What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists (2016)
aeon.co
aeon.co
"A typical problem is that, in the absence of equations, they project literal meanings onto words such as ‘grains’ of space-time or particles ‘popping’ in and out of existence. Science writers should be more careful to point out when we are using metaphors. My clients read way too much into pictures, measuring every angle, scrutinising every colour, counting every dash. Illustrators should be more careful to point out what is relevant information and what is artistic freedom. But the most important lesson I’ve learned is that journalists are so successful at making physics seem not so complicated that many readers come away with the impression that they can easily do it themselves. How can we blame them for not knowing what it takes if we never tell them?"
Of course, this writing often isn't for the layperson, it's for an audience who can tell the difference between diagram, artistic license, and metaphor, but even so, it's good to think about, especially when communicating science to the general public.
"I still get the occasional joke from colleagues about my ‘crackpot consultant business’, but I’ve stopped thinking of our clients that way. They are driven by the same desire to understand nature and make a contribution to science as we are. They just weren’t lucky enough to get the required education early in life, and now they have a hard time figuring out where to even begin."
In some sense, labeling somebody a "crackpot" assigns a sort of malicious wrongness to them. It is interesting to see somebody who's dealt with a significant subset of these people and discovered more actual, honest misunderstanding than we (or at least I) would have expected.
NNs do not model the brain, and have basically nothing to do with it. I'd imagine rereading that chapter would be a good idea.
Light-ether is real. It's [very oversimplifying] the EM pressure from maintaining every EMF-free zone (the insides of particles superconductors), plus pressure of all the cosmic background radiation.
It's like cargo-cult physics. They (try to) do all the things, but the starting point is wrong, so it can't work.
So showing them "where to even begin" is in fact the solution... if they'll listen.
This is where I find the line easier to draw. Starting from a wrong premise and reaching a wrong conclusion (even if reached rationally and logically) does not, itself, make a crackpot. The crackpot is the one who won't listen to the counterarguments. And when they do listen, they just shift the goalposts instead of actually adjusting their basis to better fit reality.
A looser, less perfect, but more easily applicable and economical heuristic that I have is:
- Is my (layperson) interlocutor mostly contrarian and skeptical of others? Then there is very little chance that trying to point them in the right direction will be productive. Being a reasonable contrarian requires a very high level of expertise.
- Is my interlocutor mostly curious and skeptical of their own understanding? Then my friend, this person is a rare golden perl, and I will spare no effort or patience, because in almost every case these people are the ones who haven’t lost the capacity to learn.
The difference is that in P. the metaphors and mappings create consistent experiences for everyone and can be manipulated symbolically using math.
That's a huge change, which is why science is everywhere and hardly anyone attempts alchemy today. But under the hood science is still a machine made of metaphors which are partial mappings of experience.
I don't think anyone believes all the different metaphors physics uses mesh together neatly, so at least some of them must be misleading. Improving the coverage is almost the definition of physics.
But it's also possible the consistent symbolic metaphor approach is limited in ways we don't yet know, and at some point it will reach its limits and have to be replaced with something else.
It pidgeon-holes and ridicules people, we know it's insulting, and we use it anyway - that seems close enough to malicious.
Needless to say the experimental results differed slightly from their theory. But what struck me is, they were actually doing science .. which is wonderful. I remembered thinking if only our local schools would do a little bit of science, or math for that matter..
1. There are labs / practicals as part of a scientific curriculum, though ultimately in a controlled fashion.
2. There are projects that allow a student to pursue an open-ended like of inquiry.
I'm not in the academia myself but I can totally see how the nth time someone offers their "insights" into something they almost certainly don't understand could make you think of them as crackpots.
Also it isn’t just physicists on the receiving end. As a software engineer I get people wanting me to help them with their “crackpot” business ideas (although they sometimes don’t want to tell me their secret, and I heartily encourage them not to!). I have seen an acquaintance explore a crackpot electrical mechanism for perpetual energy. Mathematicians surely get their fair share of crackpots too!
I don't have a solution... I do have a problem in that this drive-by dismissal of mine is getting attention when what I was excited about in another comment goes ignored. =\
It's not a truth any more than 'humans murder others when they're angry'. Sometimes humans belittle others and sometimes they gain status from it. Sometimes they lose status, and I suspect they almost always lose a little self-respect and feel more intensely the shame that was so strong, they just tried to project it onto someone else.
> Being highly educated is apparently no defense against this common weakness.
I think it depends on the fields of study. If you study humanity, you may understand this behavior. If you study quarks, I agree it is little defense.
I mean -- as a programmer, my significant other thinks that my presence soothes the Machine Spirits and makes the computer magically cooperate. Imagine if this was a superstition! The random requests for IT support would be really annoying.
Quiet a few of the misinformed are HN commenters.
Generally, the pattern appears to be "Foo is complex. Conspiracy theorist asserts there is a conspiracy making Foo complex. We cannot trust the mainstream experts because they are lying. Gishgallop with endless bad faith questions which take an enormous amount of time to answer properly but ultimately do not convince the question asker".
The general takeaway, for me at least, is that even the most intelligent person can be sucked into crackpot conspiracy. The problem is "I'm an expert in this field, this means I'm smarter than most" and then thinking that intelligence in one area grants you insights into others.
The worst part is conspiracies like to hide under the motto of "I'm just being a good skeptic". However, a good skeptic needs to actually dig deeper than just surface level assertions. A good skeptic needs to look into the counter claims to their conspiracy. What are the sources? Do the actually point to data or are they just naked assertions? Do the sources reference only other conspiracy websites? Do they have references? If this claim is actually true, why is it rejected by the mainstream? Who is actually benefiting from hiding the truth?
I love this. Also hilarious.
In my experience, also true in certain cases.
You observe something that is being done a way you would not do it. There is no reason to suspect this is the source of the problem, but you do it the way you think it should be done. Lo and behold, the process works and the problem is gone. In retrospect you can see why, maybe the filename ':/%20' was bad luck, or whatever. Looking at the process, though, it's hard to claim success was achieved by a rational scientific process...
They're both definitely in my favourite author list, of any genre.
The naive enthusiasm, self directed exploration, and passion many of these crackpots have are winning traits in many pursuits. Just a bit of poor luck they picked an especially high wall to scale with theoretical physics.
It's why they rage at people not taking them seriously - if anyone tries to show something mathematically they can't understand it, don't want to admit it, and either wander off or ignore it and go back to the extensive prose.
Usenet science boards used to have various "personalities" who were clearly ill. They would post variations on the same word salad over and over, invariably claiming that Einstein was wrong about something or other, while they were right, which made them super-geniuses.
I understand high-profile physicists particularly tend to attract these people, so dealing with them must be a challenge, and there must be a temptation to skip over anyone who looks like they fall into that group even if they're just asking questions.
There was - possibly still is - a crossover group typically made of electrical/electronic engineers who knew just enough traditional EM theory to be dangerous, but not enough to know what they didn't know about GR and QM. For some reason they were also obsessed with trying to prove that relativity was wrong - perhaps because GR is so weird it's almost offensively strange to people who want to live in an un-weird universe.
My contribution to this severely under-served department:
"It can't possibly be correct to use relativistic field theory to write effective fields for excitations of a wave medium when the whole idea of SR was that there wasn't a medium."
On the other hand it also gave us marvelous energy sources such as nuclear power. However this connection is often missed amongst lay observers.
I think this is why many profs have a secretary to screen this stuff out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect#...
> GR is so weird
Someone said about Quantum Mechanics that if you understand it, you obviously don't. Because it is so weird.
The same can be said for physicists and mathematicians who know just enough EE. As a practicing EE who specializes in RF and antennas, I've had to debunk many crackpot antenna and circuits, who developers are looking for funding. The nice thing about RF is hunks of dielectric and conductor are pretty easy to fabricate or simulate, but they don't even try to prove their ideas.
If you are ever even around physics or math at all, you will see the crackpot letters. I was a little surprised engineers are largely unaware of the phenomenon and are shocked, for example, that anyone seriously tries to make perpetual motion machines at all.
Here's a couple links about the mathematical equivalent:
The mathematical physicist John Baez proposed a “crackpot index”[1] [snip]
Mathematician Chris Caldwell was inspired by Baez’s list and devised a mathematical version. Some (lightly edited) examples from Caldwell’s list are
1 point for each word in all capital letters;
5 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous, logically inconsistent, or widely known to be false;
10 points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction;
10 points for not knowing (or not using) standard mathematical notation;
10 points for expressing fear that your ideas will be stolen;
10 points for each new term you invent or use without properly defining it;
10 points for stating that your ideas are of great financial, theoretical, or spiritual value;
10 points for beginning the description of your work by saying how long you have been working on it;
10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to established experts;
10 points for citing an impressive-sounding, but irrelevant, result;
20 points for naming something after yourself;
30 points for not knowing how or where to submit their major discovery for publication;
30 points for confusing examples or heuristics with mathematical proof;
40 points for claiming to have a “proof” of an important result but not knowing what established mathematicians have done on the problem.
Edit: The second link has a scanned advert at the end from 1983 for “The Science of Programming” by David Gries: the title of the book amuses me.
> 10 points for not knowing (or not using) standard mathematical notation;
I personally hate non-standard notation so I switch to the standard when I know about it, but at first, when moving out of well known waters you may be using non-standard notation.
> 10 points for expressing fear that your ideas will be stolen;
Ha ha, I don't express fear, but who is not afraid a little?
> 10 points for stating that your ideas are of great financial, theoretical, or spiritual value;
A lot of papers I have read starts with this actually, not to mention PhD or MSc thesis.
> 10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to established experts;
Most papers boast about how they beat the baseline that everyone uses. I do it myself although I try to be honest about the circumstances when this happens and when it's better the alternative.
> 30 points for not knowing how or where to submit their major discovery for publication;
Sometimes it happens
> 40 points for claiming to have a “proof” of an important result but not knowing what established mathematicians have done on the problem.
It has happened lot of times, since the beginning of time that some people rediscover previous results, sometimes famous people on famous and important results. To put an example the FFT, but there are a lot of them. And besides, who likes to read others people code?
I think the difference between a crackpot and other people is not accepting the mistake. It's curious it happens so much to engineers. I'm an engineer myself and if I learnt something during my studies is how little I actually know. I usually say that one thing STEM education gives you is the certainty that most of your ideas are wrong.
There were like 10+ physicists and 10+ grad students in this meeting, they respectful when they smoked this time crystal guy, but of course he just used it as an example of the cabal keeping the truth down.
They fell into a couple easy categories. Perpetual motion machines, casual ideas that are obviously impractical, fundamentally failing to understand the subject area. Not a single one of them seemed new or useful.
Then again Nicola Tesla had some strange ideas. Turns out half of them were brilliant and the other half still seem weird. Efforts to demarcate crackpot and real might be approaching the problem from the wrong direction.
I like the author’s strategy of helping people gain the knowledge to understand what they’re trying to talk about. Teslas ideas about motion and flow as it pertains to physical health were weird but that doesn’t mean he was unable to learn about biology, had he spent time learning about it, maybe he’d have brought his ideas back to reality and contributed something interesting.
We should celebrate people for their curiosity, encourage them to gain the knowledge that has already been discovered and help them express their ideas in ways that others can relate to.
In addition, I believe the article demonstrates that in these cases, the facts people are discussing and debating are only part of the picture: there is an emotional undercurrent to what they are saying.
Dr. Carl Rogers would likely argue that facts would only change their minds if they felt properly heard / seen / understood.
For example:
> One summer I went to visit three trisectors... My first trisector was... enormously pleased to see me and couldn't stop talking. He was bursting with energy and couldn't keep still... We talked about his trisection and I tried (I was younger then, and not as wise) to show him the error of his ways. He seemed to be listening to what I was saying, but none of it was making any impression.
I'm not saying "feed the trolls," only that there is more going on than meets the eye.
While pop-sci has been radically successful at making physics concepts appear accessible, it has woefully failed at making actual physics accessible. It's no wonder that Americans increasingly view science as either the tony stark like practice of wizards - or as a ceremonious endeavor practiced by those whose beliefs are no more testable than a TV pundits.
We need to do better at Science writing.
The median person who can drive, pay taxes, be a loving partner, and parent is just ... disappointingly not smart if you've been surrounded by brainiacs for most of your life. Some very bright people have other personality quirks that make it hard for them to integrate new ideas outside their comfort zone.
We need better people.
There are some folks who are incredibly motivated and also fundamentally incapable. But for most people, the biggest "issue" is that there are multiple lucrative and lower-stress exit ramps.
I would start with most terms named after their inventors/discoverers, trying to give them meaningful names.
> [...]
> We need to do better at Science writing.
Rather: we need to get better at not believing what advertising tells people.
To a certain extent, fundamental background knowledge, in particular mathematical, is needed. So to present something to a general audience will necessarily involve a simplified model of some kind. This can be a bad analogy, but even a "good models" are flawed at the edges and seem likely to be the simpler the model becomes in relation to a more complex topic.
Also saw it around COVID vaccines. I talked to several people who claimed calling it “vaccine” is fraudulent because in their minds a vaccine protects you 100% from the disease and if it only avoids hospitalization or severe cases it’s not a vaccine.
How do you mean? I think of popular science writing as always being for the layperson.
Potentially interesting to some: we get the same phenomenon right here on HN regularly! To someone an advanced understanding of music theory (including western harmony, tuning systems, acoustics, psychoacoustics, doing a graduate degree, etc) HN is a regular source of armchair music theorists putting forth their own musical grand unified theories of everything without understanding the foundations. I guess, much like the field the author works in, the nature of it is that a strong understanding of a small piece leads one to easily believe there is this neat and tidy system of well behaving patterns when the reality is vastly more complex. I'd say once a week or so I see posts on HN that are the musical equivalents. I used to answer with pointers to what one might want to learn or suggests books, but really, I have no idea what the right response to that sort of thing is. It's way, way more complicated than one would think coming from a tangentially related field. Perhaps similarly, the popular music theory writing out there creates the same effect.
And assuring us that, on the basis of his deep understanding, 5G is known to be perfectly safe. :)
So when people make stupid remarks here, view them as their "hello world" programs.
On the other hand, for musical theory, the most successful (and rich) musicians today only know a fraction of music theory. Or none at all
For as much as we can discuss about it, most of it is constructed. A lot of musical theory goes over rules and structures and archaic nomenclature for every little thing (fml) and what not, for, on the more advanced levels say "oh sure, you can break this rule if you want". Ok thanks, I guess I'll just save my time and play what sounds good, thanks
What rich or successful musicians do has as much to do with music theory as what rich race car drivers do has to do with physics - the car is the result of generations of the study of physics, but the driver only needs to know how they bits they interact with work.
The fact that the vast majority of players have no idea how the intervals of 12th root of two to the 4th power, or 5/4, became a Major 3rd (ET and JT respectively) is irrelevant to a discussion of theory. I could teach a semester long course on how we arrived at our current notes on the piano keyboard, but lots of A-list piano players don't know any of that. A physicist is the equivalent of a music theorist, not of a musician, as music theory is largely applied physics and geometry applied towards acoustics.
But you’re right, the music theory cranks are the worst.
The complexity is what keeps this industry interesting. Those people who are getting those little flashes of clarity, only to be crushed at the wheel of complexity, well, I have to admit I was and sometimes still am one of them.
It's funny (fascinating actually!) because it reads just like your typical highly opinionated software engineering blog post, only applied to music. Yet most of it, particularly the first three points, has no basis in reality. (E.g. point 3 - any music theorist will tell you there is a VERY valid reason for choosing a double-sharp over a natural in particular contexts.)
As another amateur musician, I was nodding at most of these points. I fully believe it’s all very complex and double sharps exist for some reason, but how much of that do you really need the reader to understand?
Yes, it is true that using a piece of software shouldn't require a CS degree. But you still expect the source code to follow "CS principles". Similarly, you expect scores to follow "music theory principles". Now, it takes time and effort to understand these principles, just like with CS. However, whereas almost everybody understands that the subject of computer science is vast and is not to be underestimated, the same doesn't seem to be the case for music theory. And I can sort of understand why - computer science is math (1 + 1 = 2), but music theory is just hand-wavy rules made up by dead people, no? Well, yes, but that does not make it any less "true". Music theory as a tradition is very real, and you can't expect people to take your music-theory "PEPs" seriously unless you have been deeply embedded in that tradition.
Of course, this is not me knocking the author in any way. Sometimes the best innovations come to those with fresh eyes. But I just hope to convey the idea that music theory (or maybe more accurate to say "music tradition") is not something to be easily dismissed and, just like in computer science, a good solution requires a good understanding of the problem.
Anyway, my first guess for a double sharp would be that you're e.g. notating an F# which is itself sharp for whatever reason, and you can't just notate it as a G because Gs are also sharped. (As will be true in any key signature with three or more sharps.) Then the reason for marking F𝄪 rather than G♮ is exactly the same as the reason you'd mark F# rather than G♭ in a key that didn't sharp either note. And even from a pure usability perspective, if you're in a key with three sharps and you're doing a lot of alternating between F𝄪 and G#, it's kind of nice having the two notes at the positions of F and G so that you can give them the appropriate accidentals once per measure instead of every time you play either note, the way you'd need to do if they were both on a G.
I ran into some trouble with this exact problem when engraving this score recently: https://musescore.com/user/36584999/scores/7810499
The first half of the vibraphone part looks like you're mainly doing downward variations, so I wrote it with flats. But the second half obviously suggests that it wants F#s rather than G♭s, and it felt really weird to use F# sometimes and G♭ other times.
Since I know virtually no music theory, my approach was to ask people for help on the internet. I found someone who had majored in music theory and his response was "hmm, interesting", followed by asking a bunch of his friends. Consensus eventually worked out as something like "Hmm, interesting! Could go either way, but maybe F# is a little better than G♭. Whatever you choose, be consistent."
It was all fairly unsatisfying and I'd be interested in other comments on how the accidentals in the piece should be marked. Following the general theme of "F# looks a little better, but be consistent" I interpreted every accidental anywhere in the piece as a departure upward rather than downward. :/
[1] I've also seen sharps used while going down, but it was pretty obvious what was going on there - the music had changed keys, but the score hadn't changed key signatures. Those sharps just reflected the new key rather than being departures from it.
Thanks for the link, it gave me a good laugh.
That sentence right there is just jam packed with bullshit and misunderstanding.
I think she should replace "science writers" with physicists. In my experience, it's when physicists give overflowing and superfluous explanations of things that cause the most trouble, because they are viewed as authorities. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, Brian Greene, PBS Space Time, and many others. It's interesting, because I once read an interview with Brian Green, and the question was: what career would you have chosen if you weren't a physicist? His answer was both surprising and unsurprising: a Baptist preacher. One should note that he actually has the speaking style of one.
It brings up an interesting point in that physics at the highest level sounds almost like what ill-informed amateurs produce. I have degrees in mathematics and some understanding of physics, but I've watched a few lectures of Ed Witten before, and he might as well be just making it all up. I know, it can all be backed out such that it all follows from known mathematics and physics, but one does have to marvel at the similarity, and I think this is what so-called cranks get emboldened by. It makes it worse when physicists use words like "believe".
I think physicists have done a poor job explaining that what they do is model building. The models are not reality. What reality is currently lies in the realm of philosophy. The models physicists build are simply our best descriptions based on what we observe (string theory aside). The article gets at this a bit with mentioning metaphors, but it still doesn't drive home the point because she's referring to metaphors of metaphors (i.e., metaphors for the physical models). Once you understanding that physics is about building models that describes what we observe in physical reality, it lowers the barrier of "authority". In that, in some sense, the entire point of physics is often to find out how we're wrong just as much as it is to clarify where we're right. I think many don't understand that when "is" is used in physics, it really means "is modeled by" (or something to that effect).
I'm reminded of this scene from one of my favorite movies, A Serious Man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbzWYjVrvpI
It's a failure of an education system that leaves its citizens with no conception of what science is, or how 'progress' is made.
That's become very clear with regards to Dr. Fauci and the CDC. They can explain all they want about the current state of understanding (modeling) when they are called out by the public as charlatans when the insight and thus guidelines change.
I am flabbergasted at the attacks on scientists explaining current understanding, until I realize that the people attacking very rarely comprehend the process. This isn't a slap at people attacking scientists, it's very much an indictment of our educational and scicomm system, that we say "here is a fully functional adult, who doesn't have the slightest clue as to how this stuff actually works, and we are totally fine with it." As well as experts saying "insert random domain specific jargon here" for said individuals to consume.
I've (PhD in physics) taken long (6-8hour) car rides with my Sensei (2 years of college) to tournaments. On the way, we talk about science, and I put in consumable, non-jargon terms, things like the big bang, quantum physics, steller lifecycles, etc. I'm not an expert in some of these, and out of practice in others, but being able to explain to an intelligent and curious person is feature IMO for scientists.
One should not be mysterious, or assume mantles of superiority. We all put pants on, one leg at a time. Being able to explain the joy of discovery in an approachable way is a skill. One I'd love to see in graduate schools.
My own anecdote on the crackpot bits ... I'd started at SGI in 1995 ABD. I was writing, and it was going slowly. My manager knew I was a physics type, and he forwarded me an email he'd received from someone on a new theory of relativity.
Don't ask me why someone would email SGI (a workstation company) about this. I don't know.
He asked me to look it over. This is like 4 weeks into the job (my first full time professional job post grad school). I thought this was an assignment worth doing. So I reviewed their paper. I caught a bunch of sign and other related errors they made, and wrote up a summary. He asked me to interact with them. So I sent it back to the people.
I got all sorts of weirdness coming back from them. It was a conspiracy to keep their breakthrough out of the public mind. "No", I said, "it was a set of mathematical errors." I pointed out that if they fixed them, they would get normal special relativity. They didn't want to. And complained to my manager.
Thus my introduction to internet cranks.
That's pure gloss. It isn't simply "changing your mind," it's changing the social and economic reality of 330,000,000 people. If you fuck up that messaging (science is absolute!) or fuck up plans (flatten the curve! -> eradicate covid! -> lol nvm its endemic now) you and all who support you deserve criticism.
Echoing my point on messaging, the director of the CDC says: “I have frequently said ‘we’re going to lead with the science’…I think public heard that as ‘science is foolproof. Science is black and white. Science is immediate and we get the answer and then we make the decision based on the answer'... and the truth is science is gray".
https://mobile.twitter.com/AlexThomp/status/1499810656056397...
Also, it's hard to make the case that communication, plans, and COVID going endemic are the CDC's fault, when simultaneously the president's communicated "plan" is 'it'll just disappear' or 'just drink bleach'.
Any reason to think this is a distinctly US phenomena as opposed to a more widespread phenomena?
Their toolbox for fudging the science includes dismissing (or, better, completely ignoring) inconvenient studies; praising weak studies that support their position, and acting like the studies' flaws don't exist; and failing to apply obvious logical reasoning. Some of these could be interpreted as incompetence, which in some cases it probably is; other times it becomes blatant enough that incompetence seems implausible.
Here's one example, when, around the time of Omicron, the CDC changed their post-infection isolation guidelines from 10 days to 5 days. The CDC's announcement literally said "The change is motivated by science demonstrating that the majority of SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurs early in the course of illness, generally in the 1-2 days prior to onset of symptoms and the 2-3 days after". However, as a (CDC-favorable) Washington Post article said, "New CDC guidelines were spurred by worries omicron surge could lead to breakdown in essential services: Health officials worried that mass infections could result in tens of thousands of Americans unable to work"; "The guidance by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “was based on the anticipation of a large number of cases might impact societal function,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in an interview with The Post."
Detailed discussion here (including discussion of lots of problems with the guidelines themselves): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uGvYtExLobWz2RixS/cdc-change...
I mean, bullshit. This is most definitely not motivated primarily by science demonstrating a distribution of transmission. If it was, the guidelines would have changed when they learned about this, rather than exactly when the guidelines otherwise needed to change. [...]
So in the interest of making sure people could do [essential services], we’re shortening the period to five days. Understandable? Definitely. I can’t argue with it. I’m all for ‘following the economics.’ [...] But every time you say you are ‘following the science’ when you’re transparently not doing that on any level, you’re burning your credibility and the commons that much more. It needs to stop.
The two are not mutually exclusive. What you're describing is physicists being science writers (or talkers, if they are doing videos or PBS specials). And yes, they are just as sloppy when they do it as non-physicists.
> I think physicists have done a poor job explaining that what they do is model building. The models are not reality.
I agree. I think this is one of the key sources of confusion for non-physicists trying to learn about physics.
That is of course true, but I was trying to point out that it's a much more dangerous situation when writers, presenters, etc. are scientists themselves (whether active or perceived as active), because it allows people to say "well, that's how the experts talk". It's somewhat expected of popular science writers who are not active scientists to speak in a loose way. I do agree that popular science writers need to tighten up their publications, but scientists need to be especially careful when they write for the so-called laymen.
I'll take this as a moment to again push my favorite science writing ever, and that's the Scientific American Library book series. It's some of the best written scientific literature for the interested amateur out there, that I know of, written by experts in the fields in very honest (to the source material) ways.
https://www.thriftbooks.com/series/scientific-american-libra...
Actually, "entanglement" has a precise meaning in QM (a state that cannot be expressed as a product of states of subsystems). It's just that that precise meaning won't make any sense to someone who hasn't already learned a fair bit of QM, so when asked to define the term by lay people, physicists have to wave their hands.
That horse bolted from the barn so long ago that the door has rotted away.
The process of black hole "hair loss" has been in the jargon with "balding" for decades. Google scholar will find you baldness/bald/balding with respect to black holes in publications from the 1970s, and I would be far from surprised to find that Werner Israel has the first published use of the exact words "hair loss" in the mid 1960s in a paper on electrovacuum spacetimes.
Hair loss is an important feature of the dynamical spacetime around a black hole, and takes place on timescales of approximately the light-crossing time of the event horizon diameter. Can balding encode the difference between one (classical) shell of test matter of mass M dropped into a black hole versus two shells of 1/2 M each? Good question! Can balding encode quantum numbers? Also good question! These are questions which go back to the early 1970s: https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.5.243...
(Hair loss continues to an area of current active research. A random recent paper: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12... preprint <https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.14620v1>, "... In vacuum non-zero ∇ × (αB) is quickly radiated away or swallowed by the BH (α is the lapse). However, when plasma is present nonzero ∇ × (αB) drives currents which slows down the balding process.")
Emergence seems far from religious, at least as far as I understand the context of your complaint. If you can derive theory B from theory A, B emerges from A. If, for the same theories, you cannot derive A from B, then A is the more fundamental. That's all that's meant, at least in the basement foundations of theoretical physics, in the weak field limit of quantum gravity theories, and likely most places where one must deal in effective theories. I'm sure you know this, as a physicist. I can't speak to how the term might or might not be used in theology.
I do take your point though that physicists from different areas of physics, and of course mathematicians, might not use a jargon word in the same way. Emergence might be one of those, for all I know.
The weird thing about physics is that it attracts a lot of strange fellows that want to grapple with these ideas much like the OP is working with. As far as I know, no other field attracts such folks, and no, people who cargo-cult Kubernetes into their small company workflow for resume bullet-points are NOT the same kind of person as someone who would waltz into a general relativity colloquium, from the street, sporting no degree whatsoever (it happens).
There's whole categories of outsiders, some call them cranks, who get involved with physics. John Baez even has a purity test of sorts for this (the crackpot index): https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
By what standard? The general public doesn't understand physics and makes little use of it.
> The weird thing about physics is that it attracts a lot of strange fellows that want to grapple with these ideas much like the OP is working with.
Isn't that what attracts all physicists, and humanity in its quest to understand its world?
There's plenty of general science interest in the public and a significant fraction is focused on physics. It doesn't matter if folks don't "make use of it" aside from a bit of enlightenment and wonder. Some physicists have developed quite a public persona and have used that to reach out to the public. Others stay focused on communications within their own community-- both are fine.
The particular kind of autodidactic "cranks" Sabine Hossenfelder (too) generously wrote about are, in my opinion, a very different kind of beast than merely curious folks who want to learn stuff.
For example, "quantum teleportation" has nothing to do with the common meaning of the word "teleportation", but boy do people love talking and writing about it. The popular articles that are written about them don't tell you anything about what they are actually doing, even if you actually know the theory behind it.
They can be considered approximations of reality. To say they are not reality seems dismissive. Newtonian physics is as close to 'real' as anyone is going to find.
As someone with a degree in mathematical physics, my experience with many string theorists in general (however – and I want to stress this – not with Ed Witten in particular) is that their statements and claims don't all strictly follow from known math and physics. Quite often there are huge logical gaps, implicit assumptions or implicit redefinitions of commonly used terminology. For instance, when a string theorist says that "We know that quantum theory dictates XY" or that "Any theory of quantum gravity needs to obey XY", then it might very well be that their implicit assumption is that string theory is the right fundamental theory of nature (i.e. that it makes correct predictions) and that they rather mean something like "We know that quantum theory dictates XY if we model the universe as AdS_5 × S⁵" or "Any stringy theory of quantum gravity needs to obey XY".
More generally, my experience has been that a significant number of people doing string theory lack a sufficiently deep mathematical foundation. Theoretical physicists in general are already quite cavalier when it comes to mathematical rigor and in string theory it's even worse because most quantum field theories are not even mathematically well-defined. So everyone grows up learning to ignore mathematical issues and a large number of people then end up thinking they can just "wing" the math and pick up the required mathematical bits and pieces on the go. So they end up using the same terminology as mathematicians while not really understanding it and/or not really being precise with their words nor in their arguments. At least for me this makes it extremely difficult to tell whether someone is (unknowingly) bullshitting or their claims need to be taken seriously.
The over use of anthropomorphization and metaphor is an issue but equally they're usually not completely made up.
That is beautifully appropriate to the article — thank you.
Indeed, just one quote from his recent opus Until the End of Time..., "the uncertainty principle demonstrated that there are features of the world - like the position and the speed of a particle - that a classical physicist in the mold of Isaac Newton would adamantly claim can be specified with complete certainty but that a quantum physicist realizes are burdened by a quantum fuzziness", says it all.
Maybe the math is too hard to predict what happens in such places, but they will have done something useful in pointing at them. It's not exactly science, as such, but not everything useful has to be.
(I gather that in the stringy black hole model, there is no actual space inside the horizon, so no need for a singularity. I may have misunderstood.)
Do you have examples of this? sounds interesting
I’m not a physicist although I’ve had training in the subject and I’m inclined to agree with you. It seems to me there are at least three issues here; the first is many physicists just aren’t good at drawing analogies or describing what they’re trying to explain; few, say, have Feynman's talent. The second is they aren’t good at pitching their explanation at the right level (to the recipient’s level of knowledge)—they don’t judge the recipient’s level of knowledge well before they answer. And third is that they’ve a level of impatience when it comes to such explanations—that is they’re out of their comfort zone in that they cannot use their usual jargon as they would do with other physicists who talk at their level. (I've seen comments to the effect that 'that cannot be explained, you just have to believe the math' — then they don't bother to actually provide the equation or its reference because it's a text-based web page (not that dissimilar to the explanation of the eqn in the video.)
However, it’s not fair to single out physicists alone, this problem often occurs when there’s a disparity of understanding between professionals and others.
For example, I’ve experienced the problem here on HN in both directions (that is when I’m replying to a post where I have greater knowledge than the recipient and vice versa). Let’s say we have a physics topic that’s somewhat tricky to explain such as the Aharonov–Bohm effect and I ask a professional physicist who works in the area a general question that to me may be a complex matter but which is a trite one for him/her then the moment he/she gets a whiff of understanding that I’m not at his/her level of understanding—or that I’m not using the proper vernacular then one either doesn't get a reply or alternatively only a short nonchalant one that doesn't answer my question. This isn’t always the case but it often is—in my example the reply may be along the lines 'you’d better get a better understanding of potentials before you tackle that problem.'
In the reverse situation when I’m providing an explanation then I’ll often go to considerable lengths to provide a simple explanation but this is not easy as it takes considerable time (especially so if the reply is comparatively short, succinct AND easy to understand). I don’t often succeed and as a result my comments are often too long, tedious and boring thus few people bother to read them. Essentially, one needs to learn how to best answer questions where there's no really good, simple or obvious analogy and I, like many others, don't claim great expertise in doing so.
This poor communication amongst technical processionals is a serious problem. One only has to take a glance at the scientific and technical literature to see the problem. Frankly, I’ve often seen papers on topics that I’m competent in that I struggle to read as the language is so strained and obtuse, it’s as if the writers are deliberately going out of their way to sound erudite—but in reality what they’ve written is essentially gobbledygook until the paper has been read and reread multiple times over. This should not be necessary.
Moreover, the same problem arises when it comes to math equations. Often there’s an assumption that readers are fully cognizant with the mathematical treatment of the subject and thus writers often leave out intermediate stages that would make the understanding easier or they don’t provide proper explanations and or legends where the symbols are adequately defined, and so on. Again, this smacks of trying to prove how smart they are, but in the end it doesn't do justice to their cause.
It seems to me the only way around this problem is to include some communications training in their courses. Incidentally, I don’t think the ‘math problem’ is quite as bad as Hossenfelder makes out (although it is a problem). Most people who are going to ask physicists questions on advanced topics actually do have a reasonable amount of math training behind them, so physicists need to keep the math simple as is possible and spend a little time leading questioners through the tricky bits.
On the whole I think Sabine Hossenfelder does a truly excellent job at explaining physics (from my experience of watching her on YouTube), especially so given that she’s doing so in her second language English (if my German were as good as her excellent English then I’d be very pleased). If I have any criticism of her talks then it’s that she pitches her topics lower than I’d like, similarly she uses almost no math in her explanations (but then, I can’t complain, she’s primarily not aiming her talks at people like me).
For people who can, it's just fairy tales, so what's the point of instilling a false sense of understanding?
Physics is mathematical models + experimental data. Good physical intiution comes from familiarity bred of working through math problems and observing experiments. Bad intuition comes from metaphors.
I think this statement is worth examining a little bit. This statement implies that, unless you are going to develop a working knowledge of the math and become a practicing physicist, then you shouldn't bother reading anything about it.
If it is interesting: from 10:00 onwards discussion about the reality of individual terms of the pertubation series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72us6pnbEvE&t=1367s
Who knows who ends up being a role model for a bright kid who otherwise would not have taken interest in physics, science or nature, and then goes on to become next Einstein or Tesla or Edison.
Also, I am deeply impressed by the group who are continuing spread of knowledge, giving better direction to the fellow explores without judgement. I wish more professionals could spend an hour or two a week/ month in such a way.
While a lot of very cutting-edge physics is just mathematical theory without experimental proof, another whole lot of it do have enough experimental proof to be considered correct and complete under the right point of view.
> that everyone else is a bumbling idiot.
But that's exactly the issue :-) ! Well, not really, but how hard can it be? Let's do an example. I'm one of those people who doesn't understand quantum mechanics, so I'll do a search. The first result is a page in Wikipedia, which is heavy with historical fluff but it links to the right places under "Mathematical Formulation". Right in the page it mentions and links to Hilbert spaces, and to all other needed mathematical concepts. If I were to become an armchair quantum physicist, it would take me a few minutes to understand it's all about the math. My next steps would be to buy a $1 paper notebook and a $2 pen, and start my journey. I'm sure that with a little digging, textbooks on quantum mechanics can be found for free. Will it take years for my understanding to advance from point A to point B? Very likely.
There is one thing however that I see causes severe issues over the place: people won't do math. It is not just about quantum-physics, but also stuff as mundane as compound interest or investment risk. The amount of missed opportunities and well-being for the dislike of math is astounding. Maybe, as a society, we should do better in that area.
Without the belief that you are right, why would you spend time pursuing something? If you're right, but nobody you talk to understands what you're saying then who is bumbling?
It's a question of perspective.
I have designed a new fusion reactor. I feel like the design has potential, and nobody seems interested in helping to evaluate it. I know there is a communication gap as well. I get different responses from everyone I talk to, and it's clear from their objections that some are dismissing the idea without understanding it. This leads to me dismissing their objections.
I know what the optics are, but still feel like I have to expend time and effort on this. If I don't do it, nobody else will.
In the end, it will work or not regardless of anyone's opinion.
Some years ago when I wanted to quickly expand my knowledge of React, I hired some guy to sit with me for four hours and build something with me. I had 1,000 questions and I felt like I got exceptional value for money by just being able to ask them directly and not have to try and extract these from the docs or out of date articles
What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28019659 - July 2021 (2 comments)
The Problem with Crackpot Emails from Amateur Physicists (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26590983 - March 2021 (1 comment)
What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12268362 - Aug 2016 (318 comments)
Study conspiracy theories with compassion
A PhD student's story on this. https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/73n9pm/d_c...
I've spent some time in both academic and industrial circles of mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, and physicists. It is a bit astonishing just how people in each one of these groups all sound like each other and distinct from the other groups. There are particular mannerisms and even idiomatic phrases that each group uses. Some simple ones are that physicists like to say "it goes like" and use the word "codes" to refer to code, as in software code. Computer scientists like to say "it better be". There are many others that I've lost track of and should have written down over these years. Yes, in many ways, the little idiomatic phrases make sense, but it at least lends credence to the question that if they all use the same phrases, something very simple and harmless, how else are they "conditioned"?
The book Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives by Jeff Schmidt covers some of this.
It all makes me wonder if someone like John Archibald Wheeler, a personal favorite, could be successful in today's academic climate.
Concerning a PhD, I think it's pretty easy to see that that's not the stage in your career where you would want to embark on long-term, high risk research.
Also, I am not surprised that people doing a similar job have a common vocabulary and vernacular. You could say culture. I'd be surprised if carpenters, mechanics, et al. don't have the same thing, with other words and topics, of course.
No conspiracies needed.
Wheeler had significant contributions, had the right pedigree, the right schools. I don't see how he would be at a disadvantage today.
With physics, even the experts can go on developing theory which (as I understand it) arguably might never be testable, or is only testable after some absurdly expensive new machine is planned and built which might take decades. So an armchair physicist with an idea can have no route to falsifying their idea.
You are not. There's an ocean of difference between someone that recognizes their ignorance, and someone that doesn't.
From the article:
> One or two seemed miffed that I didn’t immediately exclaim: ‘Genius!’, but most of my callers realised that they can’t contribute to a field without meeting today’s quality standard. Then again, I hear only from those willing to invest in advancing their education to begin with.
Not to mention, depending on the sub-fields, at least in AI, there is quite a bit of noise in papers as they are explaining _their_ viewpoint which might differ from broad consensus or disproven in future.
I find papers are typically written keeping in mind a specific set of people, who are typically in that particular sub-field for some time. In sub-fields like quantum computation, that specific set of people authors have in mind while writing paper are <100, and those are not newbies.
Newbies can quickly get discouraged reading a paper out of the blue. Picking the right papers at the beginning requires exposure to the field.
It's not simple.
I really hope what you said is practical. I tried. Hope it's my fault because the alternative option doesn't exist for me.
1. The crackpots are trying to "disrupt" or "overhaul" the very foundations of Physics. Finding something beyond general relativity or beyond quantum field theory is unlikely without high brain power combined with a minimum of 10 years of full time study. There's no way around it. It's like wanting to be an opera composer with a few months of guitar lessons.
2. This does not mean that there aren't thousands of fun, relevant and impactful physics problems out there. In all areas of physics. There are thousands of small questions that puzzle the best physicists and which they don't have time for, or haven't gotten the inspiration for, etc. Many of them can be tackled without understanding the whole field. It's not about laying new foundations which need to agree with decades and decades of data and theory. It's about using the tools to push the frontier.
If (2) sound interesting, keep going. If you contact a physicist and say:
- I know this and that math (done all problems in this and that textbook) - I'm interested in your field - Are there any accessible open problems that my math could potentially crack open?
Most physicists will likely point you towards interesting problems.
1. Highly unlikely best case scenario : Academic treadmill and all that implies, PhD, Postdoc, applying for grants, tenuous employment forevermore etc. The rest of society view me as a crackpot even if my fellow physicists like my ideas. I mean even if you have a Nobel it's not like society in general would value you as much as say Linus.
2. Highly Likely scenario I fail or find something else interesting to do, at some point - all that effort and agony and knowledge of quarks and tiny particles is of very little use in my day to day life.
So, like you, "What's the point?"
I chose option 2. - go do something else. I walked away and never came back. Studying computers was relevant to my daily decisions every day of my life - even if I were to have a career not directly in IT.
Some of this stuff is work that most people hate, and are happy to have off their plates.
Students see the academic path and at some point along the way realize it's not for them. It doesn't pay well, it's really difficult, and you have to constantly engage with an environment that is at best pedantic and at worst bureaucratic and toxic. Yet we still need more professors to actually teach, although the research grants, administrative costs, budget structures may not allow for it.
>> Sociologists have long tried and failed to draw a line between science and pseudoscience. In physics, though, that ‘demarcation problem’ is a non-problem, solved by the pragmatic observation that we can reliably tell an outsider when we see one.
My issue isn't with the apparent arrogance of the in-club. It's with the certainty she expresses that there isn't any pseudoscience going on inside that club.
As Sabine Hossenfelder says "Who knows, we might be the first to hear .."
But also it's good to be good to others.
The thing is, most of them (with a couple of exceptions) weren’t actually any smarter. They just “knew the language”, exactly as this article says. Sadly, their attitude turned a number of people off physics I think.
The tone of this article is similar. The author kindly took the time to talk to the unwashed masses because he felt sorry for them, or something. But, as he said, he never learnt anything real from them, except how to communicate better with idiots.
> I still get the occasional joke from colleagues about my ‘crackpot consultant business’, but I’ve stopped thinking of our clients that way. They are driven by the same desire to understand nature and make a contribution to science as we are. They just weren’t lucky enough to get the required education early in life, and now they have a hard time figuring out where to even begin. At the same time, the physicists on my team like to help others understand more about science and appreciate the opportunity to apply their knowledge outside academia. In connecting both sides, everybody wins. And who knows? Maybe we’ll be the first to learn of the new Theory of Everything.
I am interested in physics. I am one of those middle aged men. Not that I aspire to suddenly come up with a theory of everything that people who dedicated their life to it could not think of. I am just curious. I have a solid applied mathematical background with all the usual basics like linear algebra, real and complex calculus, functional analysis, information theory, probability, statistics, ODEs and PDEs, but I quickly realized that I would need to fill multiple gaps in my math before understanding modern physics: quarternions, tensors, Lie groups and algebras, differential geometry etc. so I am slowly working through this.
My problem is: it is pretty hard for me to find a good set of books/textbooks that fill the specific gaps in my math knowledge. I even started to work on DAG of areas and associated textbooks myself but any pointers would be appreciated.
Most physicists wouldn't understand group theory or lie groups any better than an undergrad having done the first 3 weeks of an algebra course. I'm telling you this because by listening to too much popular physics rather than actually reading a physics textbook you are going well on your way to becoming one of these people from the article.
Anyway, Gerard 't Hooft made a great little website to help people in your situation.
https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~gadda001/goodtheorist/index....
and that the old address may become unavailable in the future (so it seems worth documenting the new address here).
My advice to college freshmen is to consider universities as a place for meaningful interaction between explorers at different stages. The "learning" (curriculum) part is just a prerequisite done (mostly) all by yourself (through exercise) at your study desk. At the campus you show up prepared to be able to engage with the community (of peers, graduates, postgraduates, professors ...) as you climb up the ranks yourself. At its heart it is very much a social endeavor. But ime especially in physics or mathematics this is much less emphasized. Maybe understandably so in order to encourage working on a "simple" problem for weeks on end ("frustration tolerance") and not to cheat by consulting others immediately after a failed attempt without even trying the "deep dive" of carefully going through the reasoning.
>During a decade of education, we physicists learn more than the tools of the trade; we also learn the walk and talk of the community, shared through countless seminars and conferences, meetings, lectures and papers. After exchanging a few sentences, we can tell if you’re one of us. You can’t fake our community slang any more than you can fake a local accent in a foreign country. My clients know so little about current research in physics, they aren’t even aware they’re in a foreign country.
This also reminds me of the life of Alexander Grothendieck who after a decade of brilliant work ("Golden Age" in his 30's to 40's) in which he stayed in touch with the mathematical community through unsurmountable correspondence and singlehanendly spread a lot of remarkable seeds which later blossomed wonderfully in the field --- one day vehemently and visibly protested the military-industrial complex in France (because of his traumatic WWII experience), was left alone by his intimidated fellow academics (who were fearful to simply cut off a tremendous amount of funding resources) and then simply stopped engaging with the community all together and never in his later life found a way to come back in (despite his brilliant "track record") but instead grew more and more sour and frustrated becoming isolated, in the end even suffering from (mild) paranoid delusions while only a handful of people/acolytes kept him in touch with the outside world.
Hm. That bears thinking about.
pseudomathematical priestly class
Would that be string theory, which doesn't seem to lead to any falsifiable experiments? Smolin is very critical of string theory for that reason. It's apparently mathematically plausible but doesn't seem to lead anywhere.
"Science is prediction, not explanation" - Fred Hoyle
I don't know about string theory, but this is totally wrong. Exploiting a simple correlation gives you the ability to predict to a certain extent, but that's not science, that's numerology. I couldn't find the source of the quote, but I looked up the guy and found what I expected. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle#Other_controversies:
Hoyle also supported the following controversial hypotheses and speculations:
The correlation of flu epidemics with the sunspot cycle, with epidemics occurring at the minimum of the cycle. The idea was that flu contagion was scattered in the interstellar medium and reached Earth only when the solar wind had minimum power.
[...]
Science is explanation, which suggests testable predictions.
There was a PBS Space Time episode on fuzzballs last November [1].
So, "priests" because they don't know about the spirit of inquiry that gave rise to natural philosophy; this sublime tradition that they have misunderstood.
I'm a male engineer in my 40s, and I've recently developed an interest in trying to understand quantum mechanics. I wonder if people like me, seeing the arc of our lives curving closer to its end, develop a natural curiosity about How It All Works/What It All Means.
I'd be interested in paying a physicist to explain the Scharnhorst effect (predicted travel of photons very slightly faster than c between Casimir plates), and the implications for whether c is a core constant. I can't find much written about this - some papers were published about it in creditable journals iirc, it just hasn't gotten much attention for whatever reason.
Something about Hossenfelder rubs me the wrong way though.
> Many of them are retired or near retirement, typically with a background in engineering or a related industry
I have heard there is such a thing referred to as "the retiree's patent" -- presumably not fantastically market-worthy, but motivated in part by desire to make a difference or leave a mark.
‘Talk to a physicist. Call me on Skype. $50 per 20 minutes.’
lol i am not poor and that still seems like a lot to me.
This is what irked me about the article. They are making it seem like this is some sort of charity or altruistic endeavor. It's a business.
Even if she's now farming it out postgraduates in physics, it still seems like a fair price to me.
Memmo.me charges $50 per minute and up.
> I now have a small team of consultants on the ‘talk to a physicist’ service. None of us makes great money, and I don’t think we ever will because the market is too small. But broken down to dollars or euros per hour, I’ve had many freelance writing jobs that paid worse.
It's fascinating that this is so well known among physicists but to those of us outside, we are totally unaware that these people exist and that email addresses get deluged.
It seems to be a logical trap: physics is interesting enough to attract amateurs but complex enough that no amateur can hope to contribute.
Which makes me think the reason biology or sociology doesn't have crackpots (or maybe they do... Ive never heard of it though) is either that they just are not interesting to the retired engineer, or they dont take as many years of intense study.
Some fields have more crackpots and more persistent ones, I think it's an open question if that's due to to the field itself or how it's presented in the media.
I'm confident that if there are frequent high profile articles on the field that talk about "unsolved problems" or "fundamental limits" that this acts like crackpot catnip.
An alternative, cynical interpretation is that crackpots are indistinguishable from the ordinary output of some fields.
Another one I encountered personally was the group of academics who got behind the "AIDS is an autoimmune disorder, not a viral infection" theory. It was a bit uncomfortable talking to them about it, they really had a kind of evangelical / persecuted visionary complex. These were people with advanced degrees and even a university professor (in chemistry, not biology) was involved. A similar small group of academics in paleontology continue to deny that an asteroid impact had anything to do with the extinction of the dinosaurs, despite vast evidence supporting that conclusion.
A common factor seems to be that such people are susceptible to ideological fixation. They get ideas in their heads that they aren't willing to question, and promoting them becomes more of an article of faith rather than something that can be addressed by scientific methods.
- naturopaths, etc
- fad diets
- cult farming practices
- “real” histories
- pickup artists
Etc.
The "I disproved Einstein" equiv. is "Here's my cure for cancer" (yes, all cancer).
Then there are the anti-Evolution folks.
The AIDS denialists.
The anti-vaccine types.
One of the top people in retrovirology turned out to be a crank when AIDS was elucidated, and he couldn't see it. Peter Duesberg (duesberg.com). Also, HPV doesn't cause cancer, after all? He has got Kary Mullis, 1993 Nobel/chem for the polymerase chain reaction, on his side, anyway.
Geology used to be full of cranks. Not just anti-tectonicists, but anti-catastrophists who could not abide bolide strikes. There are still many who can't accept a strike 13kya; they have fallen back on demanding a crater, knowing not all bolides leave one.
A really great geology book, BTW, is "Reading the Rocks", by Marcia Bjornerud.
maybe because nothing's established enough yet to be dogma, and the field isn't practically important other than just being neat.
One might compare your visualization with results from Gravity Probe B, which had an orbital inclination of 90.007 degrees, or Juno, which continues to have have this fun polar orbit (90.000 degree inclination) around Jupiter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_(spacecraft)#/media/File:... (animated). Jupiter's mass and angular momentum ("J") parameters are, relevantly, greater than Earth's; additionally, GPB's was nearly circular, while Juno's is very highly elliptical.
I'm also curious about how you visualize -- using the gravity well example -- an extremely elliptical orbit even with J=0 and orbital inclination=0 -- one that alllllmost grazes the surface of the central object at closest, and at farthest is light-seconds away in effectively flat spacetime.
I'm not saying it can't be done, or even that you cannot do it. I just think it's hard -- I can't do it, or perhaps won't do it because I think it's easier to reach for an approximate solution of the Einstein Field Equations (and if one takes the mass of the small body to some unignorably higher level, through effective one-body methods). Others might reach for gravitoelectromagnetism. Others have some other favoured post-Newtonian or numerical method. Solve first, then grind out some useful visualization. But if you can successfully visualize first and extract a solution from that, with any sort of generality, then I'm honestly interested.
Imagine a rubber sheet and light as a toy car climbing up the well, it's easy to imagine the well becoming so steep that the car wheels cannot grip it, or the car motor cannot lift the weight of the car. Try imagining light heading directly 'out' from a black hole, space is compressed so much that ... what? Light loses its grip on spacetime? Spacetime is not just stretched but is being pulled inwards like a conveyor belt at 3e8 meters/second so light is at an effective standstill? (yet all frames of reference see light moving away from them at the speed of light).
It doesn't fit a rubber sheet for anything, really, even the basic planet orbiting the gravity well has no easy imagining in 3D. It's somehow ... Earth taking the path of least action? a straight line in curved spacetime?
I don't think I ever properly thanked Mohammed for that...
It just seems weird to me for somebody to know what a "compiler" is yet refuse to believe the fundamentals. Compilers are pretty niche, there is no glory or mainstream pop science around them.
I have a PhD in physics and one of Nobel prize laureates in theoretical physics made the following observation in my presence (I will leave him anonymous for obvious reasons): "All crackpots with zero knowledge of physics that have ever emailed me are men. It shows that there's more to the STEM gender gap than discrimination".
fwiw I'm a woman who's interested in physics, though I haven't contributed any crackpot ideas.
You can tell from that that it is vacuous.
I find it odd that this is not acknowledged or linked from the article. Perhaps this is a signal that Aeon is ashamed of YouTube or perhaps they do not want to share traffic to another platform??
the issue of the public seeing basic research as useless has always bothered me. and I'm not sure if basic research is truly useless because of its innate nature or if basic researchers themselves make it look useless on purpose because they like it to be secluded from "real life" or maybe it's too exhausting to try to explain to people while it's still ongoing.
reading Rutherford's own notes and biography was truly enlightening and refreshing, there is more to physics than the purely theoretical part.he didn't think he was too good to work with his hands.
Engineering physics / applied physics / medical physics are all interesting interdisciplinary fields where you can see physics come to life.
Interesting! A lot of times, this is what I want (as the asker) -- to be able to do quick back-and-forth with someone genuinely knowledgeable to identify where my understanding is right and wrong, and where I need to look next. I'd be interested if there were a general platform where you can hire experts on these terms. (Not interested in physics though.)
This article reminded me of that experience—especially the description of vague images. I think I could have used some advice from this guy, or at least some empathy.
[0] actually all of brilliant.org, but the rest of the learning paths aren’t important to this context
I absolutely understand not having time for the later — I don’t have time for politicians and pundits who mistake fiction for fact in computer science — but it does mean I can’t use Physics Stack Exchange to learn stuff by asking questions because my questions are, essentially, too dumb.
I think the problem science communicators have is that the English speaking tradition divorced itself from natural philosophy so long ago that it seems intractable to build a bridge back to intuition and meaning from algebraic structures and faculty blessings. Fortunately luminaries such as for example Stephen Wolfram and Eric Weinstein are pulling ears, so the entrenched narrative of the nature of reality is no longer the exclusive purview of the pseudomathematical priestly class. :o)
I warmly recommend listening to Curt's Salvatore Pais interview, as you will quickly dismiss certain doubts about the intent behind certain patents.
Moreover, I don't see any of the science communicator bad guys being mentioned in the comments saying "remember everyone, you DON'T have to understand math to practice high level theoretical physics." I don't think its on those communicators to explain this to people.
People are allowed to have interests in stuff that they don't have a practitioners knowledge of, which is good because I'm sure that you have interests and opinions in fields that you don't practice or never studied as well.
Those are just the courses specifically in the mathematics department. You also cover mathematics within the physics courses themselves of course. Especially in quantum mechanics and E&M. You also might be required to take more math depending on the structure of your degree program, I did a focus in chemistry as well so took more chemistry and less math than other students.
I also can't say how many hours I spent on this. But the overwhelming amount of my homework time, every night, was spent writing proofs and solving mathematical equations. To a lay person physics work probably looks no different than mathematics. It was all math all the time :) Sometimes I would have a homework assignment that was only a few "problems" that would take me a dozen hours to solve. As for aptitude, I was probably in the middle amongst other physics students, but that group overall was above average already.
Most of us need to be set straight once in a while.
So, off I went, got copies of as many of the CMIS/CMIP documents as I could, read and studied, learned about the registration hierarchy, etc. Finally I concluded the CMIS/CMIP OOP was just for data definitions and was not programming at all. E.g., a CMIS/CMIP object could not do even 1 + 2 = 3, if-then-else, read, write, do while, etc. So, just for storing CMIS/CMIP data, and data is all it was about, the repository we had was already up to the task.
So, CMIS/CMIP was OOP only in the sense of inheriting definitions of data. So could define an object for a computer, i.e., list all the data were going to keep on a computer, and then inherit (borrow, copy) from that definition to define a laptop computer.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/theoretical-aspects-object-or...
I'm not any of the ones who wrote those, so I will just accept 10% of your reward :).
OOP itself is more of a style, imo. you can boil it down into the things above if you want to think of it as such. I'm just not sure there's much there mathematically.
I feel the same way about computer programming/computer programmers, but we get into trouble for saying things like that...
Personally, I think it may be wrong to call this "rotating" when it is an orbit with a fixed face presented to the frame of reference in question.
Massive chops to anyone prepared to deal with loonies like me, and worse!
Also makes me glad I moved into IT, though the bug never leaves you, for anyone in a similar position this is a wonderful book on general rel, and requires very little maths - "Visual Differential Geometry and Forms: A Mathematical Drama in Five Acts"
I went down a rabbit hole there looking into numerical methods for general relativity.
I'd like to talk to someone to designs integrated circuits.
Perhaps Abramov took discreet math class the first year… what is the invention or new theory in Redux?
Abramov didn’t write Facebook either. Actually Mark going to university was important for Facebook to take off.
I wanted so badly to find this to be sarcasm or a bit of a joke. I hope it is there, I hope I missed it.
If not the arrogance and hubris is monumental. Worthy of some oldschool strictly hieraracal priesthood. We have nice roboes, leather bound books and speak many languages. You will never understand. You cannot understand. Your thinking is of no interest or importance. We shall speak the truth and ye shall listen and obey.
The earth is flat. It has always been flat. It shall always remain flat All else is hersay and yes blasphemy. We have spoken.
Historically, good ideas have often come from somewhere outside the high priesthood, and for that sin are usually ridiclued and ostracized, sometimes punished in hideaous ways.
Now historiclaly yes it happens. But history does not record the 1000000 gazillion times the idea was idiotic. We get a biased view of it when we think about pioneers. Yet it does happen.
I know a lot of smart people. I know a couple that I wold rate as geniuses. All of them know far more than me in one or more diciplines. (which is not difficult I may add)
I know a few things and a couple of specific things well.
They have all suffered my pedestrian inquiries into their realm, and in general done so politely and I have learned so much from them "dumbing it down" for me. A few times I approach a topic from such an odd angle that the discourse turns quite interesitng for both parties. Cross pollination is a real and fascinating thing.
A few times I have been on the other end of it. A dear friend who is a neurosurgon, which I still call brain surgery, She is in my opinion a genius and was in the periphery of a Nobel prize. She has called me at odd hours of the night when some technical IT disasters has occured and she needs it to work.
If I can I try to diagnose it and talk her trought it. (Or I have to go over there)
For her these weird spells and nonsense text strings I have her type have no meaning to her and its all quite mysterious. She is happy when it works again.
Just as her «victims» as I like to call them “patients” are happy to have their brainbox doing its thing better
Given that I am “neurodivergent” she is usually fascinated with the highly inaccurate theories I have as to how our brains work just because they are at times different. Sometimes she will prompt me for them.
We will have lunch and she will tell me about an upcoming case and describe symptoms to me, curious as to what (an idiot) would come up with.
One thing my smart friends have in common is the ability to decompose and leave much of the nomenclature out of it. The specific model of abstractions and metaphors that allow people within the know to communicate vastly faster and more accurate with each other is not a hard requirement. to explain how something works.
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I remember one day as I was visiting her. She brightened up, like someone who just remembered that they know a cool new story, and told me that scientist has discovered that some people have their sixth (or sevent?) chakra open! I could not act enthusiastically over this. Tried to explain to her politely that based on what I know about the world that does not sound like the kind of thing a real scientist would or could do. She accused me of having a closed mind, and we left the topic. Better be on friendly terms than having a disagreement ruin the mood.
A few months later I was visiting with my then girlfriend. She was a medical student and my mom politely inquired what kind of doctor she wanted to be. The girlfriend told her that she is interested in specialising in endocrinology. My mom got really upset that we were using complicated words instead of talking plainly. We realised that she might not know the term, so we explained that an endocrinologist measures hormone levels, diagnoses and cures disorders of the hormone system, etc. Once explained thus, she declared that she never would have thought that hormones can be measured.
That was a really surprising to me, because I have clear memories of my mom having an operative understanding about hormones. My grandad had diabetes, and she helped him with stuff related to that. One of her friends had some hormonal disorder and she referred to it as such.
What i realised, that i understood hormones on a deeper level than her. Not the way a doctor would, but like I did know that they are molecules which signal cells in our bodies to do or not do specific things. I understood that molecules are just atoms clumped together. And I understood that atoms are just the lego bricks everything around us is built out of. I don't know how exactly one would measure the level of some hormone in ones blood, but I did understand that they are just chemicals, so through complicated analytical means they can be measured.
And then I realised that if someone doesn't know these things about hormones, then when she reads a pop-science article talking about this or that hormone, then reads a different article talking about chakras they both sound the exact same kind of gobbledok. They sound both mystical and somehow connected to health. One might hear a story about how someone gained weight after their hormones went out of whack, or one might hear a story how someone cured their depression after they unblocked their heart chakra. If you don't know better, how would you know that one is bulsh*t and the other is a measurable, real thing.
In fact here is the thing, the chakras are simpler, easier and nicer. You can see a nice drawing of them! They make sense. Hormones? I know a lot about chemistry, and more than what I would like to know about hormones secreted by the pancreas and even I can't keep all of them straight. There are many of them. They have complicated scientific names. They act in all kind of bizarro complicated ways. Too much is bad, too little is bad. Some are easier to measure analytically, some are harder. Chakras are so much simpler: they can be blocked or open, they have colours, they are associated with organs you have heard of. Simple! Also ... not real in the same sense hormones are.
So I guess now I understand how it was hard for my mom to navigate the boundary of science and pseudo-science.
Robert Sapolsky succeeded in delivering the flavor of it, in "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers".
You mentioned that the amateur physicists don't know enough math. Well, some of us amateur physicists have concluded that the academic physicists don't know enough math.
E.g., when I was trying to be a ugrad physics major, the prof in the E&M course tried to prove the divergence theorem. His proof was, in one word, junk. Sadly as a ungrad math major, the math department didn't prove it either. By now, sure, I've gone through fairly careful treatments including the Jacobian, ..., exterior algebra of differential forms (texts by Fleming, Rudin, Apostol, ...). Even some of those treatments are a bit fishy in places and incomplete: Physicists keep using old versions of differentials, and the math books got rid of those 50+ years ago; clean ups are not too difficult but need to be done by either physics or math.
The Riemann integral over the whole real line is fishy (smells like old fish). The improper integral approach of integrating from -a to a and then taking the limit as a goes to infinity is also fishy. There is a good clean up -- the Lebesgue theory.
Back to the divergence theorem, physics wants to have a 2 dimensional measure they write as dA and a three dimensional measure they write as dV, but there is a gap in their argument: They are necessarily working with what measure theory calls product measure and in particular Fubini's theorem, and there needs to be some orthogonality that is not made clear, in either math or physics.
I'm tired of screaming myself to a sore throat over the claims that the wave functions of quantum mechanics form a Hilbert space. Hilbert space is a math idea, and in math departments we know quite well what a Hilbert space is, a complete inner product space. The "complete" part is in the sense of Cauchy, that every Cauchy convergent sequence converges. Well, the wave functions fail that completeness assumption.
You mentioned that you can tell backgrounds just from use of language: Right, so can math people! So, when an MIT physics guy teaches quantum mechanics and says that "the wave functions are differentiable and also continuous" we know his background is in physics, not math -- EVERY differentiable function is continuous.
It goes on this way: Net, to us math people, it is the physics people who are short on the math.
Then beyond the math, some of us amateurs have some other issues with physics:
Physics in quantum mechanics keeps talking about superposition and linearity. Us math people know in fine detail just what linearity is -- it's central to linear algebra, Banach space, Hilbert space, integration, differentiation, and more. I have to question if the physics people have a clear understanding of linearity. Then there is superposition -- tough even to make a mathematically credible guess just what physics means by superposition.
The last time I was reading from Feynman's Lectures on Physics I recall, before I wanted to get my money back, that he claimed that a particle of unknown position had probability distribution uniform over all of space. WRONG! It's a trivial argument, maybe even at the middle school level, to show that no such distribution can exist.
Then setting aside the math and going for something like actual physics, a particle goes through a beam splitter such as the one in the Mach-Zehnder interferometer. On one path from the beam splitter there is a detector. We send in one particle. The beam splitter yields the wave function in two physically separated parts on two very different paths; we believe this from our experience with the full Mach-Zehnder interferometer.
This trial we get a signal from the detector. Okay, but what happens to the other part of the wave function? The quantum mechanics lectures and texts don't say.
Professor Hossenfelder, some of us amateur physics people are actually math people (e.g., with a Ph.D. degree from a world famous research university and have published peer-reviewed original research in math with theorems and proofs) and look at physics people as very short on math and also sometimes even their physics. Uh, for $50 an hour, I will tutor you in linearity, Lebesgue theory, Hilbert space, and probability theory (based on sigma algebras).
All caps. You have earned 5 points! [0]
Those are differential forms, defined explicitly in terms of submanifolds of euclidean space. Turning them into measures on the corresponding manifolds requires picking an arbitrary "unit speed" parameterization (or equivalent data) to absorb the equally arbitrary (from the intrinsic perspective) choice of embedding.
Sticking with differential forms and letting smoothness assumptions handle all the measure-theoretic difficulties for you is the principled choice and also the easy choice, so it should come as no surprise when physicists choose it.
> Physics in quantum mechanics keeps talking about superposition and linearity. Us math people know in fine detail just what linearity is -- it's central to linear algebra, Banach space, Hilbert space, integration, differentiation, and more. I have to question if the physics people have a clear understanding of linearity. Then there is superposition -- tough even to make a mathematically credible guess just what physics means by superposition.
obeys the superposition principle = has dynamics given by a linear operator. Or sometimes a bounded linear operator, continuous linear operator, etc. depending on context. Physics is no different from math in this respect.
> I'm tired of screaming myself to a sore throat over the claims that the wave functions of quantum mechanics form a Hilbert space. Hilbert space is a math idea, and in math departments we know quite well what a Hilbert space is, a complete inner product space. The "complete" part is in the sense of Cauchy, that every Cauchy convergent sequence converges. Well, the wave functions fail that completeness assumption.
State spaces in finite dimensional QM are projective Hilbert spaces, in a perfectly literal sense, with all the completeness properties you expect. You're right that intro QM mischaracterizes it though: the position (wlog momentum) "basis" is actually defined with respect to a rigged Hilbert space structure Psi \subset H \subset Psi^*. This is also the appropriate approach for the infinite dimensional case ... and a completely inappropriate approach for teaching freshmen.
> The last time I was reading from Feynman's Lectures on Physics I recall, before I wanted to get my money back, that he claimed that a particle of unknown position had probability distribution uniform over all of space. WRONG! It's a trivial argument, maybe even at the middle school level, to show that no such distribution can exist.
Again, he's teaching freshmen: don't confuse lies-to-children with genuine misunderstanding. Physicists are well aware that plane waves are not actual states.
Yup. You gave the modern treatment. What I wrote was:
> Physicists keep using old versions of differentials, and the math books got rid of those 50+ years ago; clean ups are not too difficult but need to be done by either physics or math.
So, I was talking about the "old" stuff. That is relevant because a LOT of the physics literature elementary enough to be in courses in universities just asks the student to accept that dA is a "little unit of area" and dV is "a little unit of volume" and that that is enough to define an integral. The people who write such physics are rarely or never actually thinking the modern treatment of differential forms, tangent spaces, etc. So, often a physics student is stuck with the old versions of dA and dV and with a prof who doesn't know the modern treatment either. So, that is an example of my theme: The physics people are not so good at the math.
But if you really do want to get the maths onto firm footing, maybe you should be working to encode it all under Lean.
The math is hard.
Same deal in calculus. Conceptually very easy, you can determine the total by adding up the amount in the slices. Calculus is easy, algebra is hard.
For anyone out there beginning their journey reading this, there is nothing I would recommend more than this: do the work; chew the pencil; become very good at algebra.
Early on, studying Newtons laws, the concepts are way easier than the math for most people. Inertia, parabolas, friction, angles.. we can see it and use it every day.
But the current state of knowledge is that we can reliably use math to calculate phenomena that seem to have no analog in the familiar concepts that govern our everyday experience. The math of dark matter is fairly straightforward but the concept is so weird that tons of people reject it out of hand (as seen in the comments whenever it comes up on HN).