[Cd00d]

The most important thing I learned from my graduate advisor: anyone can have a worthwhile idea.

I watched him for years coming into weekly colloquia and seeming to tune out reading papers. But, occasionally there would be a speaker that was less than credible, and you could feel the entire hall close off. But, my advisor would hear a tidbit of a good idea (even amongst loads of bunk), and look up from his journals and ask a genuinely curious clarifying question. This would often lead to new lines of research in our labs.

In the end, many of these speakers were on the wrong overall track, but they definitely had insights that were incredibly valuable. Those who dismissed them entirely missed out, while my advisor had a knack for finding the signal in the noise and moving forward with that without missing it due to judgement.

[jiggawatts]

My hobby is to look for a physics theory of everything (ToE). I have virtually no chance at succeeding at this, but it's fun reading through random junk on ArXiV.

I noticed something similar: You can find papers by clearly crazy people that have nuggets of good ideas in them. Odd bits of mathematics they reference might be an interesting rabbithole to go down, even if it ultimately leads nowhere.

The whole thing reminds me of the passtime of the hyper-intelligent Minds in the Culture series. They play in Infinite Fun Space, which is vaguely like coming up with new rules of physics and "seeing what happens". The rules don't have to be realistic, just fun.

I've found that practising physicists seem allergic to any such notion, too quick to dismiss unorthodox approaches. So what if they're wrong? They're fun, and maybe not that wrong in some rare cases.

[sitkack]

If you want a good idea killed, have it presented by the wrong person. We attach an outsized amount of meaning between the two, sometimes so much that we kill the person delivering it.

[still_grokking]

Sometimes?

The easiest way to get killed by people in rage is to tell them the naked truth.

That's a hard rule since humanities dawn.

[JackFr]

I don't think that is true.

People claiming to be brutally honest, are often far more interested in being brutal than in being honest.

[still_grokking]

That may be true. But I didn't say it goes this way.

It makes a big difference whether someone only claims to be honest or is actually honest.

[comfypotato]

I got a good laugh from your comment here. Imagine it from my perspective. Someone (you) is suggesting they search for a ToE in their spare time, and they’re labeling someone else as clearly crazy.

;)

All in good fun. I greatly enjoy the sentiment of your comment and it’s parent that great ideas can come from anywhere. At the risk of creating a segue into controversial topics, I think this plays a huge part of why it’s important that a team of programmers be made up of folks with different backgrounds. I am so often caught completely off guard by how different a valid idea is than mine. “I totally never would have thought of that.”

[jiggawatts]

An analogy is that one can walk in the right direction for an awfully long way before getting stuck at the end of a valley, staring up a proverbial cliff. Someone walking parallel to you on a ridge might be nearby the whole time, but avoid being stuck.[1] Anyone studying AI/ML would know about getting stuck in local minima, and having to essentially restart training to shake things loose. Same thing.

My theory is that physics is stuck in a local minima where it's not sufficient to change just one, or even two or three fundamental things to get unstuck. That's too big a leap via traditional incremental publishing of new theories. Any one change to the status quo won't work, and is rejected. Multiple changes are too complex, and might need to have occurred too early in the timeline. It simply might not occur to people that the whole industry took a run turn... 100 years ago.

This is why I like crazy papers. They make you reconsider fundamental notions, the type that were in textbooks decades ago and are seen as foundational and unquestionable.

[1] This literally happened in New South Wales. For decades(!) nobody could cross the Blue Mountains, until Blaxland, Lawson, and Wentworth tried walking on the ridge tops instead of the valleys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1813_crossing_of_the_Blue_Moun...

[JackFr]

> My theory is that physics is stuck in a local minima where it's not sufficient to change just one, or even two or three fundamental things to get unstuck. That's too big a leap via traditional incremental publishing of new theories. Any one change to the status quo won't work, and is rejected.

Makes me think of Stephen Wolframs current work. Guy's a genius, who's current stuff kind of reads like he's a crank. But at the same time I'm kind of rooting for a revolutionary paradigm that's gonna totally upend things.

[jiggawatts]

He's starting from a totally blank slate and hoping he'll end up at Physics. In some sense, that's guaranteed by definition -- any sufficiently complex foundational system or algebra can represent any other, including the current models of reality. But this has no predictive power. It's like saying digital circuitry is a theory of physics because a computer can run a physics simulation!

My approach is more akin to assigning a lower probability of validity to papers that have long been generally accepted as 100% true. Then I try to hold all of them in my brain simultaneously while reassigning joint probabilities, almost like those computer game map generators that use "quantum decoherence".

The idea is to find a parallel path that goes through most of established physics but avoids the trap of local minima. The challenge is that it's really unclear which existing theories are the traps, and which are true and need to be kept.

Something like this is clearly needed, because existing theories are either contradictory or inconsistent. They can't all be right. Something somewhere must be discarded.

[guskel]

Have you taken a look at Wolframs ToE? I found it pretty intriguing.

[jiggawatts]

He's about half a dozen giant steps from a theory making qualitative predictions matching the physics of our universe, but not others. His only advantage is that his starting point is more foundational than pretty much anyone else, but that also makes it very unlikely that he'll ever develop something with predictive power.

My current set of candidate pet theories are all based on a vaguely similar foundational notion that the physical universe isn't made up of "matter on top space-time", but rather that there is a single space-time-matter fabric.

For example, to create matter, space-time must be affected (curved). Or to put it another way, all particles have mass-energy (spacetime curvature) because they are space-time-matter curvature. The idea is to unify QM and GR by making fundamental particles have geometric properties that satisfy GR at all scales.

Some of these notions are present in Wolfram's ToE implicitly, so it's possible that there is a connection. However, he isn't yet at the point where he can derive, say, the mass of an electron from first principles based on how much its specific topology curves space-time-matter.

[still_grokking]

> My current set of candidate pet theories are all based on a vaguely similar foundational notion that the physical universe isn't made up of "matter on top space-time", but rather that there is a single space-time-matter fabric.

> For example, to create matter, space-time must be affected (curved). Or to put it another way, all particles have mass-energy (spacetime curvature) because they are space-time-matter curvature. The idea is to unify QM and GR by making fundamental particles have geometric properties that satisfy GR at all scales.

I also think this is the "obvious solution". Came to the same mental picture of "space-time-energy quants" long ago.

But I guess the main problem is to formulate this in a meaningful mathematical way. (Physics always needs some "stage" on that "things" can happen. GR did not change that; it made the "stage" just more dynamic, and alone that proved to be very hard to formulate in math, which is all about static relations between objects).

BTW: Something that I found very inspirational, and what makes very much sense to me, was this here:

http://www.platonia.com/research.html

(Mr. Barbour has also some pop-science books on his topics).

The basic idea is that there is nothing besides pure geometry on the fundamental level.

That makes sense because to me as what else could be there at all? Anything that is needs to come form somewhere. Only pure structure, something that "just happens" given the idea of "things in a space" could imho resolve this problem. (Which is also quite in line with Wolframs ideas, btw).

That leads to the idea that things "are" because they "must be" alone from the fact that you try to describe their relations.

Contrary to that all physics concentrate on things that aren't "pure". Almost everything in physics is "afflicted" by some "units". But how do you explain the "units"? You can't! They're a given. So imho, even the smallest set of them can't be fundamental. Only pure "proportions", from which "structures" and "shapes" emerge, make sense on the fundamental level. Because such structures "just are", as they're mathematical objects. (Mathematical objects and structure "exist" without being created; nor they can be ever changed or destructed. That makes "very good material" for the fundamentals of a universe, imho).

Also this way to look at things explains one of the most weird and quasi not understood parts of our world, namely time.

Time is a big mystery. Mr. Barbour's ideas were to me the first explanation ever that didn't produce more questions than answers.

[JackFr]

Crazy -- just brought up Wolfram in response to a sibling comment before I saw this. Happy to see I'm not the only one.

[agumonkey]

I somehow converged around a similar idea, fun and exploration