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Is this why science advances one funeral at a time?

https://nautil.us/is-this-why-science-advances-one-funeral-at-a-time-1280650
13•Brajeshwar•4h ago

Comments

Animats•42m ago
Einstein spent his later career trying to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics. He failed. So has everyone after him. It's not about Einstein being old. It's that it's a really hard problem.
ceejayoz•37m ago
Not a physicist, so this may be a dumb question… but do we even know for sure it’s a problem with a solution?
ktallett•29m ago
So we do know that all the tiny interactions like charge of particles etc must work side by side with all the big interactions like gravity as otherwise how would anything as we know it work. However it could as easily be neither are the right way to interpret the world and there is something we are missing, or we are right and we can find a method to combine the theory of the big and the small interactions but we are missing a section. At the end of the day we can't interact in any meaningful way with more than half the matter in the universe (it's proven to exist due to a gravitational pull), so it's clear we can't experience a lot of the universe and we definitely can't explain a lot.

So yes there is a solution, but do we, as humans, have the ability to come up with it, who knows. I would say it's unlikely.

KalMann•26m ago
Not a physicist either but my understanding is that is that if you believe that we can discover all the laws of physics that explain how the world operates then it needs to have a solution.

Like we have formulas describing how gravity works. We can test these formulas by observing the motion of the planets and galaxies. Is this theory true? There's lots of evidence for it so it feels like it's gotta be pretty close to "the truth"

We also have formulas describing how elementary particles behave. These formulas have been tested to a very high degree of precision so it seems they've got to be close to the truth as well. But if you use both our formulas for gravitation and formulas for elementary particles you can derive a contradiction. So these two theories cannot simultaneously be true. There's got to be something wrong with them.

I suppose there's the possibility that at a certain point nature simply doesn't follow any laws and you can't possibly make sense of it.

jampekka•30m ago
TFA also refers to just Einstein's 1905 papers. He published general relativity 10 years later. And after GE he contributed e.g. stimulated emission, Bose-Einstein statistics, Einstein-de Sitter cosmological model and the EPR paradox, among lots of other stuff.

Also the claim "toward the tail end of Einstein’s life, he argued strenuously against the concepts undergirding the emerging field of quantum mechanics" downplays that Einstein was pivotal in emerging the field in the first place.

renox•25m ago
Yes and being 'opposed' to QM contributed to expose the 'spooky action at distance' that QM implies, which is very important.. It's a pity that experimentators were able to demonstrate it only a long time after Einstein's death, what would have been his reaction??
kulahan•37m ago
Author must not have heard of Nobel Disease - many laureates go on to propose absolutely batshit insane theories. Sounds disruptive to me…
ceejayoz•36m ago
They’re usually outside their field of expertise, though.

It’s like being a billionaire; you stop getting “no, that’s stupid” feedback and it rots your brain.

hackthemack•33m ago
I prefer the full quote by Douglas Adams.

I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

ktallett•28m ago
Disruptive work nowadays is not very popular with institutions and doesn't win you grants. What does win grants is plodding along on a same path usually towards some end goal that is the latest buzzword. Those who stay in academia all start aspirational and wish to change the world, but the system sucks it out of them.
scarecrowbob•16m ago
I found Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" helpful on this topic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

Googlebook

https://googlebook.google/
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100•_vaporwave_•1h ago•10 comments

CERT is releasing six CVEs for serious security vulnerabilities in dnsmasq

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85•devhouse•4h ago•74 comments

Is this why science advances one funeral at a time?

https://nautil.us/is-this-why-science-advances-one-funeral-at-a-time-1280650
14•Brajeshwar•4h ago•11 comments

Learning Software Architecture

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Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

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Riding the D in Los Angeles: city hopes new subway stations will be game changer

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27•raybb•1d ago•5 comments

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When life gives you lemons, write better error messages

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We accidentally recreated old Facebook

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182•Brajeshwar•4h ago•56 comments

Meta employees protest against mouse tracking tech at US offices

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Text Blaze (YC W21) Is Hiring for a No-AI Summer Internship

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SQL: Incorrect by Construction

https://chreke.com/posts/sql-incorrect-by-construction
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The Real Story of Troy

https://storica.club/blog/troy-was-real/
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Instructure pays ransom to Canvas hackers

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194•Cider9986•19h ago•189 comments

The Surprisingly Long Life of the Vacuum Tube

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55•surprisetalk•1d ago•35 comments

Snowflake Postgres, Lakebase, HorizonDB: Picking the Lock-In You Want

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16•samaysharma•2h ago•4 comments