• 20 Years of Peter Woit's "Not Even Wrong"

    From Aether Regained@21:1/5 to All on Wed Mar 20 11:13:00 2024
    https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13864

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39753115

    " When I started the blog I was 20 years past my Ph.D., in the middle of
    some sort of an odd career. Today I’m 66, 40 years past the Ph.D., much closer to the end of a career and a life than to a beginning. In 2004 I
    was looking at nearly twenty years of domination of fundamental theory
    by a speculative idea that to me had never looked promising and by then
    was clearly a failure. 20 years later this story has become highly
    disturbing. The refusal to admit failure and move on has to a large
    degree killed off the field as a serious science. " -- Peter Woit

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  • From Aether Regained@21:1/5 to All on Tue Mar 26 12:27:00 2024
    Ross Finlayson:
    On 03/20/2024 09:20 AM, Ross Finlayson wrote:
    On 03/20/2024 04:13 AM, Aether Regained wrote:
    https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13864

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39753115

    " When I started the blog I was 20 years past my Ph.D., in the middle of >>> some sort of an odd career. Today I’m 66, 40 years past the Ph.D., much >>> closer to the end of a career and a life than to a beginning. In 2004 I
    was looking at nearly twenty years of domination of fundamental theory
    by a speculative idea that to me had never looked promising and by then
    was clearly a failure. 20 years later this story has become highly
    disturbing. The refusal to admit failure and move on has to a large
    degree killed off the field as a serious science. " -- Peter Woit



    Supersymmetry has come back umpteen-many times.

    That's basically what it does, supersymmetry,
    like "we found a new rule and as long as you
    don't look at it cross-wise, the supersymmetrical
    explanation for it is now gone!"  Then, somebody
    looks around, and it results, "hey, you know,
    supersymmetry isn't dead again".


    He says "higher energy scales" but doesn't mention
    "running constants" so I kind of wonder whether
    he just thinks the universe grows and particles
    shrink or, what.


    I'm a fan of Woit among some physicists,
    but I'm not quite sure how he's, "not even wrong".

    The title "Not Even Wrong" is pretty great,
    it indicates several things, about first of
    all the "purely theoretical" theories what
    can't be applied, then in the applied, what
    results either not observables or not falsifiables.

    It reflects on the usual greatest credo
    or maxim "Quantum Mechanics is Never Wrong",
    vis-a-vis, doing it wrong or not right.

    I don't follow Woit's blog, but read it
    at least since more than a decade ago,
    and usually when it was a strong enough
    statement about the direction of physics,
    that I relate it in some sense to Turok's
    "Crisis" in physics, or in terms of evolution
    and revolution, conceptually or theoretically,
    and also to Penrose's "Fashion, Faith, and
    Fantasy", with regards to the crisis in
    physics, that functional freedom arrives
    at GR and QM both right to 30 orders of
    magnitude, yet in extrapolation disagreeing
    to 120 orders of magnitude.


    My own sort of theory is rather "theory first",
    with regards to not having to be right, while
    at the same time, theoretically it's eventually
    so that the practical and applied, is from
    pure principles, vis-a-vis Einstein's "model
    physicist" and Einstein's "model philosopher",
    vis-a-vis "shut up and compute", and these
    kinds of ideas.



    So anyways, supersymmetry is not dead:  AGAIN,
    and it's the way of things, and Quantum Mechanics
    is Never Wrong, and Continuum Mechanics is what's right.


    Similarly the super-string theory, that being
    just a backdrop for Continuum Mechanics under
    atomism and the Democritan and Planckian,
    if "Not Even Wrong" it's also "Never Wrong".


    One wonders about taking blog feeds and finding
    their Atom or RSS feeds and making digests what
    result summary and digest NNTP feeds,
    it's sort of an open system.


    "Is it Mach-ian?"  What kind of question is that, ....


    So, the age of electron physics, and the ultraviolet catastrophe,
    is for supersymmetry super-string neutrino physics,
    then as for an infrared catastrophe,
    where a catastrophe is a singularity
    is a perestroika is an opening is a multiplicity:
    is a good thing, then for space terms and getting
    electromagnetic and nuclear radiation better understood
    about the special optical visible light,
    as what's old is new again, and not just wrapped as new.

    Warm regards, good luck

    Luck:  you can't need it.




    One of the conceptual challenges of supersymmetry
    is partners and partnerinos, two concepts, one of
    them about the "high energy unification", the other
    about the "low energy unification", the one at too high
    energies to be found, the other at too low energies.

    Being kinetic and all the atom is sort of the graviton,
    then with "bigger bosons" and "gravitinos", supersymmetry
    and for "symmetry-flex" as a concept is at least two concepts,
    with a usual idea that high-energy is totally contrived as
    according to either cosmology or collider, while low-energy
    happens all the time and represents the flux of arbitrarily
    small and fast and "ultramundane corpuscles", if only
    because everything's a particle.

    The term "flux" then also has quite a variation in terms of
    its meaning. The Gaussian sort of flux is like potential
    of a surface, like a Poincare surface, that just illustrate
    continuity laws, while it's arbitrarily non-zero, in closed
    systems. The fleeting flux then, like photons for example
    but all the neutrinos and other fast parternerinos,
    and for example photinos, is quite altogether about
    the two notions of the one term, two definitions.

    So, supersymmetry and flux and symmetry-flex, with that
    not being the symmetry-breaking either way yet flex,
    is sort of like Aristotle's versus Leibniz' entropy, which
    isn't disorder yet simply minimization in whatever terms,
    potentials, sum-of-histories, sum-of-potentials.

    When half the people don't even know there are
    two meanings to "supersymmetric", "flux", and "entropy",
    then, it's usually easier to leave out the other half
    they don't know also.



    @Ross, IIRC you used to write with a lot more clarity. Have you
    outsourced your thinking to a hallucinating AI bot or what?

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  • From J. J. Lodder@21:1/5 to Aether Regained on Tue Mar 26 17:46:35 2024
    Aether Regained <AetherRegaind@invalid.com> wrote:

    https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13864

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39753115

    " When I started the blog I was 20 years past my Ph.D., in the middle of
    some sort of an odd career. Today I'm 66, 40 years past the Ph.D., much closer to the end of a career and a life than to a beginning. In 2004 I
    was looking at nearly twenty years of domination of fundamental theory
    by a speculative idea that to me had never looked promising and by then
    was clearly a failure. 20 years later this story has become highly disturbing. The refusal to admit failure and move on has to a large
    degree killed off the field as a serious science. " -- Peter Woit

    Anyone can say that something is 'not even wrong'. It is easy.
    The hard thing is saying something that is wrong, or even better, right.

    As long as you cannot do the latter, things that are 'not even wrong'
    may be better than not saying anything at all,
    because things might evolve, after all.

    But, as Imre Lakatos has said:
    Not condemning a theory, and career advice for aspiring students
    are two very different things indeed,

    Jan

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