auntienomen

The QCD and Yang-Mills results don't seem to go beyond what the experts know/expect. Basically, they're saying there is a path integral measure, but shrugging when asked what functions are integrable with respect to it. The latter question is key for mass gap and confinement, and existence of the measure only means that the question of whether a mass gap exists makes sense.

It's probably just a terminology mismatch. But practicing scientists take a lot of care to honestly say what they're saying, so it doesn't land well as rhetoric.

I think it's the "can we honestly say" phrasing that got you flamed here. It reads as "those stupid scientists don't know what they're doing".

Dark matter is what we'd get if we had a lot of stable particles that didn't interact via electromagnetism, but only by gravity and short range forces.

The standard model has lots of this kind of thing. Leptons don't feel the strong force. Neutrinos are electrically neutral. The weak force only couples to left-handed particles. It seems completely natural to expect some dark matter. The only question is how much.

This is horseshit. Turn off all learning and conversation sharing, then feed chatgpt the same sequence of prompts. Tell a story with a surprise ending. It will learn the surprise.

It's impressive but long expected and nowhere near as hard.

Agents require training data for RL. This data is rare in comparison to what we feed foundation models, and Google is sitting on a dragon's hoard of sensor and tracking data. I'm not counting them out yet.

Minor quibbles: Hawking radiation has a blackbody spectrum, so we get a variety of wavelengths, with a peak determined by the size of the hole. The outgoing particles should eventually include any kind of particle that can be created in the Standard Model, not just photons and gravitons.

Strangely, it is _not_ the instrinsic curvature of spacetime that produces Hawking radiation. There's a variation on Hawking radiation -- called Unruh radiation -- experienced by accelerated observers in flat spacetime. Any two observers will agree on the value of a field (e.g. the electric field) at a point, but an accelerated observer will experience empty spacetime as a _thermal bath of particles_, with a temperature proportional to the acceleration. Relatively accelerated observers don't agree on what the vacuum is.

I don't think the distinction between holography and string theory is as clean as you're making it. The vague idea of holography predates string theory, but most of the working examples we have of holography come from string theory. That's what AdS/CFT is: It's an explicitly holographic description of superstring theory in an anti-Desitter space. It's frankly bizarre that the author of this article doesn't mention that fact. I suspect we are seeing a popular science rebranding of string theory without the word strings.

It will also reduce your heating bill.

Most research isn't useful. Research on average is extremely useful. Great ideas are rare, and we don't know in advance where they are.

If you do know, let me know and I'll lead a round for your VC fund. I for one would never have predicted that abstract topology would lead to nuclear weapons within a few generations.

And conceptually novel approaches to outstanding problems are the sort of thing that a retrain should pick up on, because they would be hard to compress into what it already knows.

It'd be really nice to have bolt-on after-market automation. I'm not sure if the car companies will want to accommodate this, but I'd really love to make my old Honda self-driving.

I remember a company called Ghost Locomation that was working on this.

Those notations are used when writing down the models, because they make clear the intrinsic geometry, the basic symmetries, etc. But they're not used so much in the study of solutions to the equations. Solutions tend to have peculiar features, tend to break underlying symmetries, etc. and there only needs to be one nasty particular solution to prove the NS conjecture wrong.