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Slippery math of causation + How nature [or particle theories] became unnatural

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C C Offline
Solution: ‘The Slippery Math of Causation’
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-math-...-20180629/

EXCERPT: Our latest Insights puzzle attempted to model multifactorial causation with problems that involved three causal factors whose different types of interactions either produced or did not produce an effect. The goal was to challenge the all-too-intuitive picture of a straight arrow going from cause to effect as far too simplistic to describe the real world. In fact, a recent Quanta article by Veronique Greenwood describes the omnigenic model of complex traits, with the startling self-explanatory title “Theory Suggests That All Genes Affect Every Complex Trait.” The thinking that inspired our puzzle and is manifest in the omnigenic theory was captured visually by Paul Laurienti. In the diagram below, think of the genes as the causes and the complex traits as the effects, and you will see that it fits the new theory perfectly. Thank you, Paul!

Causation is indeed a complex and slippery phenomenon, and readers contributed a wealth of interesting perspectives on it in their comments. I refer to and discuss reader comments extensively below. But first, let us look at the puzzles themselves....

MORE: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-math-...-20180629/



How nature [or theories of particle physics] became unnatural
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/06...tural.html

EXCERPT: . . . But this isn’t how arguments from naturalness are used in theory-development today. In high energy physics and some parts of cosmology, physicists use naturalness to select a theory for which they do not have – indeed cannot ever have – statistical distributions. The trouble is that they ask which values of parameters in a theory are natural. But since we can observe only one set of parameters – the one that describes our universe – we have no way of collecting data for the likelihood of getting a specific set of parameters.

Physicists use criteria from naturalness anyway. In such arguments, the probability distribution is unspecified, but often implicitly assumed to be almost uniform over an interval of size one. There is, however, no way to justify this distribution; it is hence an unscientific assumption. This problem was made clear already in a 1994 paper by Anderson and Castano.

The standard model of particle physics, or the mass of the Higgs-boson more specifically, is unnatural in the above described way, and this is currently considered ugly. This is why theorists invented new theories to extend the Standard Model so that naturalness would be reestablished. The most popular way to do this is by making the Standard Model supersymmetric, thereby adding a bunch of new particles.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), as several previous experiments, has not found any evidence for supersymmetric particles. This means that according to the currently used criterion of naturalness, the theories of particle physics are, in fact, unnatural. That’s also why we presently do not have reason to think that a larger particle collider would produce so-far unknown particles.

In my book “Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray,” I use naturalness as an example for unfounded beliefs that scientists adhere to. I chose naturalness because it’s timely, as with the LHC ruling it out, but I could have used other examples...

MORE: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/06...tural.html



The 4th State of Matter Is The Most Amazing And Full of Potential. Here's Why.
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-4th-sta...here-s-why

EXCERPT: . . . Yet plasma, for all its scarcity in our daily lives, makes up more than 99 per cent of the observable matter in the Universe (that is, if we discount dark matter). [...] The study of plasmas also enjoys some remarkably elegant mathematical constructions, but unlike its scientific cousins, it's mostly been driven by its applications to the real world.

[...] Another interesting property of plasmas is their capacity to support so-called hydromagnetic waves – bulges that move through the plasma along magnetic field lines, similar to how vibrations travel along a guitar string.

[...] One of the biggest motivators of contemporary plasma science is the promise of controlled thermonuclear fusion [...]

[...] Plasma is also entangled with the physics of the space around Earth, where the stuff gets carried through the void on the winds generated in the upper atmosphere of the Sun. [...] In a new field known as 'space weather', plasma physics plays a role similar to that of fluid dynamics in terrestrial, atmospheric conditions. [...]

[...] Looking backward, not forward, in space and time, my hope is that plasma physics will offer insights into how stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters first formed. [...] Finally, plasmas help to explain some of the most spectacular phenomena we've observed in the remotest regions of the cosmos....

MORE: https://www.sciencealert.com/the-4th-sta...here-s-why
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