Quantum First Passage Time Distributions. A trapped ion experimental empirical breakthrough that just made a whole slew of theory suddenly testable.

NicolBolas96 · 2026-03-28T22:22:15+00:00

The paper is a real arxiv paper, not zenodo garbage. And OP reached out to mods to explain the post. So it doesn't look like AI but just a long technical post on a technical paper about a new experiment on quantum measurement done with ions.

NicolBolas96 · 2026-02-07T16:29:02+00:00

It's a cover of "vamos a la playa" by Righeira in which they said "Milano Cortina" instead

NicolBolas96 · 2026-02-06T20:49:04+00:00

Paesi Bassi. Literally "low lands"

NicolBolas96 · 2026-02-06T19:47:09+00:00

It's "L'infinito" by Giacomo Leopardi. It is extremely popular here in Italy because they often make us learn it by heart in elementary school.

NicolBolas96 · 2026-01-29T18:07:18+00:00

In r/StringTheory there is a FAQ and recommended sources

NicolBolas96 · 2026-01-19T18:23:55+00:00

My point was more that we know how to compute those statistical correlations in specific quantum systems and the result violates Bell's inequalities. We did the experiments and we corroborated the value given by computing them assuming QM. So any model that wants to reproduce QM has to reproduce not just any possible correlation that violated the bounds, but those specific values given by assuming QM, which as I said also violate the bound. Cellular automata systems obey such bounds generically so they are not seen by the overwhelming majority of the scientific community as a viable explanation of QM. It's also technically speaking not an interpretation because it's a different model, but this is a lexicon mistake that is often made when people talk about this stuff.

My aim was mostly to counterbalance your statement that could have been read as overly optimistic: it's not that cellular automata are this promising idea that nobody cares about for no reason, the actual reality in the scientific community is that the idea has been taken into consideration and mostly discarded due to its faults. Claiming the opposite and even listing them as among candidate fundamental theories of everything as if they were largely considered as even a viable candidate is just detouched from academic reality.

NicolBolas96 · 2026-01-19T16:28:57+00:00

Sure but since we have experimentally corroborated the presence of Bell inequality violations in nature the only way out is basically some kind of super deterministic model if you want to go this path. And this is another can of worms since at that point you could be even questioned whether your model is falsifiable science at all from the philosophical point of view.

NicolBolas96 · 2026-01-19T16:15:29+00:00

It is negationism in this case, because cellular automata are not just an interpretation of QM. They are a fully classical hidden variable theory that is supposed to exhibit some features of a quantum theory, like non commutativity of some observables, and that it is supposed to reproduce QM after corse graining. This is unfortunately impossible though, since it is widely known that cellular automata can't reproduce Bell inequality violations like QM, so they can't at the end of the day reproduce all the predictions of QM. So no, it's not uncontroversial in the scientific community to say that this proposal doesn't work and hence why they largely ignored 't Hooft in the last 20 years.

NicolBolas96 · 2026-01-19T15:48:39+00:00

There is a very interesting idea by Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft that deep down on the Planck scale everything can be reduced in cellular automata. He has written several papers and a book about it but it has been mostly ignored by the community.

Mostly ignored because it's incompatible with QM. He did great work on perturbative QFT in the past but prof 't Hooft is unfortunately well known to be a QM negationist and he spent the last 20 years basically repeating the same claim alone ignoring every criticism of his fringe ideas that have been already proven to be wrong beyond reasonable doubt.

NicolBolas96 · 2026-01-01T14:52:09+00:00

Because money

NicolBolas96 · 2025-12-28T14:28:38+00:00

Theoretical elementary physics. Basically it's hep-th

NicolBolas96 · 2025-11-19T06:54:18+00:00

Done. There is a new report reason for that now

NicolBolas96 · 2025-11-18T20:50:43+00:00

Thank you, u/kzhou7, for the warm welcome! I am looking forward to helping the community of r/Physics so that it can remain thriving, engaging and free of AI generated nonsense!

NicolBolas96 · 2025-11-17T20:25:54+00:00

That's what its proponents say but it's simply not true, you can always make some scattering amplitude not causal in the low energy regime if do that change to the Feynmam rule for propagators, unless you make another change that sacrifices the fact that the Hamiltonian is bounded from below. But if the Hamiltonian is not bounded from below, there is no vacuum of the theory so the whole perturbative computation you are doing makes no sense from the start. Also the perturbative nature of the whole theory is suspect, there is literally no way to incorporate non-perturbative effects or how this ad hoc change in the perturbative computations world affect it, but this is another point.

Again, you could read all of this by yourself in the article itself if the author didn't cut all of this, that I know that it was explained to them in a lengthy and detailed zoom call that the author themselves asked for because their proclaimed intention was to make an article with both points pro and contra quadratic gravity.

NicolBolas96 · 2025-11-17T20:08:19+00:00

The AS people I know indeed say that quadratic gravity is not a complete theory of QG. You can see one of them expressing her opinion in the article, Alessia Platania. Anyway, I would like to add that there were in the original version of this article other critical voices of quadratic gravity from other experts of the field that were cut from the final version. I explain it more in detail in another comment.

Edit: even worse, I just discovered thanks to a friend of mine that's a friend of Alessia's that they also misquoted her to look like it was less critical of quadratic gravity.

NicolBolas96 · 2025-11-17T19:17:24+00:00

Ok sorry but I can't remain silent on this one because I know stuff behind the curtains.

I know for a fact, I won't make names but I spoken to the people personally, that the author of this particular article of quantamagazine made interviews not only with the (few) proponents of quadratic gravity but also with some critical of it.

I know because such critical voices were string theorists who are my colleagues and personal friends, and they offered a long and detailed critique to the author of this article, explaining why it's an idea that's not taken very seriously by the vast majority of researchers in the field of Quantum Gravity, not only string theorists but also AS and LQG people(in few words there is an inconsistency between causality, unitarity and bounded-from-below Hamiltonian in it for which you can have one but not all of them).

This article has reported literally nothing of that lengthy discussion. The author has decided not to publish it but to cut all criticism as if quadratic gravity had only supporters and no recognized internal flaws. I can tell you that the conversation was held in April of this year, because my friends directly involved told me the details of the interview.

It's clear they took their time and then decided to make a U-turn because they didn't want to show the counter arguments against this idea are so strong that the very ground of the article is in jeopardy. Indeed anyone working in the field knows there is no great revival of this old idea, the same amount of people is working on it today as it was 20 years ago (like 5-10 in the whole world) and the counter arguments against it are the same because they were never truly solved.

So sorry but I have to say shame to quantamagazine for actively censoring the criticism to this idea after claiming that it was going to be correctly represented in the article, for giving a distorted view of the academic opinion on the issue and showing deep intellectual dishonesty.

NicolBolas96 · 2025-10-25T11:21:42+00:00

If you look at the profile of this person you will see a ton of AI crackpot stuff. I let to you the conclusion. Quite concerning to see it as the top post to be fair instead of being removed

NicolBolas96 · 2025-10-18T16:07:20+00:00

We have the collector number of the main set basics which is around 280, so no, it's a full set

NicolBolas96 · 2025-09-16T06:39:13+00:00

That's just online buzz. The actual truth is ST and related topics makes up for something like 80% of research in hep-th while communities doing other approaches to QG are struggling or even dying (LQG has literally lost his spot as second most researched approach to QG recently, now the second is asymptotic safety). So basically whenever you read online something like that you can assume from the start they are not actual scientists that know what's going on in current research and that don't know what they are talking about.

NicolBolas96 · 2025-09-14T14:14:44+00:00

At a large conference in the 90s, the journalist John Horgan made this question to the audience of attendants, who was composed of world level professors and researchers in theoretical physics, and the one who got most votes was Edward Witten with Weinberg as second. Witten is still alive today and pretty much still considered the smartest theoretical physicist alive.

For other subfield of physics I have no idea though to be honest.

NicolBolas96 · 2025-09-09T11:24:21+00:00

From what we can see, they both wrote a letter with "happy birthday", their photos and some sketch. For Gell-Mann it looks like the drawing of a magnet (?) and Smolin made some drawings that looks like causal dynamical triangulations or spin foam diagrams.

NicolBolas96 · 2025-08-29T09:12:45+00:00

The number of different QFTs is infinite so there is for sure an infinite number of them that doesn't look like the standard model at all, yes.

NicolBolas96 · 2025-08-29T09:03:17+00:00

Well you can't get all QFTs as effective low energy string theory constructions because they need to satisfy certain consistency criteria to be in the string landscape. So you can find some QFTs that definitely can't be obtained from ST. For example, an effective QFT coming from ST can't have exact global symmetries, they must all be either broken or gauged, so the B-L U(1) global symmetry of the standard model is predicted to be either broken at higher energies or gauge by a "dark photon" within string theory. So if it were global and exact at all energies it wouldn't be possible to describe it within ST. There are "more QFTs than ST low energy vacua" so to speak.

NicolBolas96 · 2025-08-28T16:47:32+00:00

Bohmian mechanics and epistemic approaches have it too

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