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.
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.