Hacker News Reader

Comment by oraphalous | Hacker News Reader

I wish they didn't use the term "crisis" for this. It's nothing like the problems other disciplines are having with respect to replication failure - where maybe the term is appropriate.

Physics can still explain / predict a shit-load of phenomena. It's not a crisis - just more work to do.

View on HN

They refer to a crisis in a sense Thomas Kuhn used. The point where paradigm shift is needed. Physics has experience with it. General relativity theory was a paradigm shift following a crisis.

Kuhn is a red herring. The issue is that physicists are too far removed from experimental checks. The scientific method requires experiment to confirm a hypothesis. The separation of theory from experiment has enabled a generation (or three) of physicists to ignore experiment entirely, spending happy careers playing with the implications of unfalsifiable theories like M-Brain theory or string theory. One gets the impression of a group of very smart people hiding behind their credentials, first unwilling to let their theories be tested, and next brazenly claiming that their theories cannot be tested, and that's okay. That's not okay, and they should lose their jobs.

If that is your impression, then I suggest you test your hypothesis. Go talk to these physicists and explain your concerns. Many are approachable and responsive.

There's a book called "The trouble with Physics" written by Lee Smolin in 2006, who is a theoretical physicist himself and wrote a survey on string theory back then, involved in the string theory community and documented his observations in that book.

In short the book conclude many of them are experiencing "group-think" and over-emphasize the importance of string theory given what they can't prove theoretically as well as experimentally.

> Many are approachable and responsive.

You must be talking about some other people here. In my experience we're not. We really don't have time to address to some random people from the public on why we disagree with what they believe.

I'm not a physicist nor a person who understands physics at all, but if what you say is true, wouldn't the most likely explanation be that physicists do that specifically for fear of losing their job?

I don't think physicists have better or worse character than the average person. However I think smart people excel at rationalizing their uselessness. "At least I'm teaching undergrads. At least I know enough advanced math that people struggle to call me out on my shit. At least I protect the environment by refraining from making anything, or doing experiments. At least I write winning grants and fund my graduate students."

I think it's the rare physicist that actually thinks "Yes, this work is useless, but I need a job and will keep up the subterfuge." I think the rationalizations are more common. But this is just my opinion. And consider the context: what's the alternative? Do you realize how hard it is to discover something actually, really new? And the sheer impossibility of doing scientific discovery on a schedule? The expectations are really insane in science. I can't help but think that "professional scientist" is not such a good idea, that we were better off when people did science on the side, as a hobby, and once in a while they'd find something cool and publish it.

There's an implicit assumption here that the "purpose of [physics] research" must necessarily result in concrete results in order to be "worthwhile". A lot of theoretical physics, at least, is increasingly really mathematics [or computer science] research, that doesn't necessarily directly and simply apply to "real world issues", but that doesn't make it invalid.

(That said: also the majority of physics research isn't fundamental physics research, which is the stuff you're talking about. There's plenty of work in areas like condensed matter physics, plasma physics, quantum optics, etc etc etc that is still producing results and driving new developments.)

I'd say rather that some physicists are doing things that aren't properly called science. Science is only that which can be checked by experiment. This means clearing a space, acquiring tools, preparing the geometry, applying the theory to compute a prediction, and then executing the experiment, taking measurements, and comparing the measurement to predicted measurement. Drop the weight, apply the voltage. Press the button.

Nobody is preventing string theory from being tested. If you know of a way to test it, please go and do so, you'll get a Nobel Prize for it because nobody else has thought of a way.

That's exactly the problem - spending decades studying a theory without any idea of how it could be tested (with devices that could, say, fit into the solar system) is not how science should work.

It's the best we can do, given our difficulty in conducting experiments.

Perhaps we should simply study other fields, where experiments are at least in principle possible. The ancient Egyptians didn't have to study quantum chomodynamics in order to advance science.

I'm not completely disagreeing with everything you said, but

> they should lose their jobs.

is too much.

You should also study the history of string theory and how their early days are miserable (too difficult to have a career as people denies string theory as physics.)

The correct approach would be to invest in string theory but also any other proponents of "theory of everything". The main issue today is that virtually only string theorist can make a career of being theoretical particle physicists.

The very fact is that there's no any other theories beyond the standard model that are falsifiable. If you require any theory to be falsifiable then no theoretical physicists can have a job. Not even the invention of general relativity would qualifies (remember although we can now falsify GM, it wasn't initially.)

I mean, replication failures are a result of bad science, bad analysis and a poor understanding of statistics in many cases. It's not so much a crisis in the state of human knowledge but the state of the education of the scientists in those other disciplines.

It's a crisis because it's so widespread and the denial that it's a problem is strong.

The phenomena are related, though. One could argue that the social sciences, with greater latitude in definitions of measurement and thresholds for statistical significance, had been building sand castles for decades. Eventually, the entire rotten edifice will collapse.

In contrast, the greater restrictions of theory and measurement in physical science didn’t easily allow researchers to do pointless hand-waving that looked good. In some sense, the “crisis” in physics is less embarassing, as it is simply theorists bumping into limits enforced by reality. They didn’t make it up as they went along.

I’m also doubtful the lauded “open science” movement will accomplish anything besides the mass transfer of intellectual property to centralized data platforms, to be mined by replication specialists.

I’m biased, admittedly, after watching an APA zoom conference on the advantages and wonders of open science, and why researchers should join in. The lead presenter’s #1 reason to join open science was “that I didn’t lose my data anymore, it was all nicely and neatly centralized on the OSF server.”

Speechless.

In biology, neuroscience, and psychology replication failure is often the result of an impedance mismatch between reductive models and real systems complexity.

This is an acute problem in animal research where 90% of work gets away with using a single genotype in a single environment. And then the “wise” old heads at NIH wonder that there is a replication bias? Really?

I wish people used the word crisis less and with a more narrow definition restricted to a short time which unexpectedly forces decisions or changes with long ranging consequences, and not a synonym for “shit is bad”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com