Stephen Hawking Was Wrong, Said Stephen Hawking

a reply to: Degradation33

Critical temperature. It doesn't seem self-organizing when there is a temperature for symmetry breaking and so on.
Every phase transition in every epoch seems to have a critical temperature to occur at. The emergent laws still break apart at preset energy thresholds. The priori that govern the laws as it were.

That's precisely what Hertog and Hawking were thinking about. Those priors are the parameters that define the laws of physics in different cosmi.

a reply to: Astyanax

Allow clarification.

I am referring the extra dimensions in string theory. There is a necessity to incorporate facets like "every possible law of physics". I have always viewed it like determining a position. Only multi-dimensionally. With the conditions of the universe being a collapsed superposition or parameter to determine as well. That would suggest our universal laws exist this way because it had to in at least one universe. Which is it's own explanation for why they are what they are. Maybe this is in error. I'm skeptical, but maybe spins and charges of the elementary particles are the vibrations of tiny loops?

In string theory they say, "after a certain time string interactions spontaneously caused symmetry breaking, causing 3 spacial dimensions to expand and 6 to remain compacted at planck length". Possibly because they ultimately determine how the spacial dimensions expand and really can't? That still suggests a type of singularity thats existence needs its own explaining.

And anything spontaneous is as hard to prove as God in my mind. Spontaneous symmetry breaking in the infant universe needs explaining some way. Or maybe I demand too much.

It makes some sense, but I can't call it any better.

a reply to: Degradation33

Re spontaneous symmetry breaking, have you read this (warning: PDF)?

Note the date of publication. Seminal and still valid nevertheless.

a reply to: Astyanax

Definitely will. I burnt myself out in the war with the immovable object, so I'll get to it after sleep. My type of nerd reading.

a reply to: Degradation33

Try the paper by Hawking and Hertog as well. Conceptually a bit less demanding than the symmetry breaking paper, too, despite the more advanced mathematical frame.

a reply to: Astyanax

Wow, that pushed my mind all the way from 1972.

Not the use of symmetry breaking I was expecting, but similar hierarchy problems confronted. It would certainly be more in line with self-organization proposed in Hawking-Herzog theory.

I feel like a professed indeterminist caught advocating X is always the cause of Y. Perhaps my thinking became subject to an absolute determinism. Losing that reducing the universe to its components does not necessarily build it back up.

If I understood correctly, its along the lines of other problems that occur when different laws are needed under different conditions, coming into play after a cut-off point, nit related the previous.

www.sciencedirect.com...

The seminal discovery of the Higgs field at the LHC has left us with a perfect Standard Model (SM) of particle physics potentially valid up to energies well above the Planck scale. At the same time, it left unsolved one of the most mysterious puzzles in particle physics: the so-called hierarchy problem.1 This has two facets. The first one is the extreme sensitivity of the Higgs mass to whatever happens above the electroweak scale. Several ways of overpassing this difficulty have been proposed in the literature. One of them is to require new physics to appear around the TeV scale.

If not, I'll come back to this when my brain stops hurting. It requires a lot of looking up concepts discussed like "electric dipole moment", making sure i get it, and then on to the handedness of synthetic sugar monocules to see if there really is an unbroken symmetry of right and left handed variants.

a reply to: Degradation33

Too stringy for me, that paper. Can't make head or tail of it. I think this kind of stuff gets churned out by the ream in physics departments nowadays, a bit like the two-dimensional toy universes cosmologists liked to play with before their funding ran out at most universities.

originally posted by: Astyanax
a reply to: TzarChasm

Also, quantum cosmology is an oxymoron and one of those elderly scientist absurdities where the apogee of theoretical physics is somehow relevant to the spiritual growth of society and the copium of daily adulting. The direct product of philosophy and astronomy crossing wires.

Maybe, but that wasn't what I asked you. Do you think Hertog meant 'barely tolerant' although he was quoted as saying 'perfectly suited' (OWTTE)? If so, why do you think so?

Just idly curious.

Elderly scientist absurdity. If he was looking at a telescope instead of a microscope, he might have reconsidered that line. But naturally it's such poetic embellishments which embarrass science and titillate the reporters pen because it promotes imagination over the rigors of analytics.

Since he's not available for examination, perhaps you can defend his statement and tell the class exactly why the universe is perfectly configured for life. Note that he didn't specify human life.

a reply to: TzarChasm

Elderly scientist absurdity

Thomas Hertog was born in 1975.

Since he's not available for examination, perhaps you can defend his statement and tell the class exactly why the universe is perfectly configured for life.

Probably better just to email him, I should think.

a reply to: Astyanax

Sure, let me get right on that for you. The article says about their collaborative efforts that Hawking "slowed from a few words per minute to several minutes per word" and then “I used to position myself in front of him and fire questions and would look into his eyes to see if he was agreeing or disagreeing" all of which hardly constitutes a professional dialogue much less a theory. We'll see at the end of the month when Hertog is due to speak at Cambridge. I hope you find and deconstruct his lecture when it happens.

a reply to: TzarChasm
Read the article at last, did you? 😆😆😆

a reply to: Astyanax

I often read, and re-read, and take notes and cross reference and fact check. What I saw initially and see again now, remains consistent. This man shouldn't be attempting to prop his career on the work of Hawking, particularly in the severely advanced stages of his degenerative state. I don't respect that approach and to remind the class of the initial topic, quantum cosmology is an oxymoron and deals with two very separate fields of physics. His quantum studies might overlap but certainly are not synonymous with Hawkings work, which is the objective of this collaboration.

We'll see what happens next month when his lecture drops online.

a reply to: TzarChasm

So you haven't read their joint paper yet, then. It was mentioned twice earlier, and linked in the thread.

Why do you think quantum cosmology is an oxymoron? Because 'cosmos big, quantum small'? That's bone-through-the-septum stuff, man.

I'm just starting Chapter 3. So far, the author is all over the place. Everything from the ancient Greeks, Anaximander, Darwin, evolution, Christianity, the Roman empire, the anthropic principle, multiuniverses, opinions of every famous scientist who ever lived – and on and on with a lot of word salad. He describes a lot of history which is worthwhile knowing, but does it really pertain to the title of the book? So far, no.

Something I definitely did not like was contained in the Preface (last page). When Hawking lost his remaining strength to use any of the equipment that had been designed for his communication, the author describes an “intellectual connection” whereby he stood in front of Hawking, fired off his ideas and then watched Hawking's eyes for a response. Whatever Hawking was really thinking is unknown. But the author seems to think he could interpret the eye movements and voila, out comes Hawking's final theory – and the author's book. Hawking was in his last days. No one knows what he was thinking much less how he was responding to the author, if he was responding at all. The author made a lot of assumptions here.

I'll continue reading the book. I generally don't like books like this. Very nonspecific, very few references and notes. But I am curious about the article that the OP posted originally. I won't be surprised if the article is really based on a lot of speculation with very little, if no evidence.

a reply to: Phantom423
Thanks for the update.
Astyanax expressed similar concerns in the opening post:

originally posted by: Astyanax
A certain sceptical anxiety troubles me, however. I worry about the infamous condition known as elderly-scientist syndrome, as well as possible lapses in mutual understanding between the two men due to Hawking's deteriorating physical condition at the time.

I agree if Stephen Hawking had that much trouble communicating, how much can we rely on the interpretation of subtle eye movements? If Hawking is backtracking and saying he was wrong before, even greater questions arise.

Regarding "multiuniverses" as you put it, Sabine Hossenfelder calls them "multiverses", and says people can say anything they want about them, as long as they don't pretend such statements are scientific, because from what she's seen, science can't say anything about them. She of course has lots of company. Untestable multiverse ideas may help to sell popular books, but it's hard to argue the scientific value of those untestable ideas from a scientific perspective:

Can Physicists Ever Prove the Multiverse Is Real?

“It is easy to write theories,” says Carlo Rovelli of the Center for Theoretical Physics in Luminy, France. Here, Rovelli is using the word colloquially, to talk about hypothetical explanations of how the universe, fundamentally, works. “It is hard to write theories that survive the proof of reality,” he continues. “Few survive. By means of this filter, we have been able to develop modern science, a technological society, to cure illness, to feed billions. All this works thanks to a simple idea: Do not trust your fancies. Keep only the ideas that can be tested. If we stop doing so, we go back to the style of thinking of the Middle Ages.”

Sabine would probably respond something like "have untestable fancies if you want, just don't pretend they are scientific".

originally posted by: Astyanax
The final works of great scientists are often problematic: think of Einstein wasting his intellect on attempts to refute quantum theory, or the futile alchemical experiments on which Newton frittered away his mature years. Similar examples abound.

Both of those are mischaracterizations and unfair slurs against geniuses.

Einstein didn't at all "refute" quantum theory (having contributed to it), but he thought that the understanding at that time was not complete. His conceptual ideas and key paper, with two other physicists, turned out to spark---only after many decades---a major revolution and a significant field of research in quantum measurement which is still active today. These experiments are very difficult and subtle. Einstein and co-authors did have a proposal to modify quantum mechanics, but that turned out not to be true. But the experiment that showed that weren't for many decades later, they were simply physically impossible to do. The point is that Einstein's intuition in the 1930's about the inadequacy of understanding of quantum mechanics was entirely correct, and the attitude of his colleagues (we know everything) was wrong. On another matter, Einstein was also right and the other founder of quantum mechanics, Neils Bohr, was wrong. And this was just plain wrong. Bohr didn't believe stimulated emission (of photons from excited electronic states of atoms). Eisntein did. Einstein was right, and created the first theory for this process. The physical manifestation was somewhat important: the laser. There are very few technological objects that we use in macroscopic human space where quantum mechanics is entirely essential and fundamental: lasers and superconductors.

Newton was trying to discover what we now call chemistry. He knew that there had to be certain regularities and laws, but the technology and knowledge of that time were insufficient. The periodic table wasn't put together until the mid to late 1800s, 150 years after Newton. It's not fair to criticize Newton for that. He was doing experiments, and he knew that was the path to discovery there, because he was perhaps the first full scientist in history.

a reply to: Astyanax

It's all a guessing game, no matter one's age.

a reply to: ltrz2025

WTF?

Experimental scientists in the early 1920s knew electrons were real particles, they regularly manipulated them in vacuum tubes. They could be counted, moved and bent and their collisions amplified and viewed as particles in on a cathode ray tube. 'cathode ray' is otherwise known as an electron beam.

> What you call "electrons" is a flow of energy.

Energy describes collective other properties of stuff in physics. Flow of energy of *what*. There's no 'energy' without a physical substrate.

Take Quantum, it's completely illogical to assume that the universe has different laws for the micro than for the macro.

It may not be logical, but it's exactly what the experiments showed, and it sure as heck puzzled many people around 1900-1940.

Like if the universe was this type of nerdy scientist with a super calculator measuring what every single particle does in the universe at any given moment and assigning different properties to it depending on its size.

It's not that, it's that the collective interactions of many small things work differently in practice in the large scale. And this is normal physics.

Water in your faucet is made of colliding atoms, and yet when you need to fill your cup, it's the collective laws of macroscopic fluid mechanics, as if it were a continuum, which are actually useful.

Or Einstein's space-time theory! How does space (which is nothing) and time (that is a unit of measure conceptualized by humans) have PROPERTIES?.... Ridiculous. Sure, in math can look "okay", but it makes absolutely no sense.

That's 'refutation by incredulity', i.e. not useful scientifically. You're reasoning linguistically but that doesn't work for physics. We can't answer the 'how', but we sure can answer the 'what does it do'.

The LIGO results (if dear old Albert were still alive he'd win another Nobel obviously) make it irrefutably certain that spacetime really does have true physical properties all on its very own, properties with quantitative laws of motion just like clocks, tides and planets that Newton understood.

What makes Einstein so special is that the very first cut at any theory of physical spacetime, General Relativity, turned out to be entirely and completely correct with no violations detected. That's insanely prescient. There have been many more similar theories since then, and LIGO results have driven a stake through most of them.

Quantum mechanics, by contrast, was built up over a couple of decades and needed all sorts of pieces. Einstein's achievement would be as if a single someone---probably Dirac---simply dropped 1935 quantum mechanics in entire full mathematical form with Hilbert spaces, operators, non-commutativity, atomic theory, photoelectric effect, uncertainty, Born rule, and all that crazy stuff right onto 1900 physics.

If you want a mystery: here's the big one. Why does adding up all the stuff in the stress-energy tensor of General Relativity work? (Are we sure it works that way?) All the rest of the fields of Standard Model interact with integers or rational numbers or zero as their coupling at the core.

GR adds up all the different fields, lepton, boson, hadron, whatever, and all with generic 'mass' terms, and the masses have weird numbers with no obvious relationship. What's going on here? It's a garbage soup, adding up stuff with 'different units' almost.

To me this makes it seem as if GR is not the ultimate microscopic theory here. I know Albert is damn right so far, but GR as some kind of collective large N macroscopic effect has an appeal, in the same way that fluid mechanics is the continuum limit of microscopic statistical kinetic interactinos.

No physical evidence so far, but it could be true, and potentially experimentally testable.

Why is this exciting to me? If GR is a collective theory, then potentially its effect could be experimentally modifiable, i.e. warp drive.

a reply to: mbkennel

Thank you for a thoughtful reply.

Einstein didn't at all "refute" quantum theory (having contributed to it)

Yes, I regretted this afterwards, but by then it was too late to edit the post. I should, of course, have said ‘quantum mechanics’, not ‘quantum theory’ -- and in particular, of course, the Uncertainty Principle.

Concerning Newton, I don’t think there is any scholarly consensus of the kind you suggest, though there is certainly a school of thought that agrees with you. Newton was very much a man of his time, superstitious by the prevailing standards of the Enlightenment and something of a conservative. So conservative, indeed, that in religion he was an Arian -- a follower of a sect that had been deemed heretical 1,300 years before he was born. He was also a student of Christian eschatology and various aspects of the occult.