Terry Replied to my posts above as a reply on his essay, I am posting that Back here......
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Author Terry Bollinger wrote on May. 14, 2020 @ 19:00 GMT
Dear snp,
Thank you for such kind words after me providing a fairly tough review! You are a good person, and I too am delighted by meeting folks like you and other here.
I like your point that the greatest value of FQXi is the interaction, not the prizes. If someone gets an FQXi prize... well celebrate! Great gravy train in the morning, why should you not? But if you don't get an FQXi prize after putting in so much work... well, meh, is it really that big of a deal?
While FQXi admirably attempts to probe a bit deeper than many groups, it is by its very nature also very deeply intertwined with the "standard" perspectives of physics, which as I noted shows up in some of its prize assessments. And that affects how seriously individuals should take its assessments.
We are speaking here of a broader research community that for the past half century has been betting the majority of its theoretical money and researcher careers (whether the researchers wanted it or not) on the idea of Planck-scale superstrings. All of that work has now been soundly shown to be irrelevant by the superb experimental data from the HAWC Consortium, which showed that tiny Planck-scale superstrings -- which from the very first paper were an enormous and very weakly justified leap of faith from quite real hadronic Regge strings -- are far too huge and gloppy to meet the experimentally verified constraints of poor old special relativity no less... the delightfully simple Poincare/Lorentz/Einstein/Minkowski symmetries that were first postulated over a century ago, back when even calculators were mechanical only.
From that costly little half-century faux pas alone (there have been other analytical strategy missteps), I think it's safe to say that the track record in modern physics for assessing and predicting which ideas will truly become the future of physics has been... well, somewhat less than stellar? Instead, it was instead those amazing mathematicians (Poincare especially) and physicists from over a century ago, the ones who had minimal tools, simple ideas, and an absolute acceptance of the need for experimental validation of everything they did, who even now, over a century later, are proving to have been the true prophets for predicting where physics must go in the future.
Cheers,
Terry
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And an addendum: I was serious in my comment above about century-old simplicity still being predictive of where physics must head in the future. For example, the recent HAWC Collaboration data seems to imply that special relativity is never violated. So why not make this into a fundamental hypothesis? That is, what would be the full implications to physics and mathematics of hypothesizing that at their deepest roots both are based not on Euclidean spaces, but on Minkowski spaces?
That may sound easy, or even "of course" like what we are already doing, but I assure you it is not. For survival purposes our brains are hardwired to think in terms of Euclidean spaces, and those are at best narrow, local-only, and unavoidably approximate subsets of the Minkowski spaces of special relativity.
Taking Poincare symmetries as a starting point would require us to abandon the primacy of Euclidean spaces. But to take the idea to its logical limit, this would need to apply not just to physics, but to the mathematics we use to describe physics. That is because the Euclidean concepts that we toss about so freely and without thought in mathematical fields and such are necessary approximations created by the hard-wiring of our brains to take advantage of the narrow, low-energy environment in which we must think quickly to survive. So just how radical might such a transformation be?
One impact is much of the mathematics of physics would suddenly and necessarily become part of a much broader context, since any Euclidean space -- even those implied by simple arrays of numbers in a computer -- would be newly understood as local-only approximates of some much larger Minkowski space, one that only looks Euclidean to our small-scale, limited-range, biologically enforced perceptions. If you play with such ideas seriously for a while, you will discover they are a bit mind-bending. Minkowski himself glimpsed this a century ago in his famous talk on the merger of space and time into a single entity. Yet even Minkowski struggled with the idea a bit, as seen in the infinities that creep into his discussion of how to define Euclidean space as a limit Minkowski space.
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