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Comment by czzr | Hacker News Reader

This is a good visualisation. It’s also a nice reminder of why the standard model feels unsatisfying. The unexplained symmetries, and the strange duplications and gaps really do strongly suggest there is something more fundamental happening behind this picture.

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Strongly reminiscent of the motion of the planets under a geocentric view of the universe.

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cassini_apparent.j...

It would be interesting to see how this looks like for a different planet.

Always wonder how the jesuits beat the Muslim astronomer in Ming and Qing dynasty always assuming they use the geocentric one. Well unlike the dogmatic Dominican the Jesuit has its friend in the court. “In 1618, the Holy Office recommended that a modified version of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus be allowed for use in calendric calculations, though the original publication remained forbidden until 1758” (wiki) only during a few year has the catholic lost its chief astronomer in the court of emperor. (Sadly the few year gap in between Qing emperor got all the Hans Christian believer slaughtered. The notation of looking at the sky is rejected and 3 of the major crimes is the catholic astronomy dared to propose the unacceptable position of Orion component star not fit with the order of the five elements.)

As a layman in physics, whenever I look at anything quantum, I'm certain there is something fundamental that we're missing. When we've figured something out about nature for good, the explanation is usually surprisingly simple and just makes sense. You know you're most probably wrong when your model produces more questions than it answers.

That said, I like Stephen Wolfram's theory of everything. It just feels like a step in the right direction.

There is no reason to think that a more fundamental theory would be simple or even tractable. We have just got lucky, so far. It is the nature of good luck to falter.

Wolfram is not doing anything original. He just doesn't tell you who he is cribbing from.

I think the history of physics does not support this view. New theories that explain a wider range of phenomena tend to be harder to understand than their predecessors that explain a narrower range of observations. For example, Newtonian mechanics is simpler than relativistic mechanics which is simpler than quantum field theories.

Also, I see nothing that would make fundamental aspects of nature comprehensible for humans. Our cognition evolved to handle classical mechanics without the relativistic or quantum effects that we find bizarre and indeed classical mechanics is roughly where average person's understanding of nature ends.

An alternative view is that there is a survivorship bias at play: we tend to understand the things about the universe that are simple enough for a human mind and remain oblivious to the ones that are too complicated for it.

There is the argument that it might be a mistake to discard complex explanations just because they are not simple. The nature is as it is and doesn't care for our preference of simple explanations.

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