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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.
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.
'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.