#peter woit

[averycanadianfilm]

What is wrong with current physics |Sabine Hossenfelder, Bjørn Ekeberg, Roger Penrose, Donald Hoffman, Peter Woit, Becky Parker, Marika Taylor and Eric Weinstein 

Mar 23, 2023

[averycanadianfilm]

funny quotes from Talagrand QFT textbook

What is Quantum Field Theory? - Michel Talagrand

I have not looked at this book, but it is highly recommended by Peter Woit (Columbia University).

I absolutely refuse to say anything about Quantum Field Theory. :-)

[averycanadianfilm]

Edward Frenkel: Infinity, Ai, String Theory, Death, The Self

TIMESTAMPS: 

- 00:00:00 Introduction 

- 00:03:40 The Langlands Program 

- 00:09:23 Love and Math: An ode to mathematics 

- 00:13:09 Art as a two-way street (reciprocal nature of artistic expression) 

- 00:18:28 The Weil conjectures 

- 00:24:53 Romantic side of math and the "Theory of Everything" as a process vs. a state 

- 00:30:39 Paradoxes in math & axioms 

- 00:33:57 Observer problem in mathematics 

- 00:39:55 The debate on philosophy's role in science 

- 00:51:44 "You can't get away from infinity." 

- 01:07:41 Are computers conscious? Can they "think"? Turing's quotation 

- 01:18:33 The limitations of computation and artificial intelligence 

- 01:23:29 Blurring lines between truth & beauty (algebraic-geometric interplay)

 - 01:33:48 The terrifying question of self 

- 01:36:07 Childhood memories and personal growth (transformative power of pain) 

- 01:49:30 The struggle for excellence & reconnecting with the past 

- 02:17:26 Death is love exposed most bare 

- 02:19:10 Function fields in higher dimensional algebraic varieties 

- 02:25:12 Superdeterminism w/ Sabine Hossenfelder Λ Bernardo Kastrup 

- 02:37:08 The human aspect in scientific theories 

 - 02:39:00 Even atheists reason backward from God to interpretations of quantum mechanics (Richard Hamming) 

- 02:43:02 The unfulfilled promise of string theory 

- 03:01:33 Credit and ethics in scientific fields (Eric Weinstein)

[allyouknowisalie]

Normally I’m fairly allergic to hearing mathematicians or physicists publicly sharing their wisdom about the larger human experience (since they tend to have less of it than the average person)...

Peter Woit, Reality is a Paradox | Not Even Wrong

[allyouknowisalie]

When he became chair of the department I remember thinking that it seemed unlikely that someone as scholarly and laid-back as him, with a somewhat typical Russian mathematician’s other-worldliness, could deal well with the challenges of the university bureaucracy. I was very, very wrong, as it became clear that he was extremely wise in the ways of the world and a great department chair. I guess that after growing up with Soviet bureaucracy, dealing with the Columbia version was child’s play.

Igor Krichever 1950-2022 | Not Even Wrong

[averycanadianfilm]

Scientific Method in Modern Physics_1

Those particles are not scientific predictions. They are calculations based on theories that have been fabricated for the very purpose of having some “new” physics in the energy range of question. I have worked in this field myself and this is literally how it’s done: You make up a theory and fiddle with the details until it shows a deviation from the established theories in a range that may become experimentally accessible soon. Then you claim this is a “prediction”.

As I have said now for more than a decade, this methodology is obviously unscientific and must be discontinued. It has become accepted practice because it’s easy and convenient and allows people to crank out a lot of papers quickly. But it’s a waste of time and money, and certainly not a reason to build a bigger collider.

Many people are afraid of criticizing high energy particle physics because they don’t understand the math. But you don’t need to understand the math to see that these so-called predictions have as a matter of fact not worked since the 1980s. You can look at Kane’s own publications to see that his predictions have been falsified over and over again and he keeps on changing them. (Which Peter has documented on this blog.)

[Sabine Hossenfelder’s comment on Peter Woit’s Blog]

[averycanadianfilm]

The problem is that while the situation with the experimental value is pretty clear (and uncertainties should drop further in coming years as new data is analyzed), the theoretical calculation is a different story. It involves hard to calculate strong-interaction contributions, and the muon g-2 Theory Initiative number quoted above is not the full story. The issues involved are quite technical and I certainly lack the expertise to evaluate the competing claims. To find out more, I’d suggest watching the first talk from the FNAL seminar today, by Aida El-Khadra, who lays out the justification for the muon g-2 Theory Initiative number, but then looking at a new paper out today in Nature from the BMW collaboration. They have a competing calculation, which gives a number quite consistent with the experimental result:...So, the situation today is that unfortunately we still don’t have a completely clear conflict between the SM and experiment. In future years the experimental result will get better, but the crucial question will be whether the theoretical situation can be clarified, resolving the current issue of two quite different competing theory values.

Peter Woit

[averycanadianfilm]

The long awaited FNAL muon g-2 result was announced today, you can watch a video of the seminar here, look at the paper and a discussion of it at Physical Review Letters, or read stories from Natalie Wolchover at Quanta and Dennis Overbye at the New York Times. Tommaso Dorigo has an extensive discussion at his blog. In terms of the actual new result, it’s not very surprising: quite similar to the previous Brookhaven result (see here), with similar size uncertainties.