I only have a master in (engineering) physics but working with statistical modeling and AI I’ve come to appreciate the “all models are wrong but some models are useful”-mindset, and I’ve started applying that to physical “laws” as well: I no longer see them as some divine truths waiting to be discovered, but more like models of the world that will always be wrong but sometimes useful.
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.
I understand that her critizism goes beyond the models that are usefull, but address the problem that there is a whole industry (wasting money and human resources) of inventing and promoting models that do not solve any urgent 'gap' and/or are not even practically testable.
Rejoice in the fact that this is only one specific area of physics, and that physics in general is making faster progress than it ever has before, particularly in quantum optics and quantum fundamentals
Interesting analogy with overfitting, though I would say this is more of an underfitting problem? i.e. we have enough 'training data' to know places where our current model fails (inconsistencies as author puts it, such as dark matter). Therefore our inductive biases must be too strong/incorrect, and relaxing them to increase expressivity would be the typical ML approach here.
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.
Overfitted models do serve a purpose here though - particle physics has reached a point where you can't build models and theories on direct observation so instead the community is throwing a huge number of falsifiable overfitted models with the expectation that all but one or two will actually be confirmed experimentally. It's certainly a time consuming, expensive, non-ideal approach, but valid. The authors argument seems to be that this approach is too expensive and slow, and it's time to revisit original assumptions to develop a new approach.
Many of these models aren't really falsifiable though - or at least, not falsifiable with any technology we can even conceive of today.
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.
She proposes to develop theories in more promising areas, ones that have explicit conflicts between different theories (quantum gravity, quantum measurement) or conflicts between theories and observation (dark matter).
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).
How does this work in practice. Do you force everyone to work on a theory they don’t believe in or are not interested in? Do we think that will actually yield useful results?
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.
I used this quote in the heading of my dissertation on uncertainty in deep learning, and I think its simultaneously true for lots of fields. In ML research we celebrate these enormous models that do everything (GATO, Flamingo, CoCa, etc.) since it feels like we're getting close to something real or universal. I imagine particle physicists feel something similar about expanding the standard model (SUSY(?), quantum gravity),
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.
I rather think that we're past our ability to make useful yet comprehensible (to us) models in physics. The only avenue is to make useful and incomprehensible models. Using machine learning for that is one way. String theory might be on the boundary where it's borderline comprehensible (for a few select people), but at the cost of being only borderline useful (maybe).
This could well be the case, though I don't know how one could falsify this without a superhuman intelligence, so is rather unscientific.
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.
Thought experiments are mostly interesting, hardly to be useful. Something about speed of light, how can we make use of it. Nuclear bombs, he didn't like it.
“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.
Re the first paragraph: It's good you think that because that literally is what we teach and should believe. People who believe otherwise are mistaken. Even so called fundamental physics is studied within an approximation almost always.
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.
Twitter seems so persistently corrosive and unhappiness-inducing. Why is it? The author's complaints are about other physicists' behaviors and attitudes to her writing, but it looks like much of it is specifically about Twitter interactions: about unhappy, defective people on Twitter (smart physicists, even) drawing other people into their miasma.
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.
> Twitter seems so persistently corrosive and unhappiness-inducing. Why is it?
> 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.
IMO this isn't just a Twitter thing. When I ran a company, we had a public forum that, in the beginning, was civilized. As we approached about 2000 people, that 5% you're talking about became so much of a problem that we had to shut them down. And in fact, it wasn't even 5% (100) people causing most of the problem: it was more like 10.
It is hard to use twitter and not be drawn into negativity and conflict. I think that is mainly because it not only recommends tweets by people you follow. You quickly end up getting exposed to lots of content other people „liked“. Which more often than not is written by people with several mental illnesses, people in tough financial or social situations or successes like Nature papers, Conference acceptances and so on. There is very little room for „normal content“.
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.
I feel like there is a social aspect to this "tweets from other people" thing. We are, of course, social people, whether we like it or not - the social context of what we're seeing always heavily biases our perception.
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.
Because spreading negativity is easy, and clearing it up is hard. Clearing it up is hard, but worth it, but Twitter’s structure makes that hard type of work even harder by having character limits and measuring value by popularity.
I don't know why exactly, but Reddit seems to promote negativity much less so. It seems to me that unpleasant comments get buried by the algorithm and the people's votes.
I find that different social networks are more "conductive" for different types feelings or states. I think a lot of it has to do a person's natural negativity bias[0] but is further amplified by the given social network. Some tend towards conducting negativity towards self. Some tend to point the finger at others. I think as we better recognize and map these bizzare (and profitable) incentive structures over time we'll be able to build apps and networks that through various tricks and shortcuts more naturally conduct positivity, love, open mindedness, a desire to unite people, etc.
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.
I know it's not an excuse but Sabine definitely "starts it". Just look at her wording in the blog post? She is always combative at the outset. She does not seem to have the kind of people skills required to harshly (and you can't deny it's harsh) and publicly criticise an entire field without upsetting everyone in that field. It takes skill to do that in a good way.
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.
1) If you aren't diplomatic while telling people their work is stupid and pointless then no one will listen to you. If no one will listen to you you may as well not talk.
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.
Being diplomatic doesn't guarantee results either. Guy that noticed people handling corpses should wash hands before doing medical operation got declared a nutcase and died in an asylum. People going after Sabine aren't that much better.
It's obvious particle physicists are stuck in a rut, their best theories can't unify gravity and QM or explain dark matter/energy.
Well that's not your choice to make, that's how taxation works. The government choose how to manage and spend a portion of your money. Do you think your opinion matters in deciding if a hospital should be built? Or if we should pay for a new vaccine? No, because you don't know anything about those things. And neither do I.
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.
Thankfully politicians don't think of science in terms of "return on investment"
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
After fifty years and $x T of investment you can easily tell that something's a waste of money.
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.
Politicians think of Big Science in terms of appropriations and sending cash to their principals, who are neither the electorate nor scientists. They don’t consider any money that buys their re-election a waste. They don’t give a rat’s ass if you discover anything and it sounds like you know it. So-called science these days is little different from military spending. As usual, follow the money.
Politicians generally have almost no influence in scientific spending other than "here is a big block of R&D money". Those who dish out the money are not elected officials, at least not elected by the public.
It’s certainly true that the decades long continuing wealth transfer away from the middle class to well-connected elites that incidentally funds your work involves more than just elected politicians. As you note unelected bureaucrats also have their role to play, as do lawyers, lobbyists, and a whole host of other classes of more or less directly involved grifters in addition to ancillary beneficiaries such as yourself.
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.
I don't think the public expect that their completely uneducated opinion on physics is in any way relevant to funding. Do you seriously think this will come as a shock to anyone?
Perhaps this lack of observational ability is a factor in your drought of new theoretical discoveries? It’s indisputable that the public believes that its completely uneducated opinion on any number of things is relevant to funding in particular and policy in general. That’s rather the point of democracy.
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.
There isn't a drought of new theoretical discoveries, quantum mechanics is progressing at a more rapid pace than ever. Just because one section of theoretical particle physics is having some problem doesn't mean that theoretical physics in general is. Look at the rapid developments in entanglement, quantum correlations, macroscopic quantum systems, and quantum measurement. This is why the public can't be trusted when discussing physics in any sense, because the uneducated layman like yourself has almost zero idea about what is going on inside physics today
Is this a general principle that you cleave to? Would you also say that the uneducated layman can’t be trusted when discussing the Ukraine conflict as well? Perhaps I should only trust Russians on the subject of Russia, since they’re clearly the experts. Or is your position limited to areas adjacent to your paycheck?
I only think it's the case in terms of medicine or science, especially disciplines that are so granular that even someone from one subfield can't fully understand a paper in the next. Most areas of physics are so specialised that they take at least a decade or two to become competent in. 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. You already demonstrated your ignorance on the current state of physics by asserting that theoretical physics has a drought.
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.
> I only think it's the case in terms of medicine or science, especially disciplines that are so granular that even someone from one subfield can't fully understand a paper in the next.
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.
But that is just political posturing for the media and his fans. He doesn't actual influence the decisions, and even if he ends up doing so, he's not influencing decisions about large scale physics experiments
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.
Well, I agree, unfortunately. Sabine is smart and knowledgeable, but when people try to engage with her in ways that push the boundaries of her knowledge, and especially when that may be some uncomfortable "unknown" position that we have no certainty on, Sabine will usually (in my observations) double down on her position and refuse to even entertain an outside idea, often in a derisive and short way that cuts off any form of dialogue about the issue.
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.
Her blog posts criticizing LIGO were based on a series of papers with very obvious flaws. She never addressed that it might have been a mistake to blog about it without talking to experts before.
Twitter's recommendation system doesn't only try to draw your attention. Tweets and their replies form a tree, and the system wants those trees to grow as much as possible.
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.
What you see on Twitter also can’t be taken as representative of (say) physicists in general, because only a small minority of physicists is active on Twitter. “Being active on Twitter” likely correlates with a set of personality traits that aren’t representative of the population at large.
It's my opinion that a lot of science today is theoretical BS. I'm glad sometimes, someone is pointing it out. When i do it myself, i get bombarded with hate. Sigh. even when it's not science, when it's about programming (my profession). And the one thing i learned is: PEOPLE WILL NOT CHANGE THEIR MIND. You can even come with proof and people wont change. They will just ignore u after you've proven it, and keep saying you're wrong. Of course, not everyone is like this, but most of the time it's the "experts" who are like this. Probably because they feel like their entire self image is under attack. Anyway.. life is life, people are people, we live in a society. Frustrating as it is, just remember to enjoy life from time to time, that's what's truly important.
I think you get bombarded with hate because of the larger problem of extreme polarization on social media. All subtlety is lost, you are associated with the one anti-science group, opposed to the one pro-science group.
It's kind of mixture of online and real-life experiences. In real-life you dont get the hate, but only because they know, it would be extremely rude. But they have other things, eg. make jokes about you to others.
When you open a conversation with as sweeping a statement as the one you presented in your first sentence, you realistically only have about a minute or two to persuade the person you are addressing that you will be able to justify it.
People do change their mind, but almost never because of adversarial debate. So, "come with proof" seldom works.
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.
> It's my opinion that a lot of science today is theoretical BS
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!
Science and everything else humans do is social and cliquey.
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.
That may be too relativist. The outlines of her critiques of particle physics do not stick in the same way, I think, against astronomy and astrophysics (witness questions being answered by Webb), or against computational climate science (witness new ability to quantitatively attribute part of given storm to global warming), or against machine learning research (lots of hype but lots of value like predicting protein structure).
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.
HN guidelines suggest that you should put the title of the page in the submission title, so there is nothing wrong with it from that standpoint. Take it out to the author of the article for not making a more descriptive title, if at all.
HN guidelines strongly encourage that for the sake of removing editorial from the submission, but adding something at least a little descriptive is good to keep people from wasting their time. This got traction because of the domain, not the title.
> 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?
> There have also been several instances in the past where particle physicists called senior people at my workplace to complain about me, probably in the hope to intimidate me or to get me fired
You would think people as smart as particle physicists most probably are wouldn't go that low, but here we are.
Are we still proliferating the myth that you have to be exceedingly smart to be a physicist? The only thing that makes a physicist a physicist is that they didn't give up. Sure there are amazing geniuses out there, but a majority of physicists (including myself) are just average people who did not drop out when it got tough.
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.
Are they smart, or do they get to boast about being smart because they work in a niche field? It doesn't excuse dickish, childish or petty behavour. Like, grow up, deal with criticism in a professional fashion, and if you feel like it was an underhanded attack, be the bigger person and all.
I mean, to give a different guess - it could be to ask her to e.g. stop bullying other members of their department; no differently than the politics of dealing with an employee from a different department stirring up trouble. This doesn't mean that it's intimidation or "trying to get her fired" (although I am sure that does happen).
IMO she does generally tend to suffer a bit of a victim complex.
FWIW, Hossenfelder sounds a bit like a crackpot contrarian in this article, but her book "Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray" is incredibly nuanced and well-argued.
Sabine seems to be promoting a twist on Newton's flaming laser sword, also known as Alder's razor: What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating.
What cannot be disproven by experiment, is not worth funding
These hypothetical particles can be disproven by experiment; they are falsifiable. However it is very expensive and there’s no reason to believe they exist.
Well, high energy physics does seem to be kind of stuck. The cosmology and big collider crowd don't seem to get much in the way of new results for the amount of effort expended. How are the string theorists doing?
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.
Hey much has been done in high energy density or high temperature physics, we have a freaking fusion article every week here. Don't count us all out, were not all lost in space like particle theorists.
A bit of a meta comment, but a lot of people are calling Hossenfelder "crack potty" or "ranty" and I just don't get that at all reading this post or the many before. She seems upset yes from the abuse she's received, but that seems understandable. I don't understand how people feel she is so combative unless you already disagree with her.
From all her posts I got quite different impression. I feel like she is abusing her position to spread misinformation about how particle physics actually works. Repeating again and again "You are all idiots and do not know what you do and only care about funding" does not help her much in building a valid scientific argument.
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).
That started off like it was going to have useful suggestions, but then devolved into "me against particle physicists", and became a bit of a self-promotion-cum-pre-defence.
That is because her audience is not expected to be physics or math grads and is best viewed as interested laypeople who may have some very basic background in math/science.
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.
To me it sounds like she is similar to a food/book/movie critic, but instead for particle physics.
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 a surprisingly bad headline for an article, giving absolutely no context about what I am supposed to take an interest in as a reader.
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.
I agree it’s an unhelpful headline. But it’s also one that is completely consistent with her voice in her YouTube videos on the subject, of which I may have seen too many. I think I even imagined her voice saying it as I read the headline.
> She also explains the ideas behind her views (which comes down to "particle physics are no longer useful")
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.
IIRC Supersymmetry predicted one mass for the Higgs boson, String theory predicted a different mass, and the measured mass turned out to be in the middle.
Lol what bad faith? How? I read the article and the guardian article yesterday... All I did was ask a clarifying question. The world isn't out to get you
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.
And for "all" that we can throw at this kind of program it should be pointed out that perhaps nothing of interest might happen until it scales to energy levels of several of our suns with observations over a scale a little longer than human evolution .. still barely a scratch on the breadth and depth of the universe.
It could even be that there is nothing new to be found no matter how high the energy gets.
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.
That's the crux with all kinds of fundamental research, isn't it? Everyone considers it a basically useless wild goose change until sometimes, something comes along that completely restructures our understanding of the universe.
I wonder if people made the same argument against funding of research in nuclear fission...
USofA nuclear physcists certainly made such an argument against pursuing the development of nuclear fission weapons, they said such things were beyond the reach of US industry in argument against the intial pleas to do so from the UK MAUD committee and a following letter from Albert Einstein.
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.
The parent comment is saying that the next scale of actually useful particle colliders might be outside of practical reach. Note that by "useful", I mean capable of discovering new physics.
His comment is therefore in agreement with Sabine, and not with yours.
It didn’t came out of the LHC project. (The LHC project was approved in 1994. There had been a decade of planning but that had nothing to do with the creation of the web.)
Opps yeah, was mixing it up with CERN in general. All the work on WWW and earlier hypertext there wasn't just for early LHC planning stuff but it has been a noted thing:
> 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.
That someone has written that before doesn't make it true. The "World Wide Web" was invented at CERN but that happened in the LEP era. LHC has absolutely nothing to do with it.
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.
As someone who has no skin in the game at all, I find her way of presenting criticism very contrarian argumentative and snarky. She might be completely right, but I can definitely understand the reluctance to hear her out on merit of style.
To be fair, the personality and style of an author are invariably raised as issues when someone takes a contrary public position. If only she had asked more nicely.
Well, as I said, I have no skin in the game. I'm only a spectator, I have no incentives to find a nonreason to dismiss her. Still I do think her style is disrespectful although entertaining, and can imagine that if her criticism was against me, I'll have a very hard time taking it as constructive.
This reads entirely as "everyone else's approach to problems have been unsuccessful, therefore they should use my approach instead, which also had been unsuccessful solving the same problems"
That's not entirely fair. I've been reading her blog for a long time.
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.
That may well be the worse example you could have given, seeing as how special relativity was necessary to reconcile Maxwell's equations with Newtonian mechanics, a major inconsistency in physics.
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).
If you read the literature of the time, the issue was considered as largely understood. I would highly recommended science and hypothesis by Poincare (1905). You'll see a lot of concepts and equations that you might have assumed came from special relativity or even general relativity.
I will be interested in reading that, but my understanding in general is that the previous (physical) theories were a mishmash of hypotheses that were patching up the luminiferous aether model as new experiments were invalidating the older assumptions. In contrast, Einstein's paper explained all of the experiments in a single simple theory with a minimal set of extra assumptions.
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.
The equations that students must often learn for special relativity were already known, hence the Lorentz naming. The question at the time was largely about how this undetectable substance called the ether behaved.
Another example might be the "discovery" of anti particles or of black holes. Both of which were long regarded as just mathematical curiosities.
Also I'll add that there were many "outs" for those that supported aether theories such as frame dragging or simply experimental error as those themselves doing the experiments often believed and kept trying to develop more refined experiments to prove the existence of the aether even into the 20s
If it's about funding, then it just sounds like she wants more money for her projects rather than the other things that are being funded. Waste of time her writing it, not going to waste my time reading it.
Particle physicist here (relatively new to the field). I mostly do not understand the problem of Dr. Hossenfelder and others like her.
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)
And yet plans do continue for FCC as well as ILC/NLC, though of the two the latter seem to be the better "investment".
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.
Plans continue because if they didn’t, starting from scratch and ramping up again would take decades. This is simply because expertise would be lost in the meantime. Just because the plans are being made does not mean it’s inevitably going to happen.
Also: what makes you say a linear collider would be a better investment?
That's not what the author means by "useful". If you spend a year describing a particular kind of plant, then you know that much more about it and that's a useful contribution to science if not society. If you keep coming up with zany theories and predictions that do not just turn out to be wrong (that's fine, "I've successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work") but where there's really no reason to even suppose they might have been right, then that's scientific busywork.
I'd suggest you read on scientific outputs of collider experiments. They do perform precision experiments and detailed measurements of particle properties and fundamental parameters of the settled fundamental models. The picture you are painting of "some theorists come up with crazy ideas and then we spend billions on colliders and then nothing" - is completely bogus. And that is very illustrative of the harm that Dr. Hosssenfelder does as a popularizer.
It's incredible how bad this reply is, and how closely it follows her claim that folks that don't like what she's saying just go straight for personal attacks without engaging at all with the content of her argument.
Governments fund research. It is healthy if civil society discusses this kinds of things. Especially if it's not some populist politician that wants to defund physics, but an experienced physicist that makes clear points.
Yes. And, by her own admission, nobody cared. Scientific community decided that her publications don't actually contribute much to fundamental physics.
As everyone with overinflated ego - she decided that that's because everyone else is wrong and she is right. So she decided to go to twitter and blogs and do the twitty-bloggy scandal thing. Now people are talking about her. I guess, that's what she wanted?
Yeah she sounds like a frustrated person seeking revenge. Because someone has to be responsible for her frustration, right? To be fair it’s a trend we see a lot currently. Angry people seeking revenge because they feel their life didn’t go as well as they deserve.
I’d appreciate feedback from people downvoting. I don’t care about HN karma, I’m just curious as to why denouncing her unconstructive and angry takes on particule physics is frowned upon.
I didn't up- or down-vote you, but I would guess it is because your comment was an ad hominem, attacking her personality rather than her arguments. People can be angry for good reasons or bad, so calling her angry doesn't advance the debate at all.
I'm not a physicist, but it seems to me that her main point seems valid: for the past ~50 years, theoretical physics has been engaged in a process that is rewarding (with research money, publications, tenure, prestige, etc.) people creating theories that cannot ever be proven true or false.
Science is supposed to be founded on the scientific method: create a theory, then create an experiment that can prove or disprove it. Now we have a hamster-wheel of experiments producing theories that produce more experiments, and the goal is to keep the hamster-wheel running rather than come to a conclusion.
> for the past ~50 years, theoretical physics has been engaged in a process that is rewarding people creating theories that cannot ever be proven true or false.
This is not true on several levels. First of all, there is a place for studying mathematical abstractions (strings and such) and there is nothing wrong with doing mathematics. Second, theoretical physics rewards theories that can be falsified - there is a huge subarea called "phenomenology" that in engaged in linking theoretical abstractions and experiments. Third, there is no "process" to the contrary and in the last ~50 a number of fundamental new discoveries was performed.
> hamster-wheel of experiments producing theories that produce more experiments
That makes no sense. Are you, like, rejecting collider experiments altogether?
It might be more accurate to say "there has been a place for the industry of mathematical abstractions (strings and such)" since the very late 1960s/early 1970s S-Matrix theory.
I think the various funding agencies around the world are largely to blame for the current situation in HEP and how/where research (theory and experiment) efforts are focused. "Efforts" can be read as man-years and money.
I don't get it. You have something against S-Matrix theory? Why do you call it an "industry"?
> funding agencies are largely to blame for the current situation in HEP and how/where research efforts are focused
Current situation in HEP is fine. The whole theoretical physics community decides where research efforts should be focused. No one else can do that even if he wanted to.
S-Matrix was the beginning of fifty years of string and SUSY leading no where beyond some interesting maths (imho). I call it an industry because of the number of people involved and the self-preservation need to keep the funding going.
I would disagree with the idea that the theoretical community decides where efforts should be focused - who ever is paying the bills ultimately makes that decision. Clearly, there are groups within interest areas that make recommendations to those agencies and nominally propose long term plans. But no dollars, no research - plans or not. Communities also tend towards preserving the status quo rather than cutting losses, splitting up and moving on to new things.
If there was more pushback from the funders we would not have seen so many working in and around string theory and susy for such a very long time with so little to show for it. That is not to say nobody should do such research, just that at some point someone has to say this no longer looks like it warrants the effort of so many, bring some new ideas/areas of research for the majority of you.
In the case of HEP experimentalists, the problem is magnified as the monies involved are very large as are the number of people, many of whom have nothing directly to do with physics (techs, etc). CERN quotes a figure of 17,500 including 2500 of their own staff. All involved have a very vested interest in making sure things do not change meaningfully and that upgrades continue to be made to LHC until funding is secured for another collider.
Otherwise where do they go? The notion that it is not in the best interest of the entire physics community or the wider public tends to fall on deaf ears when your career and paycheck are on the cutting block.
> S-Matrix was the beginning of fifty years of string and SUSY
S-Matrix is a scattering matrix - a basic notion in QFT. S-Matrix theory is an attempt of axiomatization of particle physics with S-Matrix analyticity axioms as a basis. It still makes sense to this day - and still at the brink on unresolved questions in QFT, like QCD vacuum and/or confinement. A popular notion that S-Matrix theory was "replaced" with QCD is bogus (not to mention that bulk of publications by Gell-Mann was on S-Matrix theory). String theory is just a thing that was inspired by S-Matrix theory. And SUSY has almost nothing to do with it.
> I would disagree with the idea that the theoretical community decides where efforts should be focused - who ever is paying the bills ultimately makes that decision.
It is a very naive view of how research works. It is like saying that who ever pays the bills gets to decide what startup is going to succeed.
“More importantly, everyone can see that nothing useful is coming out of particle physics, it’s just a sink of money.” -cry of a (wo)man hypnotized by capitalism.
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.
Fine, not "money", "human effort" and "material goods" (although those are in essence mostly human effort as well) — those things you absolutely can waste. And surprise! those things are measured in money.
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.