The Century-Long Pause in Fundamental Physics
danieltan.weblog.lol
danieltan.weblog.lol
Well one of the three is not like the other, three are very accomplished physicists, one is a youtuber who lies about the game to get clicks. (And we know she lies because she used to play the game quite competently.)
And sure enough they start talking about interpretations of QM.
But what an AI-generated crankery! Because I enjoy wasting my time, I chose a random point (beginning of ch2) and started reading:
> Standard field-theoretic practice selects equations using symmetry, gauge invariance, and conservation. This chapter proposes a cognate selection principle built from three structural demands. A potential that carries energy must appear on the right-hand side of its own equation, because the energy it carries is part of what sources it. A potential that describes the same physics in every frame must have an equation that survives change of observer. A tensor equation must have matching ranks on both sides.
I've italicized a couple of items: Cognate selection principle? Really?
A tensor equation must have matching ranks on both sides? As opposed to all those tensor equations with differing ranks on both sides? Not exactly the type of thing that makes someone slap their head and shout "Why didn't I think of that?!"
The technobabble is interesting in that any single sentence might make sense in the absence of sentences nearby; It that regard, it's much like an Escher painting: Locally sensible, but globally out-to-lunch.
I've read like 5 posts in a row and it's starting to dawn on me that all this might be written by AI. Why tf would you even bother posting slop like that?
Evidently.
> Why tf would you even bother posting slop like that?
Maybe low-effort internet point farming? Maybe an attempt to rake in some ad money in the odd chance the post goes viral?
> I'm new to HN and was initially excited about the various intellectual and technological posts
Ehh... It's marginally above Reddit, but that is a very low bar to overcome.
It's decent toilet time.
If it was AI-generated, I’d guess the prompt included something like ‘support Einstein’s hidden variables theory with an argument that includes ‘ontology’, ‘machine learning’, ‘Copenhagen’ but specifically excludes any mention of Bell’s inequality, EPR, and also do not mention hidden-variables specifically.’
Bell's theorem rules out local hidden variables, not hidden variables. An ontology-first approach to QM (rare in modern physics) takes Bell as the constraint it has to operate inside (same as Bohm-de Broglie) rather than as a settled debate.
The Bohr-Einstein debate wasn't adjudicated on substance. Copenhagen won sociologically, and the renewed traffic on it is the field acknowledging that "settled" was always a cultural claim.
My analysis is on diagnosing the methodological inversion that produced the impasse, rather than picking sides inside it.
(1) “Since the consolidation of quantum field theory and the Standard Model, fundamental physics has mostly confirmed and refined an inherited ontology rather than replacing it. Many Beyond-Standard-Model programs have become too flexible, mathematically rich but empirically underconstrained.”
(2) “The missing task is not a naive return to pre-Copenhagen realism, because EPR, Bell, Kochen–Specker, and modern contextuality results rule out large parts of the classical ontology Einstein hoped to preserve. The real task is to construct a post-Bell ontology: one that explains quantum phenomena, measurement, entanglement, and spacetime without hiding behind operational formalism or unconstrained mathematical elegance.”
This I’d argue says that the tests of the Bell inequality violations are the most important experiments especially Aspect/Dalibard/Roger (1982) and Hensen et al. (2015) and something in 2023 (need to read that one). This implies ontological progress is held up by experimental insufficiencies, and this may not be resolvable without unforeseen technological developments that sit in sci-fi space at present.
P.S. A nice explanatory comparison is Bell and Turing (instead of the ML example), as their structural flavor (no-go-theorem vs contradiction) is similar:
Turing: no machine can decide the halting behavior of all machines on all inputs.
Bell: no theory satisfying the Bell-local assumptions can reproduce all quantum correlations observed in Bell-type experiments.
(The difference being that Turing’s theorem is a pure mathematical impossibility result over a precisely defined class of machines, while Bell’s theorem is a mathematical constraint on a physically motivated class of theories, with experiments as source-of-truth instead of mathematical proof. But this supports your position since Turing rules out total computable halting deciders, while Bell only rules out Bell-local hidden-variable theories satisfying measurement independence and ordinary probability constraints.)