Feb 10, 2017 03:43 AM
How Does Politics Affect Physics Research In The US?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/0...in-the-us/
EXCERPT: The specific impact of politics to physics research in the US depends a lot on the type of physics. Nevertheless politics is there, though thankfully it isn’t partisan physics. The vast majority of physics research is funded by the federal government. The funding levels make an impact to the science. Most grants are three to five years long, but Congress budgets for a specific year. So if funding levels change dramatically on a given year, whether your grant is up for renewal in that year can make a huge difference to whether you get funded or not. As an example, if the federal government slashes funding to grants by 5%, 67% of the budget was already pre-allocated, so the cut is amplified by a factor of 3 to 15%. Physics leads industry by significant margins, so there usually isn’t meaningfully equivalent research in the private sector of most physics research. Without an industry counterpart to the academic research, it means that if funding is disrupted for a short period of time, the scientists that do that research are gone. The scientists find other jobs and it is a one-way door, meaning that almost no physicists return to research after stopping it....
Is emergent quantum mechanics grounded in classical physics? - Science Weekly podcast
https://www.theguardian.com/science/audi...ly-podcast
EXCERPT: The 20th century was a golden one for science. Big bang cosmology, the unravelling of the genetic code of life, and of course Einstein’s general theory of relativity. But it also saw the birth of quantum mechanics – a description of the world on a subatomic level – and unlike many of the other great achievements of the century, the weird world of quantum physics remains as mysterious today as it was a century ago. But what if strange quantum behaviour emerged from familiar, classical physics? How would this alter our view of the quantum world? And, more importantly, what would it tell us about the fundamental nature of reality?
To explore this and more, Ian Sample speaks to an advocate of an emergent theory of quantum mechanics, Gerard t’Hooft, Nobel prize winner, and emeritus professor of theoretical physics at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Providing some historical background, we hear from Kings College London’s Dr Eleanor Knox. Finally, Aix Marseille Université’s Professor Carlo Rovelli offers an alternative, “relational” interpretation of quantum mechanics....
Gerard’s paper on his theory can be found here.
Carlo’s latest book ‘Reality is not what it seems’ can be found here.
A Fight to Fix Geometry’s Foundations
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170209-...-geometry/
EXCERPT: In the 1830s, the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton reformulated Newton’s laws of motion, finding deep mathematical symmetries between an object’s position and its momentum. Then in the mid-1980s the mathematician Mikhail Gromov developed a set of techniques that transformed Hamilton’s idea into a full-blown area of mathematical research. Within a decade, mathematicians from a broad range of backgrounds had converged to explore the possibilities in a field that came to be known as “symplectic geometry.”
The result was something like the opening of a gold-rush town. People from many different areas of mathematics hurried to establish the field and lay claim to its fruits. Research developed rapidly, but without the shared background knowledge typically found in mature areas of mathematics. This made it hard for mathematicians to tell when new results were completely correct. By the start of the 21st century it was evident to close observers that significant errors had been built into the foundations of symplectic geometry.
The field continued to grow, even as the errors went largely unaddressed. Symplectic geometers simply tried to cordon off the errors and prove what they could without addressing the foundational flaws. Yet the situation eventually became untenable. This was partly because symplectic geometry began to run out of problems that could be solved independently of the foundational issues, but also because, in 2012, a pair of researchers — Dusa McDuff, a prominent symplectic geometer at Barnard College and author of a pair of canonical textbooks in the field, and Katrin Wehrheim, a mathematician now at the University of California, Berkeley — began publishing papers that called attention to the problems, including some in McDuff’s own previous work. Most notably, they raised pointed questions about the accuracy of a difficult, important paper by Kenji Fukaya, a mathematician now at Stony Brook University, and his co-author, Kaoru Ono of Kyoto University, that was first posted in 1996.
This critique of Fukaya’s work — and the attention McDuff and Wehrheim have drawn to symplectic geometry’s shaky foundations in general — has created significant controversy in the field. Tensions arose between McDuff and Wehrheim on one side and Fukaya on the other about the seriousness of the errors in his work, and who should get credit for fixing them.
More broadly, the controversy highlights the uncomfortable nature of pointing out problems that many mathematicians preferred to ignore. “A lot of people sort of knew things weren’t right,” McDuff said, referring to errors in a number of important papers. “They can say, ‘It doesn’t really matter, things will work out, enough [of the foundation] is right, surely something is right.’ But when you got down to it, we couldn’t find anything that was absolutely right....”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/0...in-the-us/
EXCERPT: The specific impact of politics to physics research in the US depends a lot on the type of physics. Nevertheless politics is there, though thankfully it isn’t partisan physics. The vast majority of physics research is funded by the federal government. The funding levels make an impact to the science. Most grants are three to five years long, but Congress budgets for a specific year. So if funding levels change dramatically on a given year, whether your grant is up for renewal in that year can make a huge difference to whether you get funded or not. As an example, if the federal government slashes funding to grants by 5%, 67% of the budget was already pre-allocated, so the cut is amplified by a factor of 3 to 15%. Physics leads industry by significant margins, so there usually isn’t meaningfully equivalent research in the private sector of most physics research. Without an industry counterpart to the academic research, it means that if funding is disrupted for a short period of time, the scientists that do that research are gone. The scientists find other jobs and it is a one-way door, meaning that almost no physicists return to research after stopping it....
Is emergent quantum mechanics grounded in classical physics? - Science Weekly podcast
https://www.theguardian.com/science/audi...ly-podcast
EXCERPT: The 20th century was a golden one for science. Big bang cosmology, the unravelling of the genetic code of life, and of course Einstein’s general theory of relativity. But it also saw the birth of quantum mechanics – a description of the world on a subatomic level – and unlike many of the other great achievements of the century, the weird world of quantum physics remains as mysterious today as it was a century ago. But what if strange quantum behaviour emerged from familiar, classical physics? How would this alter our view of the quantum world? And, more importantly, what would it tell us about the fundamental nature of reality?
To explore this and more, Ian Sample speaks to an advocate of an emergent theory of quantum mechanics, Gerard t’Hooft, Nobel prize winner, and emeritus professor of theoretical physics at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Providing some historical background, we hear from Kings College London’s Dr Eleanor Knox. Finally, Aix Marseille Université’s Professor Carlo Rovelli offers an alternative, “relational” interpretation of quantum mechanics....
Gerard’s paper on his theory can be found here.
Carlo’s latest book ‘Reality is not what it seems’ can be found here.
A Fight to Fix Geometry’s Foundations
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170209-...-geometry/
EXCERPT: In the 1830s, the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton reformulated Newton’s laws of motion, finding deep mathematical symmetries between an object’s position and its momentum. Then in the mid-1980s the mathematician Mikhail Gromov developed a set of techniques that transformed Hamilton’s idea into a full-blown area of mathematical research. Within a decade, mathematicians from a broad range of backgrounds had converged to explore the possibilities in a field that came to be known as “symplectic geometry.”
The result was something like the opening of a gold-rush town. People from many different areas of mathematics hurried to establish the field and lay claim to its fruits. Research developed rapidly, but without the shared background knowledge typically found in mature areas of mathematics. This made it hard for mathematicians to tell when new results were completely correct. By the start of the 21st century it was evident to close observers that significant errors had been built into the foundations of symplectic geometry.
The field continued to grow, even as the errors went largely unaddressed. Symplectic geometers simply tried to cordon off the errors and prove what they could without addressing the foundational flaws. Yet the situation eventually became untenable. This was partly because symplectic geometry began to run out of problems that could be solved independently of the foundational issues, but also because, in 2012, a pair of researchers — Dusa McDuff, a prominent symplectic geometer at Barnard College and author of a pair of canonical textbooks in the field, and Katrin Wehrheim, a mathematician now at the University of California, Berkeley — began publishing papers that called attention to the problems, including some in McDuff’s own previous work. Most notably, they raised pointed questions about the accuracy of a difficult, important paper by Kenji Fukaya, a mathematician now at Stony Brook University, and his co-author, Kaoru Ono of Kyoto University, that was first posted in 1996.
This critique of Fukaya’s work — and the attention McDuff and Wehrheim have drawn to symplectic geometry’s shaky foundations in general — has created significant controversy in the field. Tensions arose between McDuff and Wehrheim on one side and Fukaya on the other about the seriousness of the errors in his work, and who should get credit for fixing them.
More broadly, the controversy highlights the uncomfortable nature of pointing out problems that many mathematicians preferred to ignore. “A lot of people sort of knew things weren’t right,” McDuff said, referring to errors in a number of important papers. “They can say, ‘It doesn’t really matter, things will work out, enough [of the foundation] is right, surely something is right.’ But when you got down to it, we couldn’t find anything that was absolutely right....”