> if someone next to you in a supermarket was wounded from an explosive
that "someone" is an enemy combatant currently fighting a war
if they were wearing a uniform would you stand next to a soldier during an ongoing war?
if you were a soldier would you hide in a group of civilians?
there's a lot of blame to go around and Israel is far from clean, but the Hezbollah members are clearly also putting people in harms way by using them as a shield against attacks like this
Beacuse it's a pager, and they're rather common in most of Egypt, Turkey and middle east countries for medical support and first-time responders.
I mean, the reason Hezbollah switched to those devices was also because they're readily available in the country.
I'd be extremely, extremely surprised if this was a "targeted" shipment rather than a generic batch that was expected to a certain degree to be bought by hezbollah members.
> I'd be extremely, extremely surprised if this was a "targeted" shipment rather than a generic batch that was expected to a certain degree to be bought by hezbollah members.
Because they're not S.P.E.C.T.R.E. It's a separatist group whose more extreme members resort to terrorism, not much differently than IRA, Basque Nationalists or Bosnian Indipendentists.
Their supply channel is the same as the civilian population, they're not shopping for vibranium from Hydra.
It would be interesting if we could trace the local distributor for those devices and see where they were available at retail, it would probably match the areas in Lebanon where members of hezbollah are commonly located.
The past decade is a difficult framing to ask the question in. Notable breakthrough results are usually understood in hindsight and a decade just isn't a lot of time for that context and understanding to develop. Science also doesn't necessarily develop in this way with consistent progress every X timespan. Usually you get lots and lots of breakthroughs all at once as an important paradigm is shattered and a new one is installed. Then observations with tiny differences slowly pile up and a very blurry/messy picture of the problems with the new paradigm takes shape. But none of those things feels like a breakthrough, especially to a layman.
That said: I'll submit the first detection of gravitational waves as two black holes merged together in 2020 as meeting the bar of "notable breakthrough in the last decade".
Absolutely, they're still handing out nobels after all.
Personally I think the ER=EPR conjecture and the complexity/action duality hypothesis are incredibly interesting. Technically ER=EPR was formulated in 2000s (maybe 90s?) and CA-duality is approaching if not just past 10 years old, but the thing about asking for breakthroughs is that they take a while to percolate. Ex Hawking radiation wasn't formulated until, like, 50-70 years after the "basis" (schwarzshild, Schrodinger) was formed.
Also JWST just keeps on giving, and gravitational waves were only confirmed in 2017. If you extend a bit further higgs was in the 2010s
So, in summary, in the late 10 years
- we've shown a break in our intuition of physics (nonloca-realness, that 2022 paper)
- proposed some novel yet elegant theories (CA-duality, and I'd hope you'd begrudge me er=EPR)
- confirmed some insane provings to the underlying reality (gravitational waves)
If those aren't noteworthy, I'd ask what you consider noteworthy any why you consider it noteworthy
The Higgs boson was predicted in 1964. Gravitational waves were predicted in 1916. Bell's theorem was published in 1964. Basically every recent discovery in physics has been observations confirming old predictions and refuting the endless zoo of poorly motivated, imaginary particles that seems to be standard practice these days.
There have been almost no truly significant, novel predictions that have a hope in hell of panning out in like, 40 years or more. The only mildly interesting, novel idea in physics has been quantum computing, and even that was first published in 1980.
> So, in summary, in the late 10 years - we've shown a break in our intuition of physics (nonloca-realness, that 2022 paper)
This paper showed no such thing, it has the same superdeterminism loophole as every other paper attempting to refute local realism.
Physics is stuck in a local QM-GR minimum, and some truly novel ideas are needed to kickstart things again. Oppenheim's postquantum gravity is the first truly novel idea I've seen in awhile.
I also agree that JWST is giving us great data, some of which has placed LCDM on the ropes, but astrophysicists are hard at work adding epicycles to keep it alive.
Experimental validation of a major theory is major physics.
You can't rhetorically gloss over something as important as experimentally validating a 1964 prediction as though it doesn't matter or didn't happen.
If your contention is that a validation of something we already suspected to be true doesn't shatter/shift our paradigm, then how often would you expect that to happen? I would expect it a lot in small ways (so almost every person working in some niche area has probably had some "niche breakthrough" happen in their area that has really changed things) but not a lot in really fundamental overarching ways which for physics I think you could reasonably say has happened about 4 or 5 times in the last 400 years maybe idk: Newton, GR/SR/ quantum mechanics and then whichever ones you want to count out of Maxwell's equations and whatnot.
So to expect something like that every decade is not realistic.
> You can't rhetorically gloss over something as important as experimentally validating a 1964 prediction as though it doesn't matter or didn't happen.
I'm not, I'm pointing out that theoretical progress has stagnated. Experimentalists are doing great.
> So to expect something like that every decade is not realistic.
I'm not expecting it every decade, but we've had 4 decades of recycling the same ideas using the same failed approaches to try to patch gaps in existing theory using bogus arguments, which ends up funding poorly motivated experiments that then find nothing. I think Sabine Hossenfelder elaborated the problems here in excellent detail (see "Lost in Math").
Yes, the Higgs boson is not a new prediction but that doesn’t mean discovering it wasn’t a major breakthrough. There are other theories besides the Standard Model which don’t contain Higgs particles and were ruled out when it was discovered.
You don't consider ER=EPR as novel? Or CA-duality? Agreed that Post-quantum gravity is really cool and "fresh"
Higgs/Bell/GW were experimental results, I was indeed trying to show that there's a huge lag between prediction and observation.
Imo the paradigm shift that we're slowly undergoing is thinking about physics from a information theoretic perspective instead of a kinematics one. I'd argue that's even more fundamental of a change than Newtonian physics to early GR & QM.
They might be novel mathematical constructs but seemingly have no bearing on our universe. ER=EPR doesn't really solve anything because GR remains fundamentally incompatible with QM's linearity. That's the problem that needs to be solved. The core idea of ER=EPR wasn't even particularly novel, as Hadley effectively did something very similar back in 1997 [1].
CA-duality is again mathematically interesting, but physically dubious because it's based on anti-de Sitter space, which does not describe our universe.
Information theoretical formulations of QM are mildly interesting, but I don't think they will be revolutionary, and I don't think they are tackling the core problem, which is QM's linearity where we classically observe a non-linear universe.
Smart theoretical physicists of today should bring their Lie-group algebras and help build better neural nets, and then use those nets to make new discoveries in Physics.
I think those qualify more as interesting suggestions and experimental confirmations than as breakthroughs.
I suspect "breakthrough" is supposed to mean "huge definitive paradigm shift." We haven't had many of those in all of history, and we certainly haven't had one in the last decade.
Everyone is still very, very confused about quantum fundamentals. Non-local realness is really a Bohmian idea, and that's certainly not new. Universe-as-information is new but there's a huge gap between that and the Standard Model.
And so on. None of these problems are settled in the way that GR and QM settled various issues.
You may say that's too high a bar and things are moving. But there's been more of a history of missteps (string theory, supersymmetry, so far at least) that were sold as potential breakthroughs than genuinely transformative insights.
Experimental validation of the Higgs Boson (2012 but close enough) [1]
Direct observation of gravitational waves (2015)[2]
exoplanets going from theoretically quite likely to being actually observable things that we find all over the place [3]
...would seem to be examples of very notable results during my lifetime. This is barely scratching the surface and I'm not a physicist but those seem very important to me and likely to stand the test of time and be thought of as important in the future.
Non-breakthroughs:
These guys who are responsible for the goddam blue leds that on every second device these days always keep me from getting a decent dark nights sleep when travelling until I hunt them all down in the hotel room I'm in or whatever and cover them up.[4]
tangentially related but Grand Theft Auto speedrunners often point the camera behind them while driving so cars don't spawn "behind" them (aka in front of the car)
I saw a post on Reddit how someone in Kenya took a still image of 2 men kissing from an elevator camera video file and posted on social media for it to go viral
Seems dangerous
"I have nothing to hide" makes sense to me - except sometimes you don't know what you have to hide, or it can change after the fact
that "someone" is an enemy combatant currently fighting a war
if they were wearing a uniform would you stand next to a soldier during an ongoing war?
if you were a soldier would you hide in a group of civilians?
there's a lot of blame to go around and Israel is far from clean, but the Hezbollah members are clearly also putting people in harms way by using them as a shield against attacks like this
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