kinetic] - V[potential]). There isn't some magic, it's a statement that the energy needs to go somewhere.

Your straw-man belies the underlying issue you are experiencing, you don't just come up with a PDE, you see nature and then you describe ways to conserve counts of things, "energy", "population", whatever. The PDEs describe the exchange between these counts. The accuracy and additional terms are about more accurately representing the counts and conservation of things.

Voodoo worship of math? I am getting a bit tired of that sentiment, especially around string theory.

Math is all you've got to work with, we wouldn't have modern day physics without math.

The issue is that people think they can find some kind of magic shortcut by playing around with abstractions without reference to or grounding in physical observables. That's not a math problem, that's a psychology problem.

If you're going to say that you need to study math exclusively for many years to understand your formulas then you are not using abstraction well.

I don't think that's what I would say, but if that's what you are anticipating, then I don't think you have a very good take, either. I don't even think we'd resolve our problems with physics if everyone were a mathematician first. However, it will always take many years of training to understand some of the major equations to a sufficient degree.

Once again, my point is that people are trying to take shortcuts with abstractions that are not grounded in reality. That is a matter of self-discipline, of priorities, of putting the cart before the horse. Consider string theories: we have worked out so many ways in which strings can behave, etc. with so many possibilities and permutations. However, we never proved the ground reality for strings, we just ran with a bunch of assumptions and then parameterized them, went meta a bunch of times, and called that a research program.

All of that mathematical sophistication and model-building could have went to, e.g. perfecting QCD, or even in other directions.

Yeah, the whole 'immutability' thing is just a front for the layperson, and that's honestly fine. However it does generate a weird set of expectations and culture shock when you cross that barrier into proper physics and you see people don't consider these things immutable, the best you've got is instrumentalism and functionalist treatment of observables. These worldviews have been a source of too many red herrings for the unprepared.

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