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Comment by bsullivan01 | Hacker News Reader

what are your qualifications? No offense meant, but I am trying to see if this is real or not.

Quite a few smart people seem excited by it, yet you dismiss it

I think the point here is don't hold your breath.

Science like this has to be slow and careful. Sudden magical breakthroughs are vanishingly rare, and this probably isn't one; but it is interesting, and worth getting excited about.

.. just don't go throwing your Standard Model quite yet. :)

> your Standard Model

If you don't understand your standard model, it's merely a standard belief.

If you understand it, it can be invalidated and thrown away by the 'magical breakthrough' if it provides evidence.

These things shouldn't be treated as a question of political buy-in into to the model.

"Quite a few smart people seem excited by it"

Why aren't you asking them for their qualifications, then? Serious question, think about what your choice implies. Is it that "you want to believe", perhaps?

You don't need a PhD in quantum physics to detect the hype in this article. The comment I responded to was reacting more to the unsupported claims and hype than any actual discovery.

"yet you dismiss it"

I'm not dismissing that the work could have value, but the article makes claims that go far beyond anything that's been demonstrated.

In other words you just spent a dozen or so paragraphs venting your bullshit detector in a space where numerous contributors that are much, much smarter than you have indicated otherwise.

It's like inverse bike shedding.

Perhaps you missed the part of my very short comment where I wrote "I'm not dismissing that the work could have value, but the article makes claims that go far beyond anything that's been demonstrated."

You might want to re-read my original comment and take note of the issues I commented on. If you disagree with what I'm saying, why not respond on those points? I can't help wonder if your problem is actually that I'm interfering with your "I want to believe" circuitry.

I like to distinguish between actual science and mathematics and nonsensical metaphysical claims like "...giving up space and time as fundamental constituents of nature and figuring out how the Big Bang and cosmological evolution of the universe arose out of pure geometry." YMMV.

There's reasoned discussion of possible philosophical implications of the recent findings and then there's your post.

At https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6406551 I'm having a reasoned discussion with someone who responded more substantively to what I wrote. Your petty sniping is not reasoned discussion.

Why aren't you asking them for their qualifications, then?

Don't need to, checked them as they posted their names and all their research is online. http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.5605

They also posted the math behind it (which went over my head) unlike you. Next time, if you want to be taken seriously explain yourself better and try to be specific. If you know what you are talking about, of course.

You're comparing me to the authors of the work? My misunderstanding then, I thought you were comparing my take to that of other commenters.

"try to be specific"

I did post specifics, include a link to an example of the issues with supersymmetry as a physical model.

"explain yourself better"

If you can identify what you didn't understand, I'd be happy to explain it further. I stand by my comment - it doesn't contain anything non-factual that can't be supported with references, although when it comes to silly metaphysical claims about the universe arising from pure geometry, those references are going to be to philosophy texts, not science texts. Which hints at the problem with the claim in the first place.

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