The Century-Long Pause in Fundamental Physics

yk•about 2 hours ago

> Senior figures (Smolin, Woit, Hossenfelder, Penrose)

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.

hypersoar•about 2 hours ago

The author (who is also the submitter; it seems nearly all his submissions are his own blog posts) is not a physicist, so it's hard for me to take seriously his sweeping dismissal of the field. Then I see he links to his own Revolutionary Theory, and it starts to look like outright crankary.

jpmattia•about 1 hour ago

> Then I see he links to his own Revolutionary Theory, and it starts to look like outright crankary.

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.

sudb•about 2 hours ago

At least not all the author's blog posts seem to be AI-written: https://danieltan.weblog.lol/2023/01/why-most-image-gen-star...

aberzun•about 2 hours ago

I'm new to HN and was initially excited about the various intellectual and technological posts ... but isn't this literally just written by AI?

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?

tux3•about 2 hours ago

It's been really bad the last few months. You'd think people would want to share human blogs written by people. But half of the links are just different themes on different blogs all ghostwritten by Claude.

CuriouslyC•about 2 hours ago

The problem is that we have a bunch of people trying to keep themselves relevant amid a great reshuffle, and there's so much noise that lovingly hand-crafted content gets ignored, so your only rational option if you don't already have an established audience is to slopspam.

davisr•about 2 hours ago

Are you AI? You joined HN 5 years ago, dawg.

Pay08•about 2 hours ago

Account creation time may not line up with when someone actually started using the platform.

surgical_fire•about 2 hours ago

> but isn't this literally just written by AI?

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.

CuriouslyC•about 2 hours ago

Physics is so deep in epicycles now, and without observations to force people to sacrifice their numerically accurate dumpster fire on the altar of parsimony, we may never progress.

photochemsyn•about 2 hours ago

The main flaw in this write-up, AI or not, is it ignores the Bohr-Einstein debates on QM and Bell’s Inequality. I suspect the article deliberately ignores that debate.

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.’

jaybrendansmith•about 1 hour ago

Can you briefly explain how the debates refute the basic argument? It's a somewhat interesting comparison he makes, even if AI was used to write that doesn't necessarily make the argument less interesting. I do agree that the end seems like motivated reasoning.

The Century-Long Pause in Fundamental Physics

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion (17 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews