Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Crowdfund The Theory of Everything (cphpost.dk)
einar.petersen writes: Danish scientists are seeking to fund their research on the theory of everything in a rather unconventional way, namely via crowdfunding. The two researchers have launched a campaign that as of writing is 55% funded....
"Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life searching for an answer to the deepest question about the universe: does a fundamental principle, that governs all of reality, exist...?" reads their Indiegogo page. "In 2013 we, the theoretical physicist Jesper Moller Grimstrup and the mathematician Johannes Aastrup, discovered a simple mathematical principle, which we believe could be exactly what Einstein was searching for." One Danish newspaper jokes that the mathematician and theoretical physicist "are now offering mere mortals a chance to get in on the action."
"Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life searching for an answer to the deepest question about the universe: does a fundamental principle, that governs all of reality, exist...?" reads their Indiegogo page. "In 2013 we, the theoretical physicist Jesper Moller Grimstrup and the mathematician Johannes Aastrup, discovered a simple mathematical principle, which we believe could be exactly what Einstein was searching for." One Danish newspaper jokes that the mathematician and theoretical physicist "are now offering mere mortals a chance to get in on the action."
42
MS, ALS, Aphasia ? http://globability.org - Me http://einarpetersen.com
Of course it does. It is extremely simple too:
Everything will grow as big as it can before it explodes.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I've been wondering whether AI systems may advance science @ some point. I mean: not just as a tool with a human at the control knobs & interpreting results, but by itself as the 'entity' doing the advancing.
Some significant advances have been made not through heaps of grunt work, but when great minds like Einstein did their thing. Seeing patterns in their mind that no-one else saw. Sadly, such great minds are rare. And have a limited lifespan - of which a big part is spent learning the subject matter. And no matter how genius, with hard limits on the # of grey cells that can be thrown at the problem.
Artificial intelligent systems don't have such flesh-and-blood limitations: these can effectively be built at will, any size, optimized for specific problems sets, etc. Lately computerized systems have beat humans at increasingly complex tasks. Sometimes using brute force. Sometimes by looking at a problem from many angles at once. Fed with enough data, 'seeing' connections somehow that even experts in the field might overlook.
Regardless how it works exactly, fact is you might say that for some problems, we've built AI systems that are more capable than a "genius" human at finding solutions. Would it be hard to imagine that @ some point, an AI system might spit out a new formula, discover some as-of-yet-unseen regularity in scientific data, or find a path to unify as-of-yet-non-unified scientific theories?
Exciting times...
That post pretty much wraps up an entire day of History Channel programming
Don't they have the Hitler Hour any more? At one time they used to have it every 60 minutes.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Good luck to them. FWIW, their "Quantum holonomy" theory has only a minor mention in the Wikipedia article on quantum gravity.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
You've never tried to get a proposal accepted, have you?
Research dollars aren't exactly easy to come by - especially in a field like theoretical physics. So, it might be good work - but far enough outside the mainstream to be unfunded.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
It's pretty much all pawn and antique shows now. A good alien program every once in a while relieves the monotony.
Reality television has ruined many a channel.
...is pretty much a guaranteed signal of a terrible idea. Obviously if you were actually carrying on some work from Einstein that would be super cool, but this phrase gets used for every perpetual motion machine and grand unified crackpot theory; it's a weird dog whistle for conspiracy theorists, dreamers and idiots.
Heck, I thought by this point that was kind of an established joke - like saying your new board game "takes minutes to learn, but a lifetime to master".
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
TL:DR - yes, it's a bit out there, but no more so than any other of the big attempts.
I've talked with Jesper and Johannes at length whilst I was a PhD student - their ideas are based on applying the techniques of loop quantum gravity to non-commutative geometry. To give a brief summary of each:
LQG regards the basic variables of geometry to be holonomies and fluxes - a holonomy is the transport of a vector around a small loop, coming back to the start to find the vector isn't pointing the same way (think about carrying an arrow around the a triangle from north pole to equator). This measures the curvature of the underlying manifold. The fluxes are like field lines in electromagnetism. It is these variables that are quantized (discretized) on a spin-network in LQG.
Non-commutative geometry is the idea that geometrical operators care about the order in which they are applied - area(A) length(B) != length(B) area(A) (very loosely). Non-commutativity is at the heart of quantum mechanics, and is the root of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.
What they're hoping to do is build on the work of Connes and Chamseddine who have shown that the spectral action (special type of object in a non-commutative geometry, coming from application to the standard model) naturally reproduces the Einstein-Hilbert action (Basis of General Relatvity) in certain conditions. They hope that by applying LQG techniques here they'll get a full quantum theory of everything.
It's a long shot, of course, but all such things are - non commutative geometry is a strange beast, and no-one has shown that LQG is the right way to quantize gravity (though they have had some theoretical success in cosmology and black holes). It's a personal aesthetic as to whether you think this is more or less plausible than extra dimensions, or symmetries, or some altogether new principle. It's not something I choose to spend my time on as I don't think it's the right way to go (I don't like non-commutativity, and LQG involves fundamental discreteness in a way that I think doesn't work) but I would say it's as good an idea as any other on the market and deserves to be explored.
You know, that doesn't help a bit.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
This kind of thing is why Slashdot can be awesome. (All credit to the author of course :)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Helped me. Then again I have a physics degree :-)
Fraud! Physicists use radians, not degrees.
Ezekiel 23:20
Did you know that Jews carried out the 9/11 attacks with the backing of Israel? Zionists have conspired to suppress this information and blame Muslims. It's obvious listening to recordings that the attackers had Israeli accents. The trail of money leads back to Mossad. Can anyone provide any real evidence to disprove these facts?
The burden is on you.
Also a fact would be pretty strong.
Much of the research you've quoted seems fairly interesting to me (interest is relative, of course) and some of it also seems to be very important (e.g. genital washing practises).
In any case, since you're not familiar with how this works, here is a rough explanation: The scientist(s) have to write a very detailed research proposal, including a long state of the art overview, precise outline of the experiments to be conducted or methodology used, have to explain why the research is important, explain exactly what questions it is supposed to answer, why it may have an impact on the field and/or society, and so on. Then they need to take various bureaucratic hurdles that may range from "easy" to "almost impossible", get signatures, fill out additional forms and get ethics clearance (if animals or humans are involved), upload their credentials, CVs and prior publications, make a timeline, milestones, expected output indicators and detailed budget proposal with justification for every item, and so on. All of this takes between weeks and months of work, depending on the size of the project. Once that is done and everything is considered correct in a first vetting phase, the proposal enters a fierce competition with hundreds or thousands of other proposals. Usually, less then ten percent can get funding, although this depends very much on the call. The are evaluated and ranked by a panel of outside experts in the field according to strict guidelines that are often so detailed that they read like a book (150 pages of evaluator guidelines is not unusual). Sometimes these contests have two phases. In that case, the few winners of the first phase evaluation are then shortlisted for a second phase in which the scientists are invited to give a talk about their research projects in front of the assessment committee and the government institution that provides the funding. Again, only a few make it through this phase. These are then usually suggested for funding only, though. Normally, that means that their projects will get funding, provided that they meet all deadlines for contracts etc., but it can also happen that funding is still declined after acceptance by the scientific panel because of other funding problems, etc. After that, an account is set up, which usually requires some close collaboration with the institutions involved and their accounting departments, and the rules for the actual accounting tend to be very strict in most countries. Then some form of monitoring of the research project starts, which may range from frequent progress reports over constant re-evaluation (sometimes even by another scientific panel) to surprise visits by external controllers, depending on the strictness of the rules and how much money is involved.
And then somebody uses the one-line title of the research project or the two-line popular summary on /. to make fun of how obviously flawed the project is, forgetting that funding agencies do not just walk around and throw money at scientists. ;-)
Anyway, smart funding institutions know that research funding is very similar to investment funding. There is always a certain percentage of less or only moderately successful projects, but you take that into account because occasionally one of those projects will makes a break-through with broad impact on the field.
I don't see how crowd-sourcing the paying of researchers will help bring about a viable theory of everything. You can't purchase genius solutions to as yet unsolved deeply complex problems. This reminds me of the times when my old boss told me that I had two weeks to complete six weeks of testing. When answers come, they come. You can't speed up or buy unique solutions. When the physics and math add up, and the time is right, the theory will be developed, and later confirmed by others doing tedious work. We can't pick who will do it or pay a specific group to do so. Creativity doesn't work that way.