[HN Gopher] Fundamental physics is dying? [video]
___________________________________________________________________
Fundamental physics is dying? [video]
Author : nabla9
Score : 139 points
Date : 2024-10-11 10:21 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| nabla9 wrote:
| John Carlos Baez thinks Sabine has a point.
|
| https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/113285631281744111
|
| >Despite the silly clickbait title of this video, Sabine says a
| lot of interesting stuff in it: her criticism of claimed
| deviations from Lorentz invariance in loop quantum gravity is
| about as good as you'll get from anyone who hasn't actually
| worked on loop quantum gravity. I worked on it for about 10
| years, and the situation is even a bit worse than she makes it
| sound.
| dang wrote:
| I know people have strong reactions to her and her sensational
| style, but that is a serious recommendation from a
| knowledgeable person, so I think we can give this thread a
| second chance. (Someone emailed and asked us to.)
|
| All: please let's keep the comments on topic and substantive
| (and avoid the sensationalism and personality aspects).
|
| Edit: this subthread was getting too off-topic so I moved the
| replies to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41814764. Feel
| free to reply there if you want.
| notamy wrote:
| > John Carlos Baez
|
| For those like me who didn't know,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Baez
|
| > John Carlos Baez (/'baI.ez/;[2] born June 12, 1961) is an
| American mathematical physicist and a professor of mathematics
| at the University of California, Riverside (UCR)[3] in
| Riverside, California. He has worked on spin foams in loop
| quantum gravity, applications of higher categories to physics,
| and applied category theory. Additionally, Baez is known on the
| World Wide Web as the author of the crackpot index.
| dang wrote:
| And https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=johncarlosbaez!
|
| Perhaps he'll contribute to this thread (or perhaps it would
| waste his time)
| lamontcg wrote:
| And he was known on Usenet and sci.physics before the World
| Wide Web was invented...
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| He was also a long-time maintainer of the Usenet Physics FAQ
| and has been writing about physics and mathematics on the
| internet for decades. So not only is he the real deal in
| terms of knowledge, he also has a long history of
| communicating that knowledge to the public, albeit typically
| for a more advanced audience.
| btilly wrote:
| He is better known within physics as the author of _This Week
| 's Finds in Mathematical Physics_, an archive of which is at
| https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/TWF.html. His more current
| blog is available at https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/.
| hggigg wrote:
| 30 years ago I spoke to a fairly well known and regarded
| physicist who said something rather interesting along the same
| lines. Quoting as accurately as I can _" physics looks sexy
| from the outside due to some celebrities but inside it's mostly
| worse than anyone wants to admit."_. He also suggested I go and
| study mathematics instead because at least there will likely be
| some applications for it. I did and I am glad I did.
| Gooblebrai wrote:
| Sounds like this criticism would be valid for fundamental
| physics but there are many other physics fields with
| experimental results that become technology.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| if you want to do applications, engineering will get you a
| 10% higher salary for the same job.
| jerf wrote:
| Yes, there's definitely some interesting fields that are
| making progress that are still in the purview of "physics".
| Materials science, or condensed matter physics, is doing a
| lot of fascinating work with quasiparticles:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasiparticle There's a
| number of fields you could call "quantum engineering" where
| physics and engineering work together on the cutting edge.
| Some of the output of that is why our TVs are so good.
|
| There's a lot of work to be done on how big systems, where
| "big systems" can be as small as hundreds or even dozens of
| atoms, behave, where you can't "just" throw the whole
| wavefunction into a computer and crunch away on it.
|
| It's particle physics that seems to be stuck in a rut.
| Fundamentally, they're starved for useful data. Until that
| is resolved, the science really isn't going anywhere. Since
| people on the internet frequently seem to operate on the
| silly theory that someone pointing out a problem has some
| sort of obligation to propose a solution, let me say
| outright I have no more clue how to resolve this than
| anyone else does, except to hope that some sort of other
| progress in other fields creates new opportunities for new
| experiments.
| XorNot wrote:
| > Since people on the internet frequently seem to operate
| on the silly theory that someone pointing out a problem
| has some sort of obligation to propose a solution
|
| The issue with Sabine is she tends to yell about anyone
| proposing any solution. CERN would like to build a bigger
| particle accelerator, but since it's not her favored
| variant of accelerator they are obviously lying to the
| public and wasting _your tax payer dollars_ which could
| be spent instead on the (implied) guaranteed discoveries
| if people would just listen to her.
|
| (note also that this is a false dichotomy: any realistic
| analysis any set of potentially competing projects would
| generally conclude they're unlikely to be in competition
| if they are in fact viable - we usually have plenty of
| money to do both things provided they're likely to pay
| off. But the under-developed, under-timelined thing is a
| lot easier to promise the world with, yet far more likely
| to wind up just as "clearly blown out it's budget!" as
| the project being built).
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| She has reasonable arguments that the money could be
| invested into more promising research.
|
| It's ok you don't agree, but your only argument is to
| attack her personally. Smells like you are personally
| invested.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| > CERN would like to build a bigger particle accelerator
|
| Sabine has a point though. There isn't any specific thing
| thing that a larger accelerator is likely to yield a
| _positive_ answer on. Unlike the current biggest, which
| was at least explicitly constructed to find the higgs.
|
| And before you say dark matter, there's zero evidence
| that dark matter particles will be in any given mass
| range nor is there a solud model that predicts an
| interaction that will generate such a particle.
| XorNot wrote:
| The topic of _this_ video is that people are struggling
| to find new paths forward due to a lack of experimental
| data and a lack of results from theoretical approaches -
| which ultimately is contingent on finding some new
| experimental data they can predict.
|
| So one way or another, it's quite likely you will need a
| larger accelerator. Moreover, logistically, _not_
| building that accelerator means you quite likely never
| have it - CERN 's timelines go beyond 2050. The people
| who would be operating the next generation of
| accelerators haven't been born yet. If nobody is building
| anything, the knowledge and know how to do it is likely
| to be lost.
|
| Like I said: it's a false dichotomy. It's one thing to
| frame the problem as "we should spend some money on these
| approaches which look promising". It's quite another to
| frame it as " _those people are stealing all the money_
| which should be spent on _obviously correct alternative_
| ".
|
| There is more then enough money to build everything,
| provided a solid case can be made for it - and not "we
| should do this" but "how we will do this". CERN tends to
| win bids because they're not delivering a concept,
| they're delivering a timeline and plan of _exactly_ how
| they will get there.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Do they need to be generated in interaction? If dark
| matter particles have no charges except for mass, what
| role can they play in interaction?
| lamontcg wrote:
| > It's particle physics that seems to be stuck in a rut.
|
| You could look at the discovery of tetraquarks and
| pentaquarks, and high precision tests of the standard
| model though as a lot of progress.
|
| What it hasn't done though is create some sexy upending
| of our current models of physics, we keep asking
| questions and mostly the responses coming back are in
| line with theories that we knew 40 years ago. But that's
| still a lot of experimental progress. There just isn't
| any useful theoretical physics progress. All the beyond-
| standard-model theories that might have been useful have
| been falsified, and the ones that remain can be made to
| predict anything and aren't useful. But we wouldn't know
| that if there hadn't been a lot of experimental progress.
| The LHC was an exceptionally useful experiment. It
| destroyed more dreams of physics theories than any single
| experiment ever before. Someone should go back and mark
| up all the published articles and preprints that were
| falsified by the LHC.
| chii wrote:
| > What it hasn't done though is create some sexy upending
| of our current models of physics
|
| which is fine imho. It's only been around 100 years since
| that happened last time! Far too short to have another
| one.
| zepolen wrote:
| I think this guy has hit the nail on the head:
| https://energywavetheory.com/subatomic-particles/
|
| Take a look at how stupidly complex the standard model is
| compared to the other:
| https://energywavetheory.com/equations/theory-comparison/
|
| Everything in the universe on that site is eloquently and
| simply explained, including gravity as a shading effect
| (think an eclipse/water waves acting on an obstacle: http
| s://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/attachment.php?attachmentid.
| ..) ie. When a large mass causing the shading effect (eg
| earth) absorbs energy waves acting on us it causing less
| energy to reach you from the earth's direction and that
| means energy from above us pushes us down to Earth. All
| the math checks out too.
|
| Yes, the entire theory is based on the fact that aether
| exists, which has supposedly been disproved, but what if
| that's incorrect and launched an entire wild goose chase
| of alternative physics (string theory, standard model)
| all based on a flawed assumption.
|
| I think this reddit comment describes the situation
| beautifully:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/comments/14o41lc/why_
| doe...
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Anyone claiming that string theory is part of "the
| standard model", when proposing their alternative theory,
| is probably a crank.
|
| Anyone deriving "E=mc2", and claiming that as evidence of
| their theory, is _almost certainly_ a crank.
| Risord wrote:
| Sometimes I am wondering what if there is theory which
| have been on right track but it's (false?) falsified and
| already forgotten. Sure theory could be incomplete or
| incorrect on some ways but would that right part be
| noticed? For example I think it's too easy to imagine
| world where relativity or quantum theory would be
| socially falsified and/or left without any attention.
|
| Simple example experience I had when I was beginning of
| my physic studies (which I never finished) was when
| discussed with elder/smarter student about wheel
| friction. I was explaining that I had figured out that
| wheel spin actually matters when there is also side slip.
| [Total slip direction is dependent from spin speed.] But
| because he -knew- that wheel spin does not matter and he
| -knew- that he was better/smarter/etc. he was so focused
| to correct my mistake I was unable to convince him. How
| much this happens on higher stakes?
|
| So if situation is that there has not been much progress
| for a long time I think it could be valuable also
| understand these failed theories and of course very
| importantly why they are falsified.
|
| When I am working with hard problem I usually go this
| order:
|
| 1. Describe the problem.
|
| 2. Describe bunch of naive solutions.
|
| 3. Describe problems in those naive solutions.
|
| 4. "Describe problems in those problems": Why some of
| those problems do not hold water. Those can be
| workarounded, fixed or they actually are not really
| problem in this case or maybe some combination of naive
| solution properties gives working solution.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Did you run the experiment? I don't think wheel spin
| _does_ matter when there 's side slip. It matters when
| there would otherwise be static friction (e.g. if you're
| in a car with an ABS system), but I don't think it
| matters when it's just kinetic friction. (Of course,
| there are other kinds of friction, which might behave
| differently. I'm no friction expert. I imagine things get
| _weird_ when water 's involved, though.)
| Risord wrote:
| For some reason I cannot reply to your comment wizzwizz4.
|
| We are talking about dynamic friction in it's simplest
| form. You can treat it as simple math problem too. Let's
| consider two extreme cases:
|
| A: Side slip is 1m/s and wheel spin zero or very small.
|
| B: Side slip is 1m/s and wheel spin extremely big, let's
| say 1000m/s.
|
| I think we can agree that friction is always opposite to
| surface speed. If wheel spin is on x axis and side slip
| on y:
|
| On A case friction is (0, 1).normalized() * friction-
| coefficiency => (0, friction-coefficiency)
|
| On B case friction is (1000, 1).normalized() * friction-
| coefficiency => [approximately] (friction-coefficiency,
| 0)
|
| On classroom teacher says that slip does not matter. What
| teacher actually means that slip does not effect into
| -magnitude- of friction but this is left behind because
| problem is presented in context of 1D. Tho in 1D slip
| still matters little bit because there is difference is
| slip 1m/s or -1m/s.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _I think we can agree that friction is always opposite
| to surface speed._
|
| This isn't intuitively obvious to me. One explanation
| says "must be true", another explanation says "might be
| false". I'd want to run an experiment with a toy car on a
| polished surface. Unfortunately, I'm quite a way from the
| nearest place I could set up such an experiment.
| Risord wrote:
| In another words friction slows movement down and does
| not treat some direction on surface more preferable than
| others. Assuming regular surface this is pretty much
| definition of friction.
|
| I am not sure how well I have explained stuff but if you
| are able to experimentally disprove this it's worth of
| paper.
| aeonik wrote:
| I just read quite a bit of the summary.
|
| Honestly, I don't really care if they are cranks. The
| theory makes for a fun read, and they have a lot of
| interesting ideas.
|
| Trying to identify where their theory is wrong is a fun
| exercise, at least for me. It also helps reinforce my
| existing physics knowledge when I see multiple
| perspectives, or alternative models of measurable
| phenomena.
|
| The cool part about this theory is they have some pretty
| specific predictions, like the resting mass of the
| Neutrino (~2.2eV).
|
| They also hypothesize that the Electron is made up of 10
| Neutrinos arranged in a Tetrahedral pattern, and also
| hypothesize that the weak force can be explained via
| solar Neutrino bombardment. Which would theoretically be
| pretty easy to test, just test the radioactive decay of
| different materials in different Neutrino densities.
| jerf wrote:
| There hasn't been a total lack of progress by any means.
|
| Unfortunately, "confirming the standard model again in
| some new way", while good science, also does nothing to
| get particle physics out of its rut.
|
| I originally wrote "useful" science when I first wrote
| that sentence, but... it's debatable how useful it is,
| actually. People have been taught that measuring the
| utility of science is heresy, but I find that insane. It
| is completely possible to have science that isn't that
| useful, even to other science, let alone to any other
| purpose. Confirming the standard model yet harder isn't
| really useful. Of course, you have to run the experiments
| to confirm the standard model, in the hopes that maybe it
| won't, I'm saying the _result_ of confirming the standard
| model is of debatable utility.
| zarzavat wrote:
| IANAP but it seems that fundamental physics suffers from a
| lack of monotonicity of knowledge. Although physics does its
| best to explain things, those explanations are more like
| guesses than known facts. A theoretical physicist can have
| their life's work undone simply because someone else comes up
| with a better guess, or experiment says no. You spend your
| life working on SUSY and then... nope. Even very established
| knowledge can be overturned.
|
| People will say "that's science" and indeed that's
| fundamental _physics_ , but other fields don't really work
| like that.
|
| In chemistry and biology, certainty isn't in such short
| supply. Nobody is asking "but _is_ DNA a double helix? "
| Researchers take a problem, they attack it, then they publish
| the results, it gets replicated (or not), and the set of
| knowledge grows.
|
| Mathematics is more similar to chemistry and biology insofar
| as mathematical knowledge takes the form of an ever-growing
| set of proven facts generated by research. Take a problem,
| prove it, other mathematicians check it, the set of knowledge
| grows.
|
| Fundamental physics has issues because the "check" stage now
| often costs millions or billions of dollars (build a particle
| accelerator, neutrino detector, gravitational wave detector,
| satellite, etc), and even then it might not give a definitive
| answer. Just look at the g-2 situation where they notice a
| discrepancy, they spend millions of dollars trying to
| determine if this single discrepancy is real, and then
| someone publishes a paper "haha I recalculated it, you just
| wasted your time".
|
| Not a criticism of fundamental physics because clearly that's
| just how it is. I'd rather have guesses than ignorance. The
| gravitational wave research seems to be doing okay at least.
| pfdietz wrote:
| SUSY was never "established knowledge". It was a stack of
| increasingly baroque theories that had little or no
| experimental justification.
| empiko wrote:
| ELI5 what is the G2 situation?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| g-2. g minus 2. g is the magnetic moment of an electron.
| It is expected to be very close to 2. g minus 2 is a
| value that can be measured, and that can be calculated,
| both very precisely.
|
| If I understand the current situation, for electrons g-2
| agrees between experiment and measurement to 10 digits.
| For muons, though, it doesn't. (Muons are harder to
| measure, because they decay. And they are somewhat less
| well understood theoretically, so there's room on both
| sides of that question.)
| btilly wrote:
| The fundamental reason for this is simple. Humans are prone to
| cognitive dissonance. Meaning, we do absurd things to avoid
| painful thoughts. And anything that questions our sense of
| identity, is a painful thought.
|
| So if my self-image is, "I've advanced our understanding of the
| fundamental nature of reality," then the idea that my
| contributions weren't useful becomes painful. So we avoid
| thinking it, challenge people who question our past
| contributions, and so on.
|
| The natural result of this cognitive dissonance is a feeling of
| undue certainty in our speculations. After all certainty is
| merely a belief that one idea is easy to believe and its
| opposites are hard to believe. We imagine that our certitudes are
| based on fact. But they more easily arise from cognitive biases.
|
| And this is how a group of intelligent and usually rational
| people descend into theology whose internal contradictions can't
| be acknowledged.
| ricksunny wrote:
| This is beautifully articulated.
|
| And reinforces my general below-the-line (layperson) fear about
| the state of physics today (as reinforced ofc by the likes of
| Sabine Hossenfelder & Eric Weinstein).
| btilly wrote:
| Thank you for the compliment.
|
| I've been working on how to formulate that idea clearly for a
| while. It is a problem that goes well beyond physics. For
| example I believe that the same cognitive error is behind the
| fact that experts do significantly worse than chance in
| actually predicting the world, and the more certain the
| expert sounds, the less likely they are to be right. See
| https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-
| Know/d... for data demonstrating that fact.
|
| Depressingly, this means that we consistently put public
| policy in the hands of people who are demonstrably
| incompetent.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> I've been working on how to formulate that idea clearly
| for a while. It is a problem that goes well beyond physics.
|
| It's a really fundamental thing in psychology. The solution
| is something like the destruction of the ego, and many
| people who push hard enough to be a PhD tend toward larger
| ego to start with. Meditation and practicing martial arts
| can help. Apparently psychedelics can as well.
|
| It's a real pain because if you try to tell someone their
| ego is preventing them from seeing things clearly... Well
| that's going to trigger the same problem. So yes, it's good
| to find ways to articulate the message so it can get
| through to those that suffer from it the most.
| btilly wrote:
| The problem is that we need an ego to be healthy.
| Attempts to destroy it can wind up compromising your
| mental health.
|
| The first part of the solution is to be careful what's in
| your ego. See https://paulgraham.com/identity.html on
| this topic. See https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-ten-
| commandments-of-egoles... for how careful choices in what
| we value in ourselves, can lead to thinking better.
|
| This of course still leaves us with an identity. For that
| I've found that gratitude can help us deal with pain. And
| so targeted gratitude can help us avoid cognitive
| dissonance when we otherwise would be overrun by it.
|
| Sadly, neither skill is widely taught in our society.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > The problem is that we need an ego to be healthy.
| Attempts to destroy it can wind up compromising your
| mental health.
|
| You only need to destroy it temporarily. When you do it
| using certain tools or techniques, it will reconstitute
| by itself once the effect of the tool or technique has
| passed.
|
| This temporary ego death can open your eyes without
| creating a permanent void where your ego used to be.
| btilly wrote:
| Anecdotally I've seen such claims, but have seen mixed
| results as well. I've also encountered people who clearly
| had an ego about how little ego they had. Yes, it was
| just as ridiculous as it sounds.
|
| I've never seen anything that looks like solid research
| on the topic.
| pmontra wrote:
| Given infinite outcomes, experts in a field without a
| theory of the world that can be used to calculate the
| future will always perform worse than chance.
|
| Experts of engineering perform better than non experts.
| However the field of political behavior (or economy) is
| difficult. The only way to know what's going to happen is
| wait for it to happen.
|
| Sometimes you know more or less what's going to happen but
| not the details or the exact outcome. That's enough to make
| plans.
|
| Examples: at the beginning of 2024 we average persons knew
| that Putin would win the Russian elections no matter what.
| We average persons also knew that either Trump or Biden
| would win the American ones but we didn't know whom. We
| have to wait. Then surprise, it became either Trump or
| Harris.
|
| Maybe there are people around the world or even the USA
| that wonder why Obama don't run for president instead of
| Harris. They are not experts of the rules of the
| competition.
|
| So the question is, do the experts predictions are
| consistently worse than the predictions of any randomly
| picked person?
| btilly wrote:
| Experts who felt certain about their ideas did worse than
| chance, and worse than simplistic models.
|
| Experts who quantified uncertainty and tried multiple
| theories did better than both chance or simplistic
| models.
|
| Sadly, the experts who felt certain presented themselves
| with confidence and got higher paying jobs.
|
| Normal people were not in the data set reported. He's
| since done more research on good predictions. You can
| read _Superforecasting_ by the same author for more.
| Enk1du wrote:
| Some more reading on cognitive errors and expertise for you
| https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Spot-Solution-Right-
| Front/dp/00...
|
| >Depressingly, this means that we consistently put public
| policy in the hands of people who are demonstrably
| incompetent.
|
| You could depress yourself further by thinking that we get
| the government we deserve or you could re-assess your role
| in making good progress.
|
| "A community is like a ship, everyone should be prepared to
| take the helm." - Henrik Ibsen
| mort96 wrote:
| [flagged]
| tsimionescu wrote:
| It's in the video: LQG is not a promising, or even a
| plausible, physical theory. That's the idea.
| dang wrote:
| " _Don 't be snarky._"
|
| " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation
| of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| (I'm sure you could rephrase your point here as a substantive
| thought in a respectful way and then it would be fine)
| jancsika wrote:
| > So if my self-image is, "I've advanced our understanding of
| the fundamental nature of reality," then the idea that my
| contributions weren't useful becomes painful.
|
| Only if one believes the logical fallacy that the dependent
| steps of a process of elimination weren't useful.
| btilly wrote:
| Even if you believe that they are useful, you're also not
| going to wind up as a hero in the history books. And so
| people wind up acting in the same way.
|
| Besides, the argument that all of the bad ideas contributed
| to discovering the right one, is as strong as the empirical
| argument that white chairs are evidence that all ravens are
| black. Logically you're right. Discovering the right idea
| requires disproving all of the wrong ones. Similarly "all
| ravens are black" is logically the same as its
| contrapositive, "all non-black things are not ravens". It's
| just that you've just decided to focus on a search space that
| is so much bigger, that each data point in it becomes much
| less important.
| lazide wrote:
| Eh, in many ways the problem is a sunk cost fallacy type
| issue.
|
| If someone is later in their career and looking at having to
| throw away all that time - time they will never recover - it
| takes someone really special to just do it.
|
| And by really special I mean 'kinda suicidal sometimes'.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| To extend this, group dynamics can come into play too.
|
| I once worked at a startup that developed fancy new tec. The
| group dynamic there was that critical thinking absolutely did
| not exist. The reason was probably that they accepted only
| people in their circle, that had the same burning positive
| attitude towards the idea.
|
| This can become a self reinforcing circle, because critically
| thinking people will leave at some point. (Like sabine did in
| physics).
| tjs8rj wrote:
| This is where climate skepticism comes from by the way. Even
| climate skeptics will acknowledge that climate scientists are
| well educated, they don't deny science as a process of truth
| seeking, the problem lies in the incentives.
|
| There's a lot of prestige and grant money that comes with
| insisting climate change is true.
|
| There's a lot of political power that gets ceded to the people
| in charge if we "just accept that we're in a crisis and us
| elite are the only ones that can stop it".
|
| I believe climate change is real and human caused, but many of
| the claims and doomsday speak feel like self interested humans
| following their incentives beyond the scientific truth
| thedragonline wrote:
| What are you talking about? I spent years munging climate
| datasets from various research institutes around the world.
| The upshot: it doesn't look good for humanity. I seriously
| don't understand how a neutral third party can walk away from
| this climate work and think, 'Nothing to see here folks.' The
| denialism and willful ignorance of the potential catastrophic
| consequences is something I find terribly disheartening. Mark
| my words - the temperature records that keep getting broken
| year after year are going to keep getting broken. Entire
| towns going up in flames and cities being wrecked by
| increasingly more powerful hurricanes will be the new normal.
| <sigh>
| smegger001 wrote:
| Its hard to claim its a narrative created out of grant
| money incentives when the first people to come to these
| conclusions and make an acurate predictive model was the
| oils companies who have tried to deny their own conclusions
| ever since.
| f1shy wrote:
| I think in this an other videos, what she says is "they are not
| even wrong" and she does have a point there.
| FredPret wrote:
| As a non-physicist, it's hard to understand if she has a point or
| not.
|
| Any physicists care to weigh in?
| lamontcg wrote:
| Follow the links to John Baez's thoughts ("the situation is
| even a bit worse than she makes it sound"):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41808143
| farts_mckensy wrote:
| Theoretical physics are theoretical; that seems to be the crux of
| her problem. And in that light it makes sense that she's become
| an influencer who makes content instead of someone who devotes
| most of their time to advancing the science. Yes, oftentimes
| people will be paid to work on problems, and they'll end up in a
| cul-de-sac. That will be the case for the majority of the field
| in the case of something like quantum physics. But if we pay
| enough of these people to sit in rooms and work on problems,
| maybe one of them will figure something out. That's how science
| progresses.
| lazide wrote:
| [flagged]
| farts_mckensy wrote:
| There is no evidence to suggest that string theorists
| designed the theory to be untestable.
| lazide wrote:
| After this much time and that much work, how is it possible
| for a physics theory to _not have a single testable
| /falsifiable prediction_ without it being intentional? It
| has been _over 80 years_.
| [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_string_theory].
|
| The evidence is in the absence.
| seanhunter wrote:
| It predicted supersymmetry, which has been experimentally
| disproved.
| zachf wrote:
| The kind of supersymmetry you're referring to (global
| spacetime supersymmetry) is not required by string
| theory; this is a common misconception. Looking for super
| partners in a collider is actually only telling you about
| global supersymmetry, which unlike local supersymmetry is
| _not_ a universal feature of string theory at low energy,
| in fact the opposite, it is probably non-generic. It so
| happens that a class of appealingly simple vacua _do_
| have this property, which led to some inappropriate
| optimism among string theorists that has entirely abated
| with more experiments. Unfortunately this has been widely
| misunderstood to rule out the whole enterprise of string
| theory, which is unreasonable for the reason stated
| above, it is much more likely to not see SUSY below the
| Planck scale. [0] (Unless you just like to mock string
| theorists for hoping that the universe would be kind to
| them.)
|
| Also global supersymmetry has not been experimentally
| disproved (how would you do this, even?) but it is true
| that current or even near-term experiments are not nearly
| sensitive enough to get close enough to answering this
| definitively, which is obviously upsetting.
|
| [0] https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/string+theory+FAQ#DoesS
| TPredic...
| seanhunter wrote:
| Not intending to mock anyone and I don't know nearly
| enough physics to have a credible opinion either way.
| Thanks for your explanation.
| zachf wrote:
| Don't worry, I didn't think you were :) you're welcome!
| theendisney4 wrote:
| That proves it!
|
| I mean, you should prove they didnt. If that sounds
| unreasonable we've made progress. Prove we didn't?
|
| Ill let myself out
| Shawnecy wrote:
| Exactly. Consistently untestable and unfalsifiable claims for
| decades has to be seriously questioned at some point, and I
| think we're well beyond that point. This is especially true
| for string theory. I'm particularly fond of how Angela
| Collier laid out the timeline of string theory in her video
| on it[0] as well as the consequences that science
| communication is now facing as a result.
|
| [0] = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E
| farts_mckensy wrote:
| The same could've been said of atomic theory, neutrinos,
| gravitational waves, the higgs boson, cmb radiation, plate
| tectonics, and quantum mechanics at various points in time.
| Shawnecy wrote:
| Weren't those all arrived at from a series of falsifiable
| predictions? What does string theory even predict that
| can be tested?
| mhh__ wrote:
| As a non string theorist my understanding was that string
| theory actually makes quite a lot of empirically
| verifiable statements, just that those statements are
| only interesting at either never or extremely high
| energies.
|
| I think ppl are asuming that sting theory comes from the
| meme about turning 1+1 = 2 into some massive integro
| differential equation. The world is rarely so simple.
| drdeca wrote:
| I've heard that it also predicts at very low precision,
| some values that _are_ practically measurable, and,
| unsurprisingly for how little precision these predictions
| have, these predictions are correct (I.e. the
| experimental results are within the predicted range).
|
| (Or, maybe "a prediction" rather than "predictions"? I
| only heard about one, and I forget what it was.)
| btilly wrote:
| I am aware of no case where it clearly made an advance
| prediction of any behavior that later turned out to be
| true.
|
| I'm aware of quite a few where they managed to "predict"
| something we already knew.
|
| That said, they've made so many "predictions" that I'm
| sure that some likely worked out by sheer coincidence.
| drdeca wrote:
| Oh, yes, I meant predict a value we had already measured
| at the time the "prediction" was made. I should have made
| that clear in my original comment. I would add it now
| except that the editing time has run out. Maybe I should
| have said "postdicted".
|
| Actually, I think the value might have been something
| like, the electron mass? Or something like that. (Which,
| obviously, had been measured before string theory made a
| "prediction" of it.)
| seanhunter wrote:
| I think the prediction you may be referring to is
| supersymmetry, which was apparently empirically disproved
| by the LHC, or at least the supersymmetric extension to
| the standard model was disproved.
|
| https://www.sciencenews.org/article/supersymmetrys-
| absence-l...
| farts_mckensy wrote:
| You are making it sound as though string theorists are
| asserting some kind of flying spaghetti monster theory.
| Do you think these people are not genuinely interested in
| advancing science? That's an ad hom fallacy. There is a
| difference between a hypothesis being conceptually
| unfalsifiable and a hypothesis that is incredibly
| difficult to test from a practical standpoint, or
| impossible with present energy constraints.
| drdeca wrote:
| I don't think the mistake made is exactly an ad hom
| fallacy? I agree with the rest of your comment though.
| btilly wrote:
| That statement is only true for a few of the things on
| your list..
|
| Yes, it took a couple of decades to test the existence of
| neutrinos. But, for example, general relativity was
| successfully tested within 5 years of being published.
| Gravitational waves were a prediction that took decades
| before we could test them, but the theory itself had lots
| of other verifications.
|
| To date string theory has had many predictions that leads
| to failed tests. But not a single successful test in its
| favor.
| slashdave wrote:
| No, not really. All of those had reasonable, technically
| addressable methods for testing.
| lazide wrote:
| No you couldn't. And it's been 80 years now!!
|
| All of those things you name came directly out of
| attempts to create testable hypotheses from _experimental
| observations_ , and all of them were tested as soon as
| anyone could build an experiment apparatus or gather the
| data to do it. Which didn't take that long considering
| the extreme engineering difficulties in actually building
| the apparatus for some of them.
|
| String theory has avoided testability it's entire
| existence, nearly a century now, and no one that I've
| seen is even attempting to make an experiment to try to
| test it - because at this point it's clear that no one on
| the theory side is interested in making a testable
| hypothesis. That isn't luck, that's talent and hard work.
|
| It's one of the most absurd grifts I've personally seen
| play out so far.
| zachf wrote:
| 80 years? I would date its birth as 1968-9 (Veneziano),
| it's hard for me to imagine calling prior work than that
| as "string theory". But never mind that--the bigger
| problem with this (quite common) argument is that
| _everything about quantum gravity_ , not just string
| theory, has avoided testability because our other
| theories are too good, and because we're limited to doing
| experiments on Earth with equipment built on human scales
| with human budgets, and that's just not where quantum
| gravity would naturally make itself known. So really this
| argument just suggests we shouldn't study quantum gravity
| at all. Maybe that's your actual opinion--it's a waste of
| time if we can't access the Planck scale, we should table
| it all and sit on our hands until we can. But string
| theory really is quite interesting to study, stuff like
| AdS/CFT is just really surprising and magical when you
| get what it's about, and it would be a real pity to not
| pay the meager salaries of theoretical physics just
| because of pessimism. String theory is so far from fully
| understood! It's actually...really hard!
|
| BtW I think you got this 80 years number from looking at
| the earliest date on the Wikipedia page. You might want
| to read it more carefully. Not everything leading up to
| string theory is string theory.
| lazide wrote:
| Fair enough - 50 to almost 60, not counting s-field
| precursor work.
|
| I'm not saying string theory isn't potentially
| interesting from a mathematics perspective, I'm just
| saying treating it like physics (which is, explicitly
| about testable/falsifiable theories) is BS.
|
| If we were honest about it, it would be a maths
| speciality eh?
|
| At least until there are more clear attempts at making
| testable hypotheses.
|
| But that would cause other issues with funding I imagine.
|
| If quantum loop gravity comes up with a testable
| hypotheses, then hey, maybe I'm wrong. But so far, not so
| much yeah? And I'm not talking 'we'd need to spend a lot
| of money to test it', I mean an _actual testable
| /falsifiable hypotheses_ at all.
| btilly wrote:
| I think that you have half a point. You're absolutely right
| that just because people are paid to think about things,
| doesn't mean that they are making progress. And there is a
| lot of evidence that this is true today in the foundations of
| physics.
|
| However string theory was not intentionally untestable. In
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRzQDyw5C3M she gives a good
| history of why it was originally invented, what testable
| predictions it made, how it failed those tests. And then how
| string theorists who were trying to find relevance for their
| work tried to keep it going as it stumbled into being
| untestable.
| lazide wrote:
| Fair point, I guess. It's easy to also see how it just
| mostly ended up there. Still. A problem.
| mhh__ wrote:
| This is a very cruel reading of string theory. Intentional?
| What?
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| How is it "intentionally untestable"? I get that it is
| practically untestable, but as far as I know, there are
| people working to try to find some possible tests.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us
| something._"
|
| " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation
| of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| lazide wrote:
| Hardly a shallow dismissal dang, as the replies show. It's
| a very valid critique of where it has ended up, and goes
| right to the heart of the underlying problem.
|
| The challenge is if it's intentional from the start, or
| merely ended up being intentional at the end eh?
|
| And the folks arguing that the underlying critique are
| false, as shown in the follow-ups, are wrong.
|
| If anything, it's just getting downvotes because people
| don't realize how on the nose it actually is, near as I can
| tell.
| dang wrote:
| Sorry, but your GP comment consisted of nothing but
| putdowns--not just of an entire field but of the people
| working in it. That is a classic shallow dismissal in the
| sense that we use the term. Not a borderline call!
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _enough of these people_
|
| There's more than enough already. (And, historically, you only
| need less than a dozen.)
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| > (And, historically, you only need less than a dozen.)
|
| This seems initially like a pretty outlandish claim to me.
| Could you clarify what you're referring to here?
| btilly wrote:
| I'm not the one you're replying to, but the claim seems
| very reasonable to me.
|
| Fundamental breakthroughs in how to think about scientific
| subjects usually are created by fairly small groups of
| people. A lot more people are involved in popularizing it,
| and then filling out the details. But it is rare for it to
| start with a large number of people.
|
| For example that list in the case of quantum mechanics was
| Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie,
| Max Born, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli,
| and Erwin Schrodinger.
|
| You can think of this as the scientific version of the 2
| pizza rule.
| feoren wrote:
| Humans sure love this story. A dozen Founding Fathers
| created the United States. A dozen physicists invented
| quantum mechanics. A dozen innovators caused the
| Industrial Revolution. It's always wrong.
|
| Ask any of those dozen people where they got _their_
| ideas and (if they 're honest) they'll each have another
| dozen people to name, and so on. Ask them who made minor
| contributions and suggestions and they'll again have
| dozens of people to name. Science is an ever-expanding
| body of work that always builds on its past successes and
| it's the height of naivete to reduce humanity's effort in
| a subject down to its few most visible people. It makes
| for good stories and trivia questions, but it's extremely
| far from the actual truth.
|
| And even if it _were_ true: how could you possibly
| identify those dozen people _beforehand_? It 'd be like
| walking into a publishing house and proclaiming that
| everyone there is stupid because they waste all this
| money on books that don't end up best-sellers. Why don't
| they just _only_ invest in the future best-sellers? Are
| they stupid?
| btilly wrote:
| I partly agree. A conceptual breakthrough always rests on
| a foundation to which many contributed. All of whom, in
| some sense, contributed. But my reading of history says
| that the reconceptualization that leads to intellectual
| breakthroughs themselves usually only involve small
| numbers of people.
|
| If you've read _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_
| , what I'm saying is that new paradigms are usually
| created by very small numbers of people. But they have
| both a foundation and their further success from the
| contributions of many.
|
| I'm very much not offering an opinion on a great man
| theory of history in fields outside of science. Your
| example of the American Revolution is entirely off topic.
|
| I'm also very much not saying that who will contribute
| what is in any way predictable. At best, the necessary
| collision of circumstances to make the breakthrough
| possible is chaotic, and therefore cannot be predicted.
| Nor did anyone else. The original point a few posts up
| was that, even if though there might be a haystack of
| clearly wasted effort, there may still be a needle
| powerful enough to make up for the rest.
| feoren wrote:
| All good points, but remember the claim in question was:
|
| > But if we pay enough of these people to sit in rooms
| and work on problems, maybe one of them will figure
| something out.
|
| and the response that you called "very reasonable" was:
|
| > There's more than enough already. (And, historically,
| you only need less than a dozen.)
|
| So you were agreeing with someone who said we are paying
| too many physicists. There are too many people studying
| this problem. Okay, let's get rid of some then. Which
| ones?
|
| > I'm also very much not saying that who will contribute
| what is in any way predictable
|
| Uh oh, then how do we know who to get rid of? Which
| physicists should we not be paying? The claim that we
| should fire a bunch of scientists because we "only need
| less than a dozen" is nonsense, and you called this claim
| "very reasonable", with more examples. But maybe I should
| have replied to that person instead. It's a little
| awkward trying to have an N-way conversation when you can
| only reply to one response at a time.
| btilly wrote:
| The statement that there's more than enough, is not the
| statement that we should be firing them. It's a statement
| that we don't want more.
|
| But if we had to fire some, I'd recommend ones who are
| not willing to do research outside of oversubscribed
| ideas. That's because the lack of success of existing
| lines of research means that additional effort there is
| less likely to work out than looking at less
| overpopulated approaches.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> For example that list in the case of quantum mechanics
| was Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Louis de
| Broglie, Max Born, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg,
| Wolfgang Pauli, and Erwin Schrodinger.
|
| Those were not the only people working in that field at
| the time. Not by a long shot. In order to have pioneers
| in a field, there has to BE a field with a bunch of
| people in it.
| btilly wrote:
| You're right that these were not the only people working
| on the set of problems that lead to QM. Lots of people
| were thinking about the same problems at the same period
| of time. And lots more added to it later.
|
| But what key concept underlying how we now think about QM
| doesn't go back to this list of people? OK, add Richard
| Feynman if you want to include the second breakthrough to
| QED.
|
| Ideas that look like conceptual breakthroughs can usually
| be traced back to small numbers of people. Ideas that
| look like progress usually trace back to much larger
| groups.
| reshlo wrote:
| > What key concept underlying how we now think about QM
| doesn't go back to this list of people?
|
| Off the top of my head: quarks, and therefore the
| existence of the colour charge quantum number; and the
| Higgs field.
|
| All of the people in the list were also building on prior
| research by the likes of James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig
| Boltzmann. Einstein himself said "I stand on the
| shoulders of Maxwell."
|
| There are other obvious candidates for inclusion like
| Henri Poincare, Hendrik Lorentz, Satyendra Nath Bose...
| pvg wrote:
| For the context, the video this is a follow up to is helpful
| (they're both short) -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlHvW6k2bcM
| whatshisface wrote:
| If LQG turns out to be unworkable, we're back at string theory as
| the only renomalizable description of quantum gravity.
|
| Quantum gravity research amounts to one professor per university
| faculty on average. Even in the worst case this would not be the
| crisis of unmet expectations it is made out to be... QG
| researchers are very brave because they are risking everything on
| the possibility that existing data constrains quantum gravity in
| a way that hasn't yet been understood. I doubt there is even a
| single person making that gamble unaware that the Planck energy
| density is something like 20 orders of magnitude above present-
| day experiments.
| naasking wrote:
| > we're back at string theory as the only renomalizable
| description of quantum gravity.
|
| I think you mean, we're back at "we're not sure if string
| theory is a viable theory of anything real".
|
| Quantized gravity is not necessarily the right answer, and an
| insistence on this fundamental assumption might be the origin
| of these difficulties, eg. see Oppenheim's semi-classical
| gravity.
| m101 wrote:
| I've said this before in not the same words, and I am always
| downvoted here on hackernews: people need to understand theory of
| knowledge before they understand science. Physics and physicists
| are the worst offenders.
| feoren wrote:
| If by "theory of knowledge", you mean they need to have read a
| bunch of philosophical musings on epistemology, then I strongly
| agree with the downvoters, because that's utter nonsense. If
| you mean anything else by that, then you're being way too vague
| to contribute to a technical discussion, so again I agree with
| the downvoters. Try defining what you mean by "theory of
| knowledge" and explain _why_ you think that 's required to
| "understand science" (and you might want to explain what you
| mean by that too) and I suspect you'll see a lot fewer
| downvotes.
| m101 wrote:
| Theory of knowledge "is a branch of philosophy that examines
| the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge". Scientists need
| to understand the limits of knowledge which may be acquired
| by science.
|
| Scientists think they are in the unique possession of tools
| which ascertain truths - this is misled.
| btilly wrote:
| This strongly depends on what you mean by "theory of
| knowledge".
|
| If you mean the practical importance of self-honesty, and a
| historical awareness of how easily we slip into self-delusion,
| then I agree. See, for instance,
| https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm for a
| very famous speech on exactly this topic. A lot of Feynman's
| writing touches on the same issue.
|
| If you mean the musings of philosophers on epistemology, then I
| emphatically disagree. The philosophers in question generally
| have failed to demonstrate that they understand science. And
| when they venture into science, they generally fail to live up
| to the ideals that they proclaim that scientists should follow.
| As an example I direct you to the sight of Karl Popper arguing
| to the end of his days that quantum mechanics cannot be a
| correct scientific theory. An opinion that began because a
| probabilistic theory cannot in principle be falsified.
|
| In fact QM is a scientific theory, and it stands as an example
| falsifying Popper's criterion for science!
|
| I find it very ironic that Feynman is so disliked by
| philosophers for having been honest about how irrelevant they
| are to science. And philosophers in turn have failed to
| recognize Feynman's explanations of how to do science as a key
| topic that should be included in any proper philosophy of
| science.
| m101 wrote:
| I meant your second perspective.
|
| I'm in the Popper camp on your example. You may have good
| reasons as to why you say he's wrong, but isn't that the
| scientific method: showing things to be false. If it can't be
| shown to be false then how can it be scientific? It might be
| some other branch of thought.
|
| On the specific case of quantum mechanics - I want to see
| these forever promised quantum computers actually doing
| something useful. The promises went from (Vs classical
| computers) they will do everything faster, to they will do
| some things faster, to they will do some things not
| achievable at all. And yet, they still haven't done anything
| as far as I can tell. Physicists need to answer honestly for
| this.
| hyperbrainer wrote:
| Amusingly, the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programma -
| an A-Levels like uni-prep course - has a subject called TOK:
| Theory of Knowledge with these intentions.
| m101 wrote:
| And it was with people of this very course that I have been
| impressed by. They learnt things at a young age and it stayed
| with them.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| My understanding of the situation (which may be wrong, in which
| case please let me know) is that physics is stuck at a local
| optimum.
|
| There are two obvious ways to get out
|
| (1) Surprising physical observations, or
|
| (2) Mathematical advances
|
| Way (1) is what kicked off quantum mechanics. Way (2) is what
| kicked off Newtonian mechanics.
|
| I see string theorists and loop quantum gravity people as working
| on (2). Their models are mathematically interesting and aren't
| totally understood from a mathematical perspective. But they're
| different enough that studying them may break the impasse.
|
| I see (1) as largely limited by the budgets and technology needed
| to build things like particle accelerators and spacecraft.
|
| For (2) you have to decide whether to only explore mathematics
| that defines physical reality, or whether to also allow
| exploration of non-physical systems. For example, you might
| explore a universe that is almost physical but has time machines.
| Restricting the search space to only physically realistic systems
| is a significant constraint, so there's a debate to be be had
| about how much weight to give it.
| slashdave wrote:
| (1) is also limited by imagination
| tines wrote:
| Isn't it (2) that's limited by imagination? Nobody imagined
| quantum theory, they observed it first.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| Those mathematical advances weren't developed in a vacuum, but
| made to solve some very specific problems which came from
| better measurements. So even Newtonian mechanics originated in
| solving problems trying to explain measurements, not that
| someone sat in their chamber and dreamed up cool math that
| happened to be very useful.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| I agree.
|
| Generally, the scientific method has mutually recursive turns
| of theory and observation. And I don't mean to imply that
| exist independently.
|
| I'm just saying that if you get stuck, the two clearest ways
| out are to provide more observations or perturb the theory.
| killerstorm wrote:
| Number theory and algebraic geometry were developed for their
| own sake (i.e. "it is cool"), but later people found
| practical applications in cryptography.
|
| So "useful math must be motivated by practice" is empirically
| false
| Ma8ee wrote:
| > So "useful math must be motivated by practice" is
| empirically false
|
| That was not the claim. The claim is that useful _physics_
| originates in measurements.
| ordu wrote:
| _> physics is stuck at a local optimum._
|
| I think I heard somewhere that the trouble with string theory
| is it can describe anything if you tune it just in a right way.
| It reminds me of epicycles, they also had this property, you
| can add more and more epicycles to describe literally any
| observation data.
|
| _> Way (1) is what kicked off quantum mechanics. Way (2) is
| what kicked off Newtonian mechanics._
|
| Hmm... What was the way that kicked Copernicus to redraw
| epicycles with the Sun in the center? I mean, is there some
| notes on these? For example, Newton took as granted that
| celestial bodies move by elliptical orbits, and somehow he
| guessed that the gravitation law has r^2 in its denominator,
| and so he invented calculus to prove, that if you have r^2 in
| the denominator then you'll get elliptical orbits. The question
| where Newton got his guess it remains open for me, but back to
| Copernicus, what was his way?
|
| Maybe he thought how movements of planets will look if seen
| from the Sun, and so he had redrawn epicycles to take a look,
| and he got circles? (I'm not sure that it could work this way,
| I propose this answer to my question just to give an example of
| the kind of an answer I'd like to have).
|
| I ask this question for two reasons.
|
| 1. I believe that Copernicus advanced the science not with
| surpising physical observation and not with mathematical
| advances, to me it seems more like surprising mathematical
| observation. I'm not sure what was that observation exactly.
|
| 2. Can one apply techniques of Copernicus to the modern
| physics? I suspect that it will not. I'm sure physicist already
| tried everything and there were (is) a lot of them and they are
| pretty smart people, so it is highly unlikely that Copernicus
| can help them in any way. But I'm still curious, what
| Copernicus would do? Would he tried to imagine how electron
| flying through a double-slit might observe scientists-
| observers? Or maybe it would try to feel the pain of a black
| that may believe that the whole universe is falling on it? I
| bet that the true Copernicus idea would require to use some
| pretty hard mind-altering substances, and I like such ideas.
| WillAdams wrote:
| My understanding as a layman:
|
| 1. Copernicus figured out that if you put the sun at the
| center, then epicycles weren't necessary, and the math got
| easier --- because epicycles were based on a mis-
| understanding of the actual state of the universe --- I don't
| believe that anyone has identified such a non-alignment of
| fact and reasoning and observation for contemporary physics.
|
| 2. The problem is, modern physics is arguably getting boxed
| into a corner by approaching an end game state where the
| fundamental particles are getting identified, but are so
| small and difficult to separate out, that measurements are
| challenging to the point that while one can speculate and do
| math, actually proving out the speculations experimentally
| and taking actual measurements is expensive or so difficult
| to reason about that there doesn't seem an obvious path to an
| experiment, e.g., it looks as if the electron may be a
| fundamental particle, which is a sufficiently difficult
| concept to parse that it led to "The one-electron
| universe"/"The single electron hypothesis" and if that is the
| case, it walls off a not insignificant portion of particle
| physics at a size/state which can't be gotten smaller than.
| nyokodo wrote:
| > Copernicus figured out that if you put the sun at the
| center, then epicycles weren't necessary
|
| Actually, his model assuming circular orbits still required
| epicycles to explain retrograde motion etc. A major reason
| it never caught on was that it was less accurate than the
| Ptolemaic model but was more of a mathematical curiosity
| rather than a serious contender.
| verzali wrote:
| Yep, it didn't really seem convincing until Kepler
| replaced the circles with ellipses, and even that step
| took a lot to move past established ideas about the
| perfection of nature.
| allturtles wrote:
| 1. is a common belief, but mistaken. Copernicus didn't get
| rid of epicycles: https://farside.ph.utexas.edu/books/Synta
| xis/Almagest/node4....
| canjobear wrote:
| Copernicus used the same circular-orbit-plus-epicycles system
| as Ptolemy, just the orbits were centered around the sun
| (kind of---each planet had its own circle, with the sun only
| approximately in the middle). The system actually had more
| epicycles than Ptolemy's and was less accurate. It wasn't an
| advance in any meaningful sense.
|
| The real breakthrough was Kepler, who dropped the idea that
| planets moved in circles. It was indeed partly a mathematical
| breakthrough and the reason Kepler's work took a while to
| catch on is that people couldn't understand his math at
| first. But it was also empirical, as Kepler had access to new
| and much more precise observational data collected by his
| mentor Tycho Brahe.
| btilly wrote:
| I'd say that Galileo spotting the phases of Venus was also
| a big deal.
| moomin wrote:
| IIRC what this comes down to is Copernicus had no desire to
| tangle with the church. I remember reading he has some
| footnotes that go "Hey, obviously it works in epicycles but
| the maths works really well with ellipses and
| heliocentrism."
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| Before Newton, Kepler already figured out that orbits were
| ellipses. Newton figured out _why_ orbits are ellipses.
| moomin wrote:
| I can probably answer the r^2 question: it's the scaling
| associated with the surface area of a sphere. So if you have
| light source, or a sound source, that's how it scales with
| distance. It would have been relatively simple for someone as
| smart as Newton to guess that gravity worked the same way.
|
| It's only really our current understanding of gravity that
| makes it unobvious.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Name a single physics phenomenon that was discovered purely
| with way 2. I can only think of one, the positron.
|
| Newtonian physics was not kicked off by math "advances".
| Approximately speaking it was the other way, Newton created the
| math to explain p^2 ~ r^3, which was a surprising observation.
|
| Even theory of relativity wasn't really a math advance, the
| math was already mostly worked out by mach, lorenz, and
| minkowski. Einstein put it together into a coherent story (v.
| Important)
| zburatorul wrote:
| The Higgs.
| cb321 wrote:
| Also, the W's and the Z.. neutrino oscillations. There is
| actually a long list. Physics is the poster child science
| of theory-experiment interplay and this shows up constantly
| in the philosophy of science and other things resulting in
| expressions like "physics envy" (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_envy ).
| lagpskd wrote:
| > What's even more insane is that the only two people I can think
| of who have pushed back against this are Peter Woit and Eric
| Weinstein, and both of them are trying to sell you their own
| theory of everything
|
| Sabine forgot Stephen.
|
| https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/11/the-concept-of-t...
| btilly wrote:
| Not exactly. She's just admitted that he isn't someone she
| thought of. And that's likely because she's far more aware of
| the contributions of physicists to this field, than the
| attempted contributions of non-physicists. It's not that she's
| not aware that they exist - in fact she's painfully aware that
| there are a great number of them saying all sorts of things -
| its that she's not individually aware of them.
|
| That said, if she had thought of him then she would have merely
| increased her sample size from 2 to 3, and still had the exact
| same conclusion.
| lupire wrote:
| What absurd definition are you using that makes Stephen
| Wolfram not a physicist?
|
| Wolfram is more of a physicist than most physicists.
|
| Wikipedia:
|
| He entered St. John's College, Oxford, at age 17 and left in
| 1978[17] without graduating[18][19] to attend the California
| Institute of Technology the following year, where he received
| a PhD[20] in particle physics in 1980.[21] Wolfram's thesis
| committee was composed of Richard Feynman, Peter Goldreich,
| Frank J. Sciulli and Steven Frautschi, and chaired by Richard
| D. Field.[21][22]
|
| In the mid-1980s, Wolfram worked on simulations of physical
| processes (such as turbulent fluid flow) with cellular
| automata on the Connection Machine alongside Richard
| Feynman[29] and helped initiate the field of complex
| systems.[citation needed] In 1984, he was a participant in
| the Founding Workshops of the Santa Fe Institute, along with
| Nobel laureates Murray Gell-Mann, Manfred Eigen, and Philip
| Warren Anderson, and future laureate Frank Wilczek.[30] In
| 1986, he founded the Center for Complex Systems Research
| (CCSR) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[31]
| In 1987, he founded the journal Complex Systems.[31]
|
| From 1992 to 2002, Wolfram worked on his controversial book A
| New Kind of Science,[4][33] which presents an empirical study
| of simple computational systems. Additionally, it argues that
| for fundamental reasons these types of systems, rather than
| traditional mathematics, are needed to model and understand
| complexity in nature. Wolfram's conclusion is that the
| universe is discrete in its nature, and runs on fundamental
| laws which can be described as simple programs. He predicts
| that a realization of this within scientific communities will
| have a revolutionary influence on physics, chemistry,
| biology, and a majority of scientific areas in general, hence
| the book's title
| nabla9 wrote:
| Wofram was a child prodigy but he quit physics.
|
| It's not like you can stop doing something as a young
| person and be relevant or be competent just because you are
| smart. "A New Kind of Science" is not very deep book. It's
| graphically beautiful, but it contains lots of hand waving.
|
| He has gradually descended into crackpot regime.
| btilly wrote:
| You are right.
|
| But let's reduce it down to physicists working in quantum
| gravity, who publish in journals that such physicists
| typically publish in. Give that this is Sabine's
| background, this is who she will be aware of. For all that
| he's done, I'm pretty sure that Wolfram's works have not
| been published in such journals.
|
| Roger Penrose is an even better example. His claims to be a
| physicist include a Nobel prize. But people working in
| quantum gravity dismiss his theories, so he doesn't publish
| in the right places, and so Sabine didn't think of him.
|
| In short, Sabine is only likely to think of people in this
| context because their scientific work intersected hers.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| i love sabine. she's speaking the lived experience of quite a few
| of us who lost faith in the academy.
| phkahler wrote:
| I like her message, but some of her recent videos have me a
| little worried about her. She seems on the edge of a breakdown
| at times.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| yeah. she does seem like she's on the edge of throwing down
| f-bombs, flipping tables and screaming "i'm out of here."
| guess it's to her credit she hasn't done that.
| antegamisou wrote:
| > She seems on the edge of a breakdown at times.
|
| Academia does this to you. She's a really well controlled
| case.
| rapjr9 wrote:
| I have a pet conspiracy theory for why there has been so little
| progress in physics for so long. The invention of the nuclear
| bomb scared a lot of people, it made them scared of physics. What
| else might physicists turn up that could change the world in
| dramatic ways? Anti-gravity? Ray guns? Other dimensions? Travel
| to other worlds? All bad for business, no one is going to buy
| your airplanes or air craft carriers if they can buy an anti-
| gravity machine. So physics was suppressed by both business and
| government. Physicists were given "safe" work to do (ITER,
| quants) that would occupy them and keep them from exploring wild
| stuff. Grant financing was controlled so that only safe research
| would be conducted. It would be fairly invisible to the world,
| just a few high level decisions would determine how the funding
| was directed. I get the impression that if this was indeed a
| conscious decision that it's starting to fall apart as younger
| generations take over and become frustrated with the direction of
| physics. They weren't there when the A-bomb was invented, and
| nuclear weapons have not been on peoples minds much for a long
| time, most people have not lived in a time when one was used. So
| they see interesting topics and want to explore them and
| encounter resistance from more established scientists. It's a
| conspiracy theory because it would involve some buy-in from a
| fair number of physicists to make it work, but a lot of
| physicists when I was getting my BA in physics were very loudly
| saying "never again" about atomic weapons and felt it had
| tarnished the whole profession. It's very difficult to say what
| humanity would be capable of handling in terms of radical new
| inventions. Anti-gravity could solve many large problems, but it
| might make it even easier to destroy Earth. Once new knowledge
| exists it is hard to suppress it. Stopping it from from ever
| existing seems easier. I guess we'll find out if physics has been
| suppressed if the dam breaks and new ideas start proliferating.
| The nature of the new physics would be a big clue as to whether
| research in it was suppressed. I'm reminded of Elon Musk, he
| seems to have had really radical success in some very stagnant
| industries, just by trying instead of accepting limits, and being
| able to fund his ideas himself.
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| The theory stops working imho if you take competition into
| account. The world is not aligned as a single bloc of power.
| While it's not completely unthinkable (but extremely unlikely,
| imho) that some scientists plus some decision makers from, say,
| the liberal west might collude to achieve this kind of
| suppression, their counterparts from one or multiple other
| blocs might not, because they want to dominate and anti-gravity
| guns surely give you some nice advantage.
| theendisney4 wrote:
| You'd be amazed how quickly powerful discoveries find
| military purpose.
| WillAdams wrote:
| An important thing to consider here is that the first
| engineering project which had to make use of Einstein's
| Theory of Relativity was GPS --- the time/position
| calculations to triangulate location based on satellites is
| so exacting that it has to take into account gravimetric
| distortions based on the receivers being further down in
| the gravity well than the GPS satellites:
|
| https://xkcd.com/808/
| theendisney4 wrote:
| This seems fun
|
| https://www.alternativephysics.org/book/GPSmythology.htm
|
| Why would the receaver need a clock if they are comparing
| pulses from satelites. All the satelites are all up
| there.
| rapjr9 wrote:
| The desire to dominate can take a weird turn if using your
| anti-gravity guns reveals them and makes it likely others
| will soon invent the same. There is precedent for this, say
| in electronic warfare or cyberwarfare. As soon as you reveal
| your uber virus, anyone can take it apart and modify it for
| their own purposes. So you don't reveal it except as a last
| resort. Competition doesn't come into play then, everyone
| hides their secret weapons and never uses them unless they
| have to, and tries to make sure information in that area is
| suppressed. However, as I say in other comments, this may
| have been a bottom up conspiracy, not a top down conspiracy,
| though it may have moved to the top as the scientists
| themselves gained power. But the fear would still exist at
| all levels; sure your anti-gravity gun gives you an
| advantage, but what if it eventually causes random micro
| black holes to appear near where you use it, obliterating
| infrastructure before evaporating? We just don't know what
| the repercussions of new technologies will be, and while the
| risks have seemed low in areas like software, the risks seem
| higher with fundamental new physics. People are historically
| pretty bad at predicting how technology/science will play out
| in the long term. AI was a joke for a long time, until it
| wasn't. The internet was hailed as revolutionary, but it
| seems very different than it did in the year 2000. It's a lot
| like computer security, you can imagine the possibilities,
| but you probably can't imagine ALL the possibilities. It
| takes time and collaboration to scope out what it is that is
| new that can now be accomplished. That uncertainty scares
| some people and excites others. Seems kind of like walking
| through a minefield littered with Christmas presents. Some
| people might decide to leave the presents where they are.
| theendisney4 wrote:
| Perhaps this is of interest to you.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yTiztUNrhhM
| rapjr9 wrote:
| I'd heard the name LaRouche but I've never read his history:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_LaRouche
|
| Quite astounding, he seems to have been both woke in some
| ways (climate change) and fundamentally misguided. I can see
| a lot of Trump's playbook in his life. I was imagining a much
| more passive conspiracy, people refusing to participate for
| ethical reasons, rather than an elite conspiracy by the
| Venutians/Illuminati. The video seems unintelligable, he
| makes so many references to obscure history that may or may
| not be true (and how would he know?) it becomes meaningless
| without years of research and even then, the intentions and
| thoughts of historical figures are difficult to ascertain.
| theendisney4 wrote:
| Yeah, would take years to fact check.
| kragen wrote:
| What time frame are you talking about here? Starting in 01950,
| 01995, 02010?
|
| If we're talking about 01995, it's conceivable that, say, the
| US and CERN could coordinate to suppress research into hafnium
| bombs, AVLIS, antigravity, or whatever. If we're talking about
| research much prior to that point, though, you'd have to
| include the Russians in the conspiracy. Probably not just any
| Russians, either; probably Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov,
| Tsar-Bomba-era Sakharov, and his successors. And, on the other
| side, people like J. Edgar Hoover, JFK, McNamara, Kissinger,
| Johnny von Neumann, and Teller.
|
| I don't want to say it's literally _impossible_ for Brezhnev or
| his underlings to have made a secret agreement with Kissinger
| and Teller to suppress the development of theoretical physics
| in order to keep the world predictable. But I do think it 's
| pretty implausible, and there would have been an enormous
| incentive to cheat on any such secret agreement.
|
| In the 01990s, though, it could have become plausible. But,
| remember that that's also when Pakistan became a nuclear
| weapons state, shortly followed by North Korea in 02006. And
| the People's Republic of China has had nuclear weapons since
| 01964, so they evidently had significant physics capabilities
| that they were willing to use for warfare (which was a huge
| priority; Mao reorganized the country's economy to resist an
| anticipated US invasion), and they dominated the TOP500
| supercomputer list until this year, when they withdrew from it
| in apparent protest against the efforts of the USA to reverse
| their technological progress with a worldwide system of export
| controls.
|
| So I think there's maybe a ten-year window when this could have
| happened somewhat, about 01992 to 02002. Both before and after
| that, there are too many countries with strong physics
| communities that are too bitterly opposed to make such
| cooperation plausible.
| rapjr9 wrote:
| Reading the comments here my thinking has been revised. I'm
| no longer suggesting the elites were conspiring, at least
| initially, I'm suggesting the physicists were conspiring for
| ethical reasons. Some of them may have moved up the ladder
| and reached positions of some power. Physics is magic to most
| people, hiding possibilities in math and technicality seems
| possible. Anyone who has written code professionally has
| probably been faced with similar decisions, biases can be
| encoded, and you have to decide how you are going to approach
| these things. For example, do you add a race field to the
| medical database or not? In 1990 it was often left up to the
| programmer. Sometimes things are decided far below the level
| of the people running the show. Regardless, I do think my
| theory is far fetched, innate curiosity seems likely to have
| caused some people to explore further regardless of the
| risks, and an overt conspiracy that eventually reached high
| levels seems likely to have been soon discovered.
| These335 wrote:
| I have never seen someone prefix dates with a zero like this.
| Why are you doing that?
| rapjr9 wrote:
| There are some good comments here, thanks! There has been an
| international component to physics research cooperation. It
| seems not inconceivable that physicists in many countries,
| meeting at paper conventions and such might have agreed and
| recruited each other to try to prevent the next atomic bomb
| type invention. So while competition between countries is
| certainly real, competition between scientists might be
| somewhat different. You'd think there would be some people who
| would pursue it regardless, but they'd probably have to work
| with a team, and not everyone on the team may have supported
| the goals. It's just a theory, but it has some plausibility.
| Perhaps there are people everywhere who have decided not to be
| part of endeavors that could be disruptive and they've done us
| all a favor or have kept us from discovering the secrets of the
| universe. Who knows? The ethics of science has been mostly left
| to chance and individual decisions.
| carapace wrote:
| Some secrets keep themselves.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _" The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting
| for our wits to grow sharper."_ --EP
| pfdietz wrote:
| An easier theory is that the Standard Model is so good that
| it's very difficult to find anywhere it fails. So there's no
| experimental fuel to propel physics forward.
| rapjr9 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p.
| ..
| dang wrote:
| If you want to reply to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41811140 or say something
| Sabine-adjacent, please do it here.
|
| (This is so https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41808143 doesn't
| get too offtopic)
| gizajob wrote:
| She was ripping on the valuations and economics of quantum
| computing companies the other week, and her critiques were such
| that they could be levelled against capitalism itself and
| basically any company in the market. Was an obvious and clear
| step way out of her area of expertise.
| lamontcg wrote:
| That doesn't have anything to do with her criticism of Loop
| Quantum Gravity, and is precisely the derailing of the topic
| that dang is asking you to avoid.
| skhunted wrote:
| When people don't have expertise in an area they are prone
| to making really dumb comments. She has a history of this
| on other topics. As such I think it's appropriate to
| mention so that people can evaluate how much weight/time
| they want to spend on her video and views.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Do you have expertise in the area of deciding source
| trustworthiness or relevancy in certain fields?
| skhunted wrote:
| I do not. I do have a sense of the notion and make
| decisions for myself on whether or not something is worth
| my time. While her video might be accurate in this case
| her past casts doubt in my mind and as such I've decided
| not to watch it. Other people might find it useful to
| know about her past errors when deciding whether or not
| to watch this video.
| davorak wrote:
| "sensational style" is one part but another is that it is hard
| to extract truth from Sabine's videos, at least for me, not
| without doing some serious research as someone with a PhD in
| physics.
|
| Example starting at ~1:00 "Carlo Rovelli is fine with the
| theory being untestable for practical purposes. So now the
| situation is that either the theory is falsified or its not
| falsifiable..."
|
| Is Carlo Rovelli fine with it not being testable, in that he is
| fine with research continuing even though it can not be tested
| with up coming experimental set ups? That is reasonable lots of
| research goes on for long periods of time with out experimental
| verification. From a funding point of view it makes sense to
| allocate more money to things that have a tighter feedback loop
| though. If Sabine was going to expose howe much money was going
| to these topics and where it could be better spent that would
| be worth watching.
|
| Or is Carlo Rovelli ok with the theory being unfalsifiable in
| the sense that that he is ok with the research not being
| science? This is the straight forward meaning of Sabine's
| words, but are a negative attack, and one that would come off
| as a personal attack to many scientists I have known, one that
| she does not back up with anything immediately and then goes on
| to make more negative comments like "and Carlo complains to me
| because he thinks I do not understand his genius".
|
| Ok if Sabine was going to expose Carlo Rovelli as someone who
| was not really practice science but was getting paid to be a
| scientist that would be awesome to watch and learn about. That
| does not happen.
|
| "everyone who works on this just repeats arguments that they
| all know to be wrong to keep the money coming" - accusation of
| scientific fraud and defrauding the government.
|
| Ok what percentage and total amount of founding is going to
| this? Is there anyone who has come forward? It would be awesome
| to watch something that exposed something like this. That does
| not happen either.
|
| ~3:19 - Arguments saying loop quantum gravity require space to
| be quantized, but they can not be lorentz invariant without
| having the quantization go to zero volume, according to Sabine,
| and no one has done that and extracted back out loop quantum
| gravity.
|
| I am experimentalist and this is not my area. I would want to
| see a link to a paper/book etc. The analogy to the angular
| momentum operator comes off as a good place to start
| investigation/research but is treated dismissively, anologies
| like this often do not apply in the end but can still be
| useful.
|
| 3:53 ~ "length contraction should make that minimal area
| smaller than minimal proof by contradiction"
|
| Ok that does not seem like the gottcha that it is laid out to
| be. Interesting stuff happens where their are apparent
| contradictions in physics. If experimental/observational
| evidence about A produces theory TA and
| experimental/observational evidence about B produces theory TB
| and they contradict each other in conditions C that is an
| interesting point to study look in to etc. This may not be
| interesting for other reasons, but the apparent contradiction
| does not make it obviously non interesting.
|
| ~4:27 ~ "this can't work because these deviations would
| inevitably so large we'd have seen them already" -
|
| Why did Sabine talk about it being a mathematical contradiction
| if you can make the theory work, but it leads to physical
| phenomenon that we do not observe?
|
| I can not make those two arguments jive in to a cohesive whole.
| Not that it can not happen, but I can not from this video and
| that is the conclusion, or similar, I normally reach when
| watching Sabine's videos and why I do not watch or recommend
| them generally.
|
| I do not see any of the interesting things I mentioned above
| being discussed or dug into in comments so far or other new
| interesting takes. The issue for Sabine's videos, at least for
| me, is not the "sensational style".
| btilly wrote:
| Well, if you want a simple argument from authority, John
| Carlos Baez's confirmation that she's right is pretty good.
| If you want a better one, she very rarely gets any of her
| facts wrong.
|
| Now let's go point by point.
|
| _Is Carlo Rovelli fine with it not being testable, in that
| he is fine with research continuing even though it can not be
| tested with up coming experimental set ups?_ He is arguing
| for a version of the theory that can 't be tested, is
| continuing to do research on it, and presumably thinks that
| he is doing science.
|
| _If Sabine was going to expose howe much money was going to
| these topics and where it could be better spent that would be
| worth watching._ Discussing how these things wind up getting
| funded would be a very different video. And would not likely
| be interesting to most of her audience.
|
| _Or is Carlo Rovelli ok with the theory being unfalsifiable
| in the sense that that he is ok with the research not being
| science?_ Presumably he thinks that he is doing science.
| Sabine 's opinion clearly is that this isn't really science.
| However she only claims her opinion as her opinion, not
| established fact.
|
| _Ok what percentage and total amount of founding is going to
| this?_ Again, that would be a very different video. In 10
| minutes for a general audience, you have to make decisions
| about what you will and will not cover. It 's not a valid
| criticism of her that she made a choice. Particularly in a
| video that she disclaims as a personal rant.
|
| _Arguments saying loop quantum gravity require space to be
| quantized, but they can not be lorentz invariant without
| having the quantization go to zero volume, according to
| Sabine, and no one has done that and extracted back out loop
| quantum gravity._ This is not according to her, this is
| according to an argument that comes from Lee Smolin. A region
| of space that has a specific amount of area will, according
| to special relativity, have a smaller area according to an
| observer that is traveling fast enough. By having the
| velocity as close as you want to C, you can make the area
| arbitrarily small. So your choice is to violate Lorentz
| invariance, or have arbitrarily small areas. If you violate
| Lorentz invariance, the speed for light will depend on the
| wavelength.
|
| As her previous video at
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlHvW6k2bcM said, this
| prediction of Lee Smolin has been tested to extremely high
| precision, and the predicted effect was not seen. That
| version of LQG has been falsified. The alternative supported
| by Carlo Rovelli is that you need to average out over quantum
| areas in all reference frames. This is a neat idea, but in
| several decades, nobody has made it work. Until someone can
| make it work, LQG can't produce any testable predictions.
|
| Please note that John Baez, who worked on LQG for 10 years,
| specifically complimented her presentation of this particular
| issue. Her description of where research stands is accurate.
|
| _I am experimentalist and this is not my area. I would want
| to see a link to a paper /book etc._ Rants generally do not
| come with properly cited references. That said, the previous
| video that this refers back to is based on https://arxiv.org/
| abs/2402.06009?utm_source=substack&utm_med..., which is one
| of the experimental tests showing that Lee Smolin's
| prediction is false.
|
| _The analogy to the angular momentum operator comes off as a
| good place to start investigation /research but is treated
| dismissively, anologies like this often do not apply in the
| end but can still be useful._ It was a good place to start.
| After 20 years of research that has failed to turn that idea
| into anything workable, most people would conclude that this
| is an analogy that will not apply in the end. But apparently
| Rovelli gets mad at anyone who doubts that it will work out.
| One of the triggers for this rant was whatever Rovelli said
| to her in private. Personally, I excuse her for being human
| here in her reaction.
|
| _Ok that does not seem like the gottcha that it is laid out
| to be. Interesting stuff happens where their are apparent
| contradictions in physics._ No, it really is the gotcha it
| claims to be. It 's directly inside of the math. This
| demonstration is no different than, say, proving that sqrt(2)
| is irrational by proving that if you start with the smallest
| fraction that equals it, you can find a smaller one.
|
| The conclusion of that gotcha is exactly what she said: if
| there's a minimal area then you can't have Lorentz
| invariance. And conversely, if you have Lorentz invariance,
| then you can't have a minimal area. Experimentally, we have
| tested for the Lorentz invariance to be expected from a
| minimum area based on the Planck length. It does not exist.
| And therefore there isn't Lorentz invariance.
|
| _Why did Sabine talk about it being a mathematical
| contradiction if you can make the theory work, but it leads
| to physical phenomenon that we do not observe?_ Her previous
| video (that triggered the nasty emails)_made this point more
| clearly. She 's saying that there is a mathematical
| contradiction between having minimal areas and Lorentz
| invariance. This forces us to choose to have one or the
| other. Minimal areas leads to a testable and now falsified
| theory. Lorentz invariance has yet to lead to a theory that
| doesn't blow up with unnormalizable infinities, let alone one
| which can produce a testable prediction.
|
| _I can not make those two arguments jive in to a cohesive
| whole. Not that it can not happen, but I can not from this
| video and that is the conclusion, or similar, I normally
| reach when watching Sabine 's videos and why I do not watch
| or recommend them generally._ Is that Sabine's fault, or
| yours? This video is much lower quality than her normal ones.
| And yet absolutely none of what you think are flaws, do I
| think is one. Every one of your objections has an answer that
| jives. And the conclusion is agreed with by John Baez, whose
| background on this specific topic is much stronger than
| yours.
|
| Perhaps, rather than looking for things to complain, you
| should try figuring out what she actually said. In my
| experience it is logically internally consistent. Even though
| it skewers some sacred cows.
| davorak wrote:
| > Well, if you want a simple argument from authority, John
| Carlos Baez's confirmation that she's right is pretty good.
| If you want a better one, she very rarely gets any of her
| facts wrong.
|
| It is not what I want. I read the linked comment by John
| Carlos Baez[1] and do not agree with the wording of your
| conclusion "that she's right". There is some alignment, but
| you have removed any nuance.
|
| > Again, that would be a very different video. In 10
| minutes for a general audience, you have to make decisions
| about what you will and will not cover. It's not a valid
| criticism of her that she made a choice. Particularly in a
| video that she disclaims as a personal rant.
|
| My specific comments are about why I do not find value in
| Sabine's video not about not about a general audience. The
| over all arch is a point that I do not find her videos or
| the discussions in the comments valuable on hacker news in
| response to Dang's comment:
|
| > so I think we can give this thread a second chance
|
| [2]
|
| So my comments are not about how she decides to reach her
| general audience.
|
| I think this covers some of your pervious comments too.
|
| > This is not according to her, this is according to an
| argument that comes from Lee Smolin.
|
| "What I said in my pervious video" is what she said in her
| video. So this idea may not have originated from her, but
| my word choice is correct by saying according to her. This
| does no assert she came up with the idea or is 100% sure of
| it.
|
| > A region of space that has a specific amount of area
| will, according to special relativity, ...
|
| > ...
|
| > Please note that John Baez, who worked on LQG for 10
| years, specifically complimented her presentation of this
| particular issue. Her description of where research stands
| is accurate.
|
| My comment about about the video and why it is not useful
| to me or useful seeing it on HN, not about the correctness
| or incorrectness of Sabine's statements which is what you
| seem to be addressing here.
|
| > It was a good place to start. After 20 years of research
| that has failed to turn that idea into anything workable,
| most people would conclude that this is an analogy that
| will not apply in the end. But apparently Rovelli gets mad
| at anyone who doubts that it will work out. One of the
| triggers for this rant was whatever Rovelli said to her in
| private. Personally, I excuse her for being human here in
| her reaction.
|
| You are making some assumptions here and empathizing with
| Sabine, which is understandable. Arrogant Physics professor
| gets mad when someone questions their pet theory is not
| unrealistic but is not headline worthy either. Does it
| matter if he was mad? Is this any different than any other
| celebrity spat? If not, that is not what I read HN for.
|
| > Rants generally do not come with properly cited
| references.
|
| I know it was a rant, I saw the labeling. That does not
| help make it good material for HN or lead HN commenters to
| interesting and curious comments though. The reverse is
| often true regardless of the source of the rant.
|
| > No, it really is the gotcha it claims to be. It's
| directly inside of the math. This demonstration is no
| different than, say, proving that sqrt(2) is irrational by
| proving that if you start with the smallest fraction that
| equals it, you can find a smaller one.
|
| Physics is not practiced like math though, so it is
| different. A contradiction in physics theories is not the
| same as saying true = false in math. Experimental evidence
| and observation rule the day until we find the fundamental
| laws of physics, after that it will be more like math(well
| at least some physics will).
|
| > Her previous video (that triggered the nasty emails)_made
| this point more clearly. She's saying that there is a
| mathematical contradiction between having minimal areas and
| Lorentz invariance. This forces us to choose to have one or
| the other. Minimal areas leads to a testable and now
| falsified theory. Lorentz invariance has yet to lead to a
| theory that doesn't blow up with unnormalizable infinities,
| let alone one which can produce a testable prediction.
|
| Comments like this, and much of what you said before this,
| lead me to think Sabine's pervious video would be less
| likely to cause me to write a comment like I did.
|
| > Is that Sabine's fault, or yours?
|
| Nothing I have said is about Sabine being at fault of
| something. I can stand corrected if something I wrote was
| too misleading though.
|
| > This video is much lower quality than her normal ones.
|
| This seems like it would argue against Dang giving this
| Sabine video an exception.
|
| > Perhaps, rather than looking for things to complain,
|
| That is not what happened here. My response was to Dang
| about giving this video a exception and the comment on
| "sensational style".
|
| > you should try figuring out what she actually said.
|
| And if I was having a conversation with Sabine or if I was
| corresponding with her then both people are responsible for
| reaching out to cover any communication gaps. That is not
| what this is, this was Sabine's rant as labeled by her and
| you.
|
| > Even though it skewers some sacred cows.
|
| I do not think Sabine's videos "skewer sacred cows". At
| least not any in the physics community at large, maybe some
| sub disciplines. The physic's community at large does not
| seem to have many if any sacred cows, that is my experience
| at least.
|
| [1]
| https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/113285631281744111
|
| [2]
|
| > so I think we can give this thread a second chance
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41811140
| btilly wrote:
| Your complaint is that it is hard to extract truth from
| her videos.
|
| However extracting truth from what you said is trivial if
| you believe that what she reports as fact, is fact. And
| what she reports as her opinion, is her opinion. If you
| pick any 5 videos you want, I'd be happy to help you spot
| check them. Just like I did with this one.
|
| Now I'd like to pull out three specific issues.
|
| 1. Your point about settling physics with experiment is
| not applicable here. The result is about what the math
| will predict if you make a specific assumption in a
| specific mathematical model. Testing that is like trying
| to test the frequency with which 1+1 gives you 3. It's a
| question of logic. What becomes a question of experiment
| is whether a particular model is a good description of
| reality.
|
| 2. She may not be skewering cows that are sacred to all
| of physics. But a lot of her videos skewer cows that are
| sacred to some group, and she's constantly getting an
| earful about it.
|
| 3. Why this video? The reason why I voted for it was not
| quality, but topic. I think it is very important to be
| aware how easily branches of science become
| pseudoscience. And with John Baez' support, it's clear
| that her complaint is more than simple sour grapes. See
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41808404 for some of
| my thoughts that are specific to this topic.
| davorak wrote:
| > Your complaint is that it is hard to extract truth from
| her videos. > > However extracting truth from what you
| said is trivial if you believe that what she reports as
| fact, is fact. And what she reports as her opinion, is
| her opinion.
|
| So the level of doubt and or critical thinking I apply to
| Sabine's videos is not much different than what I would
| apply to a physic paper out of journal and I feel like I
| can often apply less than what I apply while reading many
| popular science articles. That is no where close to the
| level of trust I would put in to a well grounded physics
| text book though.
|
| This sort of doubt is critical to most people while
| reading journal articles, double checking, verifying, not
| assuming ground truth for what a paper says to uncover
| hidden assumptions, mistakes, and differing
| interpretations.
|
| ~"Just believe" is not conductive to learning science and
| is not going to make for curious or simulating
| conversation.
|
| > If you pick any 5 videos you want, I'd be happy to help
| you spot check them. Just like I did with this one.
|
| You did not extract the value from this video though. You
| reference other resources to try and get the value. I am
| not interested in doing something similar with her other
| videos.
|
| > 1. Your point about settling physics with experiment is
| not applicable here. The result is about what the math
| will predict if you make a specific assumption in a
| specific mathematical model. Testing that is like trying
| to test the frequency with which 1+1 gives you 3. It's a
| question of logic. What becomes a question of experiment
| is whether a particular model is a good description of
| reality.
|
| If physical reality does not, can not matter to resolving
| a question, your question may not be about physics. This
| one point is not enough, like I said original, by itself,
| to make the apparent contradiction obviously non
| interesting.
|
| > 2. She may not be skewering cows that are sacred to all
| of physics. But a lot of her videos skewer cows that are
| sacred to some group, and she's constantly getting an
| earful about it.
|
| Is the earful about any sacred cows though? Are their
| other viable explanations You may have evidence for you
| conclusion, but it is not here.
|
| > I think it is very important to be aware how easily
| branches of science become pseudoscience.
|
| Sabine asserts this has happened to quantum loop gravity
| but doe snot show it. If I thought what she said was true
| and I wanted to make convincing case I would have to go
| out and do considerable research and put together a case,
| I could not simply reference this video.
|
| > And with John Baez' support, it's clear that her
| complaint is more than simple sour grapes.
|
| Sour grapes normally means that when someone can not have
| something they want they go negative on it instead. Does
| this saying even apply here? Nothing in the video made me
| think she was sour about anything.
| btilly wrote:
| My lengthy comment was not about value extracted in this
| video, it was addressing your doubts about the
| information in it. I personally got value from the
| subject of the video itself. Which we did not discuss.
|
| It really appears to me that you weren't trying to
| address any value. What you describe as critical thinking
| was merely searching for ways to object without thinking
| too hard about whether it was a fair objection. As an
| example I point to your failure to follow the trivial
| mathematical argument saying that LQG models either have
| to accept that there is no lower bound on quantized area,
| or that they violate Lorentz invariance. You kept trying
| to insist that this sounded like she was contradicting
| herself (she wasn't), and this argument should be
| resolved by some sort of experiment.
|
| If this is truly the critical thinking that you take to
| research papers, you're probably not doing nearly as good
| a job of reading them as you imagine. Meanwhile, back in
| the real world, I make a habit of attempting to figure
| out how trustworthy and well-informed each source is. And
| how objectively they report on what they think that they
| know. I'm extremely pleased with Sabine. She's very
| careful to only report as fact things which are true.
| She's willing to express opinions with no regard to who
| will agree or disagree. And she's clear on the difference
| between her knowledge, opinion, and speculation.
|
| Because of this, I've learned to trust her claims on
| things that I can't independently verify. Her personal
| reports on the behavior within LQG is of interest to me.
| The independent confirmation from John Baez, who I've
| known for years, trust, and has a completely different
| point of view, makes her description extremely
| trustworthy. Her claims on that topic are not something
| that I can independently verify other than to decide
| which primary sources I trust. And I've learned to trust
| both Sabine and John.
| j_crick wrote:
| When I read the submission title here I immediately wondered if
| it was Sabine again and, well, there she was.
| knowitnone wrote:
| she said some outlandish stuff in one video - I don't remember
| which. I refuse to watch any more of her videos.
| naasking wrote:
| In other words, "she said something that completely
| contradicted my prejudices and the cognitive dissonance was
| uncomfortable, so I memory-holed what she said and
| immediately dismissed her claims as non-factual and avoid her
| from now on because I never want to experience that
| dissonance again".
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| I don't like Sabine Hossenfelder's videos because they're too
| short. When I want to relax after work by playing a game while
| listening to someone drone on on youtube on a deep and esoteric
| subject, her videos end way too soon, and with an advertisement
| for her sponsor.
|
| I just want to hear some rambling boffin expound for an hour in
| the background on some matter that can't possibly raise more
| than a few hundred views. I decided I don't like popular
| science videos any more. Boo.
| TexanFeller wrote:
| Sean Carroll is my go to guy for long form physics and
| philosophy discussions that have some depth but are still
| accessible. His October AMA on the Mindscape podcast is over
| 4 hours, but I haven't listened to it yet.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation. I'll give it a go.
| Timwi wrote:
| > When I want to relax after work by playing a game while
| listening to someone drone on on youtube on a deep and
| esoteric subject
|
| Angela Collier is the answer to your plea.
| sterlind wrote:
| I want to like Collier, but she has a patronizing,
| gatekeeping edge to some of her videos that I don't like.
| She also spends nearly as much time talking about science
| communication as she does actually communicating science.
|
| Like for example, her QCD video was about how explaining
| QCD to laypersons is impossible. She dunked on Feynman
| diagrams, first as not being real math, then because its
| antimatter notation makes laypeople think antimatter is
| time-reversed matter. ...which it is, iiuc, as far as the
| calculations of quantum field theory are concerned. Also
| that QCD is misleading because color charge isn't actual
| colors, as if viewers are doomed to take the color-wheel
| analogy literally.
|
| But this is a cynically pessimistic view to have as a
| science communicator. PBS Spacetime has covered QCD.
| Feynman's QED book teaches the layperson how diffraction,
| lensing, magnetic repulsion etc. work in terms of Feynman
| diagrams he shows you how to work through!
|
| Why not teach science, rather than spread snark? Why not
| bring the audience up to you, rather than talking down to
| them?
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Thanks, I'll try here too.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| long ago i coin: scientific physics
|
| an analogy with astrology and astronomy fits perfectly.
|
| Remember those great men who did groundbreaking work that
| completely changed the fabric of society? Consensus my a, their
| work is self evident. If you need someone to tell you something
| is a great accomplishment it apparently isn't obvious.
|
| If there is no revolution triggered by [say] relativity theory it
| doesn't qualify for the list of great discoveries. You need
| people to tell you how great it is.
|
| funny as hell
| sega_sai wrote:
| Physicist here.. I will not give Sabine more YouTube views,
| justifying clickbait titles. Below is just my opinion. There are
| certainly issues in theoretical physics. I think particularly
| string theory was a massive waste of effort in physics and to
| some degree illustration of failure of the whole system. Despite
| that most of other physics I would say in sensible shape, it is
| just harder to make progress given that we have to push to higher
| energies, more accurate measurements etc. The question whether
| there will be major advance in fundamental physics to some degree
| depends on new discoveries. Many people are pushing, but it is
| not guaranteed.
| elashri wrote:
| I know that this will probably be down-voted to death but I don't
| like these hyperbolic takes. I know that Sabine did use this
| title for click-bate purposes that she is now mostly doing
| YouTube videos (she had horrible experience that unfortunately
| not rare in scientific community [1]). I understand that the
| field of particle physics which is the corner stone in
| fundamental physics is not showing the great advances that it
| used to have a couple of decades ago. But I think people really
| don't understand that the field is still advancing and although
| these advances are less catchy to be reported in mainstream (and
| don't get traction if posted on HN) it is not dead or dying.
|
| There is a reason why we had a particle data group updating the
| PDG [2] each two years (you can order physical copies for free
| but please don't do if you don't need one). People were writing
| about that since after the big discovery of Higgs boson (that was
| 12 years ago). We still have a lot of measurement and puzzles
| that is less about unification theory that people usually would
| talk about. Theory people are coming up with all different ideas
| even if some are not testable now but that job of theorist is
| mainly come up with ideas and help bridge the gap later.
|
| I would suggest everyone interested in this topic to read the
| electroweak current chapter of the book called "How experiments
| End" [3] to understand a historical example to how we approached
| the standard model when it was first proposed. Most of the
| particle physicists will not work on supersymmetry, string theory
| and these catchy theories that people will hear about. Most of
| the work is advancing and answering (and raise questions) piece
| by piece. Here is an example of interesting results that help us
| answer some questions [4]. Also I'm not saying that the field had
| its own problems and can improve on many aspects. I'm just
| against these extreme and hot takes that claims it is in a crisis
| or dying.
|
| for people who posted the comment from John Carlos, I like this
| toot/tweet/comment by Sven Geier [5] which was what John replied.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm a particle physicist and have a skin in the game.
|
| [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiBlGDfRU8
|
| [2] https://pdg.lbl.gov/
|
| [3]
| https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo596942...
|
| [4] https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/new-results-from-
| th...
|
| [5] https://mathstodon.xyz/@SvenGeier/113284011925646281
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| Seems like you are not downvoted on HN for rational
| argumentation.
|
| I still think sabine has a point. When we consider occam's
| razor string theory is absurd. Just because einstein used math
| to show our perception of the world is flawed, doesn't mean it
| is likely repeatable with an overly complicated mathematical
| model.
|
| Yet we live in a world, where highly decorated physicists spin
| a tale of consciousness beeing enabled by the collapse of the
| wave function (and other absurd stuff like many world
| interpretation). This wasted also my time, because it confused
| me for a while.
|
| Let religion for the religious, philosophy to the philosopher.
| Physics should be a science based on observation.
| elashri wrote:
| My point was that sabine is claiming that the field is dying
| (or in a crisis). You can argue against string theory and
| quantum gravity research as much as you want. But this will
| not warrant sabine's conclusions about particle physics and
| why we should invest in other areas instead. She is doing
| this for almost a decade now.
|
| And I don't understand your point about statistical
| interpretation and how it is related to being a religion.
| Pick up any of the mainstream interpretation and start doing
| calculations of lets say ground state energy of H atom and
| you will get the same results.
|
| All mainstream interpretations yields the same results if
| calculations are done "correctly". The shut up and calculate
| works pretty well across interpretation because of two things
| you have to consider
|
| The first thing is that all interpretations rely on four
| things to be able to do the calculations. ( I simplified a
| little bit)
|
| 1- Hilbert spaces to represent quantum states
|
| 2- Operators for observables (like momentum and energy)
|
| 3- Unitary evolution of states through the Schrodinger
| equation
|
| 4- Born's rule for calculating probabilities of measurement
| outcomes
|
| Thus, the underlying equations are the same regardless of
| interpretation.
|
| The second thing you have to understand the role of
| Interpretations. They aim to explain what the mathematical
| structure of QM means. They differ on issues like: collapse,
| Is it real (Copenhagen)? just an apparent phenomenon (Many-
| Worlds)? or governed by additional variables (Bohmian
| mechanics) or the question of Determinism. Is the universe
| fundamentally deterministic (Bohmian mechanics)? or
| indeterministic (Copenhagen)?
|
| The last thing is a really philosophical question about what
| exists physically--wavefunctions, particles, or multiple
| worlds?
|
| These philosophical questions don't affect the numerical
| predictions of quantum theory and that's part of the reason
| you shouldn't learn physics from science communication books.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| Thank you for the reply. I absolutely agree, but it's not
| only science communication and journalists that try to see
| it in a philosophical way.
|
| Roger Penrose for example (as far as i can tell a highly
| respected physicist) is arguing that the collapse of the
| wave function happens inside the brain and enables our
| consiciousness.
|
| Who am I to criticise that? I think we should be open to
| anything in science. On the other hand when one tries to do
| philosophy, one should also understand the field. For an
| outsider it looks like people try to flatter themselves
| with their superior mathematical skills.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| What if String Theory is a Sophon Virus?
| js8 wrote:
| Then it's not really all that well made, frankly, because one
| of the most popular YT physicists is immune to said virus.
|
| But - I have always dismissed cryptocurrencies thinking "people
| can't be that stupid". If I had not, I could have made some
| money. So maybe Sophons didn't expect Youtube to be a thing,
| either.
| herodotus wrote:
| This might be too weird to be true, but when I heard that Geoff
| Hinton got the Nobel prize for Physics, I wondered if the prize
| committee was having trouble finding "real" physicists who had
| made fundamental advances....
|
| This is not meant to knock Prof Hinton. These are his own words:
|
| "I'm not a physicist, I have very high respect for physics,"
| Hinton said. "I dropped out of physics after my first year at
| university because I couldn't do the complicated math. So,
| getting an award in physics was very surprising to me. I'm very
| pleased that the Nobel committee recognised that there's been
| huge progress in the area of artificial neural networks."
| atmosx wrote:
| It is evident that they need more than five categories.
| Awarding Nobels to individuals who are not particularly (if at
| all) well-versed in the subject at hand, even if they
| contributed to a breakthrough in the field, directly or
| indirectly discredits the prize.
|
| Indeed, the online memes about Hinton and Hassabis being "a bit
| of a <physicist|chemist> myself!" are justified, in my opinion.
| empiko wrote:
| I agree with you. What is also telling is that there is no
| particularly strong reaction from the physics community that
| someone obvious was wrongfully omitted.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > What is also telling is that there is no particularly
| strong reaction from the physics community that someone
| obvious was wrongfully omitted.
|
| A few days before the announcement of the Physics Nobel Prize
| Sabine Hossenfelder created a video about her predictions for
| the Physics Nobel Prize. Likely all mentioned researchers in
| this video did more for the advancement of physics research
| than John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton:
|
| > Who Will Win This Year's Nobel Prize in Physics? My
| Speculations
|
| > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMTNHqEpTnw
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| I think the problem is more fundamental. Newtonian mechanics is a
| science based on observation. Mathematics is just used to build a
| model that describes _how_ the reality behaves, not why.
|
| Now Einstein is very special, because he proved that our human
| perception of space and time is wrong. When we think about the
| allegory of the cave, we got a glimpse of the reality we couldnt
| see before.
|
| Nowadays every phyiscist wants to be the next einstein that uses
| mathematics to show us something about reality. The problem is
| that einstein had good reasons for his ideas. The constant speed
| of light didn't really work with maxwells equations. The model at
| that time didn't correctly describe the observations and the
| maths he used to solve that is rather elegant and simple.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| This seems like a narrow view given that there are plenty of
| unanswered questions in chaos theory, etc. but physicists who
| think about quantum stuff typically don't like to consider the
| other physics Revolution of the 20th century as equivalent to
| theirs.
| meindnoch wrote:
| I knew from the title it's gonna be Sabine Hossenfelder. Her
| videos are just clickbait at this point.
| davidgerard wrote:
| Is this Dang turning titles into Betteridge questions again? The
| original does not have a question mark.
| teekert wrote:
| You know how some people seem knowledgeable until they talk about
| your field? Well for me (molecular biology and genomics) this
| never happens with Sabine.
|
| So, even though much of this is over my head, I grant her much
| credence.
|
| FWIW.
| Ono-Sendai wrote:
| Sabine is often right, but I think she's wrong here about Lorentz
| invariance being a problem, or at least a problem in the way
| she's saying.
|
| Lorentz transformations are never going to length-contract the
| underlying fabric of space/spacetime. Relativistic length
| contractions contract moving objects, not the underlying
| spacetime.
|
| In fact it's a strange and basic misunderstanding to have.
| auggierose wrote:
| Depending on your reference coordinate system, space is
| transformed. That is the entire point of relativity theory. You
| might be misunderstanding things here.
| Ono-Sendai wrote:
| Coordinates are transformed, not the actual space. Objects
| are length-contracted due to the electric field being length
| contracted.
| naasking wrote:
| Sabine is correct. All objects in a spacetime are anchored to
| that spacetime, so if spacetime has a minimum length, then
| length contraction of moving objects has a detectable lower
| limit, thus violating Lorentz invariance.
| Ono-Sendai wrote:
| She seems to be talking about spacetime itself being Lorentz
| contracted though.
|
| it's true that a sufficiently fast moving object would be
| length contracted so much that it started interacting with
| the minimal LQG length, which would violate Lorentz
| invariance. Depending on how big the LQG loops are, that
| could be a fanstastically high speed that isn't achievable in
| the universe though.
| naasking wrote:
| Continuously saying "minimum length could just be smaller"
| is a god of the gaps argument. Technically correct but
| wildly suspicious, particularly if your theory doesn't
| actually say what the minimum length ought to be, eg. it's
| borderline not falsifiable if you can keep moving the
| goalposts.
|
| I assume the paper she and Brian Keating are talking about
| were very explicit in how they tested this property and how
| Lorentz invariance was expected to be violated, so you
| could check the paper for specifics.
| openrisk wrote:
| Her choice of background for this video and the matching imprint
| on her blouse gives us maybe a hint that "fundamental" physics is
| too broad a field to actually die :-) I.e., there are ongoing and
| deep puzzles e.g., in dark matter / dark energy where
| observational data keep accumulating and at some point a critical
| mass (pun) of evidence _may_ reshape our ideas about how the
| universe fundamentally works. The new ideas need have nothing in
| common with pre-existing mind sets of how things work.
|
| Now about the string theory / quantum gravity furore, after
| decades of work by arguably extremely bright people its pretty
| clear that Nature in the current juncture is not giving us enough
| clues to proceed. This should not be stressful - Nature is not a
| Hollywood production studio that needs to churn gee-wow
| "experiences" every season. But Sayre's law applies rather well
| [1] "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely
| proportional to the value of the issues at stake.". What is at
| stake here is the ego of a few individuals that assumed otherwise
| (i.e., that a post-Einstein revolution is imminent) and the
| (relatively minor in the scheme of things) research funding of
| this particular niche of physics.
|
| Theoretical physics is not the only domain bouncing regularly
| between "hypes" and "winters", as the recent Nobel prize for
| Physics clearly demonstrates.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law
| drpossum wrote:
| I'm not hot on what fundamental physics looks like now or in the
| future, but there's an attitude that Sabine promotes that I see
| echoed in a lot of comments here which feeds into problems with
| research.
|
| I _don 't_ think the work put into studying fundamentals was "a
| waste of time" thus far. It's dangerous to label experiments and
| ideas that were acted on in good faith as the best options at the
| time but didn't yield positive results as missteps.
|
| Scientists need to be allowed to do work like this without fear
| because to do so otherwise leads to perverse incentives and you
| end up with things like lots of studies that can't be reproduced
| because of p-hacking or worse.
|
| Arguing bad faith after the fact is awfully hard without real
| evidence and if you're going to discount anyone with enthusiasm
| for their research proposal based on enthusiasm alone you're not
| going to be left with a healthy program. I don't blame anyone who
| supported things like supersymmetry as an example for something
| which hasn't panned out. we're still left with a major mystery
| and big questions and it says we need to rethink things in more
| difficult directions.
| Log_out_ wrote:
| The whole of human society is a combustion engine for life,
| barely held from going full self destruction by a science
| driven economy consuming resources in a unsustainable way.
| Science is what kept us peaceful and nice since WW2. And the
| breakthroughs are needed not some time far far away ,they are
| needed now. This is not about the purity of approach or some
| hypocritical game. This is a dependancy of life and death on
| the results ..
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| I'm not in any way an expert in this area, but here is what I
| see. I don't think the argument is that it's being said as "bad
| faith after the fact". I think the argument is that the
| approach was told it had fundamental flaws. Those were ignored
| / denied. People continued to invest in it and suck up all of
| the research and bright minds in the field. Decades later it
| still has those fundamental flaws and has taken over all other
| possible avenues of progress as it has all grant money and and
| the majority of all departments working on it.
|
| It's more "you were told this is broken before. It's decades
| later and it's broken in the same way. At what point to you
| admit that this approach isn't working so try something else?"
| And the answer is "No, we're going to keep digging deeper".
|
| Fundamentally, approaches need to be falsifiable. If your
| theory is "falsifiable" in the small scale but ultimately
| unfalsifiable in the large scale then it's is fundamentally
| unfalsifiable and we can't use it to lead experimentation.
|
| It's a breadth vs depth search question. We've lost all breadth
| of search in physics, because a little ways back we stumbled
| upon a branch that happened to have a (for practical purposes)
| infinite number of subbranches relating to ways to roll up
| string dimensions. So physics is stuck exploring all of those
| sub-branches instead of backtracking one level and exploring
| any other parts of the tree.
|
| The argument is that everyone is looking under the lamppost for
| the keys. After 4 decades of searching there, maybe it's time
| to search somewhere else. And the argument is made even strong
| when decades back they were told, "Hey, I didn't drop by keys
| by the lamppost. I dropped them somewhere else". And yet most
| people keep looking there.
| drpossum wrote:
| Sabine's argument has been frequently bad faith after the
| fact and currently. Just skimming some of her written work:
|
| "Before the Large Hadron Collider turned on, particle
| physicists claimed that it would either confirm or rule out
| supersymmetry. ... The answer is that the LHC indeed did not
| rule out supersymmetry, it never could."
|
| https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/04/did-w-boson-
| just-b...
|
| "I hope they'll finally come around and see that they have
| tried for several decades to solve a problem that doesn't
| exist"
|
| https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/02/what-does-it-
| mean-...
|
| Here she says physicists will just keep building bigger
| colliders because they can and not on merit
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-
| doesnt-...
|
| Here she said CERN's push for an FCC is "full of lies"
|
| http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/12/cern-produces-
| marke...
|
| When people are accused of ignoring or dismissing credible
| points where a program is legitimately problematic is exactly
| an accusation of operating "bad faith". "Good faith" means
| doing legitimate and believable science with the best
| information. These are claims it was done to the contrary.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| > Sabine's argument has been frequently bad faith after the
| fact and currently. Just skimming some of her written work:
|
| I want to make sure to clarify your point before
| continuing. Are you saying that Sabine makes arguments in
| bad faith? Or are you saying that Sabine is saying that
| many physicists are making arguments in bad faith? I
| believe that you are stating the former - but I want to
| make sure of that before continuing - if not, then
| apologies as I misunderstood you. I believe that she is
| stating the latter (stating that physicists are making bad
| faith claims), and that is the central point of her
| concern.
|
| So again, I'll preface this with saying I'm a layman here
| and don't have the expertise to speak with depth of
| knowledge.
|
| Let's take the first link you provided (simply because it's
| first and the only one I dug into). Her claim is that
| physicists are making bad faith claims.
|
| She said that prior to building the previous version of the
| LHC, physicists were pushing for it to be built in part
| because it could either confirm or disprove supersymmetry.
| More specifically that Supersymmetry was "falsifiable" and
| that building the LHC would allow the physics community to
| either confirm or dismiss it as a theory. She (in the
| video) gave references to multiple papers that made that
| claim. I didn't go read the specific papers, but I give her
| the benefit of the doubt that the papers make those claims.
| Specifically the implicit/explicit claims were that the LHC
| is needed/justified because afterwards we would be able to
| confirm or refute supersymetry.
|
| The LHC is built, none of the expected evidence shows up.
| So as a result is Supersymetry now refuted? No, now the
| same supporters say "well that just eliminates one part of
| it, there are still all of these other ways it could show
| up".
|
| If that's the case, then building the LHC could _never_
| have refuted supersymetry. And if that is true, then it was
| a false claim and a false justification for building the
| LHC. And from my reading of it she seems to be correct.
|
| Again it is her side of the story but: if someone says
| doing X will mean that our theory is shown to either be
| true or false, we do X and they then state "we still don't
| know if our theory is true or false", then it seems like
| that claim was wrong. And her point is, people in the
| community need to step up and say yes the claim was wrong
| when we made it. Particularly so, because they are using
| the same exact justification for building an even larger
| LHC. If your reasoning was wrong before, how can you use
| the same reasoning now to justify it.
|
| _(Side point I 'm not saying whether the LHC should have
| been built or not, or about any of the other physics
| theories related to the LHC that could be
| supported/refuted, I'm specifically just talking about
| those supersymetry claims confirm/falsify claims)._
|
| So that all is my read of half of her argument, and it
| seems pretty strong. But her general complaints about the
| current state of particle physics seem to go further. It's
| not just that scientists made a faulty claim and made a
| mistake, it's that they knew it at the time and still made
| the claim anyway. And that others in the know didn't speak
| up because it was to their benefit.
|
| And that's I think the core of the second half of her
| general point. There are now a number of areas of particle
| physics where the area (string theory, supersymetry, ...)
| have an enormously broad label that can be applied to
| anything and no way to refute them. Every time one of them
| is "refuted" they then grow a new head and say "but aha you
| haven't refuted this part". In addition an anomalous
| behavior is seen in physics they after the fact find a way
| to tweak parameters to make their theory "explain" what was
| seen. They are theories without constraints - they can be
| used to explain anything. And each time it's wrong a new
| flavor can be created to give a new avenue.
|
| And somehow there is no reconciliation for this. Either put
| forward something that shows your theory is falsifiable
| once and for all. Or clearly and upfront state that your
| theory can never be falsified (or can't be falsified for
| 1000 years). And if that's the case be honest about it.
|
| The problem is if it really is that the theory can't be
| falsified for 1000 years or can't be falsified at all, then
| in the end it's just philosophy and has no reason to be
| funded the way that it is and to take up all of the
| resources (monetary and cognitive) that it's consuming,
| instead of those resources being used on things that might
| actually give us results in the next 10-100 years.
|
| To me it's a very strong argument.
|
| So why do people keep making these claims? Because it's
| what gets them funding. As long as you say you're doing
| string theory you can get funding. And if string theory has
| an infinite number of possibilities you can get infinite
| funding. And if string theory can never be falsified then
| it can provide funding forever. But if you admit it can
| never be falsified and can never be truly predictive, the
| funding dries up. The only thing that can be falsified is
| one of the 10^10^40th variants of string theory and as soon
| as it is, you just move on to a new variant. That's not
| science.
|
| And a similar argument holds on a smaller scale for
| supersymetry: "You keep asking for money for the LHC to
| once-and-for-all confirm or refute supersymetry, but
| somehow no test in the near future will really ever refute
| it."
|
| Belaboring the point. It's like saying the Flying Spaghetti
| Monster is what makes plants grow. He's omnipotent. When
| nobody is looking he rubs the plant with his appendages and
| they grow. So a physicist says "I need x amount of money to
| pay people to watch a plant 24/7 to show that's what
| happens." If he shows up he's real, if the plant dies it's
| proof he's real. They get the funds, he never shows up and
| the plant still grows. So now they say "oh it's because
| he's omnipotent, so he can turn invisible. I need funds to
| do a similar experiment but enclose the plant in a glass
| box so he can't get in". They do it, and the plant still
| grows, so next time it's "ah yes he can walk through walls
| so instead I now need to do Y experiment...".
|
| Sabine is stating: "In the very beginning you said he's
| omnipotent. There is no test we can do that can falsify
| your theory of him being why plants grow. Every test you
| say could show proof of him, but when it doesn't there is
| always some new power he could have to explain the behavior
| and reason for a new test." Either admit that due to his
| omnipotence there is no test possible to refute the FSM
| existence, or give a test that once and for all will show
| it's not possible. Otherwise the default assumption should
| be your FSM theory is flat our wrong and we're chasing it
| down a forever path.
|
| So I realize this was extremely long, and way more than I
| intended to write, but I think it's a really interesting
| topic on the philosophy of science and how it relates to
| what's going on in the field.
|
| All that said, it's very possible I'm missing your point
| above, and would love to hear the other side of the
| argument if you disagree.
| drpossum wrote:
| I am saying that Sabine is saying that many physicists
| are making arguments in bad faith. Those are what my
| examples intended to show.
| elashri wrote:
| I don't want to discuss whether sabine is making argument
| in bad faith or not. Or if she us just cherry picking
| claims from couple of researchers among thousands
| working/ed on LHC. But it is inaccurate to say the LHC is
| built to search for supersymmetry. The original
| motivation for LHC was Higgs search, we didn't have
| enough energy in Tevatron so people proposed LHC. There
| are other motivations like studying dark matter,
| interactions of quarks and glouns at high energies, b
| physics and matter- anti matter asymmetry, and Beyond
| standard models searches where many of the proposed
| models where SUSY (but not limited to).
|
| I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to judge if
| ignoring all these and focus on SUSY ia bad faith
| argument or not. But one of my problems with sabine is
| that how usually she goes from premises to conclusions
| which in many cases does not work out well.
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