I am not at all a physics jock, but I have a reasonable amount of maths, and by using the actual article's abstract to help with the two pop articles you linked-- well, your read sounds absolutely bang-on to me.
Tangentially:
I am reminded of Star Trek characters constantly going to test some theory on the Holodeck, as if the Holodeck represented Reality in All Its Majesty instead of a program made by the same sorts of persons who want to test the whatever. I find it unnerving that the writers never seem to have noticed that.
In economics, too, I constantly found that my students and my colleagues got confused and thought of mathematical models of stripped-down versions of living interactions as reality, which was a equally unnerving. (Though interestingly and horribly, in the 1980s and 1990s the bullshit macroeconomic models of conservatives were initially sold as being more "elegant" than previously prevailing Keynesian models.) For economists, unfortunately, worship of mathematical tools seems culturally to tend to distract economists from remembering that they/we're actually telling stories about how humans interact through institutions, and how that pans out.
no subject
I am not at all a physics jock, but I have a reasonable amount of maths, and by using the actual article's abstract to help with the two pop articles you linked-- well, your read sounds absolutely bang-on to me.
Tangentially:
I am reminded of Star Trek characters constantly going to test some theory on the Holodeck, as if the Holodeck represented Reality in All Its Majesty instead of a program made by the same sorts of persons who want to test the whatever. I find it unnerving that the writers never seem to have noticed that.
In economics, too, I constantly found that my students and my colleagues got confused and thought of mathematical models of stripped-down versions of living interactions as reality, which was a equally unnerving. (Though interestingly and horribly, in the 1980s and 1990s the bullshit macroeconomic models of conservatives were initially sold as being more "elegant" than previously prevailing Keynesian models.) For economists, unfortunately, worship of mathematical tools seems culturally to tend to distract economists from remembering that they/we're actually telling stories about how humans interact through institutions, and how that pans out.