Hacker News Reader

Comment by Metacelsus | Hacker News Reader

This award involved some clever engineering to set up quantum effects in a macroscopic system, but was there any new physics involved here?

(Still better than last year's award which wasn't really physics at all!)

View on HN

From that viewpoint of all of chemistry and biology is just a consequence of theoretical physics. A lot of the 'consequences' of physics are very surprising and not at all obvious from the fundamental equations. There's a great paper you might want to read:

https://www.tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2011_more_is_differen...

He also won a Nobel by the way.

Many great discoveries follow from new instrumentation leading to better and novel data, and less often some conceptual leap. This is why the genius of Einstein is all the more remarkable in coming up with relativity. Interestingly, he got his Nobel for something else :)

Thanks, this context helped.

They discovered that the theory worked in a regime it hadn't been tested before; I'm not sure what "new physics" means in your sentence: it is a core assumption of physics that it's rules are always true, that all physics has always existed.

New physics in this context means previously unknown effects or mechanisms, or even a new theory/framework for an already understood phenomenon. Using "physics" in this way is common amongst academics.

Do you have two aliases on HN, or are you simply presuming to speak for the OP?

It's highly non-trivial claim that macroscopic system can have quantized energy levels and exhibit measurable quantum effects. You can't just solve Shroedinger equation of 10^24 particles to show that.

That is what BCS theory does.

Comments like these make me realize most people have no clue what science is really like.

I don't think so, I just think they expect that Nobel Prize level physics should feel less incremental, and everything that doesn't involve a revolution in physics (like supersymmetry) or at least an expected confirmation of an old revolution (like the Higgs boson or gravitational waves) feels incremental.

It would be pretty crazy to have enough big breakthroughs in physics to warrant a prize every year. I guess that’s how it was for a brief period in the early 1900s.

> This award involved some clever engineering to set up quantum effects in a macroscopic system, but was there any new physics involved here?

There's a tradition of Nobel Prizes awarded for clever experiments, even if they do not uncover new fundamental laws.

This could be one of the building blocks of quantum computing. You can have a macro system behave in quantum way.

This is a practical implementation of something that was only theoretically possible or observed on very small scale.

Great experiments are an essential part of physics.

Exactly, also in it's goal to "demonstrate quantum tunneling macroscopically" haven't we had tunneling diodes for quite a while? The device uses tunneling for its basic functionality

In those cases doesn’t the tunneling occur one electron at a time, and so not macroscopic?

I thought this too, at first. Then I read the article, and discovered it was about more than Josephson gaps and Schottky diodes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com