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No, QM works at every scale, it's just that at large scales the math is too hard to carry through and we have to use approximations.

It is true that either QM or GR (or both) as currently formulated will break down near the event horizons of black holes, but there is no reason to believe that once we figure that out the result will be significantly different in character than all the other laws of physics that have been worked out up to now.




> QM works at every scale

> either QM or GR (or both) as currently formulated will break down near the event horizons of black holes

These seem to be in conflict. Black holes is exactly what I was talking about.

From what I've understand there's no unified theory or anything close to a unified theory for certain objects in space, which means the landscape is very open for some weird, weird stuff. Physics is already extremely weird.

> there is no reason to believe that once we figure that out the result will be significantly different in character than all the other laws of physics that have been worked out up to now

I would consider both general relativity and quantum mechanics to be drastically different things compared to what came before, going from "this is reasonable" to "WTF", so I can't agree with this statement at all.


> the landscape is very open for some weird, weird stuff

Yes, that's true.

> Physics is already extremely weird.

Yes, that's true too. It is weird. But it's not complicated (in the strict computational sense).

> I would consider both general relativity and quantum mechanics to be drastically different things compared to what came before

In one sense yes, but not in the sense that matters for this discussion. GR and QM are conceptually very different from Newtonian mechanics, but they are similar insofar as they can be written down as simple (in the technical sense) mathematical equations. So there's no reason to expect that the next surprise will be different in that regard.


> In one sense yes, but not in the sense that matters for this discussion.

I'm not really sure when you decided on this, as I don't really evaluate the complexity of something based on whether it follows math. I evaluate it based on the nature of the logic and abstraction that needs to be used to follow it.

The fact that you can approximate the location of particles with a math equation doesn't really feel to me that we're doing the same thing, even mathematically, that we were doing in Newtonian mechanics. That seems very much in line with "These "laws" of physics can be written as simple mathematical equations only because these equations make various simplifying assumptions.".


> I evaluate it based on the nature of the logic and abstraction that needs to be used to follow it.

What do you think math is?

> The fact that you can approximate the location of particles with a math equation doesn't really feel to me that we're doing the same thing, even mathematically, that we were doing in Newtonian mechanics.

Huh? Are you referring to the fact that QM is probabilistic? That's not a simplifying assumption, that's a reflection of how the world actually is.




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