> All of which effort and edifice would collapse into the dumpster if some snot-nosed little upstart like you, using crude computation, achieved overnight fame by finding a counter-example.
Not at all. In fact, if I had found a counterexample, it would cause a flurry of new research to quantify exactly how wrong the BSD conjecture is. Such a finding would actually be a boon to their career! That's why my response is curiosity, and not to sneer at them for protecting their extremely secure tenured careers.
Edit 1: And if you think you've found a counterexample to a long-standing conjecture with a computation, you'd better be damned sure that your computation is correct before opening your mouth in public. And that takes a ton of work in the case of the BSD conjecture, because you've almost certainly identified a bug in the extremely complex code underlying that computation. If I ever thought I was holding onto such a counterexample, I'd approach a human calculator like Ralph Greenberg as my first step (after internal checks: re-running the code on another computer to rule out cosmic bit flips, and perhaps running more naive, unoptimized implementations).
Edit 2: This attitude pervades my software development career, and I've brought it to my foray into superconducting circuit design: a bug report brings joy to my life, and I aim to shower the reporter with praise (which may involve chocolate). There is nothing more satisfying than being proven wrong, because it helps us collectively move toward greater truths.
> Edit 2: This attitude pervades my software development career, and I've brought it to my foray into superconducting circuit design: a bug report brings joy to my life, and I aim to shower the reporter with praise (which may involve chocolate). There is nothing more satisfying than being proven wrong, because it helps us collectively move toward greater truths.
Not to mention that the usual wisdom of "don't kill the messenger" applies equally to bug reporters! Someone finding a bug in your code doesn't mean they willed it into existence; the bug would still be there even if you didn't know about it.
I've got a brief bio in my profile. The major thrust of my role is to develop architectures of digital/analog circuits for quantum computers, and I've lately been getting into device design. That's miles away from superconductivity research (at most, I could say I'm in applied superconductivity), so allow me to fawn a little... I'd love to be doing that kind of work!
Not at all. In fact, if I had found a counterexample, it would cause a flurry of new research to quantify exactly how wrong the BSD conjecture is. Such a finding would actually be a boon to their career! That's why my response is curiosity, and not to sneer at them for protecting their extremely secure tenured careers.
Edit 1: And if you think you've found a counterexample to a long-standing conjecture with a computation, you'd better be damned sure that your computation is correct before opening your mouth in public. And that takes a ton of work in the case of the BSD conjecture, because you've almost certainly identified a bug in the extremely complex code underlying that computation. If I ever thought I was holding onto such a counterexample, I'd approach a human calculator like Ralph Greenberg as my first step (after internal checks: re-running the code on another computer to rule out cosmic bit flips, and perhaps running more naive, unoptimized implementations).
Edit 2: This attitude pervades my software development career, and I've brought it to my foray into superconducting circuit design: a bug report brings joy to my life, and I aim to shower the reporter with praise (which may involve chocolate). There is nothing more satisfying than being proven wrong, because it helps us collectively move toward greater truths.