Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47611070

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43215384

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What do mean by "it's a 1.0" and "3rd iteration"? I'm having trouble parsing those in context.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43181610

Points: 109

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42607880

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A rule being "good" is largely about simplicity, which is also essentially the trick that deep learning uses to escape no-free-lunch theorems.

Dirac naturalness is as you describe: skepticism towards extremely large numbers, end of story. It has the flaw you (and every other person who's ever heard it) point out.

Technical (or t'Hooft) naturalness is different, and specific to quantum field theory.

To cut a long story short, the "effective", observable parameters of the Standard Model, such as the mass of the electron, are really the sums of enormous numbers of contributions from different processes happening in quantum superposition. (Keywords: Feynman diagram, renormalization, effective field theory.) The underlying, "bare" parameters each end up affecting many different observables. You can think of this as a big machine with N knobs and N dials, but where each dial is sensitive to each knob in a complicated way.

Technical naturalness states: the sum of the contributions to e.g. the Higgs boson mass should not be many orders of magnitude smaller than each individual contribution, without good reason.

The Higgs mass that we observe is not technically natural. As far as we can tell, thousands of different effects due to unrelated processes are all cancelling out to dozens of decimal places, for no reason anyone can discern. There's a dial at 0.000000.., and turning any knob by a tiny bit would put it at 3 or -2 or something.

There are still critiques to be made here. Maybe the "underlying" parameters aren't really the only fundamental ones, and somehow the effective ones are also fundamental? Maybe there's some reason things cancel out, which we just haven't done the right math to discover? Maybe there's new physics beyond the SM (as we know there eventually has to be)?

But overall it's a situation that, imo, demands an explanation beyond "eh, sometimes numbers are big". If you want to say that physical calculations "explain" anything -- if, for example, you think electromagnetism and thermodynamics can "explain" the approximate light output of a 100W bulb -- then you should care about this.

Conversely, the hypothesis that LambdaCDM is wrong does nothing to explain why the distance ladder methods disagree.

She clearly isn't saying that any model is infallible, she's just saying that clear flaws with one set of models throw into question some specific accusations that a different model is wrong.

You actually need to pay attention to the details; the physicists certainly are. Glib contrarianism isn't very useful here.

The side note is wrong in letter and spirit; turning potential energy into heat is one way for something to be irreversible, but neither of those statements is true.

For example, consider an iron ball being thrown sideways. It hits a pile of sand and stops. The iron ball is not affected structurally, but its kinetic energy is transferred (almost entirely) to heat energy. If the ball is thrown slightly upwards, potential energy increases but the process is still irreversible.

Also, the changes of potential energy in corresponding parts of two Carnot cycles are directionally the same, even if one is ideal (reversible) and one is not (irreversible).

"I commissioned a professional voice actor to give a full dramatic reading of that blog post."