> tried to raise some more philosophical questions with them.
Like what? Genuinely interested, not seeking to argue.
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.