I've said it all before but here we go again
backreaction.blogspot.com
backreaction.blogspot.com
From that point of view what’s happening in physics today is no surprise, but it is a bit depressing: we’ve probably passed the level of complexity where models are useful and are now adding detail that make them less so. I guess you can see it as a form of overfitting, like when less scrupulous AI researchers use the test set for validation.
“all models are wrong but some models are useful” tells us just to go find useful models, and the beautiful truth is not important. I don't think it is not important.
I think the less controversial stance is that we're running out of road on what we can test with Earth-bound particle accelerators, and there are still open problems. That's a problem with what we can verify rather than what we can conceive, which could be an impasse to a grand unifying theory.
So - yes - that's a problem.
The author's point that we must not add complexity to solve "non-problems" is very consistent with the ML analogy, though again this would mainly be to avoid adding too much inductive bias and underfitting as well.
Scientists are individually working on theories/ideas that they find most interesting.
The only way this sounds like practically enforceable is if we have a situation where funding agencies are only funding a single theory and refusing to fund people doing research in other areas. But I don’t believe that is the case.
The biggest problem with something like Supersymmetry is that, contrary to what the previous poster was saying, it is not a falsifiable theory. It has free parameters that can be used to predict that supersymmetric partners to the known particles would have any mass that hasn't been ruled out yet, more or less (maybe they can't be planet sized, but they can certainly have masses that would require accelerators the size of a solar system to rule out).
Supersymmetry has been ruled out twice already, but with a different choice of parameters, it is being proposed again - and, in fact, you can chose those parameters such that you would need the whole energy of the Sun, or more, to rule them out. String Theory and its few predictions are even worse in this regard.
Models of black hole evaporation would not only require extreme measurement precision, but also a good few billion years to collect any sort of data to confirm or deny.
Personally, I will note that I am hopeful some new insights into the measurement problem will come about from work on quantum computing, which is also eminently practical work.
The moment you say "photon" you're making an approximation (usually monochromatic and plane wave without sources, in the infrared region, and so on). Physicists who think otherwise simply do not understand what they are doing.
So in the sense that people get excited about science (see AI lately), I think these models are useful, even if they are pretty mis-specified in the grand scheme of things. I can't speak to Sabine's specific frustrations, but it sounds a little bit like Gary Marcus's concerns about neural networks. In my day-to-day I definitely value a useful model over an exact one.
These are people using Twitter with good intentions: smart people who login simply intending to have interesting discussions about philosophical topics. Professionals interacting with other professionals, or writing about their field of expertise. They don't seek out to waste time and serotonin on unpleasant social drama, but it finds them anyway.
Unfortunately for her, the only people who are really strongly swayed by her arguments are her following of lay people, because the physicists are either 1) enough into theoretical particle physics that they immediately reject her undiplomatic comments (even if they may be right) or 2) like me a physicist who knows they know so little about theoretical particle physics that they should not have an opinion on it.
Physics twitter is very cordial and positive if you simply ignore Sabine.
1) 'undiplomatic' and 'truth' aren't mutually exclusive. While science is highly social in it's game, it is not in its object. Otherwise the discipline is scientism, not science.
2) even if I knew nothing about the intricacies of counting angles on the head of a pin, I can still have an opinion on its usefulness, lack of verifiability or predictive power. In a software analogy: A black box test still reveals errors even when it doesn't show how the errors are produced.
2) No, you can't, or at least, your uninformed "opinion" is worthless. To clarify, Sabine's is not worthless, since she is actually a theoretical particle physicist. A lay person's opinion on the matter is worth nothing.
Obviously it must be justified as scientifically important, but they do not expect "something back". Government agencies generally take a more blurry and general approach to R&D, since you cannot predict what comes out of a given experiment. No one predicted an absolute revolution in squeezed light from gravitational wave detection for example. Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer will probably both get funded even though the science case is very minimal and they will cost many billions
I say that as someone with background in physics.
This is another "industry for its own sake", just like the nasa/aerospace/boeing industrial complex, which was clearly so terrible that people decided to overthrow it, and in 10 years we've reached more progress than those people did since the 70s.
It is nice to see your correct assessment of the irrelevance of the will of the electorate though. Until that becomes broadly understood I see little hope of any meaningful reform.
It’s not even a terrible system. I don’t have to be an expert on automobiles to rationally believe that we should spend less money on automobile infrastructure and more money on bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure.
Similarly nobody has to be an expert on particle physics to believe that money could better be spent elsewhere. When I clicked this story I was generally in favor of funding this research, but to a quite small extent the submission and to a considerably greater extent your clarification of the attitude of practitioners has gone a long way toward convincing me that it is in fact a complete waste of money.
Granted, we both agree that government spending is almost entirely undemocratic. And as I said, I appreciate your dispensing with that pretense.
I think you are just being contrarian really. You know well why a lay person's opinion on politics is more relevant than a lay person's opinion on physics.
Paycheck adjacent it is then.
> I don't think politics or war are as specialised. Also, those things are within the realms of daily experience, while most physics is not.
Evidently we all have our areas of ignorance. It’s silly that you say leading armies and countries is a matter of everyday experience, but physics isn’t. Suffice to say modern warfare is a deep field and politics is basically intractable for any formal approach.
And doubtless experts at defense contractors will use similar arguments to yours for why their funding shouldn’t be cut either.
> You know well why a lay person's opinion on politics is more relevant than a lay person's opinion on physics.
I do not know that. I know that the both the layman’s and the physicist’s opinions on politics and physics are equally irrelevant to the people who control spending and policy. I may not be up to date on the latest epicycles added to quantum chromodynamics, but I’ve had enough experience to know that the grants are not allotted on the basis of actual scientific merit.
I do think naked self-interest is leading you into cognitive dissonance. You know full well that science funding is more a political matter than a scientific one. Thus you either contradict yourself or agree that the opinions of the layman ought to be relevant to funding physics experimentation.
Feel free to construct anything else I say into a form that does not contradict that statement, because that's the only one I really care about.
https://twitter.com/RandPaul/status/1474101150874050561
> Pigeons playing slot machines (NIH) $465,339
even if he's not in charge of it, he still comments on the studies he thinks are a waste of the public's money
It's a very strange thing to think you can speak for "politicians."
As objective as science is it is humans who are doing science, who have emotions, vested interests and so on. So if someone criticises a whole body of people then be prepared -- best case they are completely ignored, worst case they are retaliated. No surprises there.
About opinion; yes sure we all can have it. But please when you offer it then be nice, be open to feedback, be curious. Don't go out all guns blazing.
It's obvious particle physicists are stuck in a rut, their best theories can't unify gravity and QM or explain dark matter/energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
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And yet they still want my money. Weird.
So yes, I will take your money and build my big experiment, and I don't feel bad about it, because I am the expert.
I don't have examples to hand as it's early and I can't be bothered, those are merely my observations based on a handful of interactions I've seen with her on twitter and adjacent spaces (such as podcasts), and should be taken as such.
I’ve managed to promote one of my articles successfully there with ~1 million impressions, but otherwise using the platform has been a net negative.
When reading opinions that challenge ours, when having to "go out on a limb", or picture something that we haven't been concerned with yet, we have to gift the writer our trust. We have to trust them that they're not wasting our time, that at the end of the effort of trying to understand in a deep fashion what they're saying there is going to be some pay-off. We have to trust them that they're not trying to maneuver us into something using underhanded methods.
This trust only comes from knowing people for a while, from reputation. Especially if someone's famous for being contrarian, and "their reputation precedes them", people are going to outright assume the author has hostile intent. In fact, they end up feeling that the author has intent hostile towards them specifically.
However, even without being overtly preconditioned to think the person is a trouble maker, social mistrust is our default behavior. Often you'll see something that's out of your sphere so much that you'll read it, say "haha, lol". That's not necessarily meant to deride the author, but this kind of behavior, which many of us at some level engage in (whether we tweet the reply or just think this), shows that often we just dismiss other people we don't really know. This leniency often is the first step towards derision, aggression, or even conflict.
This is easy to picture if we compare social media to pre-internet social situations.
For example, a Discord meant for a specific hobby (eg I run a Tektronix and HPAK Discord) is like a club for better or worse. People in there have common interests or goals and work together and exchange based on knowledge. This alone gives them enough social context that when they enter this virtual lodge, they know they should bestow others with a modicum of respect and not dismiss them outright. I've seen this very community turn people from not wanting to talk to each other, to talking to each other - not best friends, but good enough for a little small talk every now and then.
The Discord of a celebrity youtuber is like the waiting line to a concert, where people usually discuss the act they're going to be spectating, and adjacent acts. Again, common context, a common story, that helps us understand each other.
A personal Facebook account is like your local home town to large extent. Your family, your childhood friends, maybe people from work or university. Again, common context.
Instagram is like going to a night club or a fair and seeing the people who try the hardest. It's a well known social dynamic. It's not great. It attracts a lot of sycophants and low lifes, but it is what it is.
With Twitter, it's like you're confronted with everyone you pass on the street. Imagine that you're going down the street, and you get to hear exactly, in detail, what everyone is talking about - from the very start of the conversation, without those other people knowing you can hear it. Then if you want, you can hear everything they said in the past, since the beginning of their lives. If you were able to do this IRL, this would not just be stalking, it would be an extremely worrisome endeavor, and there is no question that it would create conflict. That's why our social norms evolved to where we like to speak to others with some degree of privacy. That's why we have laws against recording of conversations you aren't part of. That's why if you're talking to a friend on the street, and someone random shows up and starts talking to you, you feel weirded out. You're not "not accepting", you're just in a position that is awkward, maybe dangerous, and definitely upsetting. There is no commonality. There is no trust.
This is not intentional or even conscious - it's entirely subconscious and important to our survival. It's the same reason why your dog barks at the mailman or why a bird might attack anyone coming close to its nest. It's a distrust of intruders, and in general intrusions (of any new phenomena we aren't yet familiar with) into our personal space, our "bubble".
There are those rare people who are extremely accepting of rando's on the street. Some would call them too friendly for their own good. People like this can be easily taken advantage of by con artists and the likes. They're the people donation salesmen grab a hold of downtown, talking about dying children in africa or whatever. But it does show that such a mindset is possible. People like this see every such interaction as an opportunity to learn or experience something new. They'll approach people thinking first, "how can I help them" and "how can I be respectful of this person".
On the other hand there are people who are welcoming of such interactions, but they welcome them in a many-times-reinforced adversarial manner. Those are the people who want to argue with you. They're the people who see you as sport.
Put in this context it's easy to see that the social model that Twitter represents is deleterious. It can be salvaged by people who have good intentions which is why some of the most prolific accounts on Twitter are the open minded, usually left-leaning, cerebral accounts. And then there is the dark side, of people who just want to shout at you - whether they're extreme "rationalists", or right or left wing propagandists, they're going to be very prolific as well.
This explains why there is such a war going on on Twitter. It was, unintentionally, made in this design that enables such people to thrive on the platform, as well as to create the tension between the different approaches.
Fast forward to today and we have a whole culture built around it, even though the limit is long gone.
> These are people using Twitter with good intentions
I've seen a few good articles on the phenomenon, but I think it boils down to the fact that Twitter encourages/rewards constant conversation and anyone can pop up in any conversation. As a result, it rewards the most abrasive people who tweet the most. No sane, well-adjusted person without an agenda to push (or a product to sell, etc) has the time or energy to continuously engage in Twitter at the amount required to become a big figure unless they are otherwise already famous.
In essence, Twitter is the same 5% of insane people driving everyone else crazy. The other 95% of passive consumers don't realize that most content they read on Twitter is written by negative people. That's just how the platform works. If you are a well-meaning person trying to engage with this mob, either you'll get tired of it and leave or you'll get dragged into the negativity.
There's multiple studies showing that active posters on twitter skew more negative and more politically extreme (left or right) than the average population. It's a collection of people with axes to grind yelling at each other.
If you want to test this theory, start aggressively blocking people who reply to tweets with negative opinions. You'll quickly start seeing those same people already blocked when you read the replies to totally unrelated tweets. It's a really small universe of the same negative people generating most of the content.
It turns out the human brain is especially vulnerable to things such as political takes, violence, or simply stuff it perceives as dumb or useless. And there's FOMO as well. Twitter exploits those weaknesses to provoke a response.
At worst it's a simple reply. Maybe a emoji tagging a friend, who then tags another friend, and so on. At best it will be a huge tree of people arguing with each other, a tree that can grow infinitely on paper.
I suspect in that world you'll still have a lot of networks trend negative but it would be pretty cool to get to a point where there is a choice. Sort of like ad blockers.
In science it's also their grant funding and reputation, that is at stake.
Unfortunately, you (and I) also never change our minds because of adversarial debate. It's easy to tell other people "you should change your mind", but it's hard to think "I should change my mind".
In my opinion :) it should be a badge of pride to be willing (and demonstrably able) to change ones mind about important matters.
Well, at least in computer science (ML) it's not what I see. It's very much empirically driven and with a heavy engineering vibe. A little bit more science would often help imho, but papers without strong result are hard to publish, even if they improve our understanding of something. It sometimes feels a bit like a large corporate research lab, which is only a small part of science. We do not only create, we want to understand!
There's nothing that brings a group with some power over others together more than being able to agree that someone outside the group should be sidelined or punished.
So saying “well everyone can poo-poo everyone else not in their field” is still true of course, but I think her specific critiques of particle physics are biting (and provoke responses) because her experience allows those critiques to be more accurate and more trenchant.
None of the above information is in the blogpost or HN post title, which is annoying.
> Take it out to the author of the article for not making a more descriptive title, if at all.
She's not responsible for HN guidelines or our interpretations of them. She's not obligated to give her individual blog entries a name at all (or to do anything else.) Should they then just be submitted as a date?
You would think people as smart as particle physicists most probably are wouldn't go that low, but here we are.
There is no a priori reason why high innate talent at abstract reasoning would correlate with high innate talent at reading subtle social signals.
And, the only reason I didn't drop out is because I was scared to. I did not know what I would do otherwise.
125ish is the minimum IQ range to be mentally capable of understanding anything.
It's not _that_ far off the norm. It's an exceptionally bright person. It's like 90th-95th percentile. You're 1 in 10 or 20.
And that's to do anything. The absolute limit of our understanding can be comprehended if you are "pretty smart". It's why Feynman and Hawking didn't really give a shit about IQ. It doesn't unlock any more doors. It might get you to them faster, but at the end of the day, you gotta put in the work.
And that's where we do fail our brightest. The most important lesson to learn is that hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.
IMO she does generally tend to suffer a bit of a victim complex.
What cannot be disproven by experiment, is not worth funding
The interesting experimental results in recent years mostly seem to come from very low energy physics. Down around absolute zero, many interesting effects have been demonstrated.
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13070
I've never really followed Sabine Hossenfelder but I think I prefer Peter Woit's skeptical takes over hers. It is kind of weird how they both agree more than disagree about the current state of high energy physics, but she seems to see the need to attack him over the details (and where I think Woit gets it more right than she does).
I'd like to hear more about these suggestions.
Contrast to a blog like Tomasso's which is targeted at those in/near HEP those who have a reasonably advanced physics/math background at the BS level.
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/good-problems-in-f...
Sounds like a good thing. It might shake things up and result in actual progress/change.
(not saying there is not actual progress, but think of it more like swaying some physicists to take a more adventurous road. Who knows where it will lead.)
This is about a physicist claiming she is being ostracised because she has professional views about particle physics that run counter to the accepted mainstream. She also explains the ideas behind her views (which comes down to "particle physics are no longer useful") and how she is being made the target of particle physicists rage.
Given how particle physics is an area in which expensive machinery is needed (the LHC doesn't come cheap), I wonder how much of this conflict is about the allocation of scientific funding.
LHC is a massive jobs program that wastes money and time, perhaps a hundred thousand experiments could fill its place. Large part of the jobs and $$$ go to someone other than a physicist.
I wonder if people made the same argument against funding of research in nuclear fission...
His comment is therefore in agreement with Sabine, and not with yours.
They were eventualy persuaded by an Autralian nuclear scientist acting on behalf of the Commonwealth MAUD scientists.
The issue with the endless(?) chase after ever more exotic particles is that every iteration levels up by some magnitude of effort, where nuclear fission weapons were once ( just out of | just within ) reach and subject to furious debate is more the case that ever fresh exotic particles expontentially escalate beyond actual resources.
Once we ring the circumference of the planet and use all the PetaWatts we can currently generate .. what next?
It'll take a while to level up to smashing suns together .. with no guarentee the rabbit hole is halfway plumbed.
But even more fundamentally, she seem to worry about the fact that there are currently no urgent 'holes' that require you to invent new particles. She points out that the method of inventing new particle that worked so well in the past, no longer seems reasonable, but that nevertheless, the high-energy physists stick to it out of tradition. It seems that the field of high-energy physists have become an incrowd that only continues to exist because everybody pads eachothers shoulders and that people on the outside believe that something must be true about it. It sounds as if she as a person is critized (and not her ideas) primarily because of her pointing this out.
> Should China build the Great Collider?
> Stephen Hawking and Gordon Kane 2018
> [...]
> This has shown up in the past from the LHC in a number of well documented areas, including inventing the World Wide Web with its huge impact on economies world-wide and then grid computing. Someone said imagine that CERN (where the World Wide Web was invented for particle physics) had one penny for each use, then particle physics would have all the funding it could use. More industries include magnet technology and superconducting wire technology, a multi-billion dollar accelerator industry, a multi-billion dollar imaging industry that owes its existence to the development of particle physics detectors, other billion dollar industries, and many tangible benefits. Such technologies generate revenues far exceeding the investment for collider construction.
> Arguably the third industrial revolution was triggered by the invention of the World Wide Web at CERN. The requirements for data acquisition and storage and access, and the materials and technologies needed for CEPC and SPPC could help lead to the fourth industrial revolution. For the first decades of the third industrial revolution High Energy Physics led, and only in recent years industry has overtaken HEP. History may repeat itself for the fourth.
Not everything is the same in the context of this discussion: one may think that LEP was good, and even that LHC was good when it was approved, built and put in place and also think that it's a waste of resources now.
This comment is in bad faith. She says the problem is lack of progress since the 1970s. She claims that either: The theories produced since then have been falsified, OR that they have been made unfalsifiable (and she names SUSY as an example of the latter). She says that she's a particle physicist hoping for the field to make progress - but she doesn't think it will do that until it makes some big changes, which she suggests.
You either know who Sabine Hossenfelder is (theoretical physicist and educator) or you don’t.
That book explains why geniuses in the history were not listened by the community and how to approach the concerns the author of the article has.
Another example might be the "discovery" of anti particles or of black holes. Both of which were long regarded as just mathematical curiosities.
Perhaps a better example could have been GR explaining why gravitational mass and inertial mass happen to be identical (except that GR also solves other real problems - notably, how to apply special relativity in the presence of gravity).
Additionally, we already know that the luminiferous aether model would have soon hit other major problems with quantum mechanics, which was already starting to be intuited by Einstein and others. So even if SR would have been seen as just a mathematical curiosity at the time of publishing (solving a non-problem), it would have soon become even more important.
Very importantly, SR also had much fewer assumptions (free parameters) than any of the other successful models it replaced. Contrast this with String Theory, which has numerous free parameters, doesn't fully explain currently-known phenomena, and has accumulated more than thirty years of study from a vast amount of physicists. SR was one physicist's individual work for a handful of years, and the moment it was presented, it was a short and complete theory that could immediately replace more complex ones.
If any individual physicist wants to similarly individually investigate some of the non-problems listed in the article, and were to come up with a new formulation of QM/QFT that explains them with a similar theory - then by all means, I am certain Dr Hossenfelder has no problem with that. It is when the search for such a theory becomes a decades-long approach sucking up most of the funding in the field with no results at all that it becomes a problem.
She's basically opposed to maths in physics for the sake of beautiful maths (nature doesn't have to be beautiful in our eyes), and spending vast amounts on money on bigger particle accelerators when there is no particular theory to test.
She wants to see real progress in her field. This doesn't necessarily make her right, but she has valid viewpoints that somewhat threaten the status quo of particle physics.
One thing I often see and it seems reiterated here is 'Why do we need more and bigger expensive colliders?'. In general, in the particle physics community right now there isn't much of a push for 'bigger colliders'. Scientists seem to have agreed that the low-energy precision physics frontier might be more fruitful for a fraction of the cost. Even the Mecca of collider physics acknowledges that and have lunched the 'Physics Beyond Colliders' study group https://pbc.web.cern.ch/ Also, there are numerous experiments done at the LHC which are not 'search for new particles'. Yes, the main goal of the LHC was to discover the Higgs boson and the great hopes were that supersymmetry (SUSY) particles will start falling from the sky. Now we know that SUSY is most probably not the way the world works and the efforts are mostly abandoned. Especially by younger physicists in the field.
The other problem that people seem to have is with the current directions in physics which in this blogpost are referred to as 'pseudo-problems' such as: "the baryon asymmetry or the smallness of the cosmological constant". These might not be problems on the same scale as "What the hell is this dark matter??" or "How do we reconcile general relativity with the Standard Model?", but in my opinion it would be a bigger waste of resources to focus all of physics in only the few big questions and leave everything else unexplored. Yes, from a certain point of view you could say that there is no reason that matter and antimatter should be equal in the universe so the baryon asymmetry is not a real problem, but still, there is no explanation yet why everything we see is matter and antimatter is next to non-existent in the Universe.
tl;dr: The money that go to collider physics are not 100% of the money that go into particle physics and generally there are no plans in the community for larger colliders at least in the next 25 years. (the Future Circular Collider has quite a long way to go before its even considered for building)
As to SUSY, while it is good if young post docs are avoiding it, that does not mean it has gone away (not if PRD table of contents is any indicator). It will take a long time for that paper mill to end, likely with the retirement/death of current researchers or sooner if funding agencies finally come to their senses.
I don't think she is suggesting there should be no efforts in some of the other areas you have mentioned, just that there needs to be a reassessment of how much effort and money should continued to be funneled in those directions.
Also: what makes you say a linear collider would be a better investment?
So is most of botany.
You cannot waste money, we made it up and can make more. Alternatively, you can explore the universe. I would be more open to the idea that the only reason some people want to understand anything is because they want control over it. Here we see that the author only find value in what can be exploited for profit; (s)he wants to control the absolute minutiae of existence and is upset that (s)he cannot claim it as property to lord over.
If I were to give an ounce of sympathy to the profit motive of science, then I’d say that the way to profit off the unknown is to get people interested and willing to give money in order to create knowledge of it. In this way, particle physicists are wildly successful in both accumulating “Lots of money”, and in generating new mysteries to (be paid to) explore. Some factories generate fidget spinners, and the LGC generates wonder in existence. I’m happy for the latter.