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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."
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MS, ALS, Aphasia ? http://globability.org - Me http://einarpetersen.com
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...
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!