Agree in general -- I think the tiktok/shorts wave is biasing strongly for shorter video and then the time format kills any followup/2nd iteration-explanation
Agreed, she's pumping out too many videos I think. Perhaps she's succumbed a bit to the temptation of cashing in on a reputation, ironically one built on taking down grifters.
I think plenty of people don't think it's inevitable. I'm no ai researcher, just another software engineer (so no real expertise). I think it will keep getting better but the end point is unclear.
The reason it's inevitable is because because it follows from physics principles. The Bekenstein Bound proves that all physical systems of finite volume contain finite information, humans are a finite volume, ergo a human contains finite information. Finite information can be fully captured by a finite computer, ergo computers can in principle perfectly simulate a human person.
This + continued technological development entails that AGI is inevitable.
Can someone explain what's groundbreaking about this? Maybe it's not done so very rigorously, but pretty much every plasma physics textbook will contain a derivation of Boltzmann equation, including some form of collisional operator, starting from Liouville's theorem[1] and then derive a system of fluid equations [2] by computing the moments of Boltzmann equation.
1. It answers how macroscopic equations of e.g., fluid dynamics are compatible with Newton's law, when they single out an arrow of time while Newton's laws do not.
2. It was solved in the 1800s if you made an unjustified technical assumption called molecular chaos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_chaos). This work is about whether you can rigorously prove that molecular chaos actually does happen.
3. There are no applications outside of potentially other pure math research. For a physics/engineering perspective the whole theory was fine by assuming molecular chaos.
In this case, what the research says is that the approximations we have already been using for a long time are correct. "You're already right, keep doing what you're doing!" is not generally something people consider a "practical application".
David Hilbert was one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. Many of the leaders of the Manhattan Project learned the mathematics of physics from him. But he was famous long before then. In 1900 he gave an invited lecture where he listed several outstanding problems in mathematics the solution of any one of which would change not only the career of the person who solved the problem, but possibly life on Earth. Many have stood like mountains in the distance, rising above the clouds, for generations. The sixth problem was an axiomatic derivation of the laws of physics. While the standard model of physics describes the quantum realm and gravity, in theory, the messy soup one step up, fluid dynamics, is far from a solved problem. High resolution simulations of fluid dynamics consume vast amounts of supercomputer time and are critical for problems ranging from turbulence, to weather, nuclear explosions, and the origins of the universe.
This team seems a bit like Shelby and Miles trying to build a Ford that would win the 24 hours of LeMans. The race isn’t over, but Ken Miles has beat his own lap record in the same race, twice. Might want to tune in for the rest.
> the solution of any one of which would change not only the career of the person who solved the problem, but possibly life on Earth. Many have stood like mountains in the distance, rising above the clouds, for generations.
Whether or not this is AI, this comment is not true. An axiomatic derivation of a formula doesn’t change how it’s used. We knew the formulas were experimentally correct, it’s just that now mathematicians can rest easy about whether they were theoretically correct. Although it’s interesting, it doesn’t change or create any new applications.
This kind of misses the point. The problem isn't interesting because its on hilbert's list; its on hilbert's list because it is interesting.
This is not my field, but i also don't think this would help with computational resources needed for high resolution modelling as you are implying. At least not by itself.
This has been known for a long time: the irreversibility comes from the assumption that the velocities of particles colliding are uncorrelated, or equivalently, that particles loose the "memory" of their complete trajectory between one collision and another. It's called the molecular chaos hypothesis.
I've been puzzling about this as well. The best answer I have (as an interested maths geek, not a physicist, caveat lector) is that it sneaks in under the assumption of "molecular chaos", i.e. that interactions of particles are statistically independent of any of their prior interactions. That basically defines an arrow of time right from the get-go, since "prior" is just a choice of direction. It also means that the underlying dynamics is not strictly speaking Newtonian any more (statistically, anyway).
It comes about when the deterministic collision process is integrated over all the indistinguishable initial states that could lead into an equivalence class of indistinguishable final states. If you set the collision probability to zero it's time reversible even with molecular chaos, and if the particles are highly correlated (like in a polymer) there can still arise an arrow of time when the integral is performed.
Interesting, so if I understand right you are saying that coarse-graining your states can produce an arrow of time on its own? Given some fixed coarse-graining, I can see that entropy would initially increase, since your coarse-graining hides information from you. The longer you evolve the system under this coarse graining the less certain you will be about the micro-states.
But I would expect this to eventually reach an equilibrium where you are at "maximum uncertainty" with respect to your coarse graining. Does that sound right at all? And if so, then there must be something else responsible for the global arrow of time, right?
> If you set the collision probability to zero it's time reversible even with molecular chaos
Is this true for boring reasons? If nothing interacts then you just have a bunch of independent particles in free motion, which is obviously time-reversible. And also obviously satisfies molecular chaos because there are no correlations whatsoever. Maybe I misunderstand the terminology.
Even three bodies under newtonian gravity can lead to chaotic behavior.
The neat part (assuming that the result is valid) is that precisely the equations of fluid dynamics result from their billiard ball models in the limit of many balls and frequent collisions.
The Navier-Stokes equations are a set of differential equations. The functions that the equations act upon are functions of time (and space), so the system is perfectly reversible.
It's just hard to figure out what the functions are for a set of boundary conditions.
This is not quite right. Time-reversibility means that solutions to your differential equation are invariant under the transformation x(t) -> x(-t). It's pretty easy to verify that is the case for simple differential equations like Newton's law:
F = mx''(t) = mx''(-t)
since d/dt x(-t) = -x'(-t), and d/dt (-x'(-t)) = x''(-t)
Navier-Stokes is only time-reversible if you ignore viscosity, because viscosity is velocity-dependent and you can already see signs of that being a problem in the derivation above (velocity pops out a minus sign under time reversal). From my reading the OP managed to derive viscous flow too, so there really is a break in time-symmetry happening somewhere.
It's lost at Boltzmann's "molecular chaos" or "Stosszahlansatz" step. If f(x1,x2) is the two-particle distribution function giving you (hand-wavingly) the probability that you have particles with position and velocity coordinates x1 and others with coordinates x2, then Boltzmann made the simplification that f(x1,x2) = f(x1) * f(x2), ie throwing away all the correlations between particles. This is where the time-asymmetry comes in: you're saying that after two particles collide, they retain no correlation or memory of what they were doing beforehand.
I assume (on the basis that it has not come up so far in this discussion and my limited further reading) that position-momentum uncertainty offers no justification for throwing away the correlations?
The systems we're talking about here are classical, not quantum, so the uncertainty principle isn't really relevant. I think the justification is mainly that it makes the analysis tractable. In physical terms it's simply not true that the interactions are uncorrelated, but you might hope that the correlations are "unimportant" in the long-term. In a really hot gas, for instance, everything is moving so fast in random directions that any correlations that start to arise will quickly get obliterated by chance.
I don't think it really helps - you're already working in something like a probabilistic formulation. If you want to use a quantum mechanical justification for it then you need to look at some sort of non-unitary evolution.
Besides that, I don't think anybody is really arguing that the correlations are actually lost after a collision, just that it's usually a good approximation to treat them as if they are.
You can call this invariance under time reflection if you like, yeah.
Note that the solutions x(t) are not generally time symmetric. We aren't saying that x(t)=x(-t), we are saying that x(t) is a solution to the differential equation if and only if x(-t) is, which is a weaker statement.
I know what you meant; I've just tried to point out an error in your sentence which pops up sometimes, which may have mislead others. It's all about the time reversal invariance of evolution equations, not solutions.
Oh I see what you mean, it's kinda easy to read my comment as meaning time symmetry. But I do think the phrasing in terms of solutions is correct, provided you interpret it appropriately. As in "is still a solution to the diff eq after transformation" and not "is left unchanged by the transformation".
It's not a good phrasing to express the point, because "solution is invariant under operation O" has an established meaning, that the solution does no change after the operation. What you mean can be properly phrased as "equations are time-reversal invariant".
> The Navier-Stokes equations are a set of differential equations. The functions that the equations act upon are functions of time (and space), so the system is perfectly reversible.
It's hard to take full reversibility seriously given Newton's equations are not actually deterministic. If they're not deterministic, then they can't be fully reversible.
Of course maybe these non-deterministic regimes don't actually happen in realistic scenarios (like Norton's Dome), but maybe this is hinting at the fact that we need a better formalism for talking about these questions, and maybe that formalism will not be reversible in a specific, important way.
Strictly speaking, naturally on its own, it doesn't. Detailed equations remain reversible. Even for very big N, typical isolated classical mechanical systems are reversible. However, typical initial conditions imply transitions to equilibrium, or very long stay in it. The reversed process (ending in Poincare return) will happen eventually, but the time is so incredibly long, it can't be verified.
In derivations of the Navier Stokes equations from reversible particle models, the former get their irreversibility from some approximation, e.g.
a transition to a less detailed state and a simpler evolution equation for it is made. Often the actual microstate is replaced by some probabilistic description, such as probability density, or some kind of implied average.
She certainly fell into the rage bait trap, and I don't really like her these days, but this video seems fine - no ranting, just a nice piece of science communication.
Rings true for my impression too. In the end, she’s a YouTuber now, for better or worse, but still puts out what look like thoughtful and informative enough videos, whatever personal vendettas she holds grudges over.
I suspect for many who’ve touched the academic system, a popular voice that isn’t anti-intellectual or anti-expertise (or out to trumpet their personal theory), but critical of the status quo, would be viewed as a net positive.
>But the dinner finished and our group broke up and, as we walked out, the weather-Palmer began talking about free will! You’d think it would have dawned on me then I’d stumbled over the third Superdeterminist. However, I was merely thinking I’d had too much wine. Also, I was now somewhere in London in the middle of the night, alone with a man who wanted to talk to me about free will. I excused myself and left him standing in the street.
>But Tim Palmer turned out to not only be a climate physicist with an interest in the foundations of quantum mechanics, he also turned out to be remarkably persistent. He wasn’t remotely deterred by my evident lack of interest. Indeed, I later noticed he had sent me an email already two years earlier. Just that I dumped it unceremoniously in my crackpot folder. Worse, I seem to vaguely recall telling my husband that even the climate people now have ideas for how to revolutionize quantum mechanics, hahaha.
>Cough.
----------------
Jean-Pierre Petit
>Dear Sabine,
>You told us in 2017 that the equations of our Janus model were in fact yours and you accused us of plagiarism. At the time, we offered to demonstrate that our work was derived from yours, which predates ours by six years, through a jointly authored article that would have acknowledged your priority, if such proof could be established.
>In the absence of any response from you, after two years of waiting, our colleague, the Belgian mathematician Nathalie Debergh, attempted to open a dialogue with you. But you immediately cut it short, saying that “you no longer wanted to have any dealings with plagiarists.”
>If you have ever encountered humans, you might have noticed that sometimes they’re hard to understand. And that means, they’re kind of like quantum physics because, as you’ve learned on YouTube, that’s also hard to understand. And this is why, I guess, a mathematician has come up with the idea of quantum cognition.
Some comments she liked:
- This is your brain... This is your brain on quantum cognition. :Egg smashed in a hot frying pan: Any questions?
- Can’t help but feel it’s a bit of a situation of: “if the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail”. Did have to check the date though, as we're pretty close to April.
I had to go fishing for the article she was talking about as she forgot to provide a link. The article links to https://jbusemey.pages.iu.edu/quantum/Quantum%20Cognition%20.... It clearly shows this is a real field with dozen of collaborators and even a textbook.
>As we delved deeper into the topic, our amazement grew more and more, as work of computer scientists on semantic analysis and LSA revealed the existence of evident links to quantum mechanics. And it was also clear that the researchers working in those areas were unaware of these structural similarities. A short but incisive article was written to emphasize the structural connections between major approaches to semantic analysis and the Hilbert-space formalism (Aerts & Czachor, 2004), which immediately caught the attention of some researchers. Of particular interest was our observation that computer scientists did not use in their studies the tensor product of vector spaces, which instead plays a fundamental role in quantum mechanics.
>When our article had just been published, we were contacted by Dominic Widdows, a researcher at Stanford University, who appreciated our comment on the failed use of the tensor product in LSA and asked us if we had any concrete results specifically related to it. At the same time it became clear that he himself had been working from a similar inspiration to ours, and more specifically had replaced the negation of classical (Boolean) logic with the orthogonality relation of quantum logic in information retrieval systems (Widdows, 2003). A few months after Widdows had contacted us, Keith van Rijsbergen’s book was published, also linking quantum mechanics and information retrieval (Van Rijsbergen, 2004). These three events in the same year 2004, clearly independent from each other according to the chronology of the publications, initiated a new field of research, similar to quantum cognition, but with a focus on how human cognition is structurally present in texts on the World-Wide Web.
Source: From Quantum Cognition to Conceptuality Interpretation I: Tracing the Brussels Group’s Intellectual Journey https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06799
> Decision making – When people are given a chance to play a particular gamble twice, if they think they won the first play, or alternatively if they think they lost the first play, then the majority chooses to play again on the second round. Given these preferences, they should also play the second round even if they don’t think about the outcome of the first round. Yet people do just the opposite in the latter case (Tversky & Shafir, 1992). This finding violates the law of total probability, yet it can be explained as a quantum interference effect
I wouldn't say that "it can be explained as a quantum interference effect" for any respectable definition of "explained" but your mileage may vary.
> The Contextual Nature of Concepts and their Combinations – When quantum entities become entangled, they form a new entity with properties different from either constituent, and one cannot manipulate one constituent without simultaneously affecting the other. The mathematics of entanglement has been used to model the nonmonotonic relations observed among concepts when they are combined to form a new concepts such as STONE LION
> Different possible ways of looking at this combination exist, and a positive answer to both questions ‘is STONE LION a LION’ and ‘is STONE LION a STONE’ make sense. Hence a better approach is to consider both as entities, and use Fock space for a two entity situation, and forgo the more simple model of considering one of them as a context.
Vanilla Quantum Models of Cognition and Decision are not enough. One really needs Quantum Field Theory Models of Cognition and Decision. "The genuine structure of quantum field theory is needed to match predictions with experimental data." https://arxiv.org/pdf/0705.1740
>This work aims to bridge this gap by integrating cognitive psychology, information theory, and modern NLP. We pose three central research questions to guide our investigation: [RQ1]: To what extent do concepts emergent in LLMs align with human-defined conceptual categories? [RQ2]: Do LLMs and humans exhibit similar internal geometric structures within these concepts, ESPECIALLY CONCERNING ITEM TYPICALITY? RQ3]: How do humans and LLMs differ in their strategies for balancing representational compression with the preservation of semantic fidelity when forming concepts?
It would be interesting to try to reproduce Hampton's original experiment on typicality with LLMs and run the same analysis as https://arxiv.org/pdf/1208.2362.
Anyway thanks for the exchange. Running these thoughts once more in my head allowed me to reconsider some stuff I found about Zipf distributions that might tie into the tradeoff between compression and meaning Lecun is talking about.
Interesting, her videos have never struck me as contrarian for the sake of it, she seems genuinely frustrated at a lack of substantial progress in physics and the plethora of garbage papers. Though I imagine it must be annoying to be a physicist and have someone constantly telling you you're not good enough, but that itself is kind of part of the scientific process too.
My biggest complaint is sometimes it seems like she will take some low quality paper and just dunk on it. This feels a bit click-baity/strawman-y if nobody was being convinced by the paper in the first place
[I am not a physicist so probably can't really evaluate the whole thing neutrally]
It sounds like you're saying that her opponents are the entirety of physics researchers in academia. But isn't it that her opponents are those particular researchers that are publishing poor work, and that she's attacking the strongest arguments of those? Or am I missing something?
And I don't accept the "languishing in obscurity" argument - if a published work is poor, we should still critique it (by publishing a letter to the editorial, or any other manner), rather than just let it pollute the space. There have been many cases of obscure works being picked up decades hence, and especially now with AI "deep research", it's easier and easier for bad work to slip in - so I believe that science communicators should do what they can to add the appropriate commentary to such works. And if it seems like "easy" work, then all the better.
The issue is that many of her videos argue that funding for particle physics should instead go into foundations and interpretations of quantum mechanics, specifically research completely identical to what she works on.
This is not helped by the fact that she pushes an interpretation of quantum mechanics viewed as fringe at best. Her takes on modern physics seem typically disingenuous or biased.
She's correct. If you want theory of everything energy you need accelerator the size of our Solar system. Source: Stephen Hawking's Universe in a nutshell.
IDK why I'd want to listen to physicists about this result, which is mathematical rather than physical or scientific. John Baez, sure, he's in the intersection between math and physics. But physics in the broader sense is an empirical science where truth comes from experiments. This result is the opposite of that.
> Professor Dave's videos on how Sabine Hossenfelder is actively contributing to an atmosphere of anti-intellectualism
I feel like the core of intellectualism is accepting criticism, including criticism you disagree with. I find some of Sabine's videos to be a bit click-baity, but they are usually logically coherent, even the ones that aren't convincing. She's not just a crazy person yelling at the sky.
Science is not religion. Its ok for people to feel certain research programs are off track. That doesn't neccesarily mean they are right, but its ok to have opinions
It's ok to have opinions. It's ok to have criticisms. Claiming that the whole of academia is failing is not a measured criticism. Claiming that the whole of physics academia is failing is not a measured criticism. Claiming that "all of science is bullshit" (which she does, in those exact words) is not a measured criticism.
Maybe it's not measured criticism, but that doesn't mean that something is true or false. Today there are serious problems with academia and criticism in general. Also Cancel-Culture nowadays is big.
I know enough good scientists that don't work in academia today. And I've seen a clan of religious nuts (like flat-earthers) working in bio-science academia. If people claim that academia nowadays is worth something I'd add a big "citation needed"...
For physics maybe there is some hope. I still know some good guys working there... But there is e.g. atmosphere physics... if you look deeply you'll find more failure there than non failure.. The rot for sure has already started...
I haven't read everything Sabine has ever wrote, but "all of science is bullshit" seems much stronger than anything i've seen her say. Where is the original context she said that?
Prof. Sabine Hossenfelder is a pretty clear-headed communicator. I've been following her for nearly 20 years, almost since she started writing the Backreaction blog.
Her criticisms boil down to:
1. Modern science spends perhaps too much time on frivolous research that doesn't lead to anything. This very much applies to the theoretical physics and the endless series of attempts at ToE. But it's not limited to theoretical physics.
2. Modern scientific communication is often misleading and exaggerated.
3. The internal workings of scientific institutions are broken.
The challenge is that she’s right on all three of these major points … to some extent. Unfortunately at times she seems eager to fling babies without even encountering bathwater.
You are making her arguments for her. We should not "boil down" the arguments she makes. This is some of the arguments she makes. She does not ground it in particular, measured criticisms, aimed at particular researchers or departments. She does not provide solutions. She uses this broadly sweeping argument as a way to cast judgment on fields of research she is not an expert in. We should evaluate the arguments that she makes, not the arguments we would like her to have made. This includes not just a dispassionate listing of the truth claims she makes, but the specific rhetoric she employs. Is modern science flawed? Absolutely. Should we be saying "scientists are not to be trusted" as a general, categorical statement? No, that's laughable, and dangerously anti-intellectual.
I've never heard about that nobody before, but I've watched about 10 mins. of the first video you posted and it is a terrible critique to Sabine; it actually makes Sabine's points look reasonable.
He just doesn't get the arguments she's making, and "defeats" them with laughable strawmans. But anyway, it's YouTube science so one shouldn't expect much.
Btw, Sabine's video on the topic of this thread is a good one, the remark is unwarranted.
You think she looks reasonable when she says "most research in the foundations of physics isn't based on sound scientific principles" with absolutely 0 meta-analyses presented as evidence? This is an extraordinary claim to make. It requires extraordinary evidence.
(Less jokingly, nothing strikes me as particularly AI about the comment, not to mention its author addressed the question perfectly adequately. Your comment comes off as a spurious dismissal.)
To me, it looks like AI because it doesn't really answer the question but instead answers something adjacent, which is common in AI responses.
Giving a short summary of Hilbert's biography & his problem list, does not explain why this particular work is interesting, except in the most superficial sense that its a famous problem.
Your second paragraph is a much more thoughtful critique, and posting that below the original answer would focus the subsequent conversation on those points. The issue here isn't whether the comment was AI-generated; it's how we carry the conversation forward even if we suspect that it is.
(For the record, if I had attempted to answer the earlier question, I probably would have laid out a similar narrative. The asker's questions were of a kind asking for the greater context, and the fact that Hilbert (mentioned in the submission title) posed the question is pretty important grounding. But, that's beside the point.)
To be clear, im not the person who made the original ai accusation. I agree that just yelling its AI, and running away is super rude and not very constructive.
I think the last sentence, about Shelby and Miles, was written by a human, because it doesn't fit with the rest at all. Different style and a complete awkward shift of gears non sequitur. He probably recently saw the Amazon movie Ford V Ferrari, and so he threw that in to feel like he was doing more than cut-n-paste from an AI.
But you cannot prove it. So what value did your comment bring? The readership of this site should always question if a comment is in good faith, legitimate, and accurate.
That’s your responsibility. I did not state that it was 100% created by AI. You did, so back it up since you obviously know things the rest of us don’t.
Without proof I can only assume you 100% made up your argument.
John Baez wrote a Mastodon thread on this paper here:
https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/114618637031193532
He references a posted comment by Shan Gao[^1] and writes that the problem still seems open, even if this is some good work.
[^1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.06297
Shan Gao's review on this is really nice and accessible, thanks.
Sabine Hossenfelder's video on this: https://youtu.be/mxWJJl44UEQ
In my perception Sabine’s quality degraded over the last year or so.
Maybe it’s also the topics she covers. I’m not sure why she is getting into fantasies of AGI for example.
I liked the skeptical version of her better.
I don't know if it's just the persona she plays in these videos, but it's so so so creepy and cringe.
Agree in general -- I think the tiktok/shorts wave is biasing strongly for shorter video and then the time format kills any followup/2nd iteration-explanation
But this one was pretty good.
Agreed, she's pumping out too many videos I think. Perhaps she's succumbed a bit to the temptation of cashing in on a reputation, ironically one built on taking down grifters.
As far as I've seen, her position is only that AGI is pretty much inevitable. What's so fantastical about that?
I think plenty of people don't think it's inevitable. I'm no ai researcher, just another software engineer (so no real expertise). I think it will keep getting better but the end point is unclear.
The reason it's inevitable is because because it follows from physics principles. The Bekenstein Bound proves that all physical systems of finite volume contain finite information, humans are a finite volume, ergo a human contains finite information. Finite information can be fully captured by a finite computer, ergo computers can in principle perfectly simulate a human person.
This + continued technological development entails that AGI is inevitable.
Although the reasoning is clear, you (and her) jump from "possible in principle" to "inevitable in practice".
Just because something is physically possible doesn't make it "inevitable". That's why it's just a fantasy at this point.
As I said above:
> This + continued technological development entails that AGI is inevitable.
Everyone takes the above as a given in any discussion of future projections.
I found https://www.quantamagazine.org/epic-effort-to-ground-physics... much more informative. Sometimes you can't digest everything in 10min.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44442123
Can someone explain what's groundbreaking about this? Maybe it's not done so very rigorously, but pretty much every plasma physics textbook will contain a derivation of Boltzmann equation, including some form of collisional operator, starting from Liouville's theorem[1] and then derive a system of fluid equations [2] by computing the moments of Boltzmann equation.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liouville%27s_theorem_(Hamilto...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBGKY_hierarchy
Not only plasma
This is the larger part of the work:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.07818
may you please elaborate on why it is important, why hasn't been solved before and what new applications may you imagine with it, please?
The short answers:
1. It answers how macroscopic equations of e.g., fluid dynamics are compatible with Newton's law, when they single out an arrow of time while Newton's laws do not.
2. It was solved in the 1800s if you made an unjustified technical assumption called molecular chaos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_chaos). This work is about whether you can rigorously prove that molecular chaos actually does happen.
3. There are no applications outside of potentially other pure math research. For a physics/engineering perspective the whole theory was fine by assuming molecular chaos.
> 3. There are no applications outside of potentially other pure math research.
I would feel remiss not to say: such statements rarely hold
In this case, what the research says is that the approximations we have already been using for a long time are correct. "You're already right, keep doing what you're doing!" is not generally something people consider a "practical application".
That's high praise!
David Hilbert was one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. Many of the leaders of the Manhattan Project learned the mathematics of physics from him. But he was famous long before then. In 1900 he gave an invited lecture where he listed several outstanding problems in mathematics the solution of any one of which would change not only the career of the person who solved the problem, but possibly life on Earth. Many have stood like mountains in the distance, rising above the clouds, for generations. The sixth problem was an axiomatic derivation of the laws of physics. While the standard model of physics describes the quantum realm and gravity, in theory, the messy soup one step up, fluid dynamics, is far from a solved problem. High resolution simulations of fluid dynamics consume vast amounts of supercomputer time and are critical for problems ranging from turbulence, to weather, nuclear explosions, and the origins of the universe.
This team seems a bit like Shelby and Miles trying to build a Ford that would win the 24 hours of LeMans. The race isn’t over, but Ken Miles has beat his own lap record in the same race, twice. Might want to tune in for the rest.
> the solution of any one of which would change not only the career of the person who solved the problem, but possibly life on Earth. Many have stood like mountains in the distance, rising above the clouds, for generations.
Whether or not this is AI, this comment is not true. An axiomatic derivation of a formula doesn’t change how it’s used. We knew the formulas were experimentally correct, it’s just that now mathematicians can rest easy about whether they were theoretically correct. Although it’s interesting, it doesn’t change or create any new applications.
This kind of misses the point. The problem isn't interesting because its on hilbert's list; its on hilbert's list because it is interesting.
This is not my field, but i also don't think this would help with computational resources needed for high resolution modelling as you are implying. At least not by itself.
[flagged]
yes, and advertising the new f1 movie.
Explained for the layperson in the video cited here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44439593
That video s very light and doesn't explains at what point (or intuitively) where the arrow of time comes in.
So where and how does a jump from nice symmetric reversible equations to turbulent irreversibility happen?
This has been known for a long time: the irreversibility comes from the assumption that the velocities of particles colliding are uncorrelated, or equivalently, that particles loose the "memory" of their complete trajectory between one collision and another. It's called the molecular chaos hypothesis.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_chaos
I've been puzzling about this as well. The best answer I have (as an interested maths geek, not a physicist, caveat lector) is that it sneaks in under the assumption of "molecular chaos", i.e. that interactions of particles are statistically independent of any of their prior interactions. That basically defines an arrow of time right from the get-go, since "prior" is just a choice of direction. It also means that the underlying dynamics is not strictly speaking Newtonian any more (statistically, anyway).
It comes about when the deterministic collision process is integrated over all the indistinguishable initial states that could lead into an equivalence class of indistinguishable final states. If you set the collision probability to zero it's time reversible even with molecular chaos, and if the particles are highly correlated (like in a polymer) there can still arise an arrow of time when the integral is performed.
Interesting, so if I understand right you are saying that coarse-graining your states can produce an arrow of time on its own? Given some fixed coarse-graining, I can see that entropy would initially increase, since your coarse-graining hides information from you. The longer you evolve the system under this coarse graining the less certain you will be about the micro-states.
But I would expect this to eventually reach an equilibrium where you are at "maximum uncertainty" with respect to your coarse graining. Does that sound right at all? And if so, then there must be something else responsible for the global arrow of time, right?
> If you set the collision probability to zero it's time reversible even with molecular chaos
Is this true for boring reasons? If nothing interacts then you just have a bunch of independent particles in free motion, which is obviously time-reversible. And also obviously satisfies molecular chaos because there are no correlations whatsoever. Maybe I misunderstand the terminology.
Even three bodies under newtonian gravity can lead to chaotic behavior.
The neat part (assuming that the result is valid) is that precisely the equations of fluid dynamics result from their billiard ball models in the limit of many balls and frequent collisions.
But even millions of bodies under Newtonian gravity lead to reversible behaviour unlike Navier-Stokes.
You lose the reversible behavior when you describe the system ignoring almost every degree of freedom.
The Navier-Stokes equations are a set of differential equations. The functions that the equations act upon are functions of time (and space), so the system is perfectly reversible.
It's just hard to figure out what the functions are for a set of boundary conditions.
This is not quite right. Time-reversibility means that solutions to your differential equation are invariant under the transformation x(t) -> x(-t). It's pretty easy to verify that is the case for simple differential equations like Newton's law:
F = mx''(t) = mx''(-t) since d/dt x(-t) = -x'(-t), and d/dt (-x'(-t)) = x''(-t)
Navier-Stokes is only time-reversible if you ignore viscosity, because viscosity is velocity-dependent and you can already see signs of that being a problem in the derivation above (velocity pops out a minus sign under time reversal). From my reading the OP managed to derive viscous flow too, so there really is a break in time-symmetry happening somewhere.
Now I get it, thanks for the explanation.
I wonder if "t -> -t" is lost in the Boltzmann step or in the hydrodynamic step.
It's lost at Boltzmann's "molecular chaos" or "Stosszahlansatz" step. If f(x1,x2) is the two-particle distribution function giving you (hand-wavingly) the probability that you have particles with position and velocity coordinates x1 and others with coordinates x2, then Boltzmann made the simplification that f(x1,x2) = f(x1) * f(x2), ie throwing away all the correlations between particles. This is where the time-asymmetry comes in: you're saying that after two particles collide, they retain no correlation or memory of what they were doing beforehand.
I assume (on the basis that it has not come up so far in this discussion and my limited further reading) that position-momentum uncertainty offers no justification for throwing away the correlations?
The systems we're talking about here are classical, not quantum, so the uncertainty principle isn't really relevant. I think the justification is mainly that it makes the analysis tractable. In physical terms it's simply not true that the interactions are uncorrelated, but you might hope that the correlations are "unimportant" in the long-term. In a really hot gas, for instance, everything is moving so fast in random directions that any correlations that start to arise will quickly get obliterated by chance.
I don't think it really helps - you're already working in something like a probabilistic formulation. If you want to use a quantum mechanical justification for it then you need to look at some sort of non-unitary evolution.
Besides that, I don't think anybody is really arguing that the correlations are actually lost after a collision, just that it's usually a good approximation to treat them as if they are.
The former. Diffusion in gases is similar.
equations can be time-symmetric, or invariant re time reversal. What you're describing is equations being invariant re time reversal.
You can call this invariance under time reflection if you like, yeah.
Note that the solutions x(t) are not generally time symmetric. We aren't saying that x(t)=x(-t), we are saying that x(t) is a solution to the differential equation if and only if x(-t) is, which is a weaker statement.
I know what you meant; I've just tried to point out an error in your sentence which pops up sometimes, which may have mislead others. It's all about the time reversal invariance of evolution equations, not solutions.
Oh I see what you mean, it's kinda easy to read my comment as meaning time symmetry. But I do think the phrasing in terms of solutions is correct, provided you interpret it appropriately. As in "is still a solution to the diff eq after transformation" and not "is left unchanged by the transformation".
It's not a good phrasing to express the point, because "solution is invariant under operation O" has an established meaning, that the solution does no change after the operation. What you mean can be properly phrased as "equations are time-reversal invariant".
You've convinced me =)
> The Navier-Stokes equations are a set of differential equations. The functions that the equations act upon are functions of time (and space), so the system is perfectly reversible.
It's hard to take full reversibility seriously given Newton's equations are not actually deterministic. If they're not deterministic, then they can't be fully reversible.
Of course maybe these non-deterministic regimes don't actually happen in realistic scenarios (like Norton's Dome), but maybe this is hinting at the fact that we need a better formalism for talking about these questions, and maybe that formalism will not be reversible in a specific, important way.
Strictly speaking, naturally on its own, it doesn't. Detailed equations remain reversible. Even for very big N, typical isolated classical mechanical systems are reversible. However, typical initial conditions imply transitions to equilibrium, or very long stay in it. The reversed process (ending in Poincare return) will happen eventually, but the time is so incredibly long, it can't be verified.
In derivations of the Navier Stokes equations from reversible particle models, the former get their irreversibility from some approximation, e.g. a transition to a less detailed state and a simpler evolution equation for it is made. Often the actual microstate is replaced by some probabilistic description, such as probability density, or some kind of implied average.
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She certainly fell into the rage bait trap, and I don't really like her these days, but this video seems fine - no ranting, just a nice piece of science communication.
Rings true for my impression too. In the end, she’s a YouTuber now, for better or worse, but still puts out what look like thoughtful and informative enough videos, whatever personal vendettas she holds grudges over.
I suspect for many who’ve touched the academic system, a popular voice that isn’t anti-intellectual or anti-expertise (or out to trumpet their personal theory), but critical of the status quo, would be viewed as a net positive.
Reasons to dislike Hossenfelder:
Tim Palmer:
>But the dinner finished and our group broke up and, as we walked out, the weather-Palmer began talking about free will! You’d think it would have dawned on me then I’d stumbled over the third Superdeterminist. However, I was merely thinking I’d had too much wine. Also, I was now somewhere in London in the middle of the night, alone with a man who wanted to talk to me about free will. I excused myself and left him standing in the street.
>But Tim Palmer turned out to not only be a climate physicist with an interest in the foundations of quantum mechanics, he also turned out to be remarkably persistent. He wasn’t remotely deterred by my evident lack of interest. Indeed, I later noticed he had sent me an email already two years earlier. Just that I dumped it unceremoniously in my crackpot folder. Worse, I seem to vaguely recall telling my husband that even the climate people now have ideas for how to revolutionize quantum mechanics, hahaha.
>Cough.
----------------
Jean-Pierre Petit
>Dear Sabine,
>You told us in 2017 that the equations of our Janus model were in fact yours and you accused us of plagiarism. At the time, we offered to demonstrate that our work was derived from yours, which predates ours by six years, through a jointly authored article that would have acknowledged your priority, if such proof could be established.
>In the absence of any response from you, after two years of waiting, our colleague, the Belgian mathematician Nathalie Debergh, attempted to open a dialogue with you. But you immediately cut it short, saying that “you no longer wanted to have any dealings with plagiarists.”
https://jp-petit.org/nouv_f/dessins/2021-mai-Message%20a%20H...
https://www.jp-petit.org/papers/cosmo/2025-02-10-to-SABINE-H...
----------------
Quantum Cognition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0O8kz7bUcg:
>If you have ever encountered humans, you might have noticed that sometimes they’re hard to understand. And that means, they’re kind of like quantum physics because, as you’ve learned on YouTube, that’s also hard to understand. And this is why, I guess, a mathematician has come up with the idea of quantum cognition.
Some comments she liked:
- This is your brain... This is your brain on quantum cognition. :Egg smashed in a hot frying pan: Any questions?
- Can’t help but feel it’s a bit of a situation of: “if the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail”. Did have to check the date though, as we're pretty close to April.
I had to go fishing for the article she was talking about as she forgot to provide a link. The article links to https://jbusemey.pages.iu.edu/quantum/Quantum%20Cognition%20.... It clearly shows this is a real field with dozen of collaborators and even a textbook.
>As we delved deeper into the topic, our amazement grew more and more, as work of computer scientists on semantic analysis and LSA revealed the existence of evident links to quantum mechanics. And it was also clear that the researchers working in those areas were unaware of these structural similarities. A short but incisive article was written to emphasize the structural connections between major approaches to semantic analysis and the Hilbert-space formalism (Aerts & Czachor, 2004), which immediately caught the attention of some researchers. Of particular interest was our observation that computer scientists did not use in their studies the tensor product of vector spaces, which instead plays a fundamental role in quantum mechanics.
>When our article had just been published, we were contacted by Dominic Widdows, a researcher at Stanford University, who appreciated our comment on the failed use of the tensor product in LSA and asked us if we had any concrete results specifically related to it. At the same time it became clear that he himself had been working from a similar inspiration to ours, and more specifically had replaced the negation of classical (Boolean) logic with the orthogonality relation of quantum logic in information retrieval systems (Widdows, 2003). A few months after Widdows had contacted us, Keith van Rijsbergen’s book was published, also linking quantum mechanics and information retrieval (Van Rijsbergen, 2004). These three events in the same year 2004, clearly independent from each other according to the chronology of the publications, initiated a new field of research, similar to quantum cognition, but with a focus on how human cognition is structurally present in texts on the World-Wide Web.
Source: From Quantum Cognition to Conceptuality Interpretation I: Tracing the Brussels Group’s Intellectual Journey https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06799
> [Quantum Cognition] is a real field with dozen of collaborators and even a textbook.
Flat Earth is also a real field, with conferences with hundreds of attendees.
Have you visited Busemeyer's website ?
Here's the textbook he wrote, 2nd edition
https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/psycho...
Looks totally respectable. Why do you feel the need to ridicule it?
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1309.5673
> Decision making – When people are given a chance to play a particular gamble twice, if they think they won the first play, or alternatively if they think they lost the first play, then the majority chooses to play again on the second round. Given these preferences, they should also play the second round even if they don’t think about the outcome of the first round. Yet people do just the opposite in the latter case (Tversky & Shafir, 1992). This finding violates the law of total probability, yet it can be explained as a quantum interference effect
I wouldn't say that "it can be explained as a quantum interference effect" for any respectable definition of "explained" but your mileage may vary.
> The Contextual Nature of Concepts and their Combinations – When quantum entities become entangled, they form a new entity with properties different from either constituent, and one cannot manipulate one constituent without simultaneously affecting the other. The mathematics of entanglement has been used to model the nonmonotonic relations observed among concepts when they are combined to form a new concepts such as STONE LION
https://scispace.com/pdf/the-emergence-and-evolution-of-inte...
> Different possible ways of looking at this combination exist, and a positive answer to both questions ‘is STONE LION a LION’ and ‘is STONE LION a STONE’ make sense. Hence a better approach is to consider both as entities, and use Fock space for a two entity situation, and forgo the more simple model of considering one of them as a context.
Vanilla Quantum Models of Cognition and Decision are not enough. One really needs Quantum Field Theory Models of Cognition and Decision. "The genuine structure of quantum field theory is needed to match predictions with experimental data." https://arxiv.org/pdf/0705.1740
I don't think this cursory look at the abstracts and first pages of these papers is achieving the effect you intended.
The first quote summarize the findings (page 4) of Tversky & Shafir, 1992. Google indicates this paper has 978 citations.
>is STONE LION a STONE
This is called a typicality test.
Jurafsky, Lecun & two more fellows dropped this paper recently: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17117 (emphasis mine)
>This work aims to bridge this gap by integrating cognitive psychology, information theory, and modern NLP. We pose three central research questions to guide our investigation: [RQ1]: To what extent do concepts emergent in LLMs align with human-defined conceptual categories? [RQ2]: Do LLMs and humans exhibit similar internal geometric structures within these concepts, ESPECIALLY CONCERNING ITEM TYPICALITY? RQ3]: How do humans and LLMs differ in their strategies for balancing representational compression with the preservation of semantic fidelity when forming concepts?
It would be interesting to try to reproduce Hampton's original experiment on typicality with LLMs and run the same analysis as https://arxiv.org/pdf/1208.2362.
Anyway thanks for the exchange. Running these thoughts once more in my head allowed me to reconsider some stuff I found about Zipf distributions that might tie into the tradeoff between compression and meaning Lecun is talking about.
The quantum zipf stuff is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.06845
It's here too: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134/S1061920806030071
>quantum field theory
Chomsky is working on Hopf Algebra.
https://magazine.caltech.edu/post/math-language-marcolli-noa...
> I don't think this cursory look at the abstracts and first pages of these papers is achieving the effect you intended.
The only effect intended was my own amusement. I doubted anyone would ever read the comment.
> Jurafsky, Lecun & two more fellows dropped this paper recently
Somehow they missed that quantum field theory formalism is essential to explain such things.
Interesting, her videos have never struck me as contrarian for the sake of it, she seems genuinely frustrated at a lack of substantial progress in physics and the plethora of garbage papers. Though I imagine it must be annoying to be a physicist and have someone constantly telling you you're not good enough, but that itself is kind of part of the scientific process too.
My biggest complaint is sometimes it seems like she will take some low quality paper and just dunk on it. This feels a bit click-baity/strawman-y if nobody was being convinced by the paper in the first place
[I am not a physicist so probably can't really evaluate the whole thing neutrally]
What's the downside of that? Shouldn't a bit of public criticality help raise the publication standards?
Attacking your opponent's weakest argument is easy. Attacking their strong arguments is what takes skill.
If the paper is getting a lot of press that is one thing, but if its languishing in obscurity, it just feels a bit self-indulgant
It sounds like you're saying that her opponents are the entirety of physics researchers in academia. But isn't it that her opponents are those particular researchers that are publishing poor work, and that she's attacking the strongest arguments of those? Or am I missing something?
And I don't accept the "languishing in obscurity" argument - if a published work is poor, we should still critique it (by publishing a letter to the editorial, or any other manner), rather than just let it pollute the space. There have been many cases of obscure works being picked up decades hence, and especially now with AI "deep research", it's easier and easier for bad work to slip in - so I believe that science communicators should do what they can to add the appropriate commentary to such works. And if it seems like "easy" work, then all the better.
The issue is that many of her videos argue that funding for particle physics should instead go into foundations and interpretations of quantum mechanics, specifically research completely identical to what she works on.
This is not helped by the fact that she pushes an interpretation of quantum mechanics viewed as fringe at best. Her takes on modern physics seem typically disingenuous or biased.
Could she be correct in her assertion? Are we spending more on areas of physics which don’t require it?
She's correct. If you want theory of everything energy you need accelerator the size of our Solar system. Source: Stephen Hawking's Universe in a nutshell.
IDK why I'd want to listen to physicists about this result, which is mathematical rather than physical or scientific. John Baez, sure, he's in the intersection between math and physics. But physics in the broader sense is an empirical science where truth comes from experiments. This result is the opposite of that.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44439593 and marked it off topic.
> Professor Dave's videos on how Sabine Hossenfelder is actively contributing to an atmosphere of anti-intellectualism
I feel like the core of intellectualism is accepting criticism, including criticism you disagree with. I find some of Sabine's videos to be a bit click-baity, but they are usually logically coherent, even the ones that aren't convincing. She's not just a crazy person yelling at the sky.
Science is not religion. Its ok for people to feel certain research programs are off track. That doesn't neccesarily mean they are right, but its ok to have opinions
It's ok to have opinions. It's ok to have criticisms. Claiming that the whole of academia is failing is not a measured criticism. Claiming that the whole of physics academia is failing is not a measured criticism. Claiming that "all of science is bullshit" (which she does, in those exact words) is not a measured criticism.
Maybe it's not measured criticism, but that doesn't mean that something is true or false. Today there are serious problems with academia and criticism in general. Also Cancel-Culture nowadays is big.
I know enough good scientists that don't work in academia today. And I've seen a clan of religious nuts (like flat-earthers) working in bio-science academia. If people claim that academia nowadays is worth something I'd add a big "citation needed"...
For physics maybe there is some hope. I still know some good guys working there... But there is e.g. atmosphere physics... if you look deeply you'll find more failure there than non failure.. The rot for sure has already started...
I haven't read everything Sabine has ever wrote, but "all of science is bullshit" seems much stronger than anything i've seen her say. Where is the original context she said that?
Prof. Sabine Hossenfelder is a pretty clear-headed communicator. I've been following her for nearly 20 years, almost since she started writing the Backreaction blog.
Her criticisms boil down to:
1. Modern science spends perhaps too much time on frivolous research that doesn't lead to anything. This very much applies to the theoretical physics and the endless series of attempts at ToE. But it's not limited to theoretical physics.
2. Modern scientific communication is often misleading and exaggerated.
3. The internal workings of scientific institutions are broken.
The challenge is that she’s right on all three of these major points … to some extent. Unfortunately at times she seems eager to fling babies without even encountering bathwater.
You are making her arguments for her. We should not "boil down" the arguments she makes. This is some of the arguments she makes. She does not ground it in particular, measured criticisms, aimed at particular researchers or departments. She does not provide solutions. She uses this broadly sweeping argument as a way to cast judgment on fields of research she is not an expert in. We should evaluate the arguments that she makes, not the arguments we would like her to have made. This includes not just a dispassionate listing of the truth claims she makes, but the specific rhetoric she employs. Is modern science flawed? Absolutely. Should we be saying "scientists are not to be trusted" as a general, categorical statement? No, that's laughable, and dangerously anti-intellectual.
> She does not provide solutions. She uses this broadly sweeping argument as a way to cast judgment on fields of research she is not an expert in.
Can you provide examples? I guess the most glaring one is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htb_n7ok9AU
And I actually can't disagree with it entirely.
> Should we be saying "scientists are not to be trusted" as a general, categorical statement?
Here's the thing. She's saying: "Scientists are not going to be trusted at this rate if the situation doesn't change".
Heck, this is literally happening right now with the NIH and the NSF.
I've never heard about that nobody before, but I've watched about 10 mins. of the first video you posted and it is a terrible critique to Sabine; it actually makes Sabine's points look reasonable.
He just doesn't get the arguments she's making, and "defeats" them with laughable strawmans. But anyway, it's YouTube science so one shouldn't expect much.
Btw, Sabine's video on the topic of this thread is a good one, the remark is unwarranted.
You think she looks reasonable when she says "most research in the foundations of physics isn't based on sound scientific principles" with absolutely 0 meta-analyses presented as evidence? This is an extraordinary claim to make. It requires extraordinary evidence.
Missed that one. Timestamp?
8m12s
Cheers, and thank you for your service.
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Please don't do this here. If a comment seems unfit for HN, please flag it and email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can have a look.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id= 44439647 and marked it off topic.
Not enough em-dashes for it to be AI.
(Less jokingly, nothing strikes me as particularly AI about the comment, not to mention its author addressed the question perfectly adequately. Your comment comes off as a spurious dismissal.)
To me, it looks like AI because it doesn't really answer the question but instead answers something adjacent, which is common in AI responses.
Giving a short summary of Hilbert's biography & his problem list, does not explain why this particular work is interesting, except in the most superficial sense that its a famous problem.
Your second paragraph is a much more thoughtful critique, and posting that below the original answer would focus the subsequent conversation on those points. The issue here isn't whether the comment was AI-generated; it's how we carry the conversation forward even if we suspect that it is.
(For the record, if I had attempted to answer the earlier question, I probably would have laid out a similar narrative. The asker's questions were of a kind asking for the greater context, and the fact that Hilbert (mentioned in the submission title) posed the question is pretty important grounding. But, that's beside the point.)
To be clear, im not the person who made the original ai accusation. I agree that just yelling its AI, and running away is super rude and not very constructive.
I know it wasn't you :) Sorry if I came across that way.
I think the last sentence, about Shelby and Miles, was written by a human, because it doesn't fit with the rest at all. Different style and a complete awkward shift of gears non sequitur. He probably recently saw the Amazon movie Ford V Ferrari, and so he threw that in to feel like he was doing more than cut-n-paste from an AI.
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But you cannot prove it. So what value did your comment bring? The readership of this site should always question if a comment is in good faith, legitimate, and accurate.
Your commentary may only be one of those.
> But you cannot...
Prove it. Prove I cannot.
That’s your responsibility. I did not state that it was 100% created by AI. You did, so back it up since you obviously know things the rest of us don’t.
Without proof I can only assume you 100% made up your argument.
100% refers to my level of certainty, as a probability. You can think of it purely as a Quantum Mechanical Wave if that helps any.