>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.
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).
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.
Sounds like this criticism would be valid for fundamental physics but there are many other physics fields with experimental results that become technology.
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.
> 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.
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.
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: https://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:
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
My theory is that physics went down a parallel path that leads to a dead end. The fork was too far back and nobody is willing to backtrack enough. A part of this is that almost all of modern physics takes mathematical shortcuts of dubious validity because “modern” physics was developed in the era of pencil and paper.
With computer algebra systems and numerical methods new have available to us now a lot of old assumptions ought to be revisited.
Also some theories were ignored for political or even religious reasons. Or as you said, they couldn’t fix some basic issue at the time and just shelved the theory.
Some random examples:
The Many Worlds Interpretation is one of the least “popular” but the only sane and consistent theory of Quantum Mechanics.
One of Einstein’s last collaborations was Kaluza Klein theory which has many excellent features such as smoothly integrating EM and gravitational effects. The maths was too hard at the time so it languished.
Multiple time dimensions (a variant of MWI above) were all completely ignored because one paper “disproved” their feasibility. I read that paper and it only disproved a specific subset of theory space.
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.)
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.
> 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).
> 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.
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.
> Moreover, logistically, not building that accelerator means you quite likely never have it
That's exactly wrong. Who knows if you wait a bit the underlying technologies might cause a step change in price to build and make it so the project actually might get completed. For example waxahatchie vs cern
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.
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.)
> John Carlos Baez (/ˈbaɪ.ɛz/;[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.
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.
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.
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 ..
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.
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."
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.
> 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.
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.
I think you might be inadvertently side-stepping my point. My argument was not about whether the LHC should have been built. It was about whether or not it was a valid justification put forward. I think the LHC should have been built. And while I can't say for sure, I'm pretty sure Sabine would as well. I think in that same video she calls out that it was built for the Higgs, so no discrepancy there.
But it still side steps the point - which is a false justification being provided by people who either should have or did know better - and that never being acknowledged or addressed.
Sorry but how does it constitute a false justification? The short version of the proposal to build LHC was that
" We would like to construct a machine to reach the energy scale we can't currently reach with Tevatron. This will allow us to discover Higgs boson the last building block of standard model and in the process allow us to do other things like study b physics, Quark-Glouns interactions and maybe could find some low mass particles from SUSY and or other beyond standard model theories."
Most of the goals are either achieved (with the main on being higgs
Higgs) or being studied now (remember particle physics is not about unification only) but we failed to see some of things we said we could have seen.
Sorry I have hard time believing that sabine is not cherry picking and twisting facts to support her claims. I don't want to go into attacking personalities and I don't have something with sabine other than her constant stream of unfounded claims about particle physics.
Again you are focusing on something separate from the point I'm discussing. It's is not a question of whether the LHC should have been built. It is also not about whether there were other reasons to build the LHC. I stated that in my initial post - and both of your follow ups have been about that. That is not the topic I (or she) is calling out.
The topic is that of science in general. Falsifiability of theories and arguments in good faith. Most specifically *one* of the numerous reasons provided for the LHC was X. Many people made that argument. That argument was false. People who made the argument either knew it was false or should have known. That is the issue being discussed. Not whether there were other valid reasons to build the LHC - or if those reasons were successful.
It's a bit of hyperbole but it's the equivalent of "lying under oath" to get a conviction. It doesn't matter if the defendant was guilty - and that they were ultimately convicted. It's not ok to "lie under oath" to try to put them behind bars. That is her argument. An expert witness either lied under oath (or was so wrong they shouldn't be considered an expert going forward). And the "courts" should acknowledge and address that. The fact that all of the other experts that all knew he was wrong said nothing is very notable. And we should really address it before that expert witness goes and testifies in another case. All if this is entirely independent of whether the defendant was guilty (which is the point you are raising).
Your argument is "the defendant was guilty, and here is all of this evidence they were guilty. Why are you picking this one expert and their evidence?". And I'm saying it's not about whether the defendant was guilty. That expert is being called out because either they were extremely wrong to the point they shouldn't be an expert, or they knowingly gave false testimony. And in both cases, the other experts in the room who as well knew it he was wrong all remained silent - and did so likely because it benefitted them.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
That only ruled out one particularly broken model (everything revolving directly around the earth). The dominant model at the time had the sun and moon revolving around the earth and everything else revolving around the sun, with epicycles. All the information Galileo was able to present to people was equally consistent with heliocentrism and geocentrism, and Galileo's favored heliocentric model was less elegant and explained no extra data.
(Not entirely for lack of trying, though Galileo's favored rhetorical approach was 'I'm obviously right and you're all idiots', he did work with some others to try to demonstrate the rotation of the earth via displacement of dropped objects, but didn't succeed because it's quite a tricky measurement)
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.
> 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.
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.
Everett proposed that observation happens relative to observer, it's exactly Copernicus's observation. Some people buy it, many don't, so I guess heliocentric style thinking is still counterintuitive. Ironically, an argument against Everett's interpretation is the same Aristotle used against heliocentrism: "it's not supported by observation" (meaning relativity is unobservable).
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.
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.
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
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)
Bose-Einstein statistics, which originated purely from finding a derivation of an equation, without immediately understanding of the true physical meaning of the derivation.
And then Bose-Einstein condensates; a thought-experiment consequence of Bose-Einstein statistics.
Radio waves etc., from formulating Maxwell's equations.
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 ).
No the higgs mechanism was directly proposed from how particles masses were not explainable from the existing model -- so it's clearly in the "surprising observation" category.
The positron was, "oh what if we had this thing that is mathematically possible". Very different. IIRC the discovery was kind of independent. It was in the data the whole time so if the physicists didn't just ignore those "impossible" bubble tracks they might have found it before the math.
If we discovered superluminal tachyons that would definitely count. But we haven't found those.
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.”
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.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
>> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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’.
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
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>
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Schrödinger 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Depending on your reference coordinate system, space is transformed. That is the entire point of relativity theory. You might be misunderstanding things here.
You seem to be of the same opinion as Sabine when it comes down to distinguishing between mathematical modelling, and reality. In mathematics though, coordinate transformation and space transformation are the same thing. How that plays out for the actual physics happening, might be a different thing, but note that you still describe it mathematically.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm way too late for this to be meaningful, but here's what I think! tl;dr -- gravity is the problem, we should focus on experiments and observations for a while, bring in some better mathematics, and continue the long range program of developing quantum theories that include or even produce GR.
I'm just a physics enthusiast. When I became interested in physics, I was initially a sort of partisan in the "realist" camp -- pro Einstein, anti Bohr; liked Verlinde's entropic gravity, distrusted the graviton -- but have come full circle to the opposite view. GR has massive explanatory and predictive power, and an extremely satisfying aesthetic quality, but obviously breaks down behind the curtain of a black hole's event horizon, where we cannot make observations. I say obviously because it predicts a singularity, which is just another way of saying it makes no prediction at all. On the other hand, many of my complaints about QM I now look at as unanswered questions, opportunities for inquiry. QM is based 100% on experimental observations. The theory came together in a rather ad hoc fashion at the beginning of the last century, but as it was more carefully studied theoretically and experimentally, also proved to be highly predictive, even more that GR. Yes there are big ugly, outstanding questions -- measurement collapse, the transition from microscopic quantum behavior to macroscopic classical behavior, the intractability of all but the simplest calculations -- but those are huge areas of knowledge that the future will gradually (or suddenly) fill in, as our understanding moves forward.
So, gravity, not QM, is the problem. We should start with the axioms of quantum mechanics, and look for ways to observe where QM and GR can be measured at the same time. LIGO offers opportunities like this, as the sensitivity of the instrument is well within the quantum regime. Continued study of QCD could make a testable prediction for what exists inside of a black hole. Or continue to study the very fine transitions between energy levels in the nucleus. Mathematically, maybe the Langlands program, with its rather weird, Fourier-like sums of L functions will allow us to model non-linear behavior.
And yes, string theory sort of "jumped the shark" at some point. I'm sure Ed Witten regrets saying that other pursuits were a waste of time. But the thing is, the string theory program is centered on QM, and has shown that QM can naturally produce GR, given certain unrealistic assumptions. That's mathematical progress.
> 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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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".
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
From my personal observation, those whose scientific understanding I admire mostly see little value in what the philosophers have produced. Those who I see admiring the philosophers seldom demonstrate much scientific understanding. Therefore my personal observations do not lead me to the belief that the philosophy helps scientific observation.
You are an illustration. You just argued that one of the most successful scientific theories over the last century should not be considered scientific because it is probabilistic in nature. In so doing you deny all of the evidence for it. Including the theory that allowed us to build the transistors that allow your computer to work.
Evolution these days depends on the theory of population genetics, which is again fundamentally probabilistic in nature. Are you now going to take the position that the theory of evolution is also not scientific?
If so, then your definition of science is so ludicrous that I'm comfortable in dismissing it with derision.
Quantum computers were proposed primarily as a means for physicists to do simulations of quantum mechanics. I don't think the 'they'll be faster at everything' hype came from them, in fact this basically seems to have come from people misunderstanding the point of them. So I don't think physicists have anything to answer for on this, only perhaps pop-sci writers (most of whom don't think have claimed such a thing either).
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.
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.
Amusingly, the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programma - an A-Levels like uni-prep course - has a subject called TOK: Theory of Knowledge with these intentions.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you making an economic argument [pace HRV] that wit is better than distinction for avoiding underproduction of science, if it were to be monetarily compensated solely by its [near-zero] marginal unit returns?
> Je défie qu’on me montre une république ancienne ou moderne dans laquelle il n’y ait pas eu de distinctions. On appelle cela des hochets ! Eh bien ! c’est avec des hochets que l’on mène les hommes. —NB, 18 Floréal X
("Can anyone show me a republic, ancient or modern, without any achievements? They call them swag! OK — swag is how men are led.")
Id have hoped that it isn’t much of any kind of argument, since wit can be an instrument for…
(pace Edward Gibbon — via Feynman*!)
… leading by example
( but also/and by swagger
(Since wit, appropriately weaponized, losslessly communicated, is its own distinction?
)
)
NB hadnt experienced Eurovision, might have expanded his idea of swag..
* >But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous
EDIT: material baubles require a more or less centralized fount of honor (as republics ever had), transmission of wit.. otoh, needs just… a market (of at least one)
It's odd how Hollywood goes to extreme lengths to make people's faces visible under/despite helmets. I wonder if this is related to the fact that we've evolved for some reason to have visible sclera?
1. I saw some Planet of the Apes remake tiktok recently, but the huge sclera pretty much squicked me on their costuming.
(then again, I really appreciated the sclera on Khryusha the pig; maybe because he's not supposed to be a realistic character?)
2. Some coats of arms have battle helmets; some have barred-face helmets. I always figured the latter were designed to make it easier to drink at the beer tent, but maybe even they agreed with Hollywood on the visibility issue?
3. Disney used to have an exercise for animators: make a sack of flour emote. Maybe actors who intend to play hard characters ought to have to do the screen test with a bag over their head?
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.
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 Schrödinger.
You can think of this as the scientific version of the 2 pizza rule.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>> 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 Schrödinger.
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.
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.
> 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 Poincaré, Hendrik Lorentz, Satyendra Nath Bose…
You are adding people by changing the discussion to one where the point no longer makes sense.
I'm focused on how many people were needed to make the conceptual breakthrough from classical thinking to quantum thinking. I'm very explicitly not considering how many people were needed to further develop the idea of QM from there. I'm also not considering various other conceptual breakthroughs. Just how did we go from, "here's a bunch of weird observations that don't make sense," to, "here's a way of thinking that lets us explain them."
The discovery of quarks, color charge quantum number, and Higgs field are part of the further research, and so aren't relevant.
Maxwell was firmly part of classical mechanics. He provided a key foundation, but was not part of the transition.
Boltzmann was key to the creation of statistical mechanics. While converting classical statistical mechanics to QM was a key part of the success of QM, this was not work that Boltzmann was engaged with.
Henri Poincaré did indeed spend a fruitful few months on QM in the last year of his life. Sure, add him to the list.
Hendrik Lorentz contributed to SR, not QM. Yes, he did lecture on SR in the 1920s, but he was lecturing on what Schrödinger has already discovered. He did not originate new ways of thinking to QM.
You have an extremely good point about Satyendra Nath Bose.
So most of the topics you added were not part of the key shift that I was talking about. Most of the researchers that you added did not directly contribute to that theoretical transition.
We need lots of people to create the foundation. Lots to build out the new framework. But very few are needed to develop the new way of thinking that scientists transition to.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
For the context, the video this is a follow up to is helpful (they're both short) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlHvW6k2bcM
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like this criticism would be valid for fundamental physics but there are many other physics fields with experimental results that become technology.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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: https://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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
My theory is that physics went down a parallel path that leads to a dead end. The fork was too far back and nobody is willing to backtrack enough. A part of this is that almost all of modern physics takes mathematical shortcuts of dubious validity because “modern” physics was developed in the era of pencil and paper. With computer algebra systems and numerical methods new have available to us now a lot of old assumptions ought to be revisited.
Also some theories were ignored for political or even religious reasons. Or as you said, they couldn’t fix some basic issue at the time and just shelved the theory.
Some random examples:
The Many Worlds Interpretation is one of the least “popular” but the only sane and consistent theory of Quantum Mechanics.
One of Einstein’s last collaborations was Kaluza Klein theory which has many excellent features such as smoothly integrating EM and gravitational effects. The maths was too hard at the time so it languished.
Multiple time dimensions (a variant of MWI above) were all completely ignored because one paper “disproved” their feasibility. I read that paper and it only disproved a specific subset of theory space.
Etc…
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.)
Btw this potential false falsify also popped up newest Sabine's video: https://youtu.be/NHrL4fkyWKI?si=nCuagTnP3WJIDbSv
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.
> 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).
> 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.
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.
> Moreover, logistically, not building that accelerator means you quite likely never have it
That's exactly wrong. Who knows if you wait a bit the underlying technologies might cause a step change in price to build and make it so the project actually might get completed. For example waxahatchie vs cern
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?
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.
if you want to do applications, engineering will get you a 10% higher salary for the same job.
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.
SUSY was never "established knowledge". It was a stack of increasingly baroque theories that had little or no experimental justification.
ELI5 what is the G2 situation?
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.)
> John Carlos Baez
For those like me who didn't know, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Baez
> John Carlos Baez (/ˈbaɪ.ɛz/;[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.
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.
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/.
And https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=johncarlosbaez!
Perhaps he'll contribute to this thread (or perhaps it would waste his time)
And he was known on Usenet and sci.physics before the World Wide Web was invented...
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.
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 ..
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I think you might be inadvertently side-stepping my point. My argument was not about whether the LHC should have been built. It was about whether or not it was a valid justification put forward. I think the LHC should have been built. And while I can't say for sure, I'm pretty sure Sabine would as well. I think in that same video she calls out that it was built for the Higgs, so no discrepancy there.
But it still side steps the point - which is a false justification being provided by people who either should have or did know better - and that never being acknowledged or addressed.
Sorry but how does it constitute a false justification? The short version of the proposal to build LHC was that
" We would like to construct a machine to reach the energy scale we can't currently reach with Tevatron. This will allow us to discover Higgs boson the last building block of standard model and in the process allow us to do other things like study b physics, Quark-Glouns interactions and maybe could find some low mass particles from SUSY and or other beyond standard model theories."
Most of the goals are either achieved (with the main on being higgs Higgs) or being studied now (remember particle physics is not about unification only) but we failed to see some of things we said we could have seen.
Sorry I have hard time believing that sabine is not cherry picking and twisting facts to support her claims. I don't want to go into attacking personalities and I don't have something with sabine other than her constant stream of unfounded claims about particle physics.
Again you are focusing on something separate from the point I'm discussing. It's is not a question of whether the LHC should have been built. It is also not about whether there were other reasons to build the LHC. I stated that in my initial post - and both of your follow ups have been about that. That is not the topic I (or she) is calling out.
The topic is that of science in general. Falsifiability of theories and arguments in good faith. Most specifically *one* of the numerous reasons provided for the LHC was X. Many people made that argument. That argument was false. People who made the argument either knew it was false or should have known. That is the issue being discussed. Not whether there were other valid reasons to build the LHC - or if those reasons were successful.
It's a bit of hyperbole but it's the equivalent of "lying under oath" to get a conviction. It doesn't matter if the defendant was guilty - and that they were ultimately convicted. It's not ok to "lie under oath" to try to put them behind bars. That is her argument. An expert witness either lied under oath (or was so wrong they shouldn't be considered an expert going forward). And the "courts" should acknowledge and address that. The fact that all of the other experts that all knew he was wrong said nothing is very notable. And we should really address it before that expert witness goes and testifies in another case. All if this is entirely independent of whether the defendant was guilty (which is the point you are raising).
Your argument is "the defendant was guilty, and here is all of this evidence they were guilty. Why are you picking this one expert and their evidence?". And I'm saying it's not about whether the defendant was guilty. That expert is being called out because either they were extremely wrong to the point they shouldn't be an expert, or they knowingly gave false testimony. And in both cases, the other experts in the room who as well knew it he was wrong all remained silent - and did so likely because it benefitted them.
I am saying that Sabine is saying that many physicists are making arguments in bad faith. Those are what my examples intended to show.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.”
I'd say that Galileo spotting the phases of Venus was also a big deal.
That only ruled out one particularly broken model (everything revolving directly around the earth). The dominant model at the time had the sun and moon revolving around the earth and everything else revolving around the sun, with epicycles. All the information Galileo was able to present to people was equally consistent with heliocentrism and geocentrism, and Galileo's favored heliocentric model was less elegant and explained no extra data.
(Not entirely for lack of trying, though Galileo's favored rhetorical approach was 'I'm obviously right and you're all idiots', he did work with some others to try to demonstrate the rotation of the earth via displacement of dropped objects, but didn't succeed because it's quite a tricky measurement)
Before Newton, Kepler already figured out that orbits were ellipses. Newton figured out why orbits are ellipses.
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.
1. is a common belief, but mistaken. Copernicus didn't get rid of epicycles: https://farside.ph.utexas.edu/books/Syntaxis/Almagest/node4....
> 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.
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.
Everett proposed that observation happens relative to observer, it's exactly Copernicus's observation. Some people buy it, many don't, so I guess heliocentric style thinking is still counterintuitive. Ironically, an argument against Everett's interpretation is the same Aristotle used against heliocentrism: "it's not supported by observation" (meaning relativity is unobservable).
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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)
Bose-Einstein statistics, which originated purely from finding a derivation of an equation, without immediately understanding of the true physical meaning of the derivation.
And then Bose-Einstein condensates; a thought-experiment consequence of Bose-Einstein statistics.
Radio waves etc., from formulating Maxwell's equations.
The Higgs.
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 ).
No the higgs mechanism was directly proposed from how particles masses were not explainable from the existing model -- so it's clearly in the "surprising observation" category.
The positron was, "oh what if we had this thing that is mathematically possible". Very different. IIRC the discovery was kind of independent. It was in the data the whole time so if the physicists didn't just ignore those "impossible" bubble tracks they might have found it before the math.
If we discovered superluminal tachyons that would definitely count. But we haven't found those.
(1) is also limited by imagination
Isn't it (2) that's limited by imagination? Nobody imagined quantum theory, they observed it first.
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.”
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.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
>> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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).
Off topic, but a bent towards irrational optimism is necessary for progress. Generally, positive bias is needed for good mental health.
Probability shows that your idea will almost certainly fail, but you can’t believe that and put in the necessary effort to make it succeed.
This is a very good point, but then there is a fine line between bravery and stupidity.
> 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.
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.
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’.
[flagged]
It's in the video: LQG is not a promising, or even a plausible, physical theory. That's the idea.
"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)
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
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>
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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 Schrödinger 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.
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.
I think in this an other videos, what she says is "they are not even wrong" and she does have a point there.
As a non-physicist, it’s hard to understand if she has a point or not.
Any physicists care to weigh in?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Depending on your reference coordinate system, space is transformed. That is the entire point of relativity theory. You might be misunderstanding things here.
Coordinates are transformed, not the actual space. Objects are length-contracted due to the electric field being length contracted.
You seem to be of the same opinion as Sabine when it comes down to distinguishing between mathematical modelling, and reality. In mathematics though, coordinate transformation and space transformation are the same thing. How that plays out for the actual physics happening, might be a different thing, but note that you still describe it mathematically.
I agree with her views, my take on it here https://motiwala.com/blog/observations-on-the-state-of-physi...
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.
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.
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
What if String Theory is a Sophon Virus?
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.
I'm way too late for this to be meaningful, but here's what I think! tl;dr -- gravity is the problem, we should focus on experiments and observations for a while, bring in some better mathematics, and continue the long range program of developing quantum theories that include or even produce GR.
I'm just a physics enthusiast. When I became interested in physics, I was initially a sort of partisan in the "realist" camp -- pro Einstein, anti Bohr; liked Verlinde's entropic gravity, distrusted the graviton -- but have come full circle to the opposite view. GR has massive explanatory and predictive power, and an extremely satisfying aesthetic quality, but obviously breaks down behind the curtain of a black hole's event horizon, where we cannot make observations. I say obviously because it predicts a singularity, which is just another way of saying it makes no prediction at all. On the other hand, many of my complaints about QM I now look at as unanswered questions, opportunities for inquiry. QM is based 100% on experimental observations. The theory came together in a rather ad hoc fashion at the beginning of the last century, but as it was more carefully studied theoretically and experimentally, also proved to be highly predictive, even more that GR. Yes there are big ugly, outstanding questions -- measurement collapse, the transition from microscopic quantum behavior to macroscopic classical behavior, the intractability of all but the simplest calculations -- but those are huge areas of knowledge that the future will gradually (or suddenly) fill in, as our understanding moves forward.
So, gravity, not QM, is the problem. We should start with the axioms of quantum mechanics, and look for ways to observe where QM and GR can be measured at the same time. LIGO offers opportunities like this, as the sensitivity of the instrument is well within the quantum regime. Continued study of QCD could make a testable prediction for what exists inside of a black hole. Or continue to study the very fine transitions between energy levels in the nucleus. Mathematically, maybe the Langlands program, with its rather weird, Fourier-like sums of L functions will allow us to model non-linear behavior.
And yes, string theory sort of "jumped the shark" at some point. I'm sure Ed Witten regrets saying that other pursuits were a waste of time. But the thing is, the string theory program is centered on QM, and has shown that QM can naturally produce GR, given certain unrealistic assumptions. That's mathematical progress.
I knew from the title it's gonna be Sabine Hossenfelder. Her videos are just clickbait at this point.
Is this Dang turning titles into Betteridge questions again? The original does not have a question mark.
> 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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Thanks for the recommendation. I'll give it a go.
> 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.
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?
Thanks, I'll try here too.
"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".
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
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.
When I read the submission title here I immediately wondered if it was Sabine again and, well, there she was.
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.
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.
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.
Do you have expertise in the area of deciding source trustworthiness or relevancy in certain fields?
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.
she said some outlandish stuff in one video - I don't remember which. I refuse to watch any more of her videos.
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".
i love sabine. she's speaking the lived experience of quite a few of us who lost faith in the academy.
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.
> She seems on the edge of a breakdown at times.
Academia does this to you. She's a really well controlled case.
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.
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.
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.
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.
From my personal observation, those whose scientific understanding I admire mostly see little value in what the philosophers have produced. Those who I see admiring the philosophers seldom demonstrate much scientific understanding. Therefore my personal observations do not lead me to the belief that the philosophy helps scientific observation.
You are an illustration. You just argued that one of the most successful scientific theories over the last century should not be considered scientific because it is probabilistic in nature. In so doing you deny all of the evidence for it. Including the theory that allowed us to build the transistors that allow your computer to work.
Evolution these days depends on the theory of population genetics, which is again fundamentally probabilistic in nature. Are you now going to take the position that the theory of evolution is also not scientific?
If so, then your definition of science is so ludicrous that I'm comfortable in dismissing it with derision.
Quantum computers were proposed primarily as a means for physicists to do simulations of quantum mechanics. I don't think the 'they'll be faster at everything' hype came from them, in fact this basically seems to have come from people misunderstanding the point of them. So I don't think physicists have anything to answer for on this, only perhaps pop-sci writers (most of whom don't think have claimed such a thing either).
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.
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.
Amusingly, the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programma - an A-Levels like uni-prep course - has a subject called TOK: Theory of Knowledge with these intentions.
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.
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.
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.
You'd be amazed how quickly powerful discoveries find military purpose.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...
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.
I have never seen someone prefix dates with a zero like this. Why are you doing that?
It's from The Long Now Foundation: a nonprofit established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking.
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.
Perhaps this is of interest to you.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yTiztUNrhhM
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.
Yeah, would take years to fact check.
Some secrets keep themselves.
> "The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper." —EP
This is why… “science” needs lions ever ready to deploy the quite never old ultraviolence of wit (echoing FWN?)?
[and not awards or nobel prizes: “A good sciencing is its own reward” - not Faora-Ul]
(EP,wrong era, similar to HRV?)
Are you making an economic argument [pace HRV] that wit is better than distinction for avoiding underproduction of science, if it were to be monetarily compensated solely by its [near-zero] marginal unit returns?
> Je défie qu’on me montre une république ancienne ou moderne dans laquelle il n’y ait pas eu de distinctions. On appelle cela des hochets ! Eh bien ! c’est avec des hochets que l’on mène les hommes. —NB, 18 Floréal X
("Can anyone show me a republic, ancient or modern, without any achievements? They call them swag! OK — swag is how men are led.")
Id have hoped that it isn’t much of any kind of argument, since wit can be an instrument for…
(pace Edward Gibbon — via Feynman*!)
… leading by example
( but also/and by swagger
NB hadnt experienced Eurovision, might have expanded his idea of swag..* >But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous
EDIT: material baubles require a more or less centralized fount of honor (as republics ever had), transmission of wit.. otoh, needs just… a market (of at least one)
It's odd how Hollywood goes to extreme lengths to make people's faces visible under/despite helmets. I wonder if this is related to the fact that we've evolved for some reason to have visible sclera?
1. I saw some Planet of the Apes remake tiktok recently, but the huge sclera pretty much squicked me on their costuming.
(then again, I really appreciated the sclera on Khryusha the pig; maybe because he's not supposed to be a realistic character?)
2. Some coats of arms have battle helmets; some have barred-face helmets. I always figured the latter were designed to make it easier to drink at the beer tent, but maybe even they agreed with Hollywood on the visibility issue?
the Roman (allies') sol'n: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emesa_helmet
3. Disney used to have an exercise for animators: make a sack of flour emote. Maybe actors who intend to play hard characters ought to have to do the screen test with a bag over their head?
Wit may be the epitaph of an emotion, but it may also be the shem capable of animating a golem...
If PE had been from Krypton, would death have been the moment one left the essential truths of mathsing for the accidental truths of sciencing?
Sounds about right?
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.
> enough of these people
There’s more than enough already. (And, historically, you only need less than a dozen.)
> (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?
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 Schrödinger.
You can think of this as the scientific version of the 2 pizza rule.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>> 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 Schrödinger.
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.
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.
> 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 Poincaré, Hendrik Lorentz, Satyendra Nath Bose…
You are adding people by changing the discussion to one where the point no longer makes sense.
I'm focused on how many people were needed to make the conceptual breakthrough from classical thinking to quantum thinking. I'm very explicitly not considering how many people were needed to further develop the idea of QM from there. I'm also not considering various other conceptual breakthroughs. Just how did we go from, "here's a bunch of weird observations that don't make sense," to, "here's a way of thinking that lets us explain them."
The discovery of quarks, color charge quantum number, and Higgs field are part of the further research, and so aren't relevant.
Maxwell was firmly part of classical mechanics. He provided a key foundation, but was not part of the transition.
Boltzmann was key to the creation of statistical mechanics. While converting classical statistical mechanics to QM was a key part of the success of QM, this was not work that Boltzmann was engaged with.
Henri Poincaré did indeed spend a fruitful few months on QM in the last year of his life. Sure, add him to the list.
Hendrik Lorentz contributed to SR, not QM. Yes, he did lecture on SR in the 1920s, but he was lecturing on what Schrödinger has already discovered. He did not originate new ways of thinking to QM.
You have an extremely good point about Satyendra Nath Bose.
So most of the topics you added were not part of the key shift that I was talking about. Most of the researchers that you added did not directly contribute to that theoretical transition.
We need lots of people to create the foundation. Lots to build out the new framework. But very few are needed to develop the new way of thinking that scientists transition to.
[flagged]
"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
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.
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!
I guess we have a different definition of put downs eh? Noted, thanks.
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.
Fair point, I guess. It’s easy to also see how it just mostly ended up there. Still. A problem.
This is a very cruel reading of string theory. Intentional? What?
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
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.
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.
Weren't those all arrived at from a series of falsifiable predictions? What does string theory even predict that can be tested?
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.
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.)
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...
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.
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.)
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.
I don’t think the mistake made is exactly an ad hom fallacy? I agree with the rest of your comment though.
No, not really. All of those had reasonable, technically addressable methods for testing.
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.
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.
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.
There is no evidence to suggest that string theorists designed the theory to be untestable.
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
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.
It predicted supersymmetry, which has been experimentally disproved.
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#DoesSTPredic...
Not intending to mock anyone and I don't know nearly enough physics to have a credible opinion either way. Thanks for your explanation.
Don’t worry, I didn’t think you were :) you’re welcome!
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.