Theory of Everything

[nikol]

Perhaps you mean that today we have the research about possible zillions ways of reality description.

Langrangian/hamiltonian mechanics and noether theorem define applicability of symmetries, while skilled enough theoretician can invent all possible combinations of symmetries.

Well, it is the same game as debating which stoch.process is more appropriate till you clear on the market (=experiment). Professional professors will be lost in history. Still, I consider their work not completely useless. Negative answer is answer too.



When solving the maze, the black out of dead ends at some point highlights white shiny ultimate path of the solution.

[jslade]

Theorists; perhaps especially youtube personality theorists, like Weinstein and Wolfram, are full of shit. Physics has always been driven by experiment. The end. No experiment, no physics. The entire noodle theory quantum computer contingent (barring experimentalists; I think there are 3-4 honest ones) should be frog marched to Idaho and forced to pick potatoes. Wolfram already has a job doing useful work; we can put him in the pillory and throw rotten potatoes at him. Absolutely nothing has *ever* come of theoretical physics departments that isn't very closely aligned with rich experimental results. Only in current year can people imagine otherwise.



Worse than that; I found that even in hard-headed subjects like condensed matter physics are afflicted with .... phenomenologists. What's that jslade, you say, that sounds like the opposite of what you're complaining about? Apparently they're like the noodle theory of solid state physics; they just wank about things because they can't figure anything out.



I caught the tail end of when physics still meant something, but as far as I can tell, physics departments are mostly now filled with politicians participating in government make-work programs, barbarians larping like they're Einstein, and EEOC victims. Getting shit wrong used to be literally terrifying, and having hyper intelligent god-like beings with German accents tearing your work apart was both a hazing ritual and an ever present danger. Now everyone is so pussified, obvious quackery like Wolfram and Weinstein is taken with gaping credulity rather than laughed to scorn.



There will probably be a time in the future where we can point at a last honest physicist; someone like Robert Laughlin who actually did serious work, figured shit out, made predictions that could be tested. The problem is, the lunatics are running the asylum. There are vastly more dipshits, cranks and outright imbeciles than there are actual physicists in most physics departments. Completely useless. Might as well be a gender studies department. Hell some of them have dual appointments.



I remember being miffed on yacking with NP's founder that he didn't think much of physics ph.d. types. Now that I'm involved in hiring and firing; neither do I. I see it as more of an intellectual handicap to be overcome. Electrical engineers, applied mathematicians (has to be applied), or even uneducated people who are interested in computers are a better bet by far.

[chiral3]

"Getting shit wrong used to be literally terrifying, and having hyper intelligent god-like beings with German accents tearing your work apart was both a hazing ritual and an ever present danger"



Well said. I was the tail end of "shut up and calculate". There was a logic to that much like 7 year old kids leaning arithmetic before they went around talking about the area of a soccer field. Being wrong was utterly terrifying and the old physicists dressed you down like my grandfather would if I half-assed weeding his garden.



"...didn't think much of physics ph.d. types. Now that I'm involved in hiring and firing; neither do I."



I've told this story here before: first guy I fired was a math PhD with a concentration in PDEs I hired to build PDE solvers and he couldn't solve PDEs (apart from the narrow class of PDEs that his dissertation concerned itself with). First employee relations issue I had at a large cie was a French mathematician that felt I didn't give him enough credit or latitude to operate in the "French academic school of thought and inquiry", whatever that means, but he was turning in work that looked like No 7's big No 2 on "the existence of price" instead of the code I needed committed to the pile based on mathématiques importantes. Funnily he turned his pistolet on HR when they deemed his assertions incroyable and attempted to sue the cie for violating his civil rights. I believe he's been unemployed and maybe teaching in Amsterdam after a stint loitering around the banks of the Thames waiting for someone to notice him. But that was 15 years ago, maybe he's finally teaching. Anyway, PhD necessary but not sufficient sometimes. At a minimum there often needs to be a layer of people that arrange all the blocks and toys for playtime in a way that doesn't confuse people and result in orphaned math, frankencode, and no argent.

[nikol]

From your observations I conclude that if to look subjects studied by professors hired by RenTec, they would never make into less complicated HFs.



Of course, experiment is king. Still, before Einstein has published his equation, nobody even thought about measuring light deflection or time delay by mass/matter.



SM symmetries generated all those diamond like structures with particles at nodes, which were subsequently discovered.



Dont know Weinstein, but Wolfram might do just smart marketing to his software. Let it be. His money = dont care.

[chiral3]

Rentech is defined largely by Medallion, which has been closed for almost three decades; and, while I don't begrudge anyone's success, based on what we know I wouldn't call that success portable to other spaces or times (pun intended) or even falsifiable (some years).

[Jurassic]

"I remember being miffed on yacking with NP's founder that he didn't think much of physics ph.d. types. Now that I'm involved in hiring and firing; neither do I. I see it as more of an intellectual handicap to be overcome. Electrical engineers, applied mathematicians (has to be applied), or even uneducated people who are interested in computers are a better bet by far.

"

@jslade I wept at the bias here!

[nikol]

I think we should talk about Science not "scientists". Since Science became paid business there appeared tonnes of charlatans. Helas.



Those who adore the process of questioning and research and able to finance their hobbies are real heroes. I knew one such man. Almost a friend. He had 8 years of school, published dozens of articles, few monographes about butterflies and finally died voluntarily donating own body to university.



Of course, among hobbyists still there are graphomaniacs and sometimesit is hard to cut them off.

[NeroTulip]

Coming out soon from a department of queer cosmology near you: "The transgender universe: Black holes as a social construct to justify the oppression of matter by White supremacy, a gender fluid mechanics approach"

[pj]

> coming soon

Done already

[chiral3]

A close friend of mine is an anthropologist and he was complaining that they lumped gender studies into his larger department. I laughed and said that at least he doesn't have to give up any space in the library; it's not like there's a corpus or anything to base the field on to occupy space.