Which, alas, is how we get kids at Harvard chasing a couple decimal points on a dead end path instead of doing something useful. I'm actually a bit perplexed as to why anyone thinks extending the laser method to improve the fourth decimal point is worth the effort. No one will ever implement this thing, and no one believes it actually brings us closer to an actual solution to the exponent 2 conjecture. So seems entirety like a way for phd students to cut their teeth, perhaps? But ultimately not much more helpful than finding the next digit of pi.
> No one will ever implement this thing, and no one believes it actually brings us closer to an actual solution to the exponent 2 conjecture.
It brings us closer more than anything I've done, that's for sure.
I agree with your sense of taste about which problems are personally interesting, and likely to be significant in my lifetime. But I still think it's cool that there are theoretical developments like this. Refining bounds is a cool way to see theoretical progress quantitatively.
I think also it's more like discovering what pi is than trying to find the next digit. We know a lot more about pi than we do about the lowest achievable exponent.
What's needed are new methods, though. I saw some really interesting work ten years ago using group Fourier transforms to attack the problem. I think it didn't end up working out, but was fundamentally more interesting than another extension of the laser approach.
One of the major failure modes of academia is that students are generally not very good at picking problems, and can end up following their advisors down a blind alley. The underlying question here is absolutely worthwhile, but spending a year extending laser will have no impact. It's like you're trying to dig to the center of the earth and someone hands you a shovel: do you take it and start digging, or walk away and try to find/invent an oil drill?
