Are foundational issues the same as BSM?

unusualname

Yeah, hollywood hype, it was an economics award remember, not a mathematical one, even Nash thought his embeddings ideas were his best work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_embedding_theorem

anyway, no one cares, you seem to want fundamental QG research to tackle fundamental QM foundations - but it doesn't, and some of the major figures have spoken about this, eg Witten at the end chapter of Brian Greene's 'The Elegant Universe', and Polchinski in a guest blog article http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/co...tring-debates/

friend

Oh yes, of course. That's the whole point of physics. We certainly don't want anyone to succeed in deriving physics from undeniable logic. How ridiculous! That's crazy! That would be the end of all that funding money.

marcus

Hi F.
I'm afraid you may have distorted the meaning of what I said by taking out of the original context and connecting it to your "undeniable logic" idea, which is entirely unrelated to what I was talking about with Unusualname.

I emphasized the importance of a theory being testable by observations/measurements that can really be performed (Loop QG is testable in this sense according to people whose job it is to invent and study tests of theories.)

Unusual responded (I imagine jokingly or at most half seriously) to the effect that it is also important to have the good opinion of colleagues.

Actually we know this can be a bad guide in many cases because colleagues with a rival approach can be envious, or resentful, or in denial about the value of a given line of investigation.

but as a practical matter you have to have enough respect and credibility in the wider scientific community to earn a living. So I replied to Unusual's post to reassure him that the Loop QG program is doing tolerably well in the respect/acceptance category.
==quote==
Right! Otherwise grants and jobs will not be forthcoming for a large percentage of the community's recent PhDs and postdocs.
I think we can take that for granted as an unstated assumption.
http://sites.google.com/site/grqcrumourmill/
As you can see things are looking pretty good in that regard.
These should all be familiar names to anyone who follows Loop research:
==quote==
2012 Postdoc Positions:
...
Cambridge U., DAMTP (philosophy of cosmology) - Offer to: David Sloan (Utrecht; accepted)
...
Louisana State U. (loop quantum gravity & cosmology) - Offer to: Edward Wilson-Ewing (Marseille; accepted)

Penn State U. (Fundamental Gravitational Theory, GR/QC) - Offer to: Yasha Neiman (Tel Aviv; accepted), Thomas Cailleteau (LPSC, Grenoble; accepted), Marc Geiller (APC, Paris; accepted), Norbert Bodendorfer (Erlangen - Nuremberg U.)

Perimeter Institute (quantum gravity, cosmology, ...) - Offer to: Flavio Mercati (Zaragoza), Philipp Höhn (Utrecht; accepted), Ryszard Kostecki (Warsaw; accepted)
...
Warsaw U. (loop quantum gravity) - Offer to: Emanuele Alesci (Erlangen; accepted)

2012 External Fellowships:

Francesca Vidotto Grenoble -> Utrecht (Rubicon Fellowship)
William Nelson Penn State U. -> Nijmegen (Marie Curie)
Muxin Han Marseille -> Marseille (Marie Curie)

2012 Tenure Track/Faculty Positions:
...
Hanno Sahlmann APCTP, Pohang -> Erlangen - Nuremberg U. (faculty)
James Ryan Potsdam, Max Planck Inst. -> UNAM, Mexico (tenure track) - declined
Razvan Gurau Perimeter Inst. -> CNRS, France (research position)
Leonardo Modesto Perimeter Inst. -> Fudan U., Shanghai (faculty)
==endquote==

This has nothing to do with methodology (whether you imagine people proceeding by "undeniable logic" or by educated guesses and analogy with what has worked in the past). It simply is the practical matter of respect and acceptance by peers.

These are just the Fall 2012 appointments. The past year or so has seen a run of them, including a significant number to faculty or comparable research positions. I can't list all---some that come to mind are Bianchi to Perimeter, Giesel to Erlangen, Engle to Florida Atlantic, Singh to LSU, Hellmann to MPI-Potsdam, Meusburger to Erlangen, You Ding to BNU-Beijing..as I say, this is not a complete list.

strangerep

No, it just means that your "undeniable" form of reasoning or logic is wrong, or you have used incorrect inputs to the logic.

I think it was Feynman who said something like "it doesn't matter how smart you are -- if experiment contradicts your theory then you are wrong".

(Hmm, I think I hear ZapperZ approaching with his philosophy-murdering axe... :-)

friend

It may be a bit philosophical, but I think it is still a good question: How foundational are the issues in BSM? I've not seen a good place to pose questions about foundations in PF. But I thought this question would be of interest here. I'm beginning to think that QG won't be adequately addressed without answering the foundations of physics. Why is the universe both QM and GR? I think this is the same as asking what fundamental principle should give rise to both? That seems extremely foundational. And it would be nice to see a well motivated principle and some undeniable reasoning as the basis of all physics. Ultimately I think it has to be logical. For otherwise we're suggesting that at some basic level reality is somewhere not logical, and that's untenable.

marcus

Friend, as long is is not YOUR thinking, but is something that gets featured at major conferences and has professionals writing research papers about it it seems appropriate to BSM.

Your original question isn't philosophy. BSM discussion includes professionally-researched bids to subsume QM and GR in a general relativistic quantum field theory of geometry and matter.
Loop is a step in that direction: get an empirically testable quantum theory of geometry (and then add matter.) It already is accepted to discuss efforts towards that goal as long as professionally researched.

Another example is the idea that Sabine Hossenfelder just came up with where planck's h goes to zero at high energy. So nature is neither strictly quantum nor strictly classical, in her picture. She posted this on arxiv recently and we've discussed it here (mainly her and Demystifier). That's a good example of a fledgling theory that comes to grips with a "foundatiional" = fundamental issue. I'll get the link.

Here is the Hossenfelder thread:
http://physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=632220
I can't imagine how anything could be more "foundational". It denies that nature is fundamentally quantum. Quantum theories are only effective. A nonzero hbar is the result of symmetry breaking.
Hossenfelder is a pro, whose specialty is QG Phenomenology. She has already organized two international conferences on the Experimental Search for QG and her third one is coming up next month.
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/en/...he_hard_facts/

Friend, you asked a straightforward question which I think can be easily and clearly answered.

strangerep

Question: since that paper hasn't yet been published in a refereed journal, doesn't that mean it's outside the PF guidelines? I know that the BTSM forum tolerates more latitude, but I'm wondering where demarcation lies. (?)

[Don't get me wrong -- I'm perfectly happy to discuss anything Bee comes up with. I'm just wondering about the strict application of PF rules to such cases.]

friend

I thought the policy was not to advocate speculative theories. So if someone always put his theory in the form of a question, would that be allowed on PF? Or if someone developed a relatively easy theory from well accepted principles, would that be acceptable on PF? Otherwise, I think you're limiting the scope to theories that have been worked on for 10, 20, 30 years without success from professionals who seem to have a financial interest in keeping their research programs alive. Is that even a recipe for success?

arivero

There is some confusion here. Fundational questions are not Beyond SM, in the same way that fundational questions in math are not Beyond Algebra or Beyond geometry.

The confusion comes because occasionally some axiom of fundational theory implies that some particle in the BSM world can or can not exist. Or some convergence could work only for four dimensions. Or for ten. Still, the comparision with math should be a guide: you can have you intuitionistic or your formalistic approach, and some approach can even invalidate some theorems, but it is not the same subdiscipline. Perhaps the best example is Zorn Lemma, which you need for the theory of Hilbert spaces, but it can be questioned on the basis of foundations; nobody in algebra -at least. not practicioner- thinks that they are a subfield of foundational mathematics.

To be noted also, that this subforum applies the most flexible interpretation of BSM, as it includes a lot of Beyond Astrophisics, and even a bit of Beyond General Relativity.... Technically, to be BSM you must include the SM. If you do only quantum gravity, it is not BSM. If you just hint how to include the SM, you are a candidate for BSM. Of course in this view, the real BSM theories are a narrow fied: Pati-Salam, GUT groups, N=1 SUSY, and perhaps Kaluza-Klein. Amusingly, you can notice that these topics are not between the favorites of the audience here; if this lack of anchor favours more or less content in the forum, I am undecided.

To put a definite example, if I raise a question on the gauge content of Doplitcher-Roberts version of local quantum field theory, which is a very crude fundational question, I am sure it will be -correctly- moved out of this forum. Where? It will be random, depending of the moderator.

strangerep

Never mind. The BTSM guidelines clearly allow papers uploaded to the arXiv.

(BTW, the guidelines actually say "databases like arXiv". Does viXra qualify as "like arXiv", or is it considered too feral?)

Hans de Vries

What would you do if you were a moderator?

Would you want to put that literally in your guidelines or in a response to a question?
and were would that leave you with your moderation responsibilities/duties?

At the end it's all about Community Building. What you want here is a community of
professional researchers. Such a community is self moderating and knowledgeable
enough to judge subjects on it's own. When you have such a community then you
can relax your guidelines, like allowing papers from arXiv.

Your moderation goals would be directed at building and protecting such a community.
It's not hard to chase professional researchers away and yes, they do need protection.

One way to chase researchers away is letting this become a place were the opponents
of, all to obvious, crackpot theories fight it out arguing who has the real TOE. You don't
want to get involved in those kind of arguments. Another way to chase them away is
allowing them to be attacked by novices with no background knowledge but merely with
a bad gut feeling (even so if your own gut tells you the same thing)

You want to create a place and community which people are happy to visit and contribute
to and you want them to feel that their visits and contributions are meaningful.


Hans.

mitchell porter

vixra is out of bounds for this site. But it would be good to have a vixra forum.

friend

Wasn't it David Hilbert that suggested that physicists should try to axiomatize the laws of physics? And what are axioms if not the foundations of a theory? When people try to extend the SM, aren't they proposing new axioms for physics? I don't think you can propose physics beyond the standard model without proposing new axioms.

friend

Einstien was a file clerk in a patent office when he published is theory of special relativity. Since he was not a professor, he would not even be allowed to publish on the arXiv.

arivero

Think in reversal: if any extension of the SM, or whatever extension of physics, where formalised already as equivalent to a new axiom, then the whole field of foundations of physics should not be needed. Moreover, consider the math example again: obviously any math paper is about adding new theorems to the corpus. So, how is it that foundations of mathematics exist as a separate field in mathematics?

There is even an intermediate field that can be seen between foundations and practice, that of rigorisation. Classical work such as Araki-Haag-Kastler or Streater-Wightman are near to foundations, and some people can even consider it as work on the topic.

arivero

And friend, do not mistake me. I am not telling that foundations is not physics, I am telling that it is not BSM. Actually, I think that it was an error to put BSM in this subforum, instead of the particle physics subforum. It was due to the shine of string theory at the time of the creation of the forums, I think, that most participants here understood BSM as "anything including quantum gravity", while BSM means "anything including the standard model".

friend

I was being a little facetious in my response. Of course it's always nice to have consensus on theory. But fundamental questions remain that leave open the validity of present theory: why is the universe quantum mechanical, why is it generally relativistic, why is the speed of light a constant, why the internal symmetries of the SM, why 3 space dimensions and one time dimension, why the 20 or so constants of nature, etc.? Could this all break down at high enough energies? Would there be any way of testing it? The present paradigm of curve fitting (finding math to fit the data) is fundamentally inadequate to explain things we cannot test (and may not ever be able to test). I suppose the only theory able to satisfy is a theory based on reason alone. That would have to be satisfactory, for otherwise, we would find ourselves arguing with reason itself. Have we all given up faith that this is even possible at all? Are there any research programs attempting it?

I find myself wondering: what if someone were able to derive all of physics from logic alone (yes, it sounds like a dream, but what if)? What would the "professionals" think of that? And what would everyone think of these professional? I find it hard to believe that reality is really as complicated and hard to understand as the professionals are making it out to be with their complicated math and procedures. I'm confident that the underlying theory is relatively simple, and everything proceeds from that. Yes, of course, that remains to be proved. But I intend to work on it, and I think I'm making progress. Too bad I can't share it with you. I'm sure this is the community that would appreciate it. I suppose anyone could send me a Private Message if you want details.