[HN Gopher] How to become a bad theoretical physicist (2017)
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How to become a bad theoretical physicist (2017)
Author : alokrai
Score : 32 points
Date : 2021-07-31 11:09 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (webspace.science.uu.nl)
(TXT) w3m dump (webspace.science.uu.nl)
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Reader mode to the rescue... This whole article reeks of
| artificial academic elitism. Not the entire content of it, but
| just sprinkled in here and there.
| mannykannot wrote:
| I just cannot find it in me to get upset by the notion that a
| group of people who have tried hard to understand something,
| including by trying to rip apart their own and their
| colleagues' ideas, might know something, and also might have
| grounds to be irritated by being harangued by people who have
| done neither.
|
| On the matter of the presentation of this web page, however...
| xjf934jdifj9pl wrote:
| Given his achievements, I would give him the benefits of the
| doubt that it's just a grumpy person who's seen enough polished
| turd having a rent.
|
| I don't know if theoretical physics is particularly susceptible
| to producing the type of "bad" people that the OP writes about:
| but of all type of scientists I have worked with in the past,
| it appears that theoretical physicists do have higher tendency
| of doing those "bad" things described in the article.
|
| On a personal level, I am biased because I have quit a job due
| to exactly the type of behavior in question, where everyone
| thought what we were doing was the greatest thing in history
| and they remained undeterred no matter how many times I said
| what we were doing is a pile of shit. Our competitors were like
| that, too.
| maverick-iceman wrote:
| > On a personal level, I am biased because I have quit a job
| due to exactly the type of behavior in question, where
| everyone thought what we were doing was the greatest thing in
| history and they remained undeterred no matter how many times
| I said what we were doing is a pile of shit
|
| Perception is reality. If there is one thing more complicated
| than theoretical physics is predicting human reactions to
| ideas, theories and events.
| anon_tor_12345 wrote:
| lol people don't understand that science at gerard 't hooft's
| level is just as petty and vulgar as your local bar.
|
| what i mean is very accomplished scientists brag and sneer and
| bluster all the time - they feel entitled to and we worship and
| empower them to. examples abound; read any of feynman's books;
| landau had a scale by which he measured other scientists; von
| neumann would chew people out who couldn't keep up with him;
| the cat fight right now around Mochizuki's proof; etc etc etc.
| if you've never been around these people you think they're
| saints when in fact they're almost universally assholes.
|
| it's not unlike ultra-wealthy people competing with each other
| for the greatest monument to their wealth...
|
| i'm sure someone will respond to me to say something like they
| need to be this way to accomplish (just like with the slavish
| worship of the ultra wealthy) what they've accomplished and to
| this i always present to them john bardeen, who won two nobels
| and still managed to be a good neighbor.
| a9h74j wrote:
| > you think they're saints when in fact they're almost
| universally assholes
|
| This does not match my experience, and outside the classroom
| I have been in 1:1 or 2:1 situations with several Nobel prize
| winners. I'm commenting on individual demeanor, not whatever
| happens when departmental politics plays out.
|
| As you describe Bardeen, I would take that to be the norm.
|
| Edit: That much said, the topic article rubs me the wrong
| way. As someone above says, the tone is harsh.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Pauli: "What Professor Einstein [just] said is not totally
| stupid."
| katmannthree wrote:
| To be fair to one of those examples,
|
| > von neumann would chew people out who couldn't keep up with
| him
|
| Imagine what that experience was like from his perspective,
| constantly explaining simple things to people too lazy to put
| in the work necessary to have a proper discussion about
| whatever before ultimately wasting his time. Over and over
| and over again. That gets old quickly no matter what level
| you're operating on.
| anon_tor_12345 wrote:
| Lol this is exactly what I preemptively alluded to - how we
| (as a culture) enable this kind of behavior. It becomes
| even worse when you realize that at least the ultra wealthy
| pay people for the right to abuse them and von Neumann et
| al are abusing, frequently, poorly paid junior scientists.
|
| >That gets old quickly no matter what level you're
| operating on.
|
| If you can't handle being around people that are
| differently abled from you then the answer is not to take
| your frustrations out on them. The answer is to stop being
| around people. No community/culture/society owes anyone,
| not even people at this level, some kind of pampered sphere
| of existence that revolves around them.
| katmannthree wrote:
| > If you can't handle being around people that are
| differently abled from you then the answer is not to take
| your frustrations out on them.
|
| Of course. But von Neumann was just as human as the
| people who struggled to keep up with him, he just had
| different weaknesses. Having low emotional intelligence
| is every bit as deserving of understanding as having low
| general intelligence.
|
| > The answer is to stop being around people. No
| community/culture/society owes anyone, not even people at
| this level, some kind of pampered sphere of existence
| that revolves around them.
|
| You sure about that? Society has MASSIVELY benefited from
| von Neumann's work. If the cost of that was a few
| people's hurt feelings at his inability to interact with
| them a way that doesn't hurt their feelings it was a
| small price to pay.
| anon_tor_12345 wrote:
| >You sure about that? Society has MASSIVELY benefited
| from von Neumann's work. If the cost of that was a few
| people's hurt feelings at his inability to interact with
| them a way that doesn't hurt their feelings it was a
| small price to pay.
|
| The flawed premise implicit in this is that he (or even
| someone else) wouldn't have produced all the same things
| while being cordial. More importantly the even greater
| flaw is the assumption that he wouldn't have produced
| _even more_ if he 'd been easier to work with
| katmannthree wrote:
| You could speculate to that effect, just as easily and
| correctly as you could speculate that he would have been
| even more productive still had he surrounded himself with
| people he didn't consider mentally slow.
| anon_tor_12345 wrote:
| >with people he didn't consider mentally slow.
|
| your whole point is that no such people existed?
| katmannthree wrote:
| Wait what? What did I say that lead you to that
| conclusion?
|
| I'm sure there were people in his time who would rightly
| consider him to be slower than they were (and equally
| sure that he wouldn't be acknowledging that if confronted
| about it).
|
| My point is more that he had his own flaws, just like the
| people he had trouble getting along with. Being around
| slow people _is_ often frustrating, especially if you're
| more concerned with working than teaching. Was he an ass?
| Absolutely. But we should we try to understand_why_ he
| was, rather than just talk about how he should have been
| kicked out of society. Especially in von Neumann's case,
| where his net utility to society was insanely high
| (compare to, say, Mochizuki).
| tobmlt wrote:
| Yeah, the tone is harsh. He's trying to deal in mass with a
| whole pile of cranks wasting his time. Compare with his "how to
| become a good theoretical physicist":
| https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~gadda001/goodtheorist/index....
| hprotagonist wrote:
| it's not artificial, anyway: he came by it honestly.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_%27t_Hooft
| dpwm wrote:
| I studied Physics, and I ended up doing some computational work
| around High-Energy Physics. All the postdocs I worked with
| received a lot of insane emails about crank theories. Many were
| more silly ideas, but some of the proposers had put in serious
| effort.
|
| IIRC they were getting the same emails, like they were on a
| list. They were a magnet for this, particularly as high-energy
| physics was in the news a lot.
|
| The people who seemed to get it worst were the particle-physics
| phenomenology people.
|
| I would imagine they start out funny, but could after several
| years get tiring.
| ISL wrote:
| The "list" is self-organizing. When nobody listens to a
| purveyor of a poor theory, the proponent casts an ever-wider
| net.
|
| Eventually, they have the bright idea to scrape the web pages
| of physics departments for emails. At least in my case, they
| started sending email within a few months of starting grad
| school.
|
| The truly ambitious can decide to simply show up at the
| lab/building. A common refrain is, "here is my theory, tell
| me why it is wrong". No amount of countervailing evidence
| will be sufficient, usually because such a person will have
| critical misunderstandings of a fundamental concept or three
| and an intuitive sense that they are correct.
|
| Don't invite them into your office and attempt to help them
| resolve said misunderstandings in a youthful desire to save
| them from wasting their time; they might not leave. Do,
| however, give them the references they might need in order to
| see the light.
| Borrible wrote:
| There's a buck to be made:
|
| https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-
| consultant-f...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12268362
| yesenadam wrote:
| That aeon story is about Sabine Hossenfelder doing a "talk
| to a physicist" job. She sounds awesome at it, very
| impressive!
| mathgenius wrote:
| " The bad theoretical physicist, in anticipation, names his own
| equations and effects, and even his entire theories, after
| himself right away. "
|
| I never heard of anyone doing this, is there an example of this?
|
| The real trick is to _not_ name some important discovery, which
| then leads _others_ to name it after you. Or, to use a hopelessly
| unwieldy terminology for the discovery with hopefully the same
| outcome. If the discoverer comes up with a good name for their
| discovery then this significantly reduces any chance that the
| effect will be named after them.
| anon_tor_12345 wrote:
| >I never heard of anyone doing this, is there an example of
| this?
|
| ahem...
|
| https://www.wolframscience.com/
| tobmlt wrote:
| See also how to become a good theoretical physicist by the same:
|
| https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~gadda001/goodtheorist/index....
| tired_and_awake wrote:
| I remember attending a big American Physics Society conference,
| maybe 4000 physicists attending. They had many parallel tracks
| for presentations, labeled A through T or something like that. I
| remember reading through these and it was fascinating the breadth
| of topics covered, condensed matter through fluid dynamics,
| chaos, some astrophysics IIRC.
|
| So at the end of the program there's some special session labeled
| Z and it was for "special physics". All of the talks had bizarre
| names filled with jargon terms "hyper quantum zener matrix
| dimensions".
|
| I gather it was the APSs solution to quietly enable the quacks to
| talk amongst themselves instead of denying them any platform.
| leephillips wrote:
| The APS rules are that any member can submit an abstract, which
| will be printed in the Bulletin, and be allowed to either give
| a 10-minute talk or stand next to a poster. The abstracts are
| printed without regard to content, as long as they are in the
| right format. So they have to put the crank ones somewhere, and
| this is one solution.
|
| There is a rule that the submitter of an abstract must attend
| the meeting to present. In the Fluid Dynamics division, there
| was a guy who submitted weird, incomprehensible abstracts every
| year for many years--but he never showed up as far as I know.
| You could recognize his abstracts immediately because he jammed
| as much as possible in there. Each abstract referred to
| previous ones, as if they were publications. He built his own
| little empire of self-referential, unreviewed abstracts. The
| APS handled that by (eventually) scheduling his talks at the
| ends of sessions so that the no-show would not disrupt the
| schedule. They could have banned him for repeat submissions
| without appearing to give a talk, but they erred on the side of
| allowing an obvious crackpot to have his say, which I thought
| was both wise and kind.
|
| I don't know if the current APS would be so thoughful; I hope
| so. I got fed up with them years ago and stopped paying my
| dues.
| ssivark wrote:
| ArXiv similarly has the "gen-ph" classification for preprints.
| See: https://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/what-counts-as-
| science
| foob wrote:
| This is absolutely the case. When I was in physics, I was told
| that the moderation policies had previously been more strict
| and were only relaxed after one of the quacks was rejected and
| murdered someone in retaliation. I don't know for certain
| whether that's true or an urban legend, but it was told to me
| by a physicist who would never joke or lie about something like
| that.
|
| There's also viXra [1] which is like arXiv for fringe content
| that arXiv won't accept. One of the people who publishes there
| underwent a huge email spoofing campaign where they would send
| emails from one of my coworkers to others in the field
| promoting the papers. It was a really difficult situation
| because the coworker didn't know exactly who they were being
| sent to unless they replied, so it damaged his reputation
| without him getting a chance to explain what was happening.
|
| [1] - https://vixra.org
| lmilcin wrote:
| It is a little bit like software engineering.
|
| It doesn't matter a lot what you wrote first. What matters is if
| you have followed up, cleaned up, refactored and left it without
| inconsistencies. It matters if you listen to critique and try to
| understand and learn from it. And then it matters if you maintain
| it as our understanding of the problem gets better.
| [deleted]
| dave333 wrote:
| The page is also a great example of awful web design.
| gnufx wrote:
| Perhaps in comparison with the "good theoretical physicist" one
| also mentioned?
| MikeDelta wrote:
| FYI, Gerard 't Hooft is a Dutch theoretical physicist who won a
| Nobel Prize.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_'t_Hooft
| [deleted]
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