QC@QiaochuYuan• about 1 year ago

it's sort of tragic that in the 20th century our most accurate theories of physics became too hard to understand without a lot of technical background and ability. in previous centuries i think you could reasonably expect a bright educated person, not necessarily a specialist in math or physics, to at least have some sense of how newtonian mechanics worked and how that fed into this broader scientific materialist paradigm about how to conceive of the universe and our place in it. nowadays understanding the mathematics of the standard model of particle physics even at a sketchy level requires some familiarity with: lie theory, representation theory, differential geometry, fiber bundles, functional analysis, probably other stuff i'm forgetting - mathematics which mostly did not exist in the 19th century, and which is pretty hard! newtonian mechanics you can visualize and directly connect to your experience, it's about pushing balls around or whatever, it's something you can get your hands on. the standard model is extremely removed from experience - it concerns very small "particles" which you definitely can't see, and which are also not "really" particles, they're really excitations of quantum fields, whatever those are; the wave functions in quantum mechanics are hard enough to get a grip on, and quantum fields are even more inaccessible than that. seriously testing the standard model is so difficult it requires billions of dollars of resources (that's about how much the LHC cost, which was used to detect the higgs boson). (also, disclaimer: not a physicist, don't understand quantum field theory or the standard model, this is all just as far as i understand which is not much, a real physicist can correct me if i've grossly misrepresented anything.) sometimes i wonder about the psychological and cultural effects of this inaccessibility. in most human societies throughout history there was a relatively straightforward understandable official story about the nature of things, the way stuff works, what a person is, what makes the sun and the moon and the stars move in the sky. for the last several decades the official story has been that some brilliant weirdos worked out this unbelievably detailed and beautiful theory about stuff, all the stuff everywhere, the stuff inside your body, the stuff that makes up the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, the milky way, the black hole at the center of the milky way. but it's mostly inaccessible without PhD-level knowledge and ability. what is it like to live in a society that tells you that the true nature of reality is something almost nobody can meaningfully understand?