Slashdot Mirror
Theoretical Physics Breakthrough or Hoax?
Brooklyn Bob writes "Ever get the feeling that some theoretical physics papers just don't make sense? According to this New York Times article, you may be right. Genius or gibberish? Who knows?" This belongs on your virtual refrigerator with nice big virtual magnet.
Theoretical physics is simply that. Always take these things with a grain of salt. Our scientific process is based on questioning assumptions and breaking the rules.
hahah. the physics people are the one's that don't understand - they obviously don't even understand each other anymore (except in their own sub-sub-subfield...)
His colleague Dr. Jackiw compared modern physics to modern art: "One person looks at a piece of art and says it is gibberish; another person looks and says it's wonderful."
:-))
Unfortunately, modern art isn't ultimately graded on if it's falsifiable or not, whereas physics is. Thus, the debate of good/bad art can rage forever without settlement, and that's fine; however, sooner or later, many scientific theories are demonstrated to be false (excepting those which aren't, of course.
For those of you trying to support the physics community here, note that this article is not just useless physics bashing. It is about a real problem in all scientific disciplines.
This article is not about criticism of the system, but rather specific criticism of specific people in the system. It is responsibility of the schools and journals, and especially thesis advisors to make sure people are doing adaquate work.
There was an excuse given by these guys' advisor in the article about these guys working for 10 years and they should get a degree for that, even if they didn't exactly display a command of the mathmatics behind their theory.
This is absolute bullshit!
I don't care how long or hard you are working on something. If you want a degree in theoretical physics, you'd damn well better be able to understand your own thesis. If you can't AT LEAST explain it to your advisor, there is no way I can see to give you a PhD.
Your definition of "universe" is probably faulty, or at least different from the one that these physicists are using.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
'Every action has an equal and opposite reaction' is logically flawed as a scientific theory since it cannot be disproved.
Um, no, you're confused. If the theory were false, then I could disprove it by performing an experiment where an action does not have an equal and opposite reaction. Thus, the theory is hypothetically falsifiable and therefore valid as a theory (it may be incorrect, but at least it is phrased as a valid theory).
If numerous experiments demonstrating action and reaction do not disprove it, then odds are that it is also correct.
But proof of correctness is never absolute (maybe we haven't found the circumstances under which it doesn't hold, yet), while proof of incorrectness is.
-- Alastair
The NYT has the fairest registration deal I've ever seen, less intrusive than even Slashdot that nearly everyone here finds acceptable. I've never seen a spam from them, and I do subscribe to a daily news bulletin they provide. For a free service, I think it's fair to provide them the minimal amount of information reg. provides, information they need to justify the service internally and to advertisers -- and it's less trouble than bending over backwards to tunnel around it.
/. -- and a show of support is something I'd encourage. We subscribe to the weekend editions despite online access; there's still something to be said for newsprint.
NYT has arguably the best free (for how much longer?) general news source online -- very frequent cited on
BTW, they do not track what you read; I looked into this, and was paranoid enough to send a specific inquiry. Besides, they don't really know who "you" are.
Sokal published intentionally grabled crap to expose the lack of post-modernist rigor. He knew it was incoherent, the publishers didn't and praised its 'logic'. Sokal is one of the good guys.
If you say all sheep are white, and you find a black one, you have proven the statement wrong.
This sounds pretty straightforward. But now, in order to falsify your theory (all sheep are white) with certainty, you must prove absolutely the statement, "this sheep is black." This is fraught with difficulties (beginning with the exact definition of "sheep" and "black" and spreading out from there), and in fact turns out to be impossible to do with total rigor.
This is a very subtle issue, though, and for a long time people thought that Popper had it right. Then, of course, they falsified his theory ;-). When Kuhn first came on the scene, he received a lot of objections along the lines of your comment, and was accused of undermining the basis of science and turning it into a mere popularity contest. The problem is, no matter how clearly you think you've falsified a theory, the proponents of that theory can always come up with some kind of wild assumption or argument to save their theory. The trick is, at some point these assumptions get unwieldy, cumbersome, ugly, and awkward (e.g. the increasing number of circular orbits needed to save the old Ptolemaic theory of the solar system from the attack being made on it by Copernicus and co...), and eventually you just have to say, "well, yeah, it could be like that, technically, but it's just silly!"
This means that in the end you have to make an essentially esthetic judgement about the elegance and simplicity of the theory. This judgment is informed by reasonable criteria but is not made on the basis of strict logic.
I think this is cool, myself, it makes science a form of art.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
I bet most nonphysics /. readers will find the original Bogdanov papers quite difficult to read, and perhaps the theses even more so since they are in French. But I can show here some very simple things that will make nonphysics reader very suspicious about the Bogdanov twin's work.
As some /. readers have pointed out already, John Baez, the UCI physics prof, criticizes a very specific passage from one thesis, involving the Foucault pendulum part. You don't have to read everything, just see that Bogdanov mentions the pendulum and topology in one breath! here I quote from Baez's webpage:
"It goes on to discuss the supposed connection between N = 2 supergravity, Donaldson theory, KMS states and the Foucault pendulum experiment, which he claims "cannot be explained satisfactorily in either classical or relativistic mechanics". If you know some physics you'll find this statement slightly odd.
After several pages he concludes: We draw from the above that whatever the orientation, the plane of oscillation of Foucault's pendulum is necessarily aligned with the initial singularity marking the origin of physical space S3, that of Euclidean space E4 (described by the family of instantons Ibeta of whatever radius beta), and, finally, that of Lorentzian space-time M4.
Zounds! He took that pendulum and rode it right off into hyperspace..."
And this Foucault pendulum quote you can obtain directly from one Bogdanov thesis.
The Foucault pendulum bit is on page 49/162 of the thesis, in French. It's easy to read and probably will parse in babelfish.
So what's the big hoopla about Foucault's pendulum and the supergravity stuff? Well, Foucault's pendulum, contrary to the Bogdanov thesis that it's not understood in classical mechanics, is really well understood, at least the regular ole' Foucault pendulum. It's basically a free-swinging pendulum, that over time, rotates its plane of swinging because of the Coriolis force. You can check it out in any decent undergrad mechanics text, such as my dusty copy of Marion/Thornton classical dynamics, page 399, where the solution is quietly sitting. Or you can read this little web tidbit.
That a PHD physics candidate would be trying to tell us there is some connection between the very earthly, understood Foucault pendulum, and the big bang (initial singularity) really stretches the imagination! But again, this just makes one suspicious, and doesn't prove anything.
It's well-known that journalists prefer bad news whenever possible.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The Sokal hoax was nothing to do with "determinism". It was aimed at the postmodern (ab)use of scientific terminology with no regard to meaning.
Sokal is a robust defender of the idea that the experimental method is a useful way to study reality, rather than one narrative amongst many which are equally valid. He is an "objectivist" rather than a "relativist". Determinism doesn't really come into it - I'm sure he is familiar with quantum theory.