Get the latest tech news
Mathematicians just solved a 125-year-old problem, uniting 3 theories in physics
A breakthrough in Hilbert’s sixth problem is a major step in grounding physics in math
So Deng, Hani and Ma looked at what happens to Newton’s equations as the number of individual particles colliding and ricocheting grows to infinity and their size shrinks to zero. It was already known how to derive the Boltzmann equation from Newton’s laws on very short timescales, but that doesn’t suffice for Hilbert’s program, because real-world fluids can flow for any stretch of time. The authors overcame this by doing careful accounting of just how much a particle’s history affects its present and leveraging new mathematical techniques to argue that the cumulative effects of prior collisions remain small.
Or read this on Hacker News
