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Comment by baked_ziti | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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.

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I have a PhD in physics. Even though I have left the field, I’ve hung around with enough of them, and occasionally tried to raise some more philosophical questions with them.

Sabine is unfortunately spot on.

> tried to raise some more philosophical questions with them.

Like what? Genuinely interested, not seeking to argue.

This is 10 years ago, so unfortunately I don’t remember details about discussions I never got going. Some were able to argue for their favourite interpretation of QM, or rather, how to resolve the measurement problem, but I mostly got blank stares when I tried to probe a bit more about the ontology.

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.

Yeah, that's not surprising. Cutting-edge R&D is very boring hyper-parameter tuning basically, and requires a kind of person that is able to do things for a long long time (to gather data) and then to think a bit later.

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?

Sabine's point is that the current approach doesn't work any longer.

> 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.

But.. but... she can't have it both ways.

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.

Of course she can have it both ways. Don’t be stupid. There’s plenty to do in physics without building an even bigger collider which likely won’t teach us more than the current one.

plenty to do, such as?

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.

In my experience the successful ones, yes they are good at grant writing, but also they are singularly laser focused on the tiny little bit that is their specialty.

Yes, that's how science progresses, but doesn't really make for interesting coffee table discussions about the nature of reality.

Yes, that is how some parts of science progress. And I certainly don't want to diminish those contributions. But that is also the exact reason why we haven't had any mayor breakthroughs in fundamental physics in soon half a century. I don't see how an Einstein, Bohr or even Feyman could get tenure today.

QM is fundamentally not correct. They assume energy and matter is interchangeable, which is not. Build me a proton from energy and I will shut up, you can't. The appearance of positions can be explained much much much much easier, once you got your electron model correct.

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.

> Build me a proton from energy and I will shut up, you can't

We’ve been doing that since 1955 every time we make antiprotons.

Those mangeled protons are not anti-protons. They are not stable but only a Proton with damaged outer shell (the one that breaks at 5 MeV). Get it stable like the Proton and we talk again.

When real antimatter gets destroyed it looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Jupiter_impact_event

Sigh. For your benefit more than mine, I’d like to make you aware that you sound like a Markov chain trained on science-sounding words, because those words don’t fit together in the order you have combined them.

If you are so good, please explain me the black spot.

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.

Full Ack. Unfortunately training against confirmation bias (or other ones) is not part of any scientific study. We in general give very little attention to papers that falsify an accepted theory. For example, look at the papers http://cosmology.info has collected. If you have gone through some of them, you can not, at least as a scientist, still think that Big Bang is a true theory. But still, this bulls*t theory pops up all the time.... This is just one of them, in fact, nearly everything is falsified... It does not matter if theory X predict A correct, if prediction B is false your theory X is also not true but at most a model to calculate A. The model I have adopted also perdicted the "Higg-Boson", but it has nothing to do with gravity.

Tunnel vision is a thing. Taking some time to zoom out is often incredibly useful.

Also, the philosophy and sociology of science are a VERY different thing from "the humanities".

> 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.

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