Tag: foundations of physics

A Quantum Correspondence

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

Peter Morgan has worked for decades to appreciate the underlying structures of physics. But can he convince others he is right?

Magritte, Le fils de l’homme (1964).

When I receive unsolicited scientific communication, I bin writers into two crude categories: Possible Collaborators, and Probable Crackpots. Of course, these categories may overlap. Ted Kaczynski, after all, taught at Berkeley before he made those bombs.

When I first received a message from Peter Morgan, I wasn’t sure where to slot him. The fact that he was listed as a lab associate for the Yale University Physics Department pushed the needle of my prior judgment toward Collaborator. But the fact that he was cultivating journalists to promote his ideas about quantum theory…well, that swung my needle far the other way.

Morgan first contacted me on X.com (the website formerly known as Twitter) on December 9, 2024. I had posted the review of Escape From Shadow Physics: The Quest to End the Dark Ages of Quantum Theory that I had written for 3 Quarks Daily, and he posted a short comment in response. Seeing Morgan’s frequent physics posts, I followed him. Minutes later, he pitched me a column idea.

Morgan suggested that I write about his ideas:

I hope that if there are any of the ideas that deserve to go viral, they will do so sooner rather than later, then I can admire what better mathematicians and physicists than I am can do with whatever survives the winnowing. There are quite a few people who react positively to how different this is (for one thing it’s not a ToE, and the data and signal analysis aspect is met almost joyfully by some people), but I’m so far out in left field that nobody quite believes that I’m not making some obvious mistake. It’s always embarrassing to be the person who champions nonsense, right?

Right. I went to Morgan’s profile and watched one of the talks on his YouTube channel. After realizing I had no immediate way of assessing whether there was any there there, I sent him a polite but noncommittal reply, and placed a mental bookmark, thinking I might contact him again once I had time to spare. Read more »

Tuesday, August 20, 2024

Music Of The Spheres: The Hopf Fibration And Physics

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

The particles of the Standard Model (and gravity). Image credit: Cush, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Modern physics in its full mathematical splendor introduces an array of unfamiliar concepts that daunt the initiate, and often even bewilder the pro (or is that just me?). A part of it is just that it’s a complex topic, and its objects of study are far removed from everyday experience: a quark or a black hole or a glueball is not something you’re likely to find on your desk. Well, maybe the latter, if you’ve been sloppy while crafting recently, but as so very often, physicists further confuse things by giving familiar names to unfamiliar concepts (spin, I’m looking your way).

But saying ‘it’s complicated’ is merely a fig leaf. Lots of things are complicated, and we manage to navigate them with ease. Many jobs involve reams of specialist knowledge, from plumbing to hedge-fond management, and even just navigating our webs of social relationships comes with considerable overhead. So what is it that makes physics special?

There is, of course, the already mentioned issue of the remoteness of its central concepts. Many of the complicated tasks we solve are so ingrained to us that we scarcely notice their complexity—the act of throwing a ball, or catching it out of thin air in flight, involves calculations that, in a realistic setting, stymied the efforts of robotics engineers for a long time. Likewise, the acquisition of language—even present-day Large Language Models (LLMs) still need to ‘read’ tens of trillions of words to acquire a degree of language fluency a human child can pick up just from what is spoken around them in their first couple of years. By comparison, an average reader would take something like 80.000 years of continuous reading time to ingest the text on which an LLM is trained!

These are tasks that, in some manner, are performed ‘natively’ by the human brain, without us noticing their complexity. Such tasks are sometimes classed as ‘System 1’-tasks in the dual-system psychology popularized by Daniel Kahnemann in his bestselling popular science book Thinking, Fast and Slow. In contrast, solving a mathematical equation or reasoning through a logic puzzle are step-by-step, explicit ‘System 2’-tasks you have to concentrate on—they’re not performed ‘by themselves’ the way catching a ball is. Read more »