Comment by g6pdh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by g6pdh | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a former LHCb physicist and I worked for years in the cavern, fixing the cables you saw :) Thanks for your enthusiasm. Obviously, things seen from the inside aren't as ideal as a non-physicist person might think. There are the usual power dynamics you find in academia: PhD students and postdocs exploited to do service and technical work instead of independent research, careerism, researchers who have to worry more about symbolic roles and political aspects than actual research, as if the PhD->Postdoc->Tenure->Professor career model serves to create real expertise and not vice versa. In general (personally) I've felt a strong sense of frustration at how modern research in particle physics is producing papers that are all identical to each other and have no true scientific impact, other than increasing the h-index, hoping to get a permanent position somewhere. Forgive the outburst, I'm in the IT industry now and I'm feeling definitely better, but eventually it was great and educational to do research at CERN.

> felt a strong sense of frustration at how modern research in particle physics is producing papers that are all identical to each other and have no true scientific impact

Your comment above makes me think of Sabine Hossenfelder[1]. I'm sure you must've heard of her. I know she's somewhat of a "polarizing" figure. As a former "insider", do you think her core point stands? (Which is, the particle physics field has largely nothing to show for after spending billions of public money. Some particle physicists have even predicted so-called "unparticles", which almost sounds like trolling!)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabine_Hossenfelder

Yes, I know her and I agree with what she says. I also think many physicists working in the field secretly agree with her but it's a taboo to admit it openly. As an insider I can assure you that currently most analyses in experimental particle physics are a mechanical repetition of previous analyses with a few slight modifications to adapt them to the bigger statistics. It's true that it could simply be an effect due to the experiments lifetime, that have been running for 20 years now and where younger generations are struggling to come up with ideas not yet explored. I can speak less from the perspective of theoretical physics, but it seems obvious to all those in the field that there's a proliferation of papers proposing new particles, new interactions, etc. with no real impact.

I am also a former CERN scientist, and while I agree with the fact that recent papers are more and more a box-checking exercise with low value, I'm concerned on how Hossenfelder misrepresent the causes of that and the situation.

You say yourself that this situation can be simply an effect due to the experiment lifetime, and I also think it's a reasonable hypothesis.

What gives me pause with Hossenfelder is that she jumps to another conclusion, without any good observation for it or without scientific approach. These conclusions seem to be fed by the easy trap of "it's a conspiracy". We know how easy it is for people to give credit to these theses and to totally overlook that some claims are, in practice, totally unrealistic (so we have thousands of new PhD students and postdocs exploring how it works every year, the majority of them leaving the field, and strangely, the very very big majority choose, for absolutely no good reason, to keep hidden the secret they saw).

I agree with some of Hossenfelder's observations, but I find her conclusions often unsubstantiated, overstating elements that are more realistically way rarer than what she described and overlooking plenty of valid hypotheses. The fact that these "great revelations" brings her viewership also fit with a slow crank-ification. The fact that she also released videos on subjects outside of her domain and that these videos contained a lot of approximation also does not give a good image of how reliable is her approach (not that it is a crime to not know something outside of your field of expertise, but it should be something that a good scientist should be fully aware of, and they should simply not do such video in the first place).

I'm not sure if there is a real "taboo" to openly agree with her, I think it is more about the fact that she destroyed herself her own reputation with bad calls and bad conclusions, and people don't really want to tarnish themselves by association.

What's your opinion on Beatriz VIllarroel and her experiments on transient traces in plates?

I don't know her.

But in general, I don't value "individual groundbreaking research". This is a very "Disney" view on how science work: a misunderstood genius that makes a discovery that the "scientific elite" refuses to acknowledge. Or very "Ayn Rand" or "Elon Musk" view, with all the teenage hedgelord energy associated to it. The myth of the "one-man-groundbreaking-discovery" makes for good entertainment, but even if it is 95% stupid and not 100% (yeah, individual contribution matters, yeah, inertia and misplaced skepticism exists, so what), that's a 12-year-old kid fantasy.

I'm not saying this person is not reliable, I don't know. But if her research is valuable, it will come out, and not because of one person. With Hossenfelder, the situation just turned into a media circus, which is just not useful at all. Such situations just feel like it is a "instagram gossip" deal rather than being about science.

I'm not sure what I think of this. Prodigious amounts of original research where produced by individual geniuses, often misunderstood at the time.

I'm not saying that individuals cannot do huge contributions, but that what matters is science and the "fan club" aspect around "geniuses" is just boring. It may have some slightly different elements than the "fan club" aspect around pop stars or boys bands, but it is basically the same thing.

So, yeah, I'm grateful to Einstein and acknowledge it was an impressive work, but not more than anyone else who has impressive skills.

Hossenfelder is falling into the same trap most people who make their living off social media do. Lots of money can be made with conspiracies and controversies, much more than with boring facts. This just seems to creep up over time on most of these people. Jordan Peterson fell into the same trap. He used to have pretty interesting insights but then he developed a huge loyal following and over time he felt like he knew the truth about pretty much everything. And the followers were happily cheering him on.

While I agree, it is worth adding that it is not a "natural consequence". Other than them have similar following and yet don't fall into that trap.

People who have fallen into that trap are not "average people" who are "victim of social media mechanism": their actions were and are still the result of their choices, and they still have a brain that should allow them to step back and see what they are doing. The fact that they felt into that trap tells us something about their qualities: they are poor analysts and we should not give them much credits (the fact they did decent analyses at first does not exclude the fact that they are poor analysts, just that they managed to get decent results despite being badly equipped for it).

I see; thanks for expanding on it so honestly.

Not a physicist, but isn’t the issue here that these are experiments? Failure to find a potential particle at a predicted energy shouldn’t be seen as ‘nothing to show’ or a failure. I presume it tells us something really valuable- if perhaps disappointing

I know what you mean. I was recently at lunch at a (non-physics) tech conference and an ex-physicist (now a systems developer) sitting next to me responded the same.

I think (physicists in the room, please correct me if I'm making assumptions here) this is a classic "falsification" trap. Just because you can propose a hypothesis / prediction that is "falsiable" doesn't make it a worthwhile one to pursue. "Hypotheses" are dime a dozen. The art and wisdom is in choosing what to pursue.

> Just because you can propose a hypothesis / prediction that is "falsiable" doesn't make it a worthwhile one to pursue. "Hypotheses" are dime a dozen.

I think there is two things: 1. indeed all falsifiable hypothesis are not worth pursuing (for example, the hypothesis of the existence of a teapot in a 1 km2 area on the surface of Mars is technically falsifiable, you can scan and scan the region for it. But it is a poor usage of time and money) 2. some falsifiable hypothesis are really useful, but when the conclusion is "nope", then it looks like we wasted time and money while in fact we did not (and I think it's what the previous comment is saying).

For the LHC, I think it is very very hard to pretend it was a waste of money. Scanning this energy region was a very good move. It was the obvious next low hanging apple. What else could physicists have done that would have been as informative than that for the same amount of money? Sure, we did not find much (well, we found the Higgs boson, which is a huge discovery in itself), so it is "emotionally" disappointing, and "marketingly" bad luck (the public can think it was useless). But the progress of our understanding of how things work increased a lot thanks to it: before it, we just had no idea what was in this region. We had plenty of hypotheses, with no clue which one was better than the other. Now, we still have a lot of hypothesis, but we crossed-out a huge lot of them.

> The art and wisdom is in choosing what to pursue.

Exactly. On this point, I think the choice made with the LHC is hard to beat. What else could have been done instead that will bring the final word on as much unresolved hypotheses? The question is less clear with the future collider, but if it does not win the best position, it will certainly be in the top ones. So I don't think it is fair to say that people who want to build it are misguided, they still have very good arguments.

Thanks for elaborating. I totally agree with you. I wasn't implying that funding the LHC itself was misguided, for the good reasons you articulate so well.

I am in the industry too and I wish to get back to the academia sometimes. Sadly, CERN is not hiring Russians no matter what are their political convictions (I am pro-Ukraine, of course). But yes, as a Geneva resident, I was at the tunnels too (Alice), and I am always in awe every time I see this wonder of the modern world. Sometimes I wonder how actual humans could build this, much like people did for the pyramids.

CERN stopped hiring non member or associate member states citizens for some time now. Except in very rare circumstances, This applies to US citizens as much as Russians too.

You might disagree on that but we all know that it was political pressure.

>Sadly, CERN is not hiring Russians

Is that even legal under Swiss discrimination laws?

Try proving they're rejected because of their nationality. That said, CERN itself does have some official statements on the matter:

- The International Cooperation Agreement has been terminated in 2023, following the invasion of Ukraine (https://international-relations.web.cern.ch/stakeholder-rela...)

- Their recruitment policy states they source among their member states except when they really really can't find someone to fill a position from there (https://careers.cern/recruitment-policy/).

I'm not sure if / how that works together with discrimination laws, however, discrimination is a different subject than nationality I think. I can't just work in the US, not because I'm Dutch but because of visum / labor / market protection / etc laws. And with CERN, added factors to consider are international funding, espionage, sabotage, etc. Some countries may decide to pull funding if CERN were to, for example, continue working with Russia or hire Russians.

tl;dr it's a lot more complicated than discrimination.

They told you that CERN is an international org, and this is true, but it is also apparently legal under Swiss discrimination laws. I was declined a pure math position because of "knowledge security reasons" - for nothing but my passport. And it was legal, as discrimination laws apparently has many exceptions. I am not happy about it, but there's little I can do.

I don't think CERN is bound by Swiss laws. It's an intergovernmental organization with sovereign immunities.

Is that a thing? Can an organization be given sovereign immunity? I thought that was reserved for actual countries?

Yes, and it's not unusual for organizations like the World Health Organization, the UN or its agencies, the Red Cross etc.

Examples:

https://repository.cern/records/ypas9-j5751

https://cds.cern.ch/record/1035110/files/cer-002693576.pdf

https://www.icrc.org/en/document/status-update-icrcs-legal-s...

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