How do we know who's an expert here? Peer review is only as good as your peers. Genuine question.
It looks like Beyond Standard Model physics is becoming increasingly more abstract, increasingly less mathematically well-defined*, and not getting any closer to physically testable. So I don't know how to judge who's an expert.
* - What are the equations of M-Theory?
That's a fair question.
Let me give you a rule of thumb. I must emphasize you can't take it _too_ seriously. But it seems to hold quite well that in hard sciences, not just physics, looking from the inside, you notice that the ones who talk to the media are normally the bottom of the barrel. This makes a lot of sense. If your goal is to learn about the fundamental building blocks of the universe, writing blog posts the societal aspects of science doesn't help you with that. Real scientists spend their time doing science. There's very few exceptions to this. In fact right now I can think of a single person who's a world class researcher _and_ a prolific blogger; Terrence Tao, but he's a mathematician.
My point is, you can't judge who's the expert based on the quality of the science produced because you don't have the expertise for that. But believe you me, if someone spends a lot of time doing things other than research, they're probably not the best.
Right, sorry, I forgot that the only thing of importance that people have to contribute are Nobel prize winning papers. You know, lecturing, writing textbooks, writing standard scientific papers, peer reviews, all of these things aren't contributions. Obviously no-one should engage with the media unless they have won a Nobel and have decided they have no major papers left in them. In fact at that point, if they were real scientists, they'd just realise their time was up and walk off to perish on the tundra like the elderly inuits used to so they don't take up any more precious resources from the real scientists.
There is a commonality in your argument, at least from where I'm standing, with the logic of the 'proper binmen' people or the ascetics -- only those who suffer in silence away from society are truly the 'holy physicists'.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/nov/15/who-remembers-p...
It's ironic that you express the following sentiment:
> If your goal is to learn about the fundamental building blocks of the universe, writing blog posts the societal aspects of science doesn't help you with that. Real scientists spend their time doing science. There's very few exceptions to this. In fact right now I can think of a single person who's a world class researcher _and_ a prolific blogger;
when, just yesterday, the highest ranked post on the site was this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33750825
about this essay:
> My point is, you can't judge who's the expert based on the quality of the science produced because you don't have the expertise for that.
But you do have the expertise / knowledge / chuzpah to say that Mr Tao is a world class researcher? Sorta contradicktory, no?