There seem to be waves of fashion amongst these people.

Not long ago we had lots of different versions of Space and Time are emergent.

Before that we had holographic and other fads about theories of the universe and everything.

That latest that seems to be sweeping through the various science fora still extant is about cellular 'substrates'.

Comments ?

33 minutes ago, studiot said:

There seem to be waves of fashion amongst these people.

Not long ago we had lots of different versions of Space and Time are emergent.

Before that we had holographic and other fads about theories of the universe and everything.

That latest that seems to be sweeping through the various science fora still extant is about cellular 'substrates'.

Comments ?

My impression was that the fad du jour was ontology, as applied to physics. There have been about half a dozen threads on that, either here or on the other forum I frequent. Perhaps some chatbot has started using it and everyone thinks that's cool and is copying it.

But you are right that "substrate" pops up quite a bit, perhaps now that we are cottoning onto "framework" as a probable sign of botshit.

18 minutes ago, exchemist said:

My impression was that the fad du jour was ontology, as applied to physics. There have been about half a dozen threads on that, either here or on the other forum I frequent. Perhaps some chatbot has started using it and everyone thinks that's cool and is copying it.

But you are right that "substrate" pops up quite a bit, perhaps now that we are cottoning onto "framework" as a probable sign of botshit.

+1

A good addition to my catalogue.

Thanks

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

My impression was that the fad du jour was ontology, as applied to physics. There have been about half a dozen threads on that, either here or on the other forum I frequent. Perhaps some chatbot has started using it and everyone thinks that's cool and is copying it.

As I had recently mentioned in another thread, the broader theme of suggesting you can’t do physics without explicitly incorporating more philosophy has been around for a while. A lot of physics has been accomplished over the years, so I guess the way that could be true is that there is some physics we can’t discover without doing so, but the people insisting on that scenario never seem to have any workable new physics to offer.

Part of that may be a lack of appreciation of how few are working on foundations of physics; pop-sci stories seem to over-emphasize certain areas like that and high-energy particle physics.

I agree that access to consumer-grade ai likely feeds this.

People, or scientists, tend to use what they are familiar with to build models.
When lasers/holography first hit mainstream popularity, I imagine some tried incorporating those ideas into theoretical Physics.
With the mainstreaming of computers and data handling, others have tried ideas from cellular automata.

That doesn't mean these attempts are worthless as some of these ideas have 'explained', or successfully modelled some aspects of our reality. I'm sure that's not what @studiot is objecting to.

The problem, as I personally see it, arises when someone gets an idea from AI, and runs with it.
Without knowing all the implications, or having the foundational knowledge for critical consideration, but counting on the AI to provide the 'back up' for the assertions

55 minutes ago, swansont said:

As I had recently mentioned in another thread, the broader theme of suggesting you can’t do physics without explicitly incorporating more philosophy has been around for a while. A lot of physics has been accomplished over the years, so I guess the way that could be true is that there is some physics we can’t discover without doing so, but the people insisting on that scenario never seem to have any workable new physics to offer.

Part of that may be a lack of appreciation of how few are working on foundations of physics; pop-sci stories seem to over-emphasize certain areas like that and high-energy particle physics.

I agree that access to consumer-grade ai likely feeds this.

I must say it is not obvious to me that more philosophy can help physics. What unsolved problems do they think that could address? It seems to me the danger is the opposite. We already have a cottage industry in string theory, going for several decades now, which I gather has yet to make a single testable prediction. Arguably that is more philosophy than science. As Pauli said of Bohmian mechanics, it seems to be an “uncashable cheque”.

But I’m not a physicist of course.

15 minutes ago, exchemist said:

I must say it is not obvious to me that more philosophy can help physics. What unsolved problems do they think that could address? It seems to me the danger is the opposite. We already have a cottage industry in string theory, going for several decades now, which I gather has yet to make a single testable prediction. Arguably that is more philosophy than science. As Pauli said of Bohmian mechanics, it seems to be an “uncashable cheque”.

But I’m not a physicist of course.

I can see where it might inform someone investigating foundational issues, since it’s possible it might inform someone of what experiment to pursue. If “what is its nature” tells you how it behaves, since the latter is what we can observe. But there are lots of things in physics where the model is just a mathematical construct and that seems to be objectionable to some

We had someone talking about ontological purity (or something like that; was it Anton?) in recent memory so maybe there’s some OCD involved