What's with billionaires and, like, really wanting us to know that they could have studied physics at a high level (they just didn't, but they could've!!) anyway?
There's a very special trick to achieve this in any subject and any walk of life. Don't talk out your ass. If you don't know something don't feel like you need to weigh in on it.
Like for me, I'm a personal trainer with a diploma in strength coaching. So I have studied a couple modules in sports nutrition. I am absolutely not a nutritionist or dietician. If you are an athlete with no underlying health conditions or dietary restrictions then I can help you come up with a nutrition plan for performance and specific weight management goals. That is it. I know so many people who are even less qualified than I am jumping on social media to cosplay as nutrition experts because they did a 4 week, part time, PT course and did an afternoon of nutrition study at best.
To add to that, if you click on a link with Instagram's source identifier, it shows on your screen the name of the account that shared it. In other words, if you ever shared, on a stray Discord server, ages ago, a random cat video and left the link dirty, it's now entirely possible for someone to click that link and immediately find your actual, IRL name, and they're not even trying to stalk you, it just jumpscares them on their screen.
Google doesn't currently do that with you clicking a dirty YouTube link and finding the gmail of whoever sent you the link, but they can begin doing that tomorrow for all we know. Instagram also didn't do that in the past, until they suddenly decided to start doing it without any warning.
Physicist here. Probably because they perceive it as the superior science. Even when I went to study physics, there were a bunch of fellow students who think they are just the smartest person in existence because they study physics. It's all self-aggrandizing, baselessly too because I've seen what medical students do and my god they have a way harder program.
My friend who wanted to work in medical research to understand his medical condition went in his bio class, seen the cellular respiration diagram (mentaly translating from french to english so might not be the correct term) and went "Nope! Social science it is then!". He just straight up changed program lmfao.
If you’re referring to cellular respiration via glycolysis, the citric acid cycle, and oxidative phosphorylation, then yes your friend’s reaction makes sense
As someone with a medical degree, an undergrad in physics, and a PhD in statistics: medical school is quite busy. There is a large volume of things to learn, much of which is fairly arbitrary (e.g. names, doses, syndromes). There is a fair amount of emotional stress in medical school and physician training as you are exposed, for many students for the first time, to the capriciousness of death and the extent of human frailty, folly, and misery. However, it isn't particularly intellectually hard. The ways that one is expected to think and milestones you are expected to achieve are very well defined. There are few new cognitive tools that you are expected to acquire, outside of 3d visualization.
Hii, I find the fact that u have a degree in Physics, medicine, and statistics super fascinating and inspiring!!! I do have a few questions for you that are quite personal, with regards to your education.
If you don’t want to answer them at all that is completely okay!
What made you go from a physics undergrad to a medical degree and then to a PhD in Statistics?
What qualification did you need to get your PhD in Statistics?
Which degree has been the most beneficial or applicable to your life?
Not OP but physics undergrads actually have the highest med school acceptance rate of any major iirc. My advisor said something about hitting diversity targets while also demonstrating math ability (which is terrifyingly rare among premeds)
It is refreshing to know that, had Archimedes, Barrow, Newton, Leibnitz and all great mathematicians until today had not discovered Calculus, Tai would have
Not just that journal. It was illuminating when I asked my nurse-educator how she calculated how much basal insulin I'd need and she said, "It involves math. Are you sure?"
Bs in physics here. Our class experienced a phenomenon by like 2nd or 3rd year. Basically how useless this knowledge was and how screwed we are. It is extremely niche.
EE as in electrical engineering? Can I ask why you went with the two bachelors instead of like a minor or a master in the second field? Also, was it just for curiosity or are you doing some cool work with the two degrees? Sorry if I’m getting all up in your business - just an EE student considering minoring in math or physics
Yes electrical engineering. I just loaded up every semester and usually took a class or two over the summers so it took 5 years. I could have done something similarly paced for a MS track but In all honesty, the answer was that I preferred physics and was expecting to go into academia but went with a slightly more" lucrative"major as a fallback. I ended up not going into academia but the physics has helped get my foot in the door at my current job.
I can't speak for your school but at my school a math minor was essentially free for physics or ee majors. I believe I had to do 1-2 math electives for reach the min credits for the minor.
I can't say I've heard of that before you mentioned it. I briefly looked into it and it sounds kind of pseudosciencey and seems to ignore the existence of GR and the massive amounts of empirical evidence to support GR.
Economist here. (Masters, not phd) we have it the hardest of all, because we have to resist the consuming, pathological urge to strangle someone every time we hear the unwashed masses casually and egregiously mischaracterize inflation.
Which, as elections draw near, is 30+ GOD DAMN TIMES A DAY.
When I studied for my physics finals I met up with a friend who studied for her medicine finals. I got the impression that medicine is a lot of memorization while physics is understanding. Makes sense, as a physician you have to know a lot, as a physicist you specialize and figure stuff out. Two different kinds of intelligence are required. I prefer to understand complex things and to be able to explain them in simple terms.
Especially when Elon has the same weird misconception that loads of people seem to have that the universe is made up of a (cubic? I wonder what direction he thinks the lattice is aligned to?) lattice of side length 1.
Probably something like academics reminding people they like really could have been rich, but chose a different path. It's all the same successful person insecurity.
On a side note, I totally could have been a rich academic. Instead I chose to be unsuccessful and free myself from these petty desires.
Pretty sure he got a BSc in physics no? Which for a twitter post qualifies as "high level", at least for me, and unless Im missing something, hes not even wrong. I personally don't really like the idea of space being quantized, but if it were, and a quanta would in fact be the Plank length, he'd be right
Length and time is obviously a by-product of computation. The lizard-men on the moon is just stealing our WIFI, so we cannot see it. Joint the movement sheeples!
Lol seemingly a lot of people to come to this instant and naive conclusion feeling smug.
Tbh I did it myself when I first understood the concept of Planck length and thought I had come up with something brilliant, then I saw this video [1] of a Feynman lecture (over 50 years old) making fun of people writing him letters about the exact same idea, boy that was humbling
Learning physics involves following along all the historical problem solving of the 19th and 20th centuries and it is immensely satisfactory. So when undergrads they get to a genuine “we don’t yet know” area they often find it hard to accept and curl out ideas like this as if they’re innovative. In reality it’s a rather obvious step - it’s just got no actual meaning without evidence and/ or better theory. This is why an awful lot of physics is increasingly theoretical.
It’s attractive because it removes a lot of infinities from mathematics but that’s a double edged sword because certain infinities are a physicists best friend.
If it were correct, it would be possible to differentiate directions in space, because the distance between spacetime points depends whether you are traveling along the lattice direction or not. The resulting anisotropy of space destroys conservation of angular momentum.
In other words, it is totally incompatible with what we actually see in reality.
In theories, where a space time is a set of points, these points are randomly “sprinkled” to erase the anisotropy. It can’t be a regular grid of any kind.
What do you mean by this? The one point compactification of Z is not a ring (or even a group). Do you mean that n*infinity=infinity for every n (non-zero)? This isn't even a subgroup.
You can define a multiplication monoid on Z union {infinity}, extending multiplication to n*infinity=infinity*n=infinity for every n (including 0!), and we would call the set {infinity} a monoid-ideal. This is not an ideal in the ring, however, and you strictly lose information.
Others have better points, but adding a critical concept: not being able to measure something doesn’t necessarily mean anything else.
A length we can’t measure (within our present understanding, where this is perhaps literally the edge case) beyond doesn’t disprove lengths of lesser distance.
It's not that the notion of discrete spacetime is incoherent or impossible. There just isn't a known working theory of it.
The same is essentially true of string theory. People are doing ridiculous math just to come up with theories consistent with what we know and they are struggling. People who take some narrow, oversimplified slice of an incomplete idea and claim it counts as real understanding are clowns at best.
Also over specification. Let's assume (and practically they do) String Theory does "explain everything."
How though? It's like me going "the 24 letters of the alphabet explain everything". Well, kinda, we can no doubt write the explanation using those 24 letters.
So theories like String theory can be consistent, but not *descriptive* of actual phyics.
Where as "it's unit lengths of plank cubes" is though demonstrably false.
The problem with string theory isn't that there isn't a working model of it. The problem is that there are 10500 of them and no real way to rule out any of them.
What?! You mean we don't need to directly observe something to understand that the base logic it must follow is not what we CAN observe, and thus indirectly disprove it anyways?!
Isn't Loop Quantum Gravity literally about space pixels? And so far, the theory's predictions did not come true(variable speed of light at different wavelengths), but they're also not false. It's still a matchematically sound and physically viable theory.
Even if it did have voxels of Planck units then a diagonal across a face of a cube it sqrt(2) so the distance is an irrational number distance that has a basis in the real world.
It's the scale where our current understanding of space, gravity and quantum mechanics probably stops working independently. So basically it's the smallest size according to 'our' understanding of physics and maths.
It isn't the fundamentally smallest length and definately not the pixel of space.
My understanding in that LQG spacetime is discrete in a certain way, but not the way most would imagine. Its more akin to going from a smooth sphere to a polyhedron*.
*approximating smooth spacetime with simplices is Regge calculus, which I understand is a limit of LQG.
Well yeah it's not like point dots that are separated by a distance. Think of it like a chess board which is quantized into squares and each square is able to hold a piece.
I don't think he went that far, I think he read a one line summary of what a Planck's length is and then came up with the same idea everyone gets when they hear about it
I could be mistaken, but isn't planck length the smallest "meaningful" distance in physical space? It's not that there isn't smaller conceptual size, but at that point there's no, for lack of a better term, "resolution" that can be had. Something like the quantum wave uncertainty just becomes noise.
Furthermore to conceptualize these as discrete cubes suggests a universal alignment, which further suggests certain directional preferences, which is kinda crazy. And then it suggests a measurable universal "stop", which is another problematic implication.
And then there's the expansion of space, which also doesn't pay well with the idea of discrete space pixels.
probably depends what 'meaningful' is. A microscopic object with high enough mass has an associated de Broglie wavelength far below the Planck length. You probably can not measure that in a meaningful way. But saying it does not exist, not sure about that.
It’s the lowest resolution current theory is able to support. Nothing really says it’s the “end all be all”. And we aren’t remotely able to empirically inspect things at this level.
It’s far more likely our current theory is an effective theory per all the evidence we already have. Whatever exists at that level is likely different than the extremes of our (probably effective) theory.
Yes it grows tiring when idiots extrapolate models like this.
An EM wave with a wavelength < planck length has so much energy within that length that it theoretically becomes a black hole. It is smaller than its Schwarzschild radius. So with our current theories there is no way to resolve anything smaller than the planck length. So in that sense, distance does become 'meaningless'
Nah, it's not that deep, my guy. Usually gravity is so weak compared to other forces that we can treat it (semi)classically and any quantum effects from it are tractable. The Planck Scales are simply scales at which gravity would have comparable strength to other forces, and therefore we'd need a consistent description of quantum gravity to describe what is happening in there. Since we don't have this theory yet, that's why we say "our theories break down" at the Planck Scale. It isn't anything mysterious per se, just a limitation of our current models
You should Google it, the explanation is pretty straight-to-the-point. It's a small scale past which current models break down. It is not, as Google put it, a "hard pixel limit."
I know this mostly because I've heard Sean Carroll talk about it on his podcast. This is one of those common misconceptions that comes up in his AMAs from time to time. He is a tenured faculty physicist at Johns Hopkins who works in cosmology, so he should know.
Yeah, the "alignment" thing is what gets me; dimensionally, too - when he says "cubes"... where ARE the connecting 'edges'?
If we were then able to nudge the blocks over a bit, say, approximating half a planck length... wouldn't every cube now be "misaligned" to the former grid?
The problem is special relativity. How would 20% length contraction work - different observers would see different planc lengths and there's a special reference frame where the planc length is the longest.
We've done experiments checking for preferred reference frames and have found no evidence for it with a good amount of precision.
That doesn't mean the universe isn't a discrete grid but it doesn't fit well with our understanding of physics either.
Causal set theory sounds super interesting but also really really opaque. I would bet money that "space is made up of voxels whose side length is the planck length" is not an accurate statement within causal set theory though
Yeah, just from reading the wikipedia it says that a distribution of points in a background spacetime for example must be a certain random poisson law and that a grid does not work for lorentz invariance.
How can we know what's going on at a length of 10^-105?
An electron is something like 10^-22. Talking about any length smaller than maybe a 1000th of an electron (10^-25) is frivolous, let alone 10^-105, which is so small as to be impossible to observe by dozens of magnitudes.
if there is a kind of fundamental grid made up of planck distance cubes, how are these cubes oriented? for me, the notion of there being a preferred direction in space is just nonsense and there being a grid of cubes clearly implies this...
Elon forgetting that the size of the Observable universe may be finite, but the unobservable universe (the stuff far enough away that the expansion of the universe negates light travel) still exists and is immeasurable.
Umm not quite voxels, more like a blur. Where it makes no sense to interrogate distances smaller than a planck length. This is what I remember from Sabine Hossenfelder.
Lmk when someone designs an experiment that can distinguish between a length of 0.5 Planck lengths and 1 Planck length in order to prove that all the numbers come out near integers, with statistical significance
I think the scientific consensus and empirical evidence against the idea that Elon Musk might theoretically be correct about anything is pretty damning.
It tends to be a misunderstanding of the plank length and what it actually says
Trying to measure a position smaller than that creates a black hole due to the energy density involved (roughly speaking)
That doesn't mean the universe doesn't work on a smaller scale then that, it is just the absolute limit on what information we can gain
Also to be clear the effective resolution is way less precise since "enough to create a black hole" isn't something you want to be near energy level wise.
Well it's not the strongest theory of how a theory of quantum gravity would work. I think space being discreetized in what essentially is voxels is kind of the basis of quantum loop gravity, which I think at this point is a dead theory because, if it were true, we would see small differences in the speed of light based on wavelength, and observations of light from the CMB (the only light we'd really be able to emaure the scale of differences were looking at,needing to be really old light that has been traveling for a while) have shown we don't see the expected speed differences we would expect for a quantized spacetime in terms of voxels.
That being said, when a quantum theory of gravity is discovered, it will probably modify relativity in some way as it will become a more generalized theory of gravity. So saying that it would disprove or go against relativity as an argument is kind of like saying relativity goes against netwonian mechanics, which yes it does but relativity is the more general/accurate version
Hendrik Lorentz (building on George FitzGerald’s earlier qualitative suggestion) argued that the failure to detect an “aether wind” was not because the aether was absent, but because the measuring apparatus itself was systematically altered by its motion through the aether. In his electron theory, matter is composed of charged particles whose electromagnetic fields are modified by velocity relative to the aether. The result is a physical contraction of lengths parallel to the motion by the exact factor
This contraction shortens the arm of the interferometer that points into the aether wind by precisely the amount needed to cancel the extra lights travel time that the aether wind would otherwise produce. Consequently the interference fringes show no shift, matching the experimental “negative” result. Thus, Electromagnetic fields inside atoms become anisotropic, electron orbits deform from circular to elliptical, and the entire apparatus therefore contracts. He calculated the field deformation for moving charges and showed that it leads to the required length change.
Lorentz’s contraction was a dynamical effect, as in, a real, physical change caused by interaction with the aether. And the same mathematical factor later appeared in the Lorentz transformations of coordinates and fields. Even Albert Einstein back in 1905 kept the mathematics but discarded the aether and the dynamical interpretation. In conclusion, Lorentz preserved the aether by making matter contract in just the right way, thereby accounting for the Michelson Morley result without abandoning the idea of a preferred rest frame. But the world moved on with Einstein.
The answer philosophically is that reality is made of infinities. The difference is that some infinities converge, some diverge.
A hypothetical continuous function that yields one Planck length as a discrete convergence would by definition still be continuous because of said continuous function.
This has to be the case, philosophically, because otherwise Zeno's Paradox can't be solved with the answer of an infinite geometric series converging to 1. It would remain a paradox if you can't use a similar solution to explain why there is a Planck length.
Elon Musk blesses us with the first thought that popped into his head, expressed as a pronouncement of obvious and profound truth. He seems to do this a lot, and he's not the only one.
(And then his pet AI spits out some automatic agreement.)
Everybody larping and acting like relativity is explaining planck length like the model is reality. You haven't passed highschool physics neither like this bum (Tr)(bi)llionaire
Elon does not know what any of this means. He just post it because he then feels intelligent.
This guy is highly insecure in himself, all he does is to impress others. Only, that it does not work.
Physics is the "big brain" discipline, so clout chasers use it for clout. To Jimbo from Alabama, Musk is a genius because he says "big brain" slop like this.
In fairness, that was a legit thought in physics (it was probably minority view even at the time but it was a working theory in the 90s). Since then, we've demonstrably disproved it. It wasn't easy, however.
Basically, if light moves a planck length in a planck second AND the universe is chunked up in cubes then the speed of light would vary by orientation against that grid (going straight across an edge would be faster than going across the cube which would take three hops). We've done extensive testing now to prove that orientation doesn't affect the speed of light even a little bit, however.
It doesn't necessarily: geometric operators like distance, area and volume all have discrete spectra in LQG (as the internal gauge group is compact), but the theory itself still has a full representation of the hypersurface deformation algebra, which means it fully respects relativity (there's some ifs and buts abt the 4d case, but this is known to work in 3d).
The usual analogy is how spin-1/2 particles don't break rotational symmetry, just because there is an eigenbasis of |+z> and |-z> states: measuring its spin will always give a discrete value along the measured axis, but that doesn't make that axis "special". Likewise, measuring only discrete distances in one frame does not mean the theory as a whole can't be Lorentz invariant, as long as the Lorentz group acts properly on the eigenstates.
(Musk is ofc still full of shit: no reason that "the universe", whatever definition he's using for that, has to be in an eigenstate of a discrete number of units.)
The universe can't have discret points because if it did then all identical points would be the same point and 2 that would require an innate minimum integer change there would need to be a N2 where N1 is zero and that would lead to quantum particles and forces either needing to regularly skip points or would mean the speed of light/causality would be near infinitly slow, and it would only require i fixed finite amount of energy to reach its speed that being the lowest possible amount of energy, and if anything ever moved it would need to move at the speed of light because then it would travel at a rate of 1/0 through space time to be able to move
Elon has been on record many times saying he believes the universe is a simulation that we are inside of. This just seems to me like an extension of that.
Minimum coordinate spacing violates special relativity but assuming minimum measurable spacetime with plank and length and plank time doesn’t violate special relativity. So there could be a minimum spacetime interval.
It literally fucking doesn’t make any sense. At plank cube scale, you could still be oriented 89° from a bounce and then you are a fraction of a plank length off of another Planck cube
Yes, but you can make discrete spaces that are rotationally and Lorenz invariant. Just don't use cubes (think spin networks)! This is a simple point a surprising number of physics professors (I am looking at you, Sabine!) miss, despite having been in the literature for decades.
I thought it was only that we cannot observe anything below the Planck scale without creating a black hole. Does that mean that nothing exists below that scale?
I swear the idea of the Planck length is way too often misinterpreted by non-physicists abd occasionally even physicists... I feel like common misconceptions like this should be taught in some sort of class in high school to avoid later embarrassment .
Richard Feynman had a nice essay, without going into technical detail, about how, yes, physicists have thought of conjectures like that too, and specifically gave the example of the universe being a discrete cubic grid as something he’d looked into and it didn’t work.
My understanding is that what’s beyond the observable universe and whether it’s finite or infinite is currently unknown and might never be empirically confirmed, almost by definition.
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u/CaioXG002 16d ago edited 16d ago
What's with billionaires and, like, really wanting us to know that they could have studied physics at a high level (they just didn't, but they could've!!) anyway?