/sci/ - Science & Math

It's about as useful as Mesoamerican pottery crafting, so, sure, let them do whatever. May need them in about 50 or 100 years though.

There is an overabundance of theories and none of them can be tested for the foreseeable future.

>>11705644
basically: >>11705653

we're waiting on either a convenient solution to some long-standing problems in theoretical physics (YM existence/mass gap) or, more likely, for a precision measurement experiment to restrict theories. which will take a while as most theories are many orders of magnitude beyond what we can measure in the lab.
more likely is that an experiment trying to measure these theories will turn up with a result that isn't explained by standard model physics, so there will be a new rush to develop a theory with this in mind. lots of searches like this currently exist
I sure hope it's my lab that finds it

>>11705650
Yo, don't speak shit about Mesoamerican pottery, Them pots be making my garden look fancy AF next to my fountain.

>>11705644
Is that a mandel brot set seen at a very low resolution?

>>11705707
Ok, but crazy string theory shit provides cool desktop wallpapers.

>>11705706
>YM existence/mass gap
This is likely useless. We know pure YM has a mass gap. Axiomatizing the theory is a problem for mathematicians or "mathematical physicists" not theoretical physicists.

Theoretical physicists in high energy are split between those that try to work on some new model to supersede the standard model and those that work on pure theory and try to understand things like qcd better. The former kind of theorist hasn't really made any progress in decades, but they get hired more easily because they are working on 'the real world.' The later kind of theorist has made steady progress on various abstract quantum field theories, but even most of these advances were made in the 70s and 80s.

>>11705644
Just need better technology to conduct more complex physical experiments instead of thought experiment bullshit.

There’s a reason theoretical physicists end up creeping into philosophy.

>>11705644
theoretical physics is sort of in a rut, while mathematical physics might be "behind" on the newest circulating theories (usually out of skepticism / lack of rigor), they always have something to say either about old theories or old knowledge's relationship to new theory.
tl;dr physics theory is slow, imo go into math-phys, it's designed around being "slower" as a virtue.

>>11705644
Solve the Riemann Hypothesis.

>>11705644
Academia is now structured around job security for the faculty. It used to be an elite group of individuals. But now since the masses go to college, progress has been rapidly slowed in order to justify handholding PhD Students. And teaching huge numbers of international students the help pay all the faculties wages.

>>11705858
>It used to be an elite group of individuals
It still is on average. It's not easy to get a faculty position

>>11705650
I dont get you oragmatic types. Its only not useful to people with very small goals. Sure, it isnt going to help farmer joe plant crops or engineer frank design an airplane. Not everyone has such pitifully low expectations of their ambitions.

>>11705749
thats facts too.

>>11705886
I mean, suppose you started from scratch and reasoned out atomic theory, relativity, nailed every element of the standard model. But it was 1650.

Sure, it's cool, and correct, and probably really interesting. Nothing wrong with that. There'd just be zero way to apply or test much of the stuff.

And since you're not working on that timespan's great problems, or even adjacent to them, you shouldn't stress about being stuck in a rut or only completing your master theories by 1750.

lattice QCD seems pretty cool but is that theoretical or mathematical physics
pardon my ignorance I'm just a pitiful experimenter trying to find BSM physics with atoms and lasers

>>11705918
this being said, I think a better analytic formulation of QCD would be a good development.
fuck QFT though there's no way it's the best way to do things

>>11705918
Theoretical physics

>>11705926
There's a formulation of QCD entirely in terms of Wilson loops. There are also all sorts of hints at a string connection. But you won't get anywhere without learning QFT first

>>11705927
I’ve seen lattice QCD papers from mathematical physics groups

>>11705870
You can’t have 10,000 PhD and expect them all to discover something meaningful in a subject. Which is exactly what we do, corral them all through like cattle. So they chose something simple but completely frivolous just because it has a high likelihood of getting publishable results without skepticism from peers. And the academic system has very little interest in actually advancements. In fact a TRULY disruptive discover would likely harm the job security of those PhD so it is actively discouraged by peers (despite claiming the opposite)

>>11705950
They probably just got stuck in a rut and needed to find something their grad student could handle as a thesis.

>>11705950
>>11705927
okay so since I've never learned the difference what is mathematical vs theoretical physics? I've always just used the distinction experiment vs theory, is mathematical physics in the math dept.?
>>11705956
(mostly) any theory paper that isn't out of a top university is hogwash for this reason. however the top schools are composed of people who push out things of real consequence

>>11705957
Lol
Math-phys is a hard life pre tenure. The physicists think you’re too rigorous and the mathematicians think you’re applied enough to be an industry worker

>>11705956
You don't understand. There are indeed too many people trying to get a PhD. There is indeed a lot of useless research designed to accommodate those PhDs. But there are very few faculty positions available at the top of the pyramid.

On average those faculty positions go to the very few PhDs who first of all got a lucky break to work with someone good at a top school, but then also consistently produce good research over many years as a grad student and then a postdoc

>>11705960
>mathematical vs theoretical physics
the former is in the math department and has a mathematics training on physics topics, while the latter has a physics training (which involves some math) in the physics department. Theoretical physicists (typically) make new models by applying math in (typically) non-rigorous ways to make sense of experiment and other theory papers. Mathematical physics (typically) focuses on older, more established theories, and derives a lot of information by axiomatizing a theory and then using formal mathematics.
I say typically since there's overlap, and these groups ought to talk to each other more, but they generally keep to their respective journals. That being said there's enough communication that it's meaningful, and there are people from both camps who do each others' work

>>11705974
>Theoretical physicists (typically) make new models by applying math in (typically) non-rigorous ways to make sense of experiment and other theory papers. Mathematical physics (typically) focuses on older, more established theories, and derives a lot of information by axiomatizing a theory and then using formal mathematics.

I disagree with this. Most theoretical physicists are not applying math to match experiment. They are working on very abstract theories which have little to do with the real world. They have the same goals that you assign to the mathematical physicist but they come from a physics culture rather than a math culture, and so some questions of existence and uniqueness etc. are not very interesting to them.

>>11705982
this was the notion I had in mind. his description of theoretical physics was not what I was used to.

>>11705886
If someone can figure out turbulence that would help immensely with airplane design.

>>11705969
We are mostly in agreement but coming to different conclusions. Those useless studies are huge inefficiencies in the system, and clog up funding and focus for legitimate research. You don’t think that’s a factor in slowing scientific progress, but I would argue they are the primary factor. Unfortunately the university secured more funding the bigger it gets, and bureaucracies always work for their own self interest; just as if it was it’s own life form. It’s just how it always ends up. It’s unfortunate but Universities have found that they can get more money by having tons of bogus studies, than focusing efforts where it matters. Even Einstein went up against a lot of academic dogma with his ideas. There’s no easy way to advance science

>>11705969
Consider this. A university can receive billions in funding every year. Where do you think those billions of dollars is going? Wouldn’t you expect all these people receiving that money whether directly or tangentially through the university will use any means to ride this gravy train as long as possible? Of course. Nobody nowadays cares about actually progress. Just the appearance of progress to the extent it gives people jobs and makes you look good. You sound very naive

>>11706039
And if academia actually put research ahead of money and protecting the establishment they would digitalization textbooks and make all scientific journals public domain. Scientific journals and textbooks are outdated institutions with today’s technology and only prevail today because like most areas of a university it is a way for the establishment to make money under the guise of legitimacy. But he entire university is like this

>>11705644
It's this piece of shit, good luck getting peer reviewed when everyone believes this as much as the sky daddy

>>11705987
>figure out
>normalization of white noise
You realize this is why there isn't a Soviet Union anymore, right anon?

>>11705950
Lattice QCD is only useful if you've got enough vectors to cover whatever the fuck it is you're trying to describe, otherwise you're stuck with string theory N(10)

>>11705918
Realize we haven't discovered FTL measuring tech just yet. Nyquist rate requires sampling 2.54 times whatever it is you're trying to measure

>>11706050
No, I don't know the connection between turbulence and the fall of the Soviet union. What is that?

>>11706060
Ok TL;DR time
The entire reason the NSA exists is because they knew where the Soviet listening posts where "back in the day"
>hit them with white noise dot j p g
Yeah decoding that shit is why the FSB/GRU fags on here appear schizo

It's not true at all. Developing the fundamental theory of a field is far from being the only thing theoretical physicists do. I don't understand why but there is this perception that physicists only work with the most fundamental and modern theories while the older theories are wrong and outdated. There are still theoretical questions about classical mechanics or classical systems that range from the foundational to the practical.

There are many cases of well known physical effects who still lack a complete description derived from the general theory and so plenty of work is done in doing ever more refined models and arguments that explain such phenomena. Ffs there is still no full explanation for the origin of neutrino mass.

>>11705982
Would you say there’s an effective difference between mathematical and theoretical physicists other than the journals they publish in?

>>11706153
Yes, but it's hard to describe. You see a lot of mathematical physicists do a lot of boring stuff with classical differential equations and solitons in them. As a theoretical physicist I'm interested in solitons in quantum field theory, but it seems the mathematical physicists like to stick to the classical field theory because they don't want to deal with the lack of rigor inherent in the idea of a path integral. So I always have to filter a lot of boring mathematical physics papers whenever I search for papers on a particular Lagrangian.

On the flip side there is a lot of boring stuff done by theoretical physicists revolving around ideas like 'naturalness.' And also there are mathematical physicists who are working with genuine quantum field theory. But it does seem to me that the theoretical physicists are usually more cutting edge. It's a culture difference more than anything, I think.

>>11705644
basically giving you the correct equations for physics would give you too much power, obviously, so they lie to you to keep you busy. can you imagine space muslims? no, me neither. that's why you don't know shit, because no one can trust what you'd do with it if you knew.

>>11706185
I don't this is that hard to see the underlying difference between the two fields. Theoretical physics is about formulating models that predicts and explains physical phenomenon, while mathematical physics is about the study of the mathematical objects behind these models. Not caring about rigor shouldn't be defining aspect, but maybe a consequence of the objectives in each field, and it leads to missunderstandings. The path integral, because of its name and the notation used in physics, scream that the mathematical object that describes it must be a generalization of usual integration theory in infinite dimension vector spaces. Then it is proved that this shit is ill defined and so it gives the illusion that evertything is ill defined. But really if you look at what standard QFT text do, they define "formal" rules of operations that you can look at their consistency from a purley algebraic point of view. That is physicists are giving pretty clear rules about how to manipulate the objects even if the names of these objects do not correspond to the proper mathematical objects behind them. With this in mind, a mathematician should maybe not pay so much attention if something is called a measure on the space of paths or an operator valued distribution, but if the rules are clear enough, and at least for perurbative calculations, the rule are pretty clear and you can still be rigorous in the way you go about using these rules.

On the other hand, QFT has many other rules that while may have a physical justification, I believe you could also look at them as "patches" which ilustrate the lack of a general nonperturbative formulation. And so the thing is that a desirable solution is to have mathematical clarity about these objects. And the best way to study these mathematical objects is well, how mathematicians go about studying them and so it is not useless. So physicists should not dismiss this approach.

>>11705644
>If so how do we get out of the rut?

We need experiments that can probe higher energies, there is no way around that. So bigger particle colliders, or some alternative design for a collider (laser-driven?), or astronomical observations of Big Bang gravity waves.

Without any new experimental data it may not be possible to make fundamental advances.

>>11706069
they don't appear schizo. it's a deliberate tactic to confuse their opponents.

>>11706047
>sky daddy
nobody ever said god was a bearded man in the sky, YOU choose that image of god and you're mad because god doesn't look the way you envisioned it. It's okay though when you find out what god really is you'll know.

>>11706185
>>11706396
Would you say both camps have a high impact when it comes to studying physics?

>>11706444
Trips of belial
You know you've assblasted an atheist when they rush to defend their precious

>>11705650
Don't count on it. In 50 to 100 years there's a high probabililty their theories will be worthless, disproven garbage.

>>11705644
Redirect funding away from string theory.

>this entire thread is built around the premise that theoretical physics = hep-th
What an incredibly narrow point of view. There's more to physics than scattering cross sections, you know.

>>11706745
Pls answer

>>11706745
Theoretical for sure. Theoretical physics is a crucial component of physics. You could argue that physics divides itself between theoretical and experimental physics.

Mathematical can have a high impact also, but by the nature of the field there can be important results in mathematical physics that may not be all that relevant to physics. For example, in the mathematically rigorous formulation of the spectral theory, it seems that for a general self adjoint operator, it's spectrum is actually separated into three compartments, point, continuous and singular and continuous. The latter is a "bad" spectrum as it has no physical interpretation. But physicists wouldn't consider it an issue as the verification of a model already demands physical interpretation.

>>11705644
If theoretical physics is stagnant, it is only because experiment cannot keep up and give us data for the predicted models or yield something new

>>11707956
So it comes down to one’s research interests / body of work?
I ask as a math undergrad who is gonna be applying to grad schools a year’s time from now. I gained interest in physics about 2 semesters ago. I’m thinking of taking a graduate mathematical physics class that goes through mechanics, electrodynamics, and special relativity next semester.
I’m just wondering what to do and if this path would hinder me is all ;^<

so it's like the .999=1 problem, the mathematical figures out the equation behind the inequality? and the theoretical states it more generally?

>>11707981
Wat
Not the guy making the distinction, but this makes no sense. The mathematician is simultaneously interested in solving the problem and stating its results generally. 0.99.. = 1 is a consequence of the construction of the real numbers.
The difference between your example and physics is that the study of physics involves a subset of math as well as the physics used to study it, but your stated problem is a pure math problem.

How is this stagnant?

>>11707956
How often would you say mathematical physicists contribute to physics, and often in what way do they end up contributing?

>>11705644
Need to start looking elsewhere, have the data confirm your models, and don't invent variables to have your model fit said data.

>>11708725
I think you can maybe make a case that Poincare, Hilbert, Kolmogorov, Von Neumann were mathematical physicists (although maybe they would be considered just mathematicians). They certainly made big contributions to physics.

There aren't many other more recent names I can think of that have done big things that other physicists are interested in. Vladimir Arnold is one. Arthur Jaffe would certainly be considered a mathematical physicist but most of the relevant stuff he has done on say gauge theories would probably be classified as 'theoretical physics' and his work on constructive quantum field theory isn't terribly relevant to anyone other than those that care about axiomatization.

It sounds like I am not being fair here but it is true that most people who have made contributions to physics in the last 75 years have been been considered theortical physicists or sometimes just mathematicians. It is extremely rare for someone described as a "mathematical physicist" to do something relevant

>>11705650
Your answer has nothing to do with the question being asked

>>11708725
>>11708784
I think there are many issues into what constitutes a contribution. I think the first porblem is with
> is extremely rare for someone described as a "mathematical physicist" to do something relevant
I don't disagree with this, but I find this a problem of trying to define strong borders with interdisciplinary fields, and defining what you do based on your backround. Witten is a prime example of someone who has clearly developed shit in mathematical physics but he is just a "physicists". Going a bit back, hamilton done one of the best examples of mathematical physics and he consider himself a mathematician. The thing is that mathematical physics has been associated with schools who try to prove shit the physicists already developed. This is what people usually say by results that are not really relevant to physicists, but the thing is that certainly isn't what makes something a development in mathematical physics. So by not excluding the other examples it is much more clear that mathematical physics has contributed to physics massively.The best examples are in the application of topology in physics.

However I believe the sort of weird ultrapragmatism that the physics community sometimes teaches, is not a good justification to dismiss foundational questions. It may not get you to the latests theories in physics, but many results in physics have yet to be rigorously proven. The thing is, that if you want to make claims about the consitency of your theory and to have mathematical justifications of what you use, well you need to have a proper justification, if not it is not clear at all that what you are using acutally follows from your premises. Obviously this doesn't invalidate the way things are done, but it shows it is lacking in a structure other physical theories have.

But the best examples are in statistical mechanics, scaterring theory, pde theory for fluids and non perturbative QFT.

>>11708784
>>11708880
Would you say there are mathematical physicists who are also theoretical physicists as well as theoretical physicists who are also mathematical physicists? I mean this to say: does your assignment to either department gate you from actually doing work “considered relevant” to the other camp?

>>11709021
It depends on what you publish. If you manage to start a research program in collaboration with someone from the other department then you can certainly publish in both areas. There's no hard limit to what you can do besides your own capacity and conections. It is just in general not common to move away from your main area besides collaborations.

Either solve non-linear problems or reach higher energy output resources. Theory is nothing without experimentalists to test it, and it is getting harder and harder to do anything resembling desktop experimentation.

>>11709163
data is everything.

>>11709146
But then the question is, would the theoretical physics community take you seriously? Are there enough cases of “this field has helped us before” for theoretical physicists not to turn their head immediately?

>>11705957
>>11705965
I find this offensive, delete this

>>11710708
Good job on doing the investigative work. Choose your path wisely. From my own personal experience, most of my course mates who had been studying both physics and math decided to stick with math as they found it way more fun, and I would have to agree with them

>>11708880
Thorough answers anon, what's your background?

>>11705644
>Is it true when people say that theoretical physics hasn't has been stagnant for decades?
true. theoretical physics hasn't been stagnant

>If so how do we get out of the rut?
which rut? there hasn't been stagnation retard

only people that cannot follow, or even write properly

>>11706047
godless people like you is the reason why we are in this mess.
god is a philosophy of living not wish granter

>>11710827
Wait, how does this address the post you were responding to? Would people in physics take you seriously as a researcher in math-phys?

>>11711645
I wasn't directly responding to that post, but more to the fact that anon had a bunch of consecutive questions.

From my personal experience, I haven't noticed too much beef between theoretical physicists and mathematicians. As was mentioned before, physicists always benefited from mathematicians so I doubt anyone would ever turn their head away from any math. In fact, I'd argue that most of the famous physicists got famous because they successfully applied some field of math (group theory, differential geometry, etc.) for physics

>>11705653
LHC already ruled out some theories, like supersymmetry at LHC energies.

>>11705644
>Is it true when people say that theoretical physics hasn't has been stagnant for decades? If so how do we get out of the rut?

Yes. It's a funding issue