There was a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure, with writing from Douglas Adams. It's entertaining, but insane what you have to figure out to get the babel fish...
There's a more basic problem with string theory, which is that it's not a theory. It's a mathematical framework which is compatible with a very wide range of specific physical theories.
About tests of quantum gravity, there have been proposals for feasible tests using gravitationally-induced entanglement protocols:
I don't think that's quite the problem. In mathematics, the word "theory" is often used when referring to particular mathematical frameworks (e.g. Group Theory, Graph Theory, Morse Theory). In that sense I think String Theory is very much a theory. As you imply, in physics, the word "theory" is typically used in a different sense. I'm not a physicist but I presume a physical theory has to be verifiable, consistent with observations, able to predict the behavior of unexplained phenomena. If I understand correctly, the basic problem is that in some quarters string theory is being passed off as a physical theory. I know of pure mathematicians who are interested in string theory and who couldn't care less whether its a physical theory.
The word "theory" doesn't matter in the way you are portraying it as.
Like a book is a book because it's got pages with words on them glued to a spine with covers. It's not "not a book" because the plot makes no sense.
Scientists don't care about what "a theory" is, it's not philosophically important to them. It's just a vague term for a collection of ideas or a model or whatever.
I guess I'm not being clear. I don't care about the word "theory". The point is string theory makes no predictions. It's not just inaccessible energies which make it untestable, but the fact that, as a framework, string theory is compatible with a huge range of possible universes.
Eh, again you're just saying "it's not real because..." whether or not you attach the word theory. It is a space with lots of possible parameters being explored and is not one set of parameters with predictions because all of the sets that have been explored so far are either broken or don't represent reality. That in itself does not mean it doesn't have merit. It's simply incomplete, but given its history it's fair to doubt that it ever will close the loop and have a final form that models our reality.
I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with tbh. If you look up the thread, my point is that the reason string theory is untestable is not simply that high energies are experimentally inaccessible. Rather, string theory doesn't make any definite predictions for those high energies either. It seems you agree with that?
One disanalogy between human language use and LLMs is that language evolved to fit the human brain, which was already structured by millions of years of primate social life. This is more or less the reverse situation to a neural network trained on a large text corpus.
Yes, but animal/human brains (cortex) appear to have evolved to be prediction machines, originally mostly predicting evolving sensory inputs (how external objects behave), and predicting real-world responses to the animal's actions.
Language seems to be taking advantage of this pre-existing predictive architecture, and would have again learnt by predicting sensory inputs (heard language), which as we have seen is enough to induce ability to generate it too.
One part of the story I found fascinating is the overlap in infants' brains of the areas involved in tool use and hierarchical syntax. These diverge and specialize in adults. The homologous brain region in primates is involved in motor planning.
It's an interesting hint at the deeper evolutionary origins of language in the ability to plan complex actions, providing a neural basis for the observation that language and action planning have this common structure of an overall goal that can be decomposed into a structure of subgoals, which we see formalized in computer programs too.
This is an older reference (1991) where I first heard about it. there are more recent studies reinforcing various aspects of it but I didn't find one that was as comprehensive
"overlap in infants' brains of the areas involved in tool use and hierarchical syntax"---you didn't see that in the Quanta article, right? I went back and looked, but can't find it mentioned anywhere.
Not from the quanta article. By "story" I just meant the general story of the neural basis for language. What I mentioned in the comment is from the article I linked there
If people were honest, we'd likely discover that unprovoked snake bites are almost unheard-of.
Likewise, if every drowning victim were routinely checked for BAC, I think we'd discover that sober people are much more drown-resistant than the stats would indicate. Unfortunately, water + play correlates highly with beer/wine cooler/hard seltzer consumption, in the US at least.
People make a lot of bad decisions, and it has effects.
It's a good question, so good in fact that's it's addressed in the linked article.
Examples of "provoked" attacks that occured while interacting with sharks include bitten while spear fishing sharks, bitten while removing from nets or hooks, etc.
Unprovoked attacks are shark bites while swimming, surfing, generally minding ones own business.
It's explicit in the source that provoked attacks are understood.
That's reminiscent of Livingstone's description of the time he was mauled by a lion:
"The shock produced a stupor similar to that which seems to be felt by a mouse after the first shake of the cat. It caused a sort of dreaminess, in which there was no sense of pain nor feeling of terror, though quite conscious of all that was happening."
The article says it's the heaviest rainfall recorded in Hat Yai over the last 300 years. So that's the actual meaning, and interpreting it in the probabilistic sense seems to have been the initiative of the headline writer.
https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/284757-job-...
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