I really enjoy this magazine, but them and a couple others seem to have an "earth shattering" theory announcement nearly every week and it is often hard to tell from the articles if these are truly fundamental discoveries or I'm just being taken for clickbait.
Adding to the other reply pointing out this is quite fundamental work, the point of these articles isn't really to announce new breakthroughs that happened last week, but rather to sketch major research themes that's been going on for the past couple of decades, but received little to no media coverage because they're highly technical.
For what it's worth: The bootstrap revival is a pretty big deal, much more important and more immediately useful than almost everything else Wolchover writes about. It's a new set of techniques for analyzing existing theories, and it applies equally well to theorist's toys like supersymmetric QFT and to experimental workhorse models like the 3d Ising Model. Rychkov, Poland, Simons-Duffin and (now many) others have been working at it for just a couple of years, and they've already set the gold standard for the computation of a lot of important and difficult quantities.
I don't understand the point of most of these pop-sci articles. They are too difficult to understand for the layman, but they are too handwavy and contain too many silly analogies and too little insight for those who are truly interested.
The article provides some historical background, introduces a few key topics and the researchers involved as well as some idea of how it all fits into a bigger picture.
That's a tall order and I think quantamagazine does a good job with this.
For a properly prepared and motivated person, the quantamagazine article could be a starting point for further reading, for example, like lengthy review articles in subject-matter journals. But far more common, I think, it's just an interesting cursory read for anybody who happens to stumble upon this in their news feed. That's OK.
I'd argue the target audience is the "layman" in a tangential field. So, they have enough background that what the article talks about doesn't go above their head, and they can get a quick overview of the subject, but it doesn't require them having to read up on a bunch of materials outside their field. Think people like mathematicians that work in tandem with physicists in their institutions, but don't read into it as much themselves.
Do you have any specifics in how the article doesn't meet your standards or which aspects were poorly communicated?
My decently informed layman's understanding [1] led me to believe this article was a very well written description of some fascinating developments. As of now, I want to read more articles like it.
To be fair, I may be representative of a smaller niche. I agree that many laypeople might struggle with the technical parts.
However, I would love to know specifically how I may be mistaken in what I am taking away from these articles, if anything.
[1] I majored in math and am an avid follower of physics and cosmology.
Then it means they are for the layman. Layman isn't after understanding, but curiosity, wonder, anger, whatever fuels his emotional needs at the moment.
I think this attitude vastly underestimates how messy of a process knowing actually is. To give just one point here: understanding a topic---even a single assertion---isn't like a switch, something you lack one moment and have the next. A researcher who can use knowledge about a topic in a wide variety of contexts (especially beyond their mechanical training) and who can map it into a wide variety of other systems has, for the most part, a better understanding than a researcher who can't. And of a course a layman who can't even work in a single system but has acquired a few "analogical" notions can have more understanding than someone who doesn't even recognize the concept.
Exactly because of how knowing works, I think articles like this can have an important place. They can open up new concepts for us (often little more than an empty node that can later be filled in). For experts in the broader field, they can give a quick impression of what other people are working on which might stimulate digging into more detail. And for experts on this topic, taking such writing seriously can have benefits like keeping their work in perspective and stimulating creativity (see Feynman's point about teaching physics 101).
And yes, these articles satisfy emotional needs. But what good thing doesn't?
Edit: I was mostly responding to the parent->parent, not so much disagreeing with the parent, who raised a good point.
That's right. Sometimes part of the fun is having an understanding of what the theory is useful for, and how it could impact science overall in the medium and long term, even if we don't get anything at all about the workings of the theory itself.
Are you talking about cave people, or fellow human beings?
Curiosity and wonder are the motivation for understanding, even among researchers.
Or do you believe that researchers do their work for a PhD and for the compensation?
Not sure why you mention anger. I picture an angry plumber ripping up an issue of Popular Science while sitting in a La-Z-Boy and drinking a Rolling Rock.
Nowhere does his post condemn the satisfying of emotional needs. In fact, given that emotions are primary action catalysts, his post asserts Quanta is doing very important cultural work.
This is such a bizarre way to totally miss the point.
Let me respond to the left turn you just took. There are genetic and social differences between our prehistoric ancestors and modern humans. Where exactly we draw the line of who is a "caveman" and who is not, is ancillary to the point:
You're evaluating the statement, a "then" statement, without considering the antecedents from its parent comment.
He uses "laypeople" to describe a group of people who are not truly interested, who are not seeking understanding, and who use pop-sci literature to abate basal emotions like anger.
> In fact, given that emotions are primary action catalysts, his post asserts Quanta is doing very important cultural work.
By that logic, every magazine for people who are not truly interested and don't seek understanding is potentially culturally important if it can connect with emotions. I don't buy it.
Cave people is such a nebulous term that I probably shouldn't have responded to that part of your post :\
He says the layperson isn't seeking understanding, yes. To conflate that, and curiosity, wonder, and anger, with being -not truly interested-, baffles me. Maybe you disagree that interest manifests in ways besides seeking understanding?
Thanks for clarification, it was precisely my point: layman won't understand true detail but they won't care, because the sense of interest in those articles comes from other 'rewards' (more emotional).
> Curiosity and wonder are the motivation for understanding, even among researchers.
Right, and the layperson is just interested in those first two things, whereas the researcher follows through to the point of understanding. Or maybe they don't. Someone who does research is not necessarily interested in understanding every single field either.
Nice condescension you have going on there. You don't think that reading about these articles might actually inspire someone to study mathematics? Introduce and explain difficult topics to laypeople, thus making mathematical research more accessible?
I didn't mean to condescend. And while I am convinced online article won't inspire anyone to study a field as arcane and useless to most people as math, I was simply extending on parent's observation: a lot of content out there is written in a way that non-expert can't use, and experts have no use because it's too basic.
> And while I am convinced online article won't inspire anyone to study a field as arcane and useless to most people as math
An individual seeking more information about physics will likely understand that complex math will be deeply involved.
The problem tackled by a pop-sci article shouldn't be to inspire the individual to develop a thorough background in math but to inspire a different way of thinking or to introduce new concepts.
One of the reasons I gave up on New Scientist. We would be much better served by more in-depth articles that don’t claim to ‘change everything’ but instead inform.
You shouldn't think of them as earth-shattering announcements. Think of these articles as the highlights reel of the 10-year progress report in some area of physics/math. Most of these are not ideas that will have any revolutionary impact over the next couple of years. But, over the next decade, we expect these ideas to lead to some very fruitful insights.
This is one of the hardest parts of communicating research to the layperson -- it can often come across as deceptively simple. Ten minutes of simplified communication summarizes ten years of blood, sweat and tears by dozens of people.
EDIT: I'm pretty optimistic about the Bootstrap idea in particular; I'm not trying to downplay its importance. But I wanted to convey that the way it'll end up helping might be very different from the leaps anticipated in the article, as it would be for any such article on any area of research.
Comprehensive list of "earth shattering" theories in fundamental physics of the last 50 years, discovery of the standard model as a gauge theory, first discussion of gauge theories in the 20ies, completion with observation of the Higgs boson in 2012, dark matter, first discussed by Zwicky in the 1920ies, since WMAP (~2000) a well established observation. Dark Energy, first discussed by Einstein in the twenties (actually I think a decade earlier) and observed by the High-Z-Supernova-Project in 1998. And neutrino mass, discussed as a curiosity for a long time and observed first in the 60ies and confirmed in 2001.
So anybody who uses the description "earth shattering" more than once a decade is probably overselling the importance of individual papers.
