[HN Gopher] Black holes finally proven mathematically stable
___________________________________________________________________
Black holes finally proven mathematically stable
Author : shantanu_sharma
Score : 167 points
Date : 2022-08-04 14:28 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| lowpro wrote:
| General question: where does this research lead to? As in what
| might be the next step for this research team, and/or their field
| in general? I always like to understand what discoveries like
| this could open up in the future.
|
| *Asking as someone not in the field or any type of
| physics/mathematics
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _In a 912-page paper posted online on May 30, Szeftel, Elena
| Giorgi of Columbia University and Sergiu Klainerman of Princeton
| University have proved that slowly rotating Kerr black holes are
| indeed stable._
|
| I wouldn't have expected it to be a short paper, but... 912
| pages!
|
| While I'm not a cosmologist, I usually enjoy reading through the
| papers that pop up. I think I might end up skipping this one and
| just stick to the Quanta article, unfortunately.
|
| Hopefully Anton Petrov does a summary video on the paper.
| Victerius wrote:
| PHYS 540 General Relativity
|
| Homework problem of the week: Prove that slowly rotating Kerr
| black holes are stable.
|
| Deadline: Two weeks.
|
| Final grade weight: 5%
| sidlls wrote:
| You joke, but I recall my graduate level GR class homework.
| Just mechanically writing out solutions (the GR equivalent to
| writing the correct integral down and then evaluating it) to
| a much less exciting problem, starting with the most basic
| mathematical representation of the tensor field(s) involved
| would take pages and pages of handwritten work. It's a
| fascinating field.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The assignment website to upload work keeps telling me that
| my upload is too big. It says there's a 900 page limit
| lapetitejort wrote:
| "Just... cut a few."
|
| "Which pages do you have in mind, professor?"
| dylan604 wrote:
| the one with the final answer of course. you get majority
| of credit from showing your work
| curt15 wrote:
| The original proof of the stability of Minkowski spacetime was
| too long for a paper, so the authors wrote a 500 page book:
| https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691632551/th...
| V__ wrote:
| > an 800-page paper by Klainerman and Szeftel from 2021, plus
| three background papers that established various mathematical
| tools -- totals roughly 2,100 pages in all.
|
| It basically comes in three volumes. What an astonishing amount
| of work.
| rrishi wrote:
| At 912 pages, thats a book not a paper (i jest)
| samstave wrote:
| The Tome of The Black Hole's Mathematical Stability was so
| massive, at 912 pages, hardly a word in the English language
| escapes the horizon of events unfolding betwixt its covers.
| varjag wrote:
| Oh come on. You'd often get that much for an MCU part and
| they call it a (data)sheet.
| sharkweek wrote:
| > (i jest)
|
| Infinite Jest? 70 pages longer (if you don't include the
| footnotes)
| rrishi wrote:
| i meant that i was kidding calling it a book.
| baq wrote:
| at 2100 pages it's a trilogy, so yeah...
| WebbWeaver wrote:
| I'm definitely going to go in there and find out how they
| defined 'slowly rotating.' I bet its pretty cool.
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| The Quanta overview basically answered this - they consider
| the ration of the black hole's angular momentum to its mass.
| A "slow" black hole is one where this ratio is much less than
| one. How much less than one it has to be, the paper's authors
| apparently don't derive.
| codethief wrote:
| > While I'm not a cosmologist
|
| The people behind the above prove and similar works do research
| relatively far away from cosmology, in a field usually called
| mathematical General Relativity. In particular, they are
| usually mathematicians by training, not physicists.
|
| Sad side note: Most physicists (even many of those doing
| research in General Relativity) have never heard of
| mathematical GR.
| ziddoap wrote:
| My understanding is that GR forms the basis of the discipline
| of cosmology, but your comment implies it doesn't. Could you
| expand on that a bit? What differentiates GR and
| 'mathematical GR'? Why is the formation/stability of
| blackholes not considered to be a part of cosmology, when the
| understanding of black holes is central to understanding how
| to universe formed?
|
| e.g. "General Relativity forms the basis for the disciplines
| of cosmology (the structure and origin of the Universe on the
| largest scales) and relativistic astrophysics (the study of
| galaxies, quasars, neutron stars, etc.)"
|
| from https://uwaterloo.ca/applied-mathematics/future-
| undergraduat...
| layer8 wrote:
| _A_ forming the basis of _B_ doesn't imply that everyone
| working on _A_ will be considered a _B_ -ologist.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Sure, I get that, but parent said:
|
| > _relatively far away from cosmology_
|
| and that surprised me, because it doesn't seem that far
| away in my eyes. Which is why I was genuinely asking for
| clarification. They might not be cosmologists, but this
| paper seems pretty close to cosmology, not 'far away'
| from it.
|
| If it's not, I'm happy to be wrong, but I'd like to be
| corrected rather than just told I'm wrong.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > In a 912-page paper
|
| I don't envy peer reviewers.
| woopwoop wrote:
| Oh man, 912 pages, they almost beat Almgren's big regularity
| paper.
| googlryas wrote:
| The result of 900 pages of math:
|
| Q(A) = 1 2 (c)D[?]b (c)DPq + r -4 /d <=1 (Gb, rGg) + O(ar-3 )d
| <=1B + O(ar-4 )A + O(ar-3 )d <=1Pq +r -1 d <=1 (Gb * (P , B q ))
| + r -2 d <=1 (Gg * (rB, A)) + Ks[?]b (c)[?]3B + r -1 d <=1 (Ks *
| A),
| dalbasal wrote:
| Terrific, but terrifying.
| dylan604 wrote:
| My cat is a genius, as I swear that's what he typed after
| walking across my desk a couple of times with a text editor
| window having focus
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Breaking it down into a series of operations would help a
| lot. perl-esque obfuscated one-liners are just that.
| lokimedes wrote:
| Karl Popper would have been sent spinning at a headline like
| that. Our knowledge of Black holes as physical objects is hardly
| affected by someone mathematically "proving" that a mathematical
| model is consistent. Only empirical observations/experiments can
| change physical fact. This confusion of mathematics with physics
| is not helping us understand the Universe as it really is. At
| most, this many lead to a prediction that may be falsified, but
| we kinda had the "stability of black holes" on the todo list
| already.
|
| I know people who stare at protons to see if they really are
| stable. Current lifetime is around 1e39 years or something...
|
| Now I'm ranting on (sorry, this is bad HN etiquette), I both
| enjoy and regret the seemingly reverence of the physical "laws"
| by non-physicists. Applicability is not equal to universality,
| great mathematical models of physical phenomena such as
| Electromagnetism, General Relativity and the whole Quantum Field
| Complex, are testaments to the human imagination and
| resourcefulness, but they are just someone's mathematical
| representation of an idea about how the universe act. We should
| be more aggressively prodding at the weak points of these models
| but also seek to explore novel representations of the same
| phenomena with the hope of new predictive power from changing the
| basis. I also hoped for more "general searches" and robotic
| experimentation to allow experiments without the "bias" of the
| theorists imagination to influence the way we look for new
| physics.
| chowells wrote:
| Didn't this paper _exactly_ prod a model 's weak point until
| they eventually determined the model was consistent with the
| observed universe? Isn't that exactly what you're asking for?
| jstogin wrote:
| I see a number of people commenting on the size of the proof
| (roughly 900 pages) which is not uncommon in this particular sub-
| field of PDEs. For context, I had the distinct privilege of
| studying under Sergiu Klainerman for my PhD on this topic. My own
| dissertation was about 600 pages. From my personal experience, I
| have come to understand a few factors that contribute to large
| proof sizes. 1. A lot of work is on inequalities involving
| integrals with many terms. These are difficult to express without
| taking up substantial space on the page. Some inequality
| derivations themselves might take multiple pages if you want to
| go step-by-step to illustrate how they are done. 2. Writing a
| proof of this size is not unlike building a medium-to-large size
| codebase. You have a lot of Theorems/Classes that need to fit
| together, and by employing some form of separation of concerns
| you can end up with something quite large and complex. 3.
| Verifying this kind of proof isn't usually done all at once. A
| lot of verification happens on the individual lemmas before
| they're pieced together. Once the entire paper is written,
| verification is more of a process where you rely on intuition for
| what the "hard parts" of the proof are and drilling down on
| those. But when writing the paper, you must of course account for
| all the details regardless of whether they are "easy" or "hard",
| and there can be many.
|
| Having said all this, I have not read their paper and it has been
| 5 years since I was in this space. This is a truly remarkable
| accomplishment and the result of decades of hard work!
|
| I'll end with an amusing anecdote. A fellow grad student, when
| deciding between U of Chicago and Princeton for his PhD program
| was pitched by a U of Chicago professor who once said something
| like "Of course you could go to Princeton and write 700 page
| papers that nobody reads." When this story was shared during a
| conversation over tea at Princeton, another professor retorted,
| "Or you could have gone to U Chicago to work with him and write
| 70 page papers that nobody reads!"
| arcen wrote:
| Are there any tools that are used to manage all the pieces?
| auntienomen wrote:
| How do you know you don't have errors in a 600 page proof?
| swayvil wrote:
| Would it be possible to create a proof of a proof?
|
| Like : Given this list of assumptions -- This list of
| conclusions is proven to be true.
|
| Maybe even with a confidence rating.
|
| Then you could package your proof inside the proofproof. Thus
| sparing us the effort of reading it, and maybe even make your
| proof more widely appreciated.
| Archelaos wrote:
| > Would it be possible to create a proof of a proof?
|
| The sub-discipline of mathematics that deals with this is
| called "metamathematics". For a start see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamathematics
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Sounds like the halting problem :)
| thomasahle wrote:
| In principle you could provide what's called a
| Probabilistically Checkable Proof. This would be a long
| string of bits, and a verifier would only have to sample 3
| random bits to check the validity of the whole thing.
|
| In practice we don't even make "normal" machine checkable
| proofs. They are just too much work. Maybe in the future when
| the machines are better at understanding us.
| gigatexal wrote:
| What an insane effort. And to think the peers of these folks
| that had to edit/accept this stuff had to check and verify the
| new math they came up with for the proof.
|
| That's my one issue -- is it dubious we have to come up with
| new math to prove stuff? Or is that readable especially when
| dealing with such exotic things like black holes?
| momentoftop wrote:
| If the proof is that size, I'd leave it out of my thesis
| proper, and just provide a link to it as a stable artifact.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Can anyone build on results that are so hard-won and complex
| that understanding them is as much effort as learning the
| basics of some entire fields of study?
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Yes. That's how basically all expansion to the field of human
| knowledge is constructed today.
|
| A human can only ingest and understand so much information in
| so much time. As Matt Might[1] eloquently described in "The
| Illustrated Guide to a PhD" [2], learning the basics of an
| entire field of study is what a bachelor's degree is for, a
| master's degree gives you a specialty, graduate students
| reading research papers like this one is how you get to the
| edge of human knowledge...only then can you start building on
| that sum of knowledge.
|
| [1] http://matt.might.net/
|
| [2] http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
| btrettel wrote:
| I don't agree with that article. I previously wrote about
| my disagreement on HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29141107
|
| To summarize, a PhD often (maybe even typically) does not
| bring someone to the edge of human knowledge. Often a PhD
| gets people near it, but given the shear amount of
| scientific literature out there, it's difficult to know
| where the edge is.
| jstogin wrote:
| Some graduate students will likely spend a substantial part
| of their PhD understanding this paper. They will learn a lot
| in the process, and then they can contribute by either
| extending the result or finding a way to simplify a part of
| the proof. Or if they have a (very) related interest, they
| may be able to adapt some of the techniques to the problem
| they're interested in. Slowly over time, through this
| process, the knowledge might diffuse to other less related
| areas.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Oftentimes proofs start out very complex but become simpler
| as time goes on and more people understand it and connect it
| to other existing ideas.
|
| It is akin to refactoring a codebase after it started as a
| spaghetti code behemoth.
| markmiro wrote:
| If these proofs really are like codebases, wouldn't we
| eventually expect these proofs to be written as software?
|
| You'd install lemmas using a package manager and then import
| them into your proof.
|
| You can then install updates to proofs. Maybe someone has found
| the proof to be wrong, in which case you either find a
| different proof or invalidate the lemma so all the dependents
| can be invalidated automatically.
| HighlandSpring wrote:
| And the individual lemmas could have author and chronology
| metadata attached, then you could plot the DAG as a
| roadmap/tech tree of sorts with an axis corresponding to
| time.
|
| You'd be able to at a glance see the year a result entered
| public domain, who authored it, etc
|
| One can dream
| TobTobXX wrote:
| Somewhat OT, but I've had this question for a while now: Why do
| we know that black holes have a singularity? This might be a dumb
| question, but when you increase the mass of, let's say, a neutron
| star, at some point gravitaton is too strong for light to escape
| and there'll be a Schwarzschild border. But why does the mass
| inside of a black hole have to shrink to a singularity? Can't
| there be some ultra-dense but finitely small core?
| gizmo686 wrote:
| If we assume general relativity is correct, then singularities
| are an unavoidable result of black holes. The math simply does
| not allow for such a large density to not form a singularity.
| Having said that, we know GR is not correct, as it fails to
| account for any quantum phenomena; and we have thus far been
| unable to combine GR and QFT into a unified theory. Attempts to
| combine the theories fall under the title of quantum gravity.
| Several proposed theories of quantum gravity predict that black
| hole singularities do not exist.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Essentially the Schwarzschild equations based off relativity
| say that happens.
|
| The problem turns out that we have no way to actually know if
| that's what happens at the core of the black hole. The event
| horizon presents a problem where it becomes impossible to
| experimentally test anything beyond that point. For example the
| fundamental constants could alter themselves inside the event
| horizon, as long as the event horizon was still a one way trip,
| it wouldn't matter, we'd not be able to gather any information
| about that.
| starwind wrote:
| As I understand it: before gravity captures light--which moves
| as fast as anything can move--gravity will have captured
| everything else and overcame all other repulsive forces
| crushing the matter into a singularity
|
| edit: pixl97 made a really good point right as I posted. I
| should say "As I understand _the math_ "
| pas wrote:
| I'm not familiar with the current thinking about this, but last
| decade the singularity was understood as a gap in our
| understanding/model. Of course there's model dependent realism,
| after all if all you have are models (built on decades or
| centuries of data), with no means of devising new experiments,
| what else is reality?
| jmyeet wrote:
| I'm can't help but imagining a world where the papers on black
| holes become so large they themselves undergo gravitational
| collapse and become black holes.
|
| Exercise for the reader: how large can a paper get before
| collapsing?
|
| Seriously though, can someone comment on this and it's
| significance?
| drexlspivey wrote:
| It is known that if you manage to fold a paper in half more
| than 7 times it becomes a black hole
| codethief wrote:
| > Seriously though, can someone comment on this and it's
| significance?
|
| I have not been part of the hyperbolic PDE subfield of
| mathematical relativity (but a sibling subfield) but the
| (in-)stability of Kerr black holes had always been presented to
| me as one of the big open questions in that field.
|
| And, now putting on my physicist's hat, it is indeed: I mean,
| if Kerr black holes had turned out to be instable, then black
| holes wouldn't last very long and the question would have been
| what the photos from the Event Horizon Telescope are actually
| showing. (Note: It is expected that in nature all black roles
| rotate at least slightly, so are of the Kerr kind.)
| antognini wrote:
| As someone who has done a PhD in gravitational dynamics I think
| I can say that there are probably only a few dozen people in
| the world who can comment intelligently on this paper.
| lisper wrote:
| What happens when those few dozen people die?
| strbean wrote:
| Then we have to make more.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > how large can a paper get before collapsing?
|
| Assuming it's confined to a one meter radius, the Bekenstein-
| Schwarzschild limit comes out to around `(1m)^2 (tau c^3 log(e)
| / 2hbar G)` or about 2^230 bytes (or 2^150 yottabytes, at the
| point where SI prefixes run out).
|
| If you're limited to storing one bit per amu (or other unit of
| mass), rather than saturating the Bekenstein bound for your
| space-energy budget, you only really care about the
| Schwarzschild limit (`(1m) c^2 / 2 G * (1bit/amu)`), which
| gives 2^175 bytes or 2^95 yottabytes.
|
| Obviously, if you have more space available, there's no hard
| upper bound, although you may need to put some parts of the
| (physical storage substrate of the) paper into orbit around
| other parts to keep the mass density below the (decreasing with
| radius) density of a black hole of that radius.
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| Is this more than a preprint? Usually really long research like
| this takes a long time to verify, like that guy who claimed to
| solve the abc conjecture. The article talks about it like
| everyone agrees this is valid, but is it?
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Paper was posted on 30th May and this article was written on
| 4th August. So it is possible it has been verified.
| gus_massa wrote:
| That's only 2 months for 900 pages, like 15 pages per day,
| it's impossible to read it so fast. IIRC checking the proof
| of the last Fermat theorem took a few years (and a few
| modifications to fix holes).
| corndoge wrote:
| FTA:
|
| > [...] He did stress, however, that the new paper has not yet
| undergone peer review.
| woopwoop wrote:
| Probably there isn't anyone who wasn't an author who can vouch
| for it yet, but this is a different situation. These guys have
| been working toward this problem for a long time in much closer
| touch with the mathematical community, with partial results
| that people can vouch for. This contrasts with the situation
| with the abc conjecture, which was done in almost complete
| isolation from the mathematical community with as far as I know
| no intermediate results.
| primitivesuave wrote:
| > Klainerman emphasized that he and his colleagues have built on
| the work of others. "There have been four serious attempts," he
| said, "and we happen to be the lucky ones." He considers the
| latest paper a collective achievement, and he'd like the new
| contribution to be viewed as "a triumph for the whole field."
|
| Come what may in peer review, this is an admirable attitude to
| have toward science.
| lotw_dot_site wrote:
| At a certain point of abstraction, theoretical physics almost
| never has any direct correlation with empirical reality. It is
| most often used as a way to give the paradigm lenses that color
| our thoughts nice little workouts. (One can also apply
| Wittgenstein's notion of language games here.)
|
| If, by the term "black hole", a person is referring to some
| object that has the shape of a mathematical point, then it just
| doesn't make much sense to call it a thing that relates to the
| world of observation. (The postulates of Quantum Mechanics
| dictate that physical objects _must_ be fundamentally spread out
| in the form of wave functions.)
|
| Solutions to simplistic kinds of mathematics come in the form of
| idealizations called "points". But physical reality is
| fundamentally spatial, and the necessary maths must involve
| things like topological manifolds, which brings us directly to
| the doorstep of String Theory, which is not so much a "theory"
| but rather a broad category that consists of the entire spectrum
| of all possible Quantum Field Theories. String Theorists, in
| fact, are always speculating over the possibility of some given
| theory's existence, such as when Witten spoke of a mysterious
| "M-theory" in the mid-90's.
| colechristensen wrote:
| What? Lighten up on the philosophy of a topic before you
| understand it.
|
| Sure, the physical reality of the singularity is a bit of a
| mystery as it comes up against the nature of gravity at an
| extreme which requires a quantum theory which includes general
| relativity, but that is a known unknown and not what any of
| this black hole physics is about.
|
| Outside of the singularity, and definitely outside the event
| horizon, a black hole is a very real thing which has been seen
| and measured in "empirical reality" and theory has so far
| matched well with measurement.
|
| Nobody is going to Euclid and claiming a point or line is a
| real physical entity, anything but a useful abstraction.
| lotw_dot_site wrote:
| >Lighten up on the philosophy of a topic before you
| understand it
|
| But philosophy is an activity that must necessarily be done
| in order for there to even _be_ a topic that can at all be
| understood in the first place! We had to have someone like
| Descartes before we could get someone like Newton, and Newton
| before the quantum theorists, etc.
|
| The idea that you can just jump straight to (and always stay
| within the framework of) "hard science" and do away with the
| malleable philosophical bits that allow for the kind of
| connective tissue that binds civlizations is perhaps the
| biggest reason why we collectively face the existential
| crises that we currently do.
|
| And the other idea that everyone (or at least everyone who
| has jumped through the hoops to get the necessary
| credentials) can simply sit fat and happy in their own arcane
| specialties as long as they are able to "prove" their worth
| to the rest of us by patting each other on the back with
| their circles of academic citations is... well... not very
| sustainable. All academic disciplines, to the extent that
| they cannot remain "rooted" within some larger framework of
| philosophical sensibility will necessarily get weeded in due
| time.
| colechristensen wrote:
| No, this isn't about the philosophy of science, but you in
| particular misrepresenting a topic and then making
| philosophical arguments about it. You ought to understand
| the science you're criticizing before sharing your
| commentary on it.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _a person is referring to some object that has the shape of a
| mathematical point_
|
| Black holes aren't points, they're space-time shapes with a
| singularity at the middle and a spherical event horizon. The
| black hole at the center of our galaxy extends across 16
| million miles, or a little over eighteen times the size of our
| sun.
|
| If the singularity at the middle is slightly modified to be
| something else according to a better theory of gravity (most
| physicists believe that this will eventually happen), the
| outlying spacetime will not change very much, for reasons
| similar to how Newton was able to work out how the planets
| moved around the sun without knowing what the sun was made of
| or what was inside it.
|
| If you imagine a circus tent propped up in the middle by a
| square pole, it will look very much like one propped up by a
| round pole. That's because solutions to the Laplace equation
| smooth themselves out as quickly as possible as you move away
| from the boundary condition.
| otikik wrote:
| I thought wether or not a singularity sits at the center of a
| black hole is actively discussed.
|
| Or to be more precise: our math seems to indicate that there
| is one ... _and precisely because of that we think that our
| math might be wrong or incomplete_ (because every single time
| we have encountered an "infinite" or something resembling
| that in the past it turned to be an error).
| colechristensen wrote:
| General Relativity says there is a singularity, more than
| one depending on the metric and coordinate system chosen.
|
| However GR is not a quantum theory and it is well known
| that it clashes with quantum mechanics in ways that would
| show up in a singularity so what the physical reality of
| space actually at and nearby the singularity is still a
| mystery because we don't yet have an accepted theory of
| quantum gravity.
| lisper wrote:
| [deleted because brain wedgie]
| colechristensen wrote:
| That's literally the rest of my comment.
| lisper wrote:
| Sorry about that.
| [deleted]
| lotw_dot_site wrote:
| >they're space-time shapes with a singularity at the middle
|
| Upon googling "black hole singularity", the first "People
| also ask" is "Does black hole contain singularity" and the
| answer is, "No, black holes in our universe, that is to say
| the real universe, do not contain singularities." While this
| doesn't in itself invalidate your point, it does seem to
| raise questions.
|
| >The black hole at the center of our galaxy extends across 16
| million miles, or a little over eighteen times the size of
| our sun.
|
| I think what you are doing here is conflating the physical
| effects of the thing (the gravitational field of force) with
| the mathematical description of the thing itself (a precisely
| defined geometric structure). If you are talking about
| extremely strong gravity fields, such as those that bind
| entire galaxies (or galaxy clusters or even larger
| organizational patterns), then that is one class of things
| (empirical), but the purely theoretical notion of physical
| singularities is an entirely different class of things
| altogether (a class, which, IMO is perfectly self-
| contradictory).
|
| >That's because solutions to the Laplace equation smooth
| themselves out as quickly as possible as you move away from
| the boundary condition.
|
| This seems incorrect. I find that solutions to the Laplace
| equation typically "smooth themselves out" in a quasi-linear
| way (ie, the way sines and cosines do). The most vexing
| question in Quantum Mechanics is in fact why quantum states
| (i.e. the eigenfunctions that are solutions to PDE's such as
| Laplace's equation) appear to us as localized packets rather
| than how their "wave functional" mathematical descriptions
| would dictate (diffuse). The way this conundrum is resolved
| in QM is by way of a perfectly ad-hoc procedure called
| "collapsing the wave function".
| sethjr5rtfgh wrote:
| They're stable if you put them in a box.
| hamiltonians wrote:
| how do you even check 900 pages of dense hard math...nuts. goes
| to show how top math and physics people in whole other leauge
| compared to college level
| spicymaki wrote:
| I had the same question. Who could even review this for
| correctness?
| EGreg wrote:
| Is this all humans or computer stuff?
| woweoe wrote:
| The agreement between the UK and EU ran to 1250 pages in
| English alone.
| untilted wrote:
| check for yourself: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.14808.pdf
| NHQ wrote:
| Great, let us see our own black hole with the James Webb, it
| should be relative to a mirror.
| spicymaki wrote:
| Perhaps it is getting a bit ridiculous publishing 900+ pages of a
| math proof in a pdf format. Perhaps mathematicians should move to
| a GitHub style publication platform.
| _Microft wrote:
| For a paper, I would take a PDF over basically any other form
| of media any day of the week. Being able to archive a paper
| easily and print it in the form as the author intended it is
| extremely valuable.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Yes, if you want to print it out on paper... but don't you
| think someone might want machine readable?
| lmkg wrote:
| We don't have a good way to handle equations. They are
| dense and sometimes minute aspects of positioning have
| semantic value. And this paper in particular, the equations
| are the core of the content.
|
| There's room for improvement over the status quo, but with
| the standards we have available today, faithfully
| representing the content requires a faithful representation
| of the visual layout. So a typesetting format like PDF is
| what's needed.
| gjs278 wrote:
| lisper wrote:
| > We don't have a good way to handle equations.
|
| S-expressions?
| strbean wrote:
| > We don't have a good way to handle equations.
|
| LaTeX?
| gus_massa wrote:
| Looking behind the curtain (i.e. .tex files) is a
| horrible experience.
|
| You expect to see
|
| $a^2+b^2=c^2$
|
| but you actually see manually spacing, sub/super-index
| before and after the object, weird hats, ...
|
| $a+{}^2\\!\hat{x}\ \leq& \ 7\ y_2\\!\\!^5+\epsilon$
| archgoon wrote:
| Pdfs are readable by machines. It's also released as tex.
|
| https://arxiv.org/format/2205.14808
|
| Huh. this account apparently got shadowbanned. Guess it's
| another good reminder not to post here.
| CBarkleyU wrote:
| I guess I can see you from the shadows...
| _Microft wrote:
| If you think that something is wrong with your account,
| you can get in touch with the moderators via the
| "Contact" link in the footer of the page.
| archgoon wrote:
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Do you know what physicists or mathematicians actually
| want, or are you just theorizing as an outsider, based on
| experience from completely different domain?
| Loughla wrote:
| I'm confused by the reason behind your question (which
| I'm assuming you have, I guess). Are you arguing that
| scientific works shouldn't be made accessible?
| panda-giddiness wrote:
| Unless you are a physicist or mathematician, I doubt any
| format will make this work "accessible".
| Loughla wrote:
| I think maybe we have a difference in what accessible
| means. I'm talking accessible as in, 'I can literally
| access this', not as in 'I can understand what this
| means'.
|
| I use a screen reader, and unless the pdf is explicitly
| created as an accessible pdf, it is just garbled up
| nonsense.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| If you cannot read the PDF, you can also download LaTeX
| source from arxiv. I don't think it is reasonable to
| expect anything more accessible than that.
| simonh wrote:
| If PDF format is the preferred format of those needing to
| access the work, compared to likely alternatives, then it
| is accessible. Are you claiming you know better what the
| needs of professionals in the field are?
| gjs278 wrote:
| Loughla wrote:
| I think maybe we have a difference in what accessible
| means. I'm talking accessible as in, 'I can literally
| access this', not as in 'I can understand what this
| means'.
|
| I use a screen reader, and unless the pdf is explicitly
| created as an accessible pdf, it is just garbled up
| nonsense.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Yes, they should, and rendered PDFs are accessible to
| readers.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Someone, perhaps, but in general, not particularly. PDFs
| are just fine for the machine readability that almost
| everyone wants.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Not the kind of machine readability that he was talking
| about and you know it.
| simonh wrote:
| But if practically nobody wants it, is that a real
| problem?
| trident5000 wrote:
| Do both
| mhh__ wrote:
| Just do both.
|
| It's a flaw with latex as far as I'm concerned.
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