Interesting magazine! Here is another article from it, by Graham Priest, involving another kind of "Standard Model" (a logical notion, not related to the physical one): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36832916
I noticed a pattern in the pedagogy of certain difficult fields: often, the entire world gets "stuck" on a single teaching approach, a single method, or a single point of view. This happens when the subject is difficult enough by itself that reframing it is decidedly non-trivial, so people don't bother. They slog through the one path available, get to a point of understanding, and then they're so exhausted and relieved that they got there at all that they cling to their mountaintop of success for dear life and refuse to contemplate re-taking that journey by some different path.
I've seen diagrams like this before, made by two of my fellow students who's brains were... rather odd, let's just say. I can't grok diagrams like this. They're too busy. Animations would help, or labels, or even just a legend explaining the random and meaningless colour choices.
But there aren't any other diagrams. There's this one, and only this one. It was the one in the original paper, and was copied into every blog, every other paper, and Wikipedia as well.
The Standard Model is the same kind of thing. Its maths is atrocious: a horrific blend of Einstein summation convention, matrices chosen out of thin air, and complex numbers sprinkled on top just for fun. Then it gets worse.
There's a reason for this: history. The linked article walks through the steps we took over the last century building up to the Standard Model.
The problem is that those steps were the pinnacle of human thought. The greatest minds climbed to each of those peaks through decades of effort.
Nobody can just wave their hand and reframe the maths, or explain it a different way -- rotating the topology to show a difference face to new students. It's just too hard. It's Everest, not the local forest path.
If you keep at it long enough, you'll see some partial attempts. I've seen most (but maybe not all?) of the associated maths rephrased into the language of Geometric Algebra. Most of the complexity just evaporates. The magical matrices disappear, and the reason for their historical usage becomes clear. The complex numbers disappear. The summation convention vanishes. Etc...
But nobody flies the helicopter to the top of Mount Everest, even though we can do that now. The point is to climb up there. So we suit up students every year, and make them go through each base camp, suffering through altitude sickness and frostbite on the way up.
Hi, I am the author of ANS and of these diagrams you don't like - made more than a decade ago. Sure, animations are nicer, but you cannot put them into articles ... and indeed somebody else could make them through this decade.
Regarding the Standard Model, its development is mostly new experimental surprises and fitting new corrections to the Lagrangian - currently more than a hundred. It would be great to see them as kind of Taylor expansion of some simpler more fundamental model, not guessing but deriving new terms.
Where to search for such more fundamental model? Maybe in topological defects like recently growing in popularity skyrmion models. For charge quantization: by interpreting curvature of some deeper field as EM field, Gauss law counts topological charge - which has to be quantized.
I am developing this kind of approach since 2009, and seems quite promising, e.g. naturally unifying EM+QM+GEM gravity vacuum dynamics, has 3 leptons, baryons e.g. with proton lighter than neutron ...
I used the example of your ANS algorithm precisely because I think it's such a great contribution to the entire field of computer science, and really wanted to understand it. If you weren't on the other side of the planet from me, I'd offer to buy you a beer to say thanks for making my phone faster! https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4oie88/apple_h...
(And I think companies like Apple owe you a lot more than just a beer.)
My point is just that people learn in different ways, and often many different approaches need to be available so to that everyone can have that ah-ha moment. The diagram in your paper didn't work for me, and it was just frustrating that everyone else who did understand the algorithm just copy-pasted the diagram instead of re-framing the concept with new terminology or a different diagram.
Speaking of physics and the difficulty of understanding other physicists, I think the PDF you linked to is perfectly illustrative of the style of diagramming that doesn't "work for me". Too busy, many colours without apparent meaning, packing too much into one sheet, etc...
FYI, one of the smartest people I've ever met had the same style. I don't want to call it a mental illness, because it's more a "style of genius", but it's interesting that it's definitely a "recognisable trait" that some people have or don't have, like blue or brown eyes.
PS: I've been poking away at a TOE myself for over a decade, and my approach has been curiously similar to yours, also based on a "particles are topological quantities" concept.
They see (conserved) topological defects as baryon numbers, while we with Manfried Faber interpret them as electric charges for charge quantization.
They use trivial vacuum (potential with single minimum) getting only short-range interactions (nuclear), while we use S^2 (-> SO(3), SO(1,3)) vacuum due to Higgs-like potential - allowing for long-range interactions like Coulomb (for S^2 vacuum + QM for SO(3) vacuum + GEM for SO(1,3) Lorentz group vacuum).
For SO(3) vacuum, like in biaxial nematic liquid crystals, we can construct hedgehog with one of 3 axes: the same topological/electric charge, but different mass - resembling 3 leptons, also requiring magnetic dipole moment due to hairy ball theorem.
Is there a way to follow this research or you, personally? Do you have a blog? Just few your comments on HN demonstrate that you have tons of knowledge about modern science.
E.g. recently I have proposed (and search for collaboration) two-way quantum computers - enhancement with CPT analogue of state preparation, potentially solving NP problems:
> They slog through the one path available, get to a point of understanding, and then they're so exhausted and relieved that they got there at all that they cling to their mountaintop of success for dear life and refuse to contemplate re-taking that journey by some different path.
Alternative hypothesis: We've selected a group overrepresenting people for whom that particular approach was effective, and that's precisely the group of people least equipped to come up with a different framing. (These aren't really in contradiction though, both could be true.)
Personally, I doubt that. We throw essentially a random set of people at various university courses. I studied Physics and Computer Science, but I very nearly pricked Chemistry and was tempted by some form of Engineering as well. My fell students were all above some watermark required for entry, but were very "neurodiverse" in an abstract sense of the word.
All that is because of lack of understanding of underlying physics. Standard model is used as substitute to physics, which results in explanations like that: "there is no Everest (physics), it's just excitement in the height field (model). Gravitation (physics) bends space-time (model), so students just follow the shortest path.", and so on.
> The Standard Model is the same kind of thing. Its maths is atrocious: a horrific blend of Einstein summation convention, matrices chosen out of thin air, and complex numbers sprinkled on top just for fun.
This isn't even coming close to describing the mathematical atrocities of the Standard Model / quantum field theories. Those are the easy and mathematically well-defined parts.
this started off well enough but quickly descended into unintelligible jargon. i fear that quantum physics will never be accessible to the common person, and that all this was mapped out only 50-100 years ago. i want to skip the next 1000 years of theory hardening and see what happens.
That statement is often quoted and usually attributed to Einstein. He never said it, though. I also think it's wrong. Feynman said something similar, yet different: "I couldn't break it down to freshmen level, which means we haven't really understood it yet."
I have never heard this quote being attributed to Einstein. DuckDuckGo can't find the quote in the first place; Google does yield a few results and yes, one or two websites indeed attribute the quote to Einstein, but others attribute it to other people.
In any case, are you sure you're not thinking of the much more famous quote
> Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler
which is also wrongly(?, [0]) attributed to Einstein?
Indeed baryogenesis is one example of baryon number violation, another is Hawking radiation - baryons forming stars and finally ending as massless radiation.
In both these examples conditions are completely extreme - what might be the missing factor for human attempts to directly observe it: in room temperature water.
