Physics Lournal

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1. The Hidden Rules of Physics

The current generation of Physics knowledge isn't benefiting from the labor divide between theorist and experimentalist.

Thoughts: I think this is largely because the gray area between the two has shrunk: in order to discover new things, we must know how do to the work of the field we want to discover new things in.

Most of the running theories haven't yielded experimental evidence, some of them aren't even scientifically falsifiable.

This speaks to Eric Weinstein's GIN- there's very little excuse for the fact that we've been championing theories based on hope that they're correct.

Mathematicians have a subjective idea of beauty in the context of mathematics, which they put forward as a defense of theories that don't yield results.

There's a method to quantify how natural a theory is, based on the number of improbable coincidences it relies on.

Thoughts: The irony is that everything physics studies is effectively an improbable coincidence: in fact, that's the why of Physics, because arguably nothing should be, yet everything is. I would almost expect the true fundamental theories of Physics to include improbable coincidences.

"I doubt my sense of beauty is a reliable guide to uncovering (the) fundamental laws of nature, laws that dictate the behavior of entities that I have no direct sensory awareness of, never had, and never will have. For it to be hardwired in my brain, it ought to have been beneficial during natural selection. But what evolutionary advantage has there ever been to understanding quantum gravity?"

Scientists have been trying to poke holes in QM, but have not been able to, which is related to the generation of the new hail-mary theories.

This reminds me of something from Eric, and something from Wolfram: for Wolfram it's computational irreducibility- we've perhaps hit the computational limit of some aspects of physics- perhaps QM is a sub-system of the reality system that we can't predict unless we supply it some initial conditions and let it run (we never know which slit the electron goes through until it does).

The reason physics relies so heavily on math, is that it forces us to be honest, but the beginning of generating these mathematical pieces of knowledge, looks rather unlike the end result

Messy Ideas−>Elegant Maths\small \text{Messy Ideas} -> \text{Elegant Maths}.

Physics & Maths benefit from each other, however, Physics is not Maths.

I am finding it hard to accept this- I know they're not equivalent fields, but Physics - Math = 0, to me- I know this is wrong, but I can't tease Math out of Physics mentally yet.

It very well may be that: Physics - Math = Logic\small \text{Physics - Math = Logic}

If a thousand people read a book, they read a thousand different books. But if a thousand people read an equation, they read the same equation.

The theories that we work with today have stood up to a great many experimental tests. And every time the theories passed another test, it has become a little more difficult to improve anything about them. A new theory needs to accommodate all of the present theories’ success and still be a little better.

"Now the time it takes to test a new fundamental law of nature can be longer than a scientist’s full career. This forces theorists to draw upon criteria other than empirical adequacy to decide which research avenues to pursue. Aesthetic appeal is one of them."

Something about Richard Hamming's doubling of math, scientists all being alive right now.

Particles come in two types: Fermions and Bosons.

Fermions do not play nicely together, very much like two magnets of the same charge.

Bosons, get along with each other just fine, and are happy to group up.

Supersymmetry proposes that the laws of nature remain consistent if you swap Bosons and Fermions, meaning each of the 25 elementary particles, whatever camp they fall into, must have a partner of the other type.

None of the known particles fit this, meaning there must be new particles to discover.

Susy, however doesn't mention the mass of these particles, and they have not been revealed at currently achievable TeV scales.

Most of what keeps people attracted to susy is that the theories are aesthetically beautiful.

eV = electron volt, and TeV = 101210^{12}, or a Trillion eV's. The LHC can deliver 14 TeV.

Referenced in

**1. The Hidden Rules of Physics**