The crisis in physics is not only about physics
backreaction.blogspot.com
backreaction.blogspot.com
I think people fail to appreciate the many frontiers that exist in just understanding how matter interracts with itself. The past was exciting because we got to discover new building blocks, but that only provides information on the periphery of whats going on. We know all sorts of stuff about the proton, but put it in a nucleus with a few dozen other nucleons and its a whole different story. All sorts of virtual particles are exchanged, its really complicated, and there literally arent any models that can predict the properties of the nucleus purely from first principles. There are important conceptual and computational innovations happening continuously to make progress on hundreds of problems just like this.
My thesis was in fluorescent bio physics at the nano scale (STED). We literally had a PI effect. Normally, the 'PI effect' is that when the professor comes in, the experiment stops working, mostly due to Murphy's law. With our case, it was because the extra body heat caused the mirrors to expand and drift out of place, ruining the alignment. This also meant it took a while for the mirrors to come back into alignment after lunch and first thing in the morning. What a mess!
So yes, in microscopy, the apparatus very much is part of the experiment and it takes ages to get things controlled and imaging correctly.
When designing sensitive instruments we had to use almost a paranoid attention to detail.
Also, not a stupid question. We thought of it too and it took us a week to collect enough data to rule out the AC system as a cause.
If you break up the Nobel Prizes and look at the optics based ones, ones that made up some new microscope, or used light in some new way, then Optics becomes a top 5 domain. In that a lot of Nobels come out of manipulating light. And a lot of the time, the sum total 'new thing' worthy of a Nobel is just a single optical object, sometimes it's five, not much more. But, the thing is, if you look at how long those experiments took to preform, from concept to working prototype taking some kind of data, then Optics varies wildly. Some, like DIC imaging, is just a single 1/4 waveplate in the middle, and it took Nomarski nearly a decade and a half to get it just right. Some, like STED, were built in Hell's living room over about a month. And that's the thing about Optics research, it's just blind luck most of the time. Sure, the equations help, but they tend to come after the apparatus is up and running. You can spend a few weekends in your living room in your underwear tinkering about while watching the game, or you can spend your entire career painstakingly laboring in the nauseating dark of the lab all alone. Incremental progress just doesn't seem to be a thing in Optics; you either get it right or you don't. Anyone that has been in totality during an eclipse knows that there is a huge difference between 99% and 100% coverage. Optics is exactly like that.
It's not like she has a better plan. She says "new and better methods". I mean that's exactly what physicists try and pursue. I highly doubt that an ambitious young scientist wldn't try and get a cool publication if they could think of a novel theory. But the reality is that novel ideas that fit all the existing experimental constraints are very very very hard to figure out. People work on them but lack of a million new models a year is not because of some groupthink but because physics is hard.
Let's not lump medicine in with physics, please. Medicine has always been skeptical of theories without data and, while maybe facing issues, they aren't the same as physics.
Its ironic that a physicist, criticizing others physicists, make a common mistake that all physicists make: over simplification and acting like everything is just like physics with slight modifications.
To me it's bound to work on less reliable data.
Derek Lowe isn't quite so optimistic about it: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/10/23/th...
(tl;dr--the anti-amyloid hypothesis you should be extremely skeptical about, and the inconsistency in the trial data here is signalling that statistical fluke should be a high concern).
There's a reason I went back to being a software engineer at an internet company working on ML models that actually work- clinical trials have a long way to go before they produce results that can be really trusted.
You might at well claim that medicine made great strides because so many new and exciting leeches were discovered.
Other subfields are thriving (AMO, quantum information) and maybe it’s just time to accept the relevance of different subfields changes with time.
Show me one paper that measured Lorenz contraction, you can't because it does not exist.
The whole standard model is based on wrong assumptions.
In fact If you would actually talk with scientist in the respected fields that don't take every explanation but ask critically, you will see that most of them are stuck.
Accusing working scientists of being insufficiently reflective on any topic, let alone themselves or the field they work in, seems without merit on its face, and frankly so bizarre as to be silly or even dim-witted. Further, the assertion that only the humanities will save science, or indeed the accusation that scientists are ignorant of the history of science, is a weighty charge that I see no reason to even consider believing.
> They believe they are too intelligent to have to think about what they are doing.
Come on.
Sabine is unfortunately spot on.
Like what? Genuinely interested, not seeking to argue.
One of the reasons I left academia was that I never found the intellectual and curios environment I longed for. The successful people were successful mostly because they knew how to write grant proposals and which committees they should be on, not because they did really interesting science.
The same goes on with neuro folks. Consciousness, mind, hello? No, just let's poke rats, thanks.
But this works.
And that's why I don't understand Sabine's viewpoint. She can't just sit in an ivory tower and stare down the cosmos in a contest until it reveals its secrets. We need data, better models, better measurements, etc. Yes, sure, it needs better theorists too, but then why not let the experimentalists do what they do best? It's not like there isn't a bunch of theorists in every serious university on the planet, maybe organize them better?
> She can't just sit in an ivory tower and stare down the cosmos in a contest until it reveals its secrets.
That is a gross misrepresenation of what she is saying. Did you actually read anything she wrote? She is criticising the notion that you can make progress, sitting in the ivory tower, as you exprss it, and coming up ideas about strings and super symmetries without any experimental data or other validation from reality. But she is also critical to the approach: just throw more money and manpower into even bigger experiments before we even know what to look for and hope something interesting reveals itself.
The current unexplained data is not much, and the best explanations involve a lot of hard to test things.
Why? Because there's not enough unexplained data. The easy to test theories have been already thrown out.
Yes, sure, what she is saying is nice, let's try to explain stuff the simplest way possible. Occam's razor. But theorists already do this.
also, she can't wish away the fact that without data any new theories are worthless, even if someone conveniently comes up with one.
also, saying that the LHC haven't taught us anything ignores the reality of all the data that it has generated.
is it shiny "new" physics? no, but it's a crucial prerequisite for that.
particle physics needs new data for new physics eventually.
Yes, that's how science progresses, but doesn't really make for interesting coffee table discussions about the nature of reality.
When I studied physics I never saw the periodic table as the result of QM model, never made sense for me. Now I understand, thanks to a more advanced, but classical model.
QM and GR can never be unified because GR is a effect of surface pressure and QM has the wrong surface.
We’ve been doing that since 1955 every time we make antiprotons.
When real antimatter gets destroyed it looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Jupiter_impact_event
I just follow quite different, more classical model that is not invented by me.
What most people think is is a very bad truth function.
I care about the number of assumptions required for a model and the number of papers falsifying it. I don't care if a paper praises how good prediction X fits, you have a infinite number of models that predicted exactly the same value. But through falsification you can sieve out the wrong ones and guess what, most of the models commonly proposed as "truth" are long falsified. The standard model is not even logically sound and combined with GR/SR highly paradoxical.
Also, the philosophy and sociology of science are a VERY different thing from "the humanities".
I'm not sure that they are.
But my point is simply that accusing scientists of not being self-reflective is silly, accusing them of ignorance of history is silly, and for this piece to be elevated beyond the level of polemic would require something, anything, in the way of persuasion that its assertions were true.
I am not going to bother doing a line-by-line rebuttal, because I've already done this for nearly a hundred of her previous articles, in forums across the internet. It just doesn't matter, because tomorrow she will put out another massively popular article with the same oversimplifications and misrepresentations, and it will get 1000 times the views any response I write could. That is what it means to be a public intellectual. I am a working scientist, which means I have neither the time to keep up nor the audience.
„I am the only physicist who has at least come up with an idea for what to do.”
Seemed pretty arrogant. But I have no knowledge of her
So instead you get all this hand-wringing about the process, about how theorists come up with elegant math that isn't testable, yada yada, without at least an honest statement that "It is at least possible that the universe's final secrets will never be amenable to human inquiry."
I think that I mostly agree with the theme of your post. An important thing to keep in mind is that physics is inherently an experimental science, so the critique of formulating untestable theories is valid. I have heard that cosmology is particularly bad about this, however I am not in that field...so who knows.
This is something I've thought about. I'm a physicist, but am now happily working in industry. My job is to solve problems, and for most part I do, but it always seems possible that one fine day, someone will walk into my cubicle with a problem that I just can't solve. I'm always faced with the fact that I can't honestly predict how long the next problem will take. Maybe a day, maybe a week, maybe... forever?
Despite a string of successes, we never know for sure when physics will be hit with a problem that takes a decade, or a century, or even a millennium, to solve. As I understand the history, the ancient Greeks could formulate quadratic equations that they couldn't solve, and it wasn't until something like a millennium later that Al-Khwarizmi cracked it, at least for real roots. Now we teach it to children in middle school.
Finding a testable theory of quantum gravity might be the problem that takes a millennium.
No offence but she is a trained physicist so she too is an 'actual scientist' by the very definition of the term. And she's completely right about the neglect of economic reasoning. The arguments against blowing 40 billion bucks on an accelerator that will likely not surface anything new is valid. Physicists gotta accept that opportunity costs are real.
And the 'canary in the coalmine' point in particular in regards to pharmaceuticals is valid too. The research costs for very specialised, small scale drugs has exploded by a magnitude or two depending on who you ask. Other fields are starting to suffer as well.
I would go even further than she does and say it's an almost universal condition of modern research. We see diminishing returns everywhere, and if this is not stopped and we don't manage to drastically increase the efficacy of scientific research we'll effectively flatline at some point.
Almost any material hard metrics you look at like life expectancy, economic growth or whatever you could consider a sign of technological advancement, even tens of billions in investment seem to produce only marginal improvements. We are not living in the golden age of science.
As a knit pick, these metrics are all derivatives of science output, and not science itself. For example, detecting gravity waves does move the needle on any of these metrics, but it is still a great achievement for experimental physics.
And you basically followed with it. Basic science is the foundation engineering builds on. I believe 1st semiconductors were a science experiment. Em waves were. Gigantomagnetoresistance was. The internet was an academic curiosity.
It think it's important to blow some of human work on the free thinkers. It moves the popluation forward. Any other comparable scientific and engineering progress I can think was fueled by war.
Imho allocating resources only for acute goals lead to local technological optima. Seemingly puporseless research helps to break out.
Today number theory is the basis for several important fields of application, including computation theory, modern cryptography, and numerical calculation.
Also in modern times, especially, there is a big problem of discoverability. If the mathematical result you need for some application is buried in a thirty-year-old journal using unfamiliar terminology, what are the chances you'll find it and understand it when you need it? I venture to suggest that much of the time it's easier to re-derive the result than to find it.
Not a chance.
I'm pretty sure the transistor [1] was invented specifically to solve a real engineering problem.
[1] I'm taking your use of "semiconductor" to mean transistor because my understanding is semiconductors are a kind of material that was discovered, not invented.
All intensive purposes. Get down to brass tax. There's a lot of these that I've uttered or heard and they last a long time because they sound kind of sensible.
It will surely do. Those achievements are not possible without staggering advances in technology that can be later applied in different fields.
The same technology that we first developed for those expensive colliders is now used in MRI and others diagnosis tools that we have for granted today.
The question is, how much better would "MRI and other diagnosis tools" if that money had been spent actively trying to improve them instead of mostly going to detecting gravity waves? That's the question you need to answer to justify spending billions chasing physicists latest "fetish".
"Big physics" proponents always justify wasting (in my opinion) billions in colliders and observers by the unintended benefits that accidentally derive from them but they never mention how much more progress those other ares could make by directly using that money.Instead of spending $40B in the next big collider, what if we were spent developing CRISPR and related technologies? Or on a "moon-shot" for AGI? On developing new tools and techniques to study and understand large scale social systems?
P.S.: I have a BS/MS/PhD in Theoretical Physics
Arguments for "spinoff benefits" from research always seem really weak to me. If you want lighter, imperishable food, invest in food preservation, not a space program that might happen to produce freeze-dried food.
I think, when you take humans into account, you're better off setting interesting and challenging goals, with many useful byproducts.
I still think it's pretty weak though; the inspiration benefit seems unlikely to overcome the lost efficiency, in general. And different people find different problems inspiring; some people can be inspired by practical problems (e.g. "how can we lighten the backpacks of trampers").
The problem with attempting to justify space exploration with spin-off examples like food preservation is that it risks provoking a 'so what?' response. Piling on unimpressive claims does not strengthen one's argument, it dilutes it, and gives the opposition an easy target to dispute.
When Clarke came up with the idea of communications satellites, he, and others, thought he had come up with a before-the-fact justification for space travel, as he expected these relays would need regular maintenance, but another claimed-spinoff-but-not-really, semiconductor electronics, obviated the need.
There is plenty of wasted money in the pharma sector that can be spent and profited from in crispr technologies. I'm not sure why you're taking physics money for that.
The physics funding programs have already moved on from big budget tags in some spaces. ITER will probably be the last big white whale project in fusion. There are a bunch of smaller fusion projects being funded at smaller scales to prove their efforts before going big. The iterative tech model is bleeding over into science funding.
If you want the MRI 2.0, you start with something monstrously different, otherwordly, like gravitational wave detection. There you reach metrological precision, DSP, optics, waveguides, EM shielding, thermal noise compensation, and other incremental advancements that taken together gives you MRI 1.5, and then you can bring in those who make it work into a nice and shiny improved MRI.
The problem with moon-shots (eg. AGI) is that you don't know where to go. With physics at least you sort of do. Higher energy. More sensitivity. Better experiments.
(Also a BSc in TPhys (& maths), fwiw.)
I've always been very skeptical of claims that heavy investment in the space sciences advacnced other technologies, more than if we had just invested that money directly in the other technology. I also see a lot of money wasted in space sciences running experiments on the ISS that aren't really that useful (like crystallography- sure, you can grow nice crystals in space and then bring them back down to earth, but for the money you spent on that, you could have funded 10 PIs, and also crystal structures aren't that useful for advancing science).
Interestingly, if you look at modern science funding, it does basically treat it as a multi-armed bandit and there is a portfolio of project funding that includes both large particle physics experiments and individual investigators.
The average cost of an application of permethrin 1% cream is about $20; an application of spinosad costs $270 without insurance.
Ouch!
Most likely there is no way to increase efficacy, because the problems we try to solve become harder and harder as we go. This is why the predictions of singularity are unrealistic, the self improving AI, and constantly increasing number of human researchers will go into merely not flatlining instead of solving everything at once.
Making "smarter" humans (either via sperm/egg/embryo selection, and/or via brain-computer interfaces) would also help a lot.
And it doesn't look like we're anywhere close to "peak brain", after all we do a lot with just 20W and ~1.5 kg of wetware.
Whatever improvements our potential descendants make will surely look like the big-s-singularity to us.
Consciousness is a conceptual problem, not a physical one. It merely goes away once you start asking the right questions.
Consciousness is still an extant and very unexplained phenomenon.
A quick Google of the subject will demonstrate it is still an (maybe, the) outstanding subject of philosophy and perhaps ultimately physics.
Check any online encyclopedia, but if you have any respectable references that disagree, I'd be genuinely interested.
Eg:
So in the philosophy of physics and the mind, there are whole departments filled with tenured professors who came of age in their thinking at a time when consciousness was a Hard Problem, and have focused their mental tools on a class of solutions (qualia, observer-triggered wave collapse, etc.) which are irreconcilable with mechanistic physical reality, making the problem even more intractable and mysterious. It'll take another generation or two before the ideas of Dennett, Dawkins, Tegmark, etc. get more widely recognized and consciousness finally goes the way of phlogiston.
For references, I recommend Dennett's "Consciousness Explained", and really anything by Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins--materialistic explanations of consciousness pervade their work. For a compatible (hah!) physical perspective, I suggest Max Tegmark:
Also, I don't really like the way you're describing these professors of philosophy. These people have spent their lives studying this problem and adjacent topics. Sure you may be absolutely convinced that "things that conflict with our understanding of mechanistic physical reality must be untrue," others believe "what almost all people perceive to be true about their internal experience cannot be dismissed when discussing the nature of that experience." I think this topic is much more debatable than you are making it out to be.
A phlogiston is not the correct analogy for grounding consciousness in science. An easier fit would be the software/hardware split you find in computing, where the abstractions and meaning we perceive to be real is a set of built layers of computational or logical abstraction.
I am on the side of not thinking you can scientifically ground consciousness with the understanding we have. I don't think either analogy fits and the argument will forever be pinned in debate between characters that prefer their own worldview.
We have not yet mapped out the wiring diagrams of our brains which result in the human experience of consciousness. But that's a technological limitation in brain scanning and simulation. We also haven't yet created AI machines that exhibit what we would call consciousness, but we have good ideas of how to do so and are making progress. In both cases we know there is no need to invoke dualist answers, whether it be souls, ghosts in the machine, or 'qualia.'
https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl
(Also modern dualism is much better than spiritualism! There are some good reasons why people believe it.)
That's news to me. What do you mean? What are those good ideas that we have and that we are making progress towards, that will lead us to conscious machines?
Actually: conscious software. Presumably, if we can get to strong AI from where we are right now, then we already have the hardware and we just need to figure out how to write the software?
https://www.askamathematician.com/2009/12/q-howwhy-are-quant...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in...
It's no coincidence that, on the other end of the spectrum, a lot of successful entrepreneurs could barely stay in college long enough to get their bachelor's degree.
I'm not sure if "eagerness to efficiently apply one's skills" is something that can be taught but it could certainly be incentivized.
Please respect those that still think there need not be any base reason for learning about the world
and
> I am a working scientist, which means I have neither the time to keep up nor the audience.
For those that don't know about Sabine, who is criticized in the parent, you can read about her at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabine_Hossenfelder
Short summary... she is a research fellow, theoretical physicist, and of course has a PhD in physics.
I fully expect scientists to disagree with each other. I even enjoy reading about their disagreements. But, to take shots at qualifications (even if in a passive aggressive manner) is rude. The tone of the parent attempts to dismiss her by making us feel she isn't a read scientist while in fact she's talking about her profession.
Sabine has more qualifications than me, but like Michio Kaku and NDT, she now spends most of her time promoting a certain message to the public in a very one-sided way. That's why I called her a popularizer. Like Michio Kaku, she can afford to spend the time on that, and I can't.
Her factual statements, that every high-energy physics experiment since the 1970s has only confirmed an existing theory (the Standard Model) and that every prediction made by physicists about possible extensions to that existing theory has turned out to be wrong, are correct.
If you think that the underlying cause for these facts is not what she says, what do you think it is?
Well, the snarky answer is that the equivalent of the LHC (America's SSC) was defunded halfway through construction in the 1990s. This set back the field by nearly 20 years. It's rather unfair to say that no progress was made in the 1990s and 2000s if the very instrument that could have done so was defunded.
Anyway, the real answer is that the vast majority of scientific theories ever formulated were completely wrong. Some people say the early 20th century was the golden age of physics. But there were several failed theories of relativitistic gravity proposed in the 1910s, many failed attempts to formulate the quantum theory of fields in the 1920s, and within particle physics, a slew of failed theories of the atomic nucleus and the fine structure constant. None of this appears in textbooks.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Recall that back then the journals were still getting filled with theoretical papers weekly -- the fact that we teach the material that was right to undergraduates in slim textbooks shows that the vast majority was wrong or irrelevant.
Experimental confirmation has always taken a long time, e.g. see the long disputes over the ether that stretched well into the 1940s, 40 years after the proposal of special relativity, complicated by false positives and systematic uncertainties.
Fundamental science is simply hard, and it only looks like it used to be easy because we forgot 99% of the failures. There is a perfectly valid point to be made that it may be getting harder, but it is insufficient to just point to failures to prove it.
Standard Model then implied neutrino mixing would be slight (based on quark mixing). That was also demonstrated to be incorrect.
Standard Model has no good reason to predict that protons are stable, yet so far they apparently are.
There is more to particle physics than Higgs, Horatio.
This article is not about doing data analysis in experiment, it's more about how we should choose the theories that guide our choices in experiments in the first place. I disagree with Sabine because I see her as painting an unfair picture of theorists, as if we were all completely unreflective and she was the only one in the world to think seriously about theory selection. Most of her vague suggestions are things that people (sometimes, hundreds of people) have been already doing for decades.
That breaks the cardinal rule of science popularization: don't trash people or take credit for insights without giving a careful, fair picture of everything that is going on, because the scientists affected don't have the right of reply.
Still, I don’t think Hossenfelder is a reason to be this salty! Just post links to some other physics blogger that contradicts her and move on. That’s how Lubos is handled and it works ok as far as I can tell (I can’t actually tell very well on account of all the ignoring of Lubos I’m doing).
But maybe, one can dream at least, in the future science will be done with smart models, that can at least verify themselves given some assumptions.
I'd like to point out that discoveries in fundamental physics do not always come from work in fundamental physics. Physical systems exhibit some "holographic" or "self-similar" tendency where high-level statistical effects will often mimic low-level fundamental dynamics. For example, wave propagation was originally described for pressure waves propagating in a physical medium, then applied to light waves after the work of Maxwell. More recently, the Lorentz transformations, originally used to calculate the effects of finite-speed electric fields on susceptible particles, turned out to be a fundamental property of the universe. And the Hamiltonian path integral formulation, originally a mathematical curiosity, turned out to be crucial for describing relativistic quantum interactions.
Some of the work that `yummypaint describes which is being done in quantum chromodynamics -- a field in which we have a working "lattice" approximation but almost no real analytical solutions -- may eventually prove useful for a theory of quantum gravity. However, QCD is still very immature. Those with a little experience will recognize the phrase "non-perturbative" which describes some QCD problems -- this also appears in quantum gravity, where perturbation theory fails. The lattice gauge theory model used to solve QCD problems today cannot be extended to gravity, but other methods might not have this limitation.
So the lack of clear and demonstrated progress in fundamental physics does not mean that we are not learning real facts which can eventually be useful for describing fundamental physics. The situation is not so dire.
As for critiques of Hossenfelder, it's certainly true that her writing tends to the dramatic. Just last year she was optimistic about asymptotically safe quantum gravity:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-an-old-theory-of-everythi...
technical FAQ: http://www.percacci.it/roberto/physics/as/faq.html
One might guess that her tone of despair here is a little performative as well.
Old measurements do not change. Over bog standard Newtonian physics, special relativity provides additional decimals in the form of significant figures and mostly in particular circumstances. For plotting the trajectory of a large rock at comparably low speeds, Newton's equations work rather well on Earth, once you take air resistance into account. Even if another theory supplants special relativity for the extreme situations, old ballistic tables will still work.
Each advance will have smaller and smaller corrections to the experimental values, in narrower edge cases, even if the mathematics of the newer theory looks completely different. This in turn means that discarding an old theory in favor of a new one by experimental confirmation of what was unexpected in the old system must only come either in the more extreme values (more Telsa to a magnetic field, for example) or with greater precision and accuracy via more elaborate and finely-calibrated equipment. Both are expensive, requiring more time and more work.
I believe she is right in that we are certainly on course for some very time-consuming and expensive science. However, I do not see an easy way out of it, nor should we, I believe, expect one. Flip open a CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics; many of the basic values have been long-known. We have added a few more numbers to the right of the decimal in many cases, but that is it. Two hundred years ago, a single person with a modest budget could discover new physics and chemistry. A hundred years ago, a handful of collaborators with some backing could advance these most basic of sciences. By only fifty years back, we are looking at budgets in the millions and teams of scientists working in harness.
It may simply be out of reach to disassemble a galaxy to build a collider large enough to test some theories and at that juncture, one might well consider physics "close enough to done." A mote of dust is always going to fall on some surface no matter how often you polish and buff. At some point you have to stop fussing and enjoy your furniture.
Yes, it is handy to look for the cases where we can find a way to test our hypotheses for under a million dollars, in no more than a few years. We will run out of those, too.
This is "unsexy" to many. The ratcheting noose of entropy in a closed system, which we can only try to run away from at pedestrian sub-light speeds is, bluntly put, a drag.
"I try to explain to a cosmologist or particle physicists that we need smarter ways to share information and make decisions in large, like-minded communities."
Making decisions in large, like-minded communities? When has that ever been successful? Isn't that pretty much the opposite of what has led to physics breakthroughs, up and to this point?
"And please spare me the complaints that I supposedly do not have anything better to suggest, because that is a false accusation. I have said many times that looking at the history of physics teaches us that resolving inconsistencies has been a reliable path to breakthroughs, so that’s what we should focus on."
If I was a physicists and some random other physicist of little renown was to suggest that I (and everyone else) need to "focus more on the inconsistencies", I wouldn't exactly be swayed. I would be rolling my eyes. It's just not a very useful suggestion to make.
> Because the existing scientific system does not encourage learning. Physicists today can happily make career by writing papers about things no one has ever observed, and never will observe.
Maybe what's really going on is that almost every scientist out there is forced to chase grants and maintain a steady stream of publications. We have to give our scientists the ability to put long-term effort into projects that have a low likelyhood of payoff; otherwise research stagnates.
Also, it seems like the 'groupthink' she pointed out is a very real problem. Remember that weird EM drive associated with NASA? We all know that it's nearly impossible that it could be a valid phenomenon; but as a global scientific community, almost everyone dismissed it outright. We should all have jumped on it, to see if it could possibly be true, regardless of how outlandish. If we are unwilling to explore the boundaries of what we know, then we deserve to stagnate, and we will.
At present my plan is the following: Keep the amount of time spent making money to the minimum needed to support myself. Then I can invest my own time and money into research. I could make money from research via grants/contracts like normal academics, but that's not necessary in this scheme. I'm thinking about starting several SaaS businesses.
But I got busy and never launched. I guess this is the launch then? Feel free to join, post, etc. I'd love to discuss this with like-minded folks.
"The only way to avoid being sucked into this vicious cycle is to choose carefully which hypothesis to put to the test. But physicists still operate by the “just look” idea like this was the 19th century. They do not think about which hypotheses are promising because their education has not taught them to do so. Such self-reflection would require knowledge of the philosophy and sociology of science, and those are subjects physicists merely make dismissive jokes about. They believe they are too intelligent to have to think about what they are doing."
Jumping on a crank's idea is not carefully choosing which hypothesis to test.
I also suggested that the other large cause of the current stagnation is that we do not have enough scientists pursuing outlandish theories - we should hear about things like the EM drive far more frequently, and we should be excited about new ideas, not dismissive of anything foreign to the current 'groupthink'.
Also, returning to your first point, the author pointed out just the opposite to the point you're attempting to make:
> With fewer experiments, serendipitous discoveries become increasingly unlikely. And lacking those discoveries, the technological progress that would be needed to keep experiments economically viable never materializes. It’s a vicious cycle: Costly experiments result in lack of progress. Lack of progress increases the costs of further experiment. This cycle must eventually lead into a dead end when experiments become simply too expensive to remain affordable. A $40 billion particle collider is such a dead end.
But we should make it easy for crackpots to test their shtick. So we should invest in better metrology.
And when something actually breaks through, then we should jump on it.
And basically that's what's going on with the "EM drive". Currently even though it goes in the face of basic theories the test bench they used was not sensitive enough to rule it out.
There's a broad spectrum of topics there, and quite a few episodes talk about the foundation of physics, including the quantum measurement problem (several episodes about that, in fact), string theory and several cosmology topics.
This seems to discount the explosion of work in the foundations of theoretical physics. Most notably the many variations of String Theory. Just because the work has not yet produced experiments that can validate them do not mean they are not progress. It's some of the most exciting foundational work that's come for decades.
The argument I've seen expressed about this, is that these advances should more properly be considered advances in mathematics not physics. Or to put it another way "the math works, but we have no idea if it applies to the real world or not."
It's a question for the episemologists, I suppose, whether or not we should consider an advance "real new knowledge" if there's no experimental validation.
The problem isn’t that no ones has managed to experimentally validate the theory. The problem is that string theory has failed to even make predictions that even in theory could be experimentally tested.
Edit: since I’m getting downvoted, is there anything factually wrong with what I have written?
Hossenfelder is well aware of string theory, as she says right in the article:
"All these wrong predictions should have taught physicists that just because they can write down equations for something does not mean this math is a scientifically promising hypothesis. String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There’s math for it, alright. Pretty math, even. But that doesn’t mean this math describes reality."
> Just because the work has not yet produced experiments that can validate them do not mean they are not progress.
But it's not just that string theory hasn't yet produced experiments that can validate it. It's that (a) direct experiments to validate it are something like twenty orders of magnitude away in terms of energy scale, so not doable now or for the foreseeable future, and (b) every prediction it's made so far that can be tested at energy scales we can probe (such as the prediction that supersymmetry would show up at the LHC) has been wrong.
(And some of those theories have some large scale cosmological implications too, so better telescopes can rule out more.)
But ... there seems to be a lack of (serious) theories that have easily testable predictions. And this is not surprising, because we also lack easily reproducable but yet unexplained data. (For example the high-energy gamma ray busts are very interesting but we have no idea where do they come from really.)
Yes. The problem is that ruling out is all that's happening. Not one has had an implication about lower energy ranges that has turned out to be right.
At some point it's no wonder we need bigger microscopes to see deeper into reality.
Sure, were someone just come up with an even better theory that can be tested easily, that would be great too, but since we have no recipe for that, but we have quite a few for building bigger experiments, that's what most of the particle physicists advocate.
Here is my suggestion: how about for the next LHC scale physics project we get all the governments in the world to put in manhatten project levels of funding to research machines which can control the climate and the weather to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change.
This would be a lot more practical and better for science and the future of the human species than confirming what everyone has known with 99%+ confidence for over 30 years. Just my 2 cents.
Me: Hmm... interesting. Personally I think they should spend time consolidating the different mathematical techniques.
> Maybe all these string theorists have been wasting tax-money for decades, alright, but in the large scheme of things it’s not all that much money. I grant you that much. Theorists are not expensive.
> String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There’s math for it, alright. Pretty math, even. But that doesn’t mean this math describes reality.
I don't really understand this part. I am not convinced that her post says much [], because consider this: she is encouraging observation at the expense of speculation and then arguing that observational techniques are more expensive and hence prohibitive in the long run?
Is the real "unhappiness" in academia not just as simple as information overflow and the fact that only a few can be famous, whether there are a few or whether there are many? I don't know if that is what people get at with these kinds of blog posts. In any case, what I have found in mathematics is that the names of people whose work are worth reading are not necessarily the ones that you'll encounter first. OP does actually hint at this as well, but again, is it not just information overflow (and shouldn't be made more complicated than that)?
[] The one good takeaway that I see is "focus on inconsistencies".
Me: Hmm... interesting. Personally I think they should spend time consolidating the different mathematical techniques.
> Maybe all these string theorists have been wasting tax-money for decades, alright, but in the large scheme of things it’s not all that much money. I grant you that much. Theorists are not expensive.
> String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There’s math for it, alright. Pretty math, even. But that doesn’t mean this math describes reality.
I don't really understand this part. I am not convinced that her post says much [1], because consider this: she is encouraging observation at the expense of speculation and then arguing that observational techniques are more expensive and hence prohibitive in the long run?
Is the real "unhappiness" in academia not just as simple as information overflow and the fact that only a few can be famous, whether there are a few or whether there are many? I don't know if that is what people get at with these kinds of blog posts. In any case, what I have found in mathematics is that the names of people whose work are worth reading are not necessarily the ones that you'll encounter first. OP does actually hint at this as well, but again, is it not just information overflow (and shouldn't be made more complicated than that)?
[1] The one good takeaway that I see is "focus on inconsistencies".
What, in the whole world? That sounds a bit messianic, if I may.
The differential return on progress with time is not linear.
Intuitively, progress is harder, the deeper we probe.
We have reached the point where we are probing the fundamentals of matter at the smallest and largest scales in the universe.
This is much harder to progress on than newton's laws, which could be arrived at through human observation.
Yes! Thank you! Are the days of Rationalism behind us? Everyone these days seems focused on trying to prove if the sun will rise tomorrow.