Hacker News Reader

Comment by doctoboggan | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why the physicists are the only group to not want the full information released upfront? As a casual fan of physics[0] it seems like their completion of the standard model is possibly the biggest deal of all these breakthroughs, am I wrong?

[0]: PBS space time watcher

View on HN

The writing is a bit ambiguous, but if I'm parsing it correctly it's only a big deal to the small subset of physicists who care about mathematical rigor: proof that Quantum Field Theory (i.e. what theorists have been using since the 1940s or so) is mathematically sound.

This part,

The existence proof pertains to the simplest grand unified theory that includes the gauge fields and fermions of the Standard Model

looks like a reference to SU(5) GUT from 1974:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgi%E2%80%93Glashow_model

A bigger deal to mathematicians who like physics to be mathematically sounds and precise.

As a slightly less but still very casual enjoyer too, I don't think there is a huge amount of value in dumping the lean proof or the natural language proof. I'd rather have an abstract of a paper that I can at least hope to understand 75% of before getting lost.

I'm guessing if you were really interested, you could email YANGMILLS4D@gmail.com (itself a hilarious e-mail address).

Careful, completion of the standard model ≠ theory of quantum gravity or theory of everything. The actual question is too abstruse for me (biophysicist).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com