How to become a bad theoretical physicist (2017) | Hacker News Reader

How to become a bad theoretical physicist (2017)

webspace.science.uu.nl

39 pointsalokrai32 comments

I remember attending a big American Physics Society conference, maybe 4000 physicists attending. They had many parallel tracks for presentations, labeled A through T or something like that. I remember reading through these and it was fascinating the breadth of topics covered, condensed matter through fluid dynamics, chaos, some astrophysics IIRC.

So at the end of the program there's some special session labeled Z and it was for "special physics". All of the talks had bizarre names filled with jargon terms "hyper quantum zener matrix dimensions".

I gather it was the APSs solution to quietly enable the quacks to talk amongst themselves instead of denying them any platform.

The APS rules are that any member can submit an abstract, which will be printed in the Bulletin, and be allowed to either give a 10-minute talk or stand next to a poster. The abstracts are printed without regard to content, as long as they are in the right format. So they have to put the crank ones somewhere, and this is one solution.

There is a rule that the submitter of an abstract must attend the meeting to present. In the Fluid Dynamics division, there was a guy who submitted weird, incomprehensible abstracts every year for many years—but he never showed up as far as I know. You could recognize his abstracts immediately because he jammed as much as possible in there. Each abstract referred to previous ones, as if they were publications. He built his own little empire of self-referential, unreviewed abstracts. The APS handled that by (eventually) scheduling his talks at the ends of sessions so that the no-show would not disrupt the schedule. They could have banned him for repeat submissions without appearing to give a talk, but they erred on the side of allowing an obvious crackpot to have his say, which I thought was both wise and kind.

I don’t know if the current APS would be so thoughful; I hope so. I got fed up with them years ago and stopped paying my dues.

This is absolutely the case. When I was in physics, I was told that the moderation policies had previously been more strict and were only relaxed after one of the quacks was rejected and murdered someone in retaliation. I don't know for certain whether that's true or an urban legend, but it was told to me by a physicist who would never joke or lie about something like that.

There's also viXra [1] which is like arXiv for fringe content that arXiv won't accept. One of the people who publishes there underwent a huge email spoofing campaign where they would send emails from one of my coworkers to others in the field promoting the papers. It was a really difficult situation because the coworker didn't know exactly who they were being sent to unless they replied, so it damaged his reputation without him getting a chance to explain what was happening.

[1] - https://vixra.org

ArXiv similarly has the "gen-ph" classification for preprints. See: https://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/what-counts-as-science

FYI, Gerard 't Hooft is a Dutch theoretical physicist who won a Nobel Prize.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_'t_Hooft

It is a little bit like software engineering.

It doesn't matter a lot what you wrote first. What matters is if you have followed up, cleaned up, refactored and left it without inconsistencies. It matters if you listen to critique and try to understand and learn from it. And then it matters if you maintain it as our understanding of the problem gets better.

See also how to become a good theoretical physicist by the same:

https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~gadda001/goodtheorist/index....

" The bad theoretical physicist, in anticipation, names his own equations and effects, and even his entire theories, after himself right away. "

I never heard of anyone doing this, is there an example of this?

The real trick is to not name some important discovery, which then leads others to name it after you. Or, to use a hopelessly unwieldy terminology for the discovery with hopefully the same outcome. If the discoverer comes up with a good name for their discovery then this significantly reduces any chance that the effect will be named after them.

>I never heard of anyone doing this, is there an example of this?

ahem...

https://www.wolframscience.com/

"Einstein-Cartan-Evans theory" of the "Evans field equations" proposed by... Myron Wyn Evans. Full crackpot but still. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Cartan%E2%8...

Most academics are completely useless and wouldn't stand a chance if they weren't hired by other useless academics.

The page is also a great example of awful web design.

Perhaps in comparison with the "good theoretical physicist" one also mentioned?

Reader mode to the rescue... This whole article reeks of artificial academic elitism. Not the entire content of it, but just sprinkled in here and there.

it’s not artificial, anyway: he came by it honestly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_%27t_Hooft

Given his achievements, I would give him the benefits of the doubt that it's just a grumpy person who's seen enough polished turd having a rent.

I don't know if theoretical physics is particularly susceptible to producing the type of "bad" people that the OP writes about: but of all type of scientists I have worked with in the past, it appears that theoretical physicists do have higher tendency of doing those "bad" things described in the article.

On a personal level, I am biased because I have quit a job due to exactly the type of behavior in question, where everyone thought what we were doing was the greatest thing in history and they remained undeterred no matter how many times I said what we were doing is a pile of shit. Our competitors were like that, too.

I studied Physics, and I ended up doing some computational work around High-Energy Physics. All the postdocs I worked with received a lot of insane emails about crank theories. Many were more silly ideas, but some of the proposers had put in serious effort.

IIRC they were getting the same emails, like they were on a list. They were a magnet for this, particularly as high-energy physics was in the news a lot.

The people who seemed to get it worst were the particle-physics phenomenology people.

I would imagine they start out funny, but could after several years get tiring.

The "list" is self-organizing. When nobody listens to a purveyor of a poor theory, the proponent casts an ever-wider net.

Eventually, they have the bright idea to scrape the web pages of physics departments for emails. At least in my case, they started sending email within a few months of starting grad school.

The truly ambitious can decide to simply show up at the lab/building. A common refrain is, "here is my theory, tell me why it is wrong". No amount of countervailing evidence will be sufficient, usually because such a person will have critical misunderstandings of a fundamental concept or three and an intuitive sense that they are correct.

Don't invite them into your office and attempt to help them resolve said misunderstandings in a youthful desire to save them from wasting their time; they might not leave. Do, however, give them the references they might need in order to see the light.

There's a buck to be made:

https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-f...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12268362

That aeon story is about Sabine Hossenfelder doing a "talk to a physicist" job. She sounds awesome at it, very impressive!

I just cannot find it in me to get upset by the notion that a group of people who have tried hard to understand something, including by trying to rip apart their own and their colleagues' ideas, might know something, and also might have grounds to be irritated by being harangued by people who have done neither.

On the matter of the presentation of this web page, however...

lol people don't understand that science at gerard 't hooft's level is just as petty and vulgar as your local bar.

what i mean is very accomplished scientists brag and sneer and bluster all the time - they feel entitled to and we worship and empower them to. examples abound; read any of feynman's books; landau had a scale by which he measured other scientists; von neumann would chew people out who couldn't keep up with him; the cat fight right now around Mochizuki's proof; etc etc etc. if you've never been around these people you think they're saints when in fact they're almost universally assholes.

it's not unlike ultra-wealthy people competing with each other for the greatest monument to their wealth...

i'm sure someone will respond to me to say something like they need to be this way to accomplish (just like with the slavish worship of the ultra wealthy) what they've accomplished and to this i always present to them john bardeen, who won two nobels and still managed to be a good neighbor.

To be fair to one of those examples,

> von neumann would chew people out who couldn't keep up with him

Imagine what that experience was like from his perspective, constantly explaining simple things to people too lazy to put in the work necessary to have a proper discussion about whatever before ultimately wasting his time. Over and over and over again. That gets old quickly no matter what level you're operating on.

Lol this is exactly what I preemptively alluded to - how we (as a culture) enable this kind of behavior. It becomes even worse when you realize that at least the ultra wealthy pay people for the right to abuse them and von Neumann et al are abusing, frequently, poorly paid junior scientists.

>That gets old quickly no matter what level you're operating on.

If you can't handle being around people that are differently abled from you then the answer is not to take your frustrations out on them. The answer is to stop being around people. No community/culture/society owes anyone, not even people at this level, some kind of pampered sphere of existence that revolves around them.

> If you can't handle being around people that are differently abled from you then the answer is not to take your frustrations out on them.

Of course. But von Neumann was just as human as the people who struggled to keep up with him, he just had different weaknesses. Having low emotional intelligence is every bit as deserving of understanding as having low general intelligence.

> The answer is to stop being around people. No community/culture/society owes anyone, not even people at this level, some kind of pampered sphere of existence that revolves around them.

You sure about that? Society has MASSIVELY benefited from von Neumann's work. If the cost of that was a few people's hurt feelings at his inability to interact with them a way that doesn't hurt their feelings it was a small price to pay.

>You sure about that? Society has MASSIVELY benefited from von Neumann's work. If the cost of that was a few people's hurt feelings at his inability to interact with them a way that doesn't hurt their feelings it was a small price to pay.

The flawed premise implicit in this is that he (or even someone else) wouldn't have produced all the same things while being cordial. More importantly the even greater flaw is the assumption that he wouldn't have produced even more if he'd been easier to work with

You could speculate to that effect, just as easily and correctly as you could speculate that he would have been even more productive still had he surrounded himself with people he didn't consider mentally slow.

>with people he didn't consider mentally slow.

your whole point is that no such people existed?

Wait what? What did I say that lead you to that conclusion?

I'm sure there were people in his time who would rightly consider him to be slower than they were (and equally sure that he wouldn't be acknowledging that if confronted about it).

My point is more that he had his own flaws, just like the people he had trouble getting along with. Being around slow people _is_ often frustrating, especially if you're more concerned with working than teaching. Was he an ass? Absolutely. But we should we try to understand_why_ he was, rather than just talk about how he should have been kicked out of society. Especially in von Neumann's case, where his net utility to society was insanely high (compare to, say, Mochizuki).

> you think they're saints when in fact they're almost universally assholes

This does not match my experience, and outside the classroom I have been in 1:1 or 2:1 situations with several Nobel prize winners. I'm commenting on individual demeanor, not whatever happens when departmental politics plays out.

As you describe Bardeen, I would take that to be the norm.

Edit: That much said, the topic article rubs me the wrong way. As someone above says, the tone is harsh.

Pauli: “What Professor Einstein [just] said is not totally stupid.”

Yeah, the tone is harsh. He’s trying to deal in mass with a whole pile of cranks wasting his time. Compare with his “how to become a good theoretical physicist”: https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~gadda001/goodtheorist/index....

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