<story><title>Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math</title><url>https://nautil.us/why-physics-is-unreasonably-good-at-creating-new-math-797056/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alickz</author><text>please forgive my ignorance, has there been notable progress in the field of physics in the last decade? noteworthy breakthroughs i mean&lt;p&gt;i ask out of layman curiosity</text></item><item><author>janalsncm</author><text>I don’t agree with this. I think there are definitely people like Michio Kaku who have books to sell who spend their time pontificating. People just think that physics looks like pontificating because that’s what it looks like on TV.&lt;p&gt;But there are also active researchers doing real research. Physics postdocs aren’t just sitting around in a circle making up stories about what the universe is like.</text></item><item><author>selectodude</author><text>To some extent, observation has taken a back seat because we&amp;#x27;re at the point in our physics journey where we pontificate about things that are too small or too dark and far away to see. We simply can&amp;#x27;t observe this stuff anymore.</text></item><item><author>tines</author><text>&amp;gt; it wasn&amp;#x27;t made during the nineteenth century&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s because people were totally focused on physics, and math was just a useful tool sometimes. Doing physics was the true goal and observation the final arbiter of truth.&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, that distinction is blurred but for the opposite reason; people think that anything conceived by sound math must be true, and observation has taken a back seat.</text></item><item><author>cjs_ac</author><text>One of my physics lecturers at university made the offhand observation that the distinction between physics and mathematics is a &lt;i&gt;twentieth-century idea&lt;/i&gt;: it wasn&amp;#x27;t made during the nineteenth century or before, and it seems to be disappearing in the twenty-first.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Misdicorl</author><text>The past decade is a difficult framing to ask the question in. Notable breakthrough results are usually understood in hindsight and a decade just isn&amp;#x27;t a lot of time for that context and understanding to develop. Science also doesn&amp;#x27;t necessarily develop in this way with consistent progress every X timespan. Usually you get lots and lots of breakthroughs all at once as an important paradigm is shattered and a new one is installed. Then observations with tiny differences slowly pile up and a very blurry&amp;#x2F;messy picture of the problems with the new paradigm takes shape. But none of those things feels like a breakthrough, especially to a layman.&lt;p&gt;That said: I&amp;#x27;ll submit the first detection of gravitational waves as two black holes merged together in 2020 as meeting the bar of &amp;quot;notable breakthrough in the last decade&amp;quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math</title><url>https://nautil.us/why-physics-is-unreasonably-good-at-creating-new-math-797056/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alickz</author><text>please forgive my ignorance, has there been notable progress in the field of physics in the last decade? noteworthy breakthroughs i mean&lt;p&gt;i ask out of layman curiosity</text></item><item><author>janalsncm</author><text>I don’t agree with this. I think there are definitely people like Michio Kaku who have books to sell who spend their time pontificating. People just think that physics looks like pontificating because that’s what it looks like on TV.&lt;p&gt;But there are also active researchers doing real research. Physics postdocs aren’t just sitting around in a circle making up stories about what the universe is like.</text></item><item><author>selectodude</author><text>To some extent, observation has taken a back seat because we&amp;#x27;re at the point in our physics journey where we pontificate about things that are too small or too dark and far away to see. We simply can&amp;#x27;t observe this stuff anymore.</text></item><item><author>tines</author><text>&amp;gt; it wasn&amp;#x27;t made during the nineteenth century&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s because people were totally focused on physics, and math was just a useful tool sometimes. Doing physics was the true goal and observation the final arbiter of truth.&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, that distinction is blurred but for the opposite reason; people think that anything conceived by sound math must be true, and observation has taken a back seat.</text></item><item><author>cjs_ac</author><text>One of my physics lecturers at university made the offhand observation that the distinction between physics and mathematics is a &lt;i&gt;twentieth-century idea&lt;/i&gt;: it wasn&amp;#x27;t made during the nineteenth century or before, and it seems to be disappearing in the twenty-first.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hughesjj</author><text>Absolutely, they&amp;#x27;re still handing out nobels after all.&lt;p&gt;Personally I think the ER=EPR conjecture and the complexity&amp;#x2F;action duality hypothesis are incredibly interesting.  Technically ER=EPR was formulated in 2000s (maybe 90s?) and CA-duality is approaching if not just past 10 years old, but the thing about asking for breakthroughs is that they take a while to percolate.  Ex Hawking radiation wasn&amp;#x27;t formulated until, like, 50-70 years after the &amp;quot;basis&amp;quot; (schwarzshild, Schrodinger) was formed.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s also been a ton of productive research integrsting computer science and physics lately ( on hn last week: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arxiv.org&amp;#x2F;abs&amp;#x2F;2403.16850&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arxiv.org&amp;#x2F;abs&amp;#x2F;2403.16850&lt;/a&gt; and 2022 novel prize; &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&amp;#x2F;article&amp;#x2F;the-universe-is-not-locally-real-and-the-physics-nobel-prize-winners-proved-it&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&amp;#x2F;article&amp;#x2F;the-universe-is-n...&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;Also JWST just keeps on giving, and gravitational waves were only confirmed in 2017.  If you extend a bit further higgs was in the 2010s&lt;p&gt;So, in summary, in the late 10 years
- we&amp;#x27;ve shown a break in our intuition of physics (nonloca-realness, that 2022 paper)
- proposed some novel yet elegant theories (CA-duality, and I&amp;#x27;d hope you&amp;#x27;d begrudge me er=EPR)
- confirmed some insane provings to the underlying reality (gravitational waves)&lt;p&gt;If those aren&amp;#x27;t noteworthy, I&amp;#x27;d ask what you consider noteworthy any why you consider it noteworthy</text></comment>