Hacker News Reader

Comment by katmannthree | Hacker News Reader

> It is unfortunate that a science communicator would express her research preference in such a way.

It is disappointing, and more unfortunately pretty much her personal brand now. There are, as she seems to have discovered, a lot of eyeballs to be had when you bash things that are poorly understood and already looked down upon for it.

She's a fine physicist and her points have merit, but she's smart enough to be perfectly aware that rather than improving the field through discussions with peers what she's doing here is just capitalizing on that distaste people have for their work and doing what she can to undermine them.

View on HN

There is a limited pool of resources available to do basic fundamental science and it's fair to argue that things like LHC have absorbed a disproportionate share of these scare resources, without a whole lot to show for it. Since it's the general public that ultimately funds these projects (unless the LHC can attract its own Jeff Bezos), I think it is OK to have a public discussion about it.

> LHC have absorbed a disproportionate share of these scare resources

As opposed to? This sentiment was bandied around a lot before the LHC went online, but no one ever had a proposition of what the alternative was is the goal was to advance fundamental particle physics. You've got exactly 2 ways to probe subatomic interactions: (1) particle accelerator measurement and (2) incidental measurements of high-energy spaceborne collisions.

We're doing both. Theoreticians being unable to conclusively find a new measurement is a problem independent of the fact the LHC exists to do those sorts of measurements that they'd need.

Maybe the physicists are looking for their car keys under the streetlight. Unable to find, them the only solution they can conceive of is a bigger streetlight.

Which might be the right approach in a world without torches?

As opposed to open season on new theory - or even new kinds of theory.

The Standard Model is a bit of a franken-theory of a thing, a kit of parts bolted together in awkward ways. It looks a lot like the pre-quantum ad-hoc theories that attempted to describe quantum effects before QM was invented.

It's hard to believe that physics can't do better. But easy to believe that physics won't do better while most of the money and all of the mental space is owned by concepts that are more than a hundred years old now.

That sounds like you are complaining about the amount of investment in experimental physics in general, rather than the LHC in particular. It is true that fundamental physics could use a major breakthrough from the theorists. However, the theorists we do have are desperate for more experimental evidence to help them.

Add to that that experimental physics is simply far more expensive then theoretical physics, and it should come as no surprise that we spend more money on experiments then pure theory.

The complaint about LHC is more about questioning weather spending $5 billion to smash protons together is the most effective way of getting more empirical evidence to the physicists.

> spending $5 billion to smash protons together

About the same as a the price of a large modern sports club in a top league[0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/apr/29/chelsea-sir...

Proton decay experiments? Magnetic monopole searches?

Providing better bounds on the (non-)existence of phenomena predicted by existing non-Standard Model particle physics theories sounds like a worthwhile endeavor rather than praying that particle accelerators will maybe uncover a particle if you give it just a little bit more juice.

What's the difference to new particles predicted by BSM theories you might uncover if you give it just a little bit more juice? Especially if you measure a ton of other things at the same time?

> no one ever had a proposition of what the alternative was is the goal was to advance fundamental particle physics. You've got exactly 2 ways to probe subatomic interactions: (1) particle accelerator measurement and (2) incidental measurements of high-energy spaceborne collisions.

Sabine has recommended funding more telescopes to learn more about dark matter.

As opposed to funding things that are not particle physics at all. As far as I can tell, knowing that bosons exist has had approximately zero impact on our ability to engineer new stuff. Personally, I'm tired of footing the bill for a field that requires the one of the largest, most expensive experimental systems ever conceived yet seems unable to produce more than useless factoids.

This is just demanding to know where research will lead us, as though it's the tech tree in a 4X game.

You'd be equally opposed to Sabine's alternative since what use is knowing anything about dark matter? For that matter who cares where the universe came from. What have telescopes helped us with lately?

"Not a whole lot to show" from the LHC? We got the Higgs Boson, and piles of data providing more accurate measurements of fundamental constants in the Standard Model, along with a ton of progress in various "applied" areas related to developing the materials/tools for constructing the thing.

The possibility of Higgs appearing at LHC, but not any supersymetry partners, has a name among physicists: the nightmare scenario. The Higgs discovery (measuring its mass) wasn't unexpected, there were known symmetries and energy bounds that made it pretty much have to be there. Everything new LHC was supposed to discover has not appeared. That's not to say there's not good science happening there -- but many people (physicists) consider it disappointing. The purpose of building a collider that big and expensive is to find new particles.

> The purpose of building a collider that big and expensive is to find new particles.

This is not true! There's much more to particle physics than simply hunting for new particles. Our knowledge of even the particles we know to exist is massively incomplete. Several next-gen collider proposals are for "Higgs factories" to study the Higgs boson better, for example.

Is it fair to argue that though? What's the metric for that? $ per Nobel prize? If you look at $ per scientist, LHC is actually quite cheap. $ per "theory tested", LHCb has disproved so many theory papers it's not even funny.

If you compare how much money is spend on fundamental research (or research in general), the pool of funds for a given direction is not limited because of other research. It's limited by all the other things we spend money on. If society wants to fund more DM, astro, whatever research, it would be much easier to find that money for example in the military spending. A minimal haircut there and you could double the research funding.

> doing what she can to undermine them.

She's not trying to undermine anyone, just giving her opinion about where funding should go in order to actually advance our knowledge of the world.

She definitely tried to undermine LIGO. This is a very carefully written article designed to cast shade: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/09/whats-up-with-ligo....

Characterizing all (or even just the most dismissive) criticisms as attacks or devious attempts to undermine keeps nice people from being truthful.

I'm not sure what that means, but she definitely was outright wrong on that one, and she used all her skills to make what looked like a convincing argument for "there just isn't enough data there to conclude gravity waves".

I don't think the contention here is whether she's right or wrong. Phrasing like 'undermine' and 'cast shade' seems to imply malicious intent, which is going too far. Being wrong isn't the same as being wrong with malicious intent.

The fact that she chooses to bring forward here doubts via youtube, books, and blogs (i.e. the things she earns money with) instead of/in addition to a well written paper on arxiv (i.e. like everyone else who wants to partake in a honest physics discussion*) lets me question her intent. (She has papers to some of the things she complains about, which normally get answered by rebuttals. This is normal scientific discourse. A blog with locked comments is not.)

Maybe she's in it for the fame and money, but I don't think that would make her intentions malicious.

She abuses an information asymmetry and social conventions. Scientific discourse is usually conducted in academic papers, for better or worse this is how the community conducts itself. When she criticizes others work or the usefulness of the fields outside this channel she is addressing as a singular voice the general public. Which gives her voice an outsized presence with a public that is not prepared to engage on equal terms on that discourse or prepare any rebuttal. Meanwhile the rest of the physics community looks dumbfounded because she is escaping the typical means of discourse and ratting them out to the general public, that can´t really make an informed judgement.

Either she is socially clueless on how this can be seen negatively by the rest of the scientific community or she is malicious in her attempts to defund parts of science she believes shouldn't get funding.

If she earnestly believes that particle physicists are lying to the public to get funding, then there's nothing malicious about going to the public and saying this. It makes her essentially a whistleblower, and there's nothing malicious about that. Even if she happens to be wrong, that still isn't malicious intent.

If she's lying, then that's different. But I haven't seen any convincing evidence that she's lying. It's clear a lot of people don't like what she's saying, feel threatened by what she's saying, and think she's wrong. But that doesn't make her malicious.

Whistleblowing (real or false) is a type of undermining.

It's also a step beyond casting shade.

You're too focused on whether there is "malicious intent" to see that your description fits just fine with the initial words you were objecting to.

I think her perspective is quite a bit more productive than just capitalizing on distaste. For example, in this discussion she's making concrete criticisms of specific communications patterns.

I don't think it's too strong to call it "disinformation" out of the journals. They claimed that the next big toy will prove or disprove supersymmetry. They never acknowledged that their claim had been incorrect, or that it was misleading.

Calling out that repeated pattern is, I think, on the respectful side of the public gadfly playbook.

I think she wants to "improve the field" by incenting theoretical advances that actually lead to testable predictions. Unfortunately, that transition will put a lot of e.g. string theorists out of work.

Not really, in the sense that Hossenfelder only advocated for subtracting resources from particle physics, never about what should be funded instead.

> never about what should be funded instead.

This isn't entirely true. In this blog post (http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/04/does-world-need-lar...) she recommends:

> "One of the key motivations for building a larger particle collider that particle physicists like to bring up is that we still do not know what dark matter is made of. But we are not even sure that dark matter is made of particles. And if it’s a particle, we do not know what mass it has or how it interacts. If it’s a light particle, you would not look for it with a bigger collider. So really it makes more sense to collect more information about the astrophysical situation first. That means concretely better telescopes, better sky coverage, better redshift resolution, better frequency coverage, and so on."

Though she goes on to say

> "But really my intention here is not to advocate a particular alternative. I merely think that physicists should have an honest debate about the evident lack of progress in the foundations of physics and what to do about it."

> better telescopes, better sky coverage, better redshift resolution, better frequency coverage

And all of this is being built currently or already exists (ELT, ASSN, Vera Rubin, SKA, CTA), so it's not clear what she's advocating.

Presumably "more of that." Would cosmologists really turn away even more funding? I can't imagine so.

It's not like there are a lot of idling cosmologist for lack of instruments right now, you'd really need to expand the set of tenured positions within the field if you'd want anyone to actually use a second Vera Rubin.

So "more of that" isn't a very useful position, science output isn't a linear, or even monotonous function of dollars spent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com