United @GnRRF

Joined January 2014

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Physics In History @PhysInHistory

a month ago

Feynman on the state of "confusion" ✍️ When you're thinking about something that you don't understand, you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called confusion. It's a very difficult and unhappy business. And so most of the time you're rather unhappy, actually, with this confusion. You can't penetrate this thing. Now, is the confusion's because we're all some kind of apes that are kind of stupid working against this, trying to figure out how to put the two sticks together to reach the banana and we can't quite make it, the idea? And I get this feeling all the time that I'm an ape trying to put two sticks together, so I always feel stupid. Once in a while, though, the sticks go together on me and I reach the banana. 📷 Caltech Archives Image

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steve hsu @hsu_steve

a month ago

Feynman and Magic The subject of quantum gravity came up and Penrose and Feynman got into a heated argument. Penrose said, Feynman was so quick, he was usually about five steps ahead of me at any given point. Sometimes he didn't listen to what I was saying. The whole thing was mentally exhausting. I was completely drained at the end of the session. I have never encountered anyone so quick before. What Penrose and many other physicists didn't realize was the reason that accounted for Feynman's quickness on many matters in physics. Feynman thought about some of these areas in great depth and for long periods of time. A topic like quantum gravity would be one that Feynman had spent countless hours thinking about. It wasn't all off the cuff. infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/02/feynma…

Wais @momans

a month ago

@hsu_steve explaining why Richard Feynman’s seemingly instant genius wasn't magical intuition, but the result of obsessively mulling over a finite set of hard problems long before anyone asked.

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Deane Yang @deaneyang

2 months ago

mastodon.social/@tristanbuckma…

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levent @alpoge

2 months ago

Please welcome to the world a beautiful new geometric object, to do with a problem i’ve always loved. claude really contains multitudes:D Does S^6 admit a complex structure? Yup

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Daniel Litt @littmath

2 months ago

@ultima_shifl @TheZvi I also think that it’s often useful to focus on small problems where one can meaningfully contribute, rather than trying to tackle the giant problem head on. Perhaps this is something one learns by doing math research ;-P.

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Zohar Komargodski @ZoharKo

2 months ago

I am not a professional mathematician (do have a BSc though :)) Historically math was never just about proofs. Newton treated infinite series and calculus problems before the foundations were made rigorous - centuries later! His route to discovery was often "experimental." Gauss did something similar. As a teenager, he counted primes in blocks, compared the results with logarithms, and noticed that their density looked like (1/\log x). He kept testing the idea whenever new prime tables appeared. A proof arrived only about a century later. This was normal: calculate, draw figures, inspect tables, try examples, make a conjecture, and then search for an argument. A lot of the math (or maybe even all of it) developed in that period ended up directly relevant for physics. The modern ideal of definitions first, perfect rigor throughout, and mathematics as an abstract axiomatic system became dominant mainly in the 20th centuries. Many of my colleagues think it destroyed math. It certainly led to a huge amount of math that has no known application outside the field—and may never have one. The true most important “utility function” of a mathematician is not the number of problems they solve, or the number of counterexamples they find to some random conjectures, but the number of fertile ideas, definitions, and structures they create for other mathematicians. There is no other consumer to most ideas in modern math other than human mathematicians. In this sense, math is not "done" *yet*.

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Ulugbek S. Kamilov @prof_kamilov

4 months ago

Academia is fascinating. You spend years becoming the world’s expert on something eight people care about, and three of them disagree with you.

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United @GnRRF

5 months ago

@quantum_geoff @ZoharKo I think this discussion is revealing. The real issue is that the question is under-specified. A key part of research is choosing idealizations, adding assumptions, and classifying cases. Current AI can be strong on well-posed problems, but less reliable at this modeling stage