10 ms·

Physicist Fotini Markopoulou traded quantum gravity for industrial design

80 points by sasvari 10y ago

i386 10y ago
This puff peice is so light it's about to eminently float away on the mearest breeze.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  Really not. When you see a line like: 'He [Turok] didn’t want the institute, he says, “to be center for alternative physicists who were doing unusual things in speculative directions.”' you know something has gone wrong somewhere. Because when you have no idea how to get to quantum gravity, shutting down "unusual things in speculative direction" is pretty much guaranteed to leave you with nothing.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - budu3 10y ago
    On the surface it looks like her departure is a huge loss to the academic world. > I applauded her for her bravery for pursuing her own line, but that inevitably brings risks with it. She is a very fundamental thinker; she had original ideas. But at the end of the day you had to decide if those ideas are going to pan out Why not let the broader community of scientist decide this?
    - jsprogrammer 10y ago
      >On the surface it looks like her departure is a huge loss to the academic world. And a huge gain for everyone else?
      - nice1 10y ago
        It is definitely not a loss for the academic world, but it could be a gain for some, time will tell.
    - jessriedel 10y ago
      There are finite resources for paying salaries, and people (before tenure) get cut based on how promising their ideas are as judged by their local peers (the tenure committee). You can imagine an alternate system where you poll the larger community, but this is liable to degenerate into a popularity contest as each voter spends a tiny amount of time choosing people with whom they are not familiar. In contrast, the tenure committee is able to invest more time looking carefully at a single candidate.
      - jessriedel 10y ago
        It just dawned on me that I should of course disclose I work at the Perimeter Institute. However, I actually disagree a lot with Neil Turok on hiring philosophy and what PI's priorities should be, in a way that makes me very sympathetic toward this former physicist. But I know nothing about her actual work (she left before I arrived), and for all I know Neil made the right decision and it wasn't close.
    - selimthegrim 10y ago
      When people say things like "really courageous" (Hossenfelder) and "really very different and hardly acknowledged by leading researchers in the field" (Turok), those are polite ways of damning someone with faint praise in writing a recommendation letter for them if you think they're a crackpot. Only Lloyd struck me as genuine in that article (and Hossenfelder because she's in a similar spot, not because of her quote)
  - T-A 10y ago
    I remember having a total "WTF?!?" moment when I heard Turok, of all people, had been chosen as Perimeter's new director. At the time, Perimeter's reputation was not unlike that of SpaceX or Tesla - a daring, unconventional outfit trying to shake things up with a new approach, and unusually enough endowed with the resources to actually do it. "Things" being very much quantum gravity. Then, out of the blue, Turok parachutes in, a hum-drum theoretical cosmologist who built his career on straightforward computer simulations of classical field-theoretic toy models, quite unrelated to quantum gravity. What?!? If he can say he didn't want the institute "to be center for alternative physicists", it is because the people who put him in place decided they didn't want that. But that was very much the origin story of the place. I still wonder what really happened. Maybe Lazaridis (an engineer, not a physicist) finally realized how far we are from any kind of experimental test of quantum gravity and decided that he wanted some kind of tangible return on his investment. Howard Burton, the founding director who was replaced by Turok, wrote a book [1] about the early years which may shed some light on events [2]. Maybe some day I'll read it. [1] https://www.amazon.ca/First-Principles-Business-Serious-Science/dp/1554701759/157-8685500-0664562 https://www.amazon.ca/First-Principles-Business-Serious-Scie... [2] http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=1805/ http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=1805/
    - selimthegrim 10y ago
      Turok worked with Steinhardt on those ekpyrotic models, which at least have something to say in principle about CMB polarization and gravity waves and could be linked to the BICEP results sorta (which ended up being a no verdict). Does her model even do that? Edit: made my statement less sloppy
      - T-A 10y ago
        In HN terms, that's like calling a proposal for a new foundation of computing - spintronics, say - an "app", comparing it to some random social network, pointing out that the latter has really nice support for sharing cat pictures, and asking whether the proposed "app" even does that.
        10y ago
  - selimthegrim 10y ago
    Like it or not, Perimeter was getting a reputation as a place for crackpots.
  - i386 10y ago
    Oh you can't get puffier than this waffle > She is fine-featured and striking. Her heavy-lidded eyes anchor a gaze that seems wary of its own powers, as if her promiscuous intelligence must hold itself back from latching on to your every word. She wears her hair in a tousled pixie-cut, and on this spring day, a green knit sweater and blue scarf with a pattern of fish-like scales.
dharma1 10y ago
I think the article was fine but it was hard understand what Doppel does from their website. So it vibrates at BPM you set?
joaorico 10y ago
To use Lee Smolin's (her ex-husband) terminology [1], she was clearly a Seer, not a Crafstperson. The Seers-Craftspeople problem is not unlike the innovator's dilemma and the big-corp/startup. The Perimeter, of all places, was about fostering Seers. Einstein is the canonical Seer, and it is generally accepted that Einstein today would have been, at the beginning of his career, even less welcomed by the scientific community (before his 1905 papers, he was unable to secure several faculty positions, etc, went to work in the patent office). Maybe Milner/Zuck can come up with something to help fund the Seers, à la startup incubator, thinking long-term, in the sense that 1 successful unicorn in a portfolio of 100 would be worth it, and you could have 15+ years to think without any pressure to publish. Apparently the odds of finding some at the Perimeter have diminished in the last few years. Maybe YC/Thiel/Musk want to take up this challenge, à la OpenAI. Maybe hope lies in guaranteed basic income. (À la Buchheit: "we don't need more jobs, we need more Steve Jobs.") [1] Smolin, Lee - The Trouble with Physics, Chapter 18 "Seers and Craftspeople"
- joaorico 10y ago
  I'm using Smolin's terminology because he was defending Seers in his book, is Markopoulos' ex-husband and colleague, and a central piece at the Perimeter. From his book, cited above (the whole chapter is very much worth reading): "Master craftspeople and seers come to science for different reasons. Master craftspeople go into science because, for the most part, they have discovered in school that they’re good at it. They are usually the best students in their math and physics classes from junior high school all the way up to graduate school, where they finally meet their peers. They have always been able to solve math problems faster and more accurately than their classmates, so problem solving is what they tend to value in other scientists. Seers are very different. They are dreamers. They go into science because they have questions about the nature of existence that their schoolbooks don’t answer. If they weren’t scientists, they might be artists or writers or they might end up in divinity school. It is only to be expected that members of these two groups misunderstand and mistrust each other. [...] Of course, some people are mixtures of both. No one makes it through graduate school who is not highly competent on the technical side. But the majority of theoretical physicists I know fall into one or the other group."
maverick_iceman 10y ago
If you look at her Inspirehep page, she has a citation count of 1193 only [1]. For someone who got a PhD in 1998, that's definitely below par. Also her major work is on causal dynamical approaches to quantum gravity - an endeavor not with many successes and currently not considered to be very fruitful by most high energy physicists. I don't think she would have been able to get tenure in any major research university. [1] http://inspirehep.net/author/profile/F.Markopoulou.1 http://inspirehep.net/author/profile/F.Markopoulou.1
- faitswulff 10y ago
  So this article is no longer interesting if she's not qualified enough for your liking, despite the fact that she's a highly educated physicist? I'm not sure how this comment is relevant.
YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
>> She wears her hair in a tousled pixie-cut, and on this spring day, a green knit sweater and blue scarf with a pattern of fish-like scales. Ah, alright. I was wondering what she was wearing. (is your sarcasm detector working?)
- elcritch 10y ago
  And some people, like myself, enjoy a bit of non-technical but human details. As in, goodness, this is a real person and maybe dealing with similar questions in life aside from technical papers and research. Actually, from a narrative perspective these details tie together some of the theme of the article, that of Markopolou's approach of creativity in life and physics. As in she's not a dour academic wearing muted colors, but having a splash of color and texture.

80 points by sasvari 10y ago

i386 10y ago

This puff peice is so light it's about to eminently float away on the mearest breeze.

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
Really not. When you see a line like: 'He [Turok] didn’t want the institute, he says, “to be center for alternative physicists who were doing unusual things in speculative directions.”' you know something has gone wrong somewhere. Because when you have no idea how to get to quantum gravity, shutting down "unusual things in speculative direction" is pretty much guaranteed to leave you with nothing.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- budu3 10y ago
  On the surface it looks like her departure is a huge loss to the academic world. > I applauded her for her bravery for pursuing her own line, but that inevitably brings risks with it. She is a very fundamental thinker; she had original ideas. But at the end of the day you had to decide if those ideas are going to pan out Why not let the broader community of scientist decide this?
  - jsprogrammer 10y ago
    >On the surface it looks like her departure is a huge loss to the academic world. And a huge gain for everyone else?
    - nice1 10y ago
      It is definitely not a loss for the academic world, but it could be a gain for some, time will tell.
  - jessriedel 10y ago
    There are finite resources for paying salaries, and people (before tenure) get cut based on how promising their ideas are as judged by their local peers (the tenure committee). You can imagine an alternate system where you poll the larger community, but this is liable to degenerate into a popularity contest as each voter spends a tiny amount of time choosing people with whom they are not familiar. In contrast, the tenure committee is able to invest more time looking carefully at a single candidate.
    - jessriedel 10y ago
      It just dawned on me that I should of course disclose I work at the Perimeter Institute. However, I actually disagree a lot with Neil Turok on hiring philosophy and what PI's priorities should be, in a way that makes me very sympathetic toward this former physicist. But I know nothing about her actual work (she left before I arrived), and for all I know Neil made the right decision and it wasn't close.
  - selimthegrim 10y ago
    When people say things like "really courageous" (Hossenfelder) and "really very different and hardly acknowledged by leading researchers in the field" (Turok), those are polite ways of damning someone with faint praise in writing a recommendation letter for them if you think they're a crackpot. Only Lloyd struck me as genuine in that article (and Hossenfelder because she's in a similar spot, not because of her quote)
- T-A 10y ago
  I remember having a total "WTF?!?" moment when I heard Turok, of all people, had been chosen as Perimeter's new director. At the time, Perimeter's reputation was not unlike that of SpaceX or Tesla - a daring, unconventional outfit trying to shake things up with a new approach, and unusually enough endowed with the resources to actually do it. "Things" being very much quantum gravity. Then, out of the blue, Turok parachutes in, a hum-drum theoretical cosmologist who built his career on straightforward computer simulations of classical field-theoretic toy models, quite unrelated to quantum gravity. What?!? If he can say he didn't want the institute "to be center for alternative physicists", it is because the people who put him in place decided they didn't want that. But that was very much the origin story of the place. I still wonder what really happened. Maybe Lazaridis (an engineer, not a physicist) finally realized how far we are from any kind of experimental test of quantum gravity and decided that he wanted some kind of tangible return on his investment. Howard Burton, the founding director who was replaced by Turok, wrote a book [1] about the early years which may shed some light on events [2]. Maybe some day I'll read it. [1] https://www.amazon.ca/First-Principles-Business-Serious-Science/dp/1554701759/157-8685500-0664562 https://www.amazon.ca/First-Principles-Business-Serious-Scie... [2] http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=1805/ http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=1805/
  - selimthegrim 10y ago
    Turok worked with Steinhardt on those ekpyrotic models, which at least have something to say in principle about CMB polarization and gravity waves and could be linked to the BICEP results sorta (which ended up being a no verdict). Does her model even do that? Edit: made my statement less sloppy
    - T-A 10y ago
      In HN terms, that's like calling a proposal for a new foundation of computing - spintronics, say - an "app", comparing it to some random social network, pointing out that the latter has really nice support for sharing cat pictures, and asking whether the proposed "app" even does that.
      - 10y ago
- selimthegrim 10y ago
  Like it or not, Perimeter was getting a reputation as a place for crackpots.
- i386 10y ago
  Oh you can't get puffier than this waffle > She is fine-featured and striking. Her heavy-lidded eyes anchor a gaze that seems wary of its own powers, as if her promiscuous intelligence must hold itself back from latching on to your every word. She wears her hair in a tousled pixie-cut, and on this spring day, a green knit sweater and blue scarf with a pattern of fish-like scales.

dharma1 10y ago

I think the article was fine but it was hard understand what Doppel does from their website. So it vibrates at BPM you set?

joaorico 10y ago

To use Lee Smolin's (her ex-husband) terminology [1], she was clearly a Seer, not a Crafstperson. The Seers-Craftspeople problem is not unlike the innovator's dilemma and the big-corp/startup. The Perimeter, of all places, was about fostering Seers. Einstein is the canonical Seer, and it is generally accepted that Einstein today would have been, at the beginning of his career, even less welcomed by the scientific community (before his 1905 papers, he was unable to secure several faculty positions, etc, went to work in the patent office). Maybe Milner/Zuck can come up with something to help fund the Seers, à la startup incubator, thinking long-term, in the sense that 1 successful unicorn in a portfolio of 100 would be worth it, and you could have 15+ years to think without any pressure to publish. Apparently the odds of finding some at the Perimeter have diminished in the last few years. Maybe YC/Thiel/Musk want to take up this challenge, à la OpenAI. Maybe hope lies in guaranteed basic income. (À la Buchheit: "we don't need more jobs, we need more Steve Jobs.") [1] Smolin, Lee - The Trouble with Physics, Chapter 18 "Seers and Craftspeople"

joaorico 10y ago
I'm using Smolin's terminology because he was defending Seers in his book, is Markopoulos' ex-husband and colleague, and a central piece at the Perimeter. From his book, cited above (the whole chapter is very much worth reading): "Master craftspeople and seers come to science for different reasons. Master craftspeople go into science because, for the most part, they have discovered in school that they’re good at it. They are usually the best students in their math and physics classes from junior high school all the way up to graduate school, where they finally meet their peers. They have always been able to solve math problems faster and more accurately than their classmates, so problem solving is what they tend to value in other scientists. Seers are very different. They are dreamers. They go into science because they have questions about the nature of existence that their schoolbooks don’t answer. If they weren’t scientists, they might be artists or writers or they might end up in divinity school. It is only to be expected that members of these two groups misunderstand and mistrust each other. [...] Of course, some people are mixtures of both. No one makes it through graduate school who is not highly competent on the technical side. But the majority of theoretical physicists I know fall into one or the other group."

maverick_iceman 10y ago

If you look at her Inspirehep page, she has a citation count of 1193 only [1]. For someone who got a PhD in 1998, that's definitely below par. Also her major work is on causal dynamical approaches to quantum gravity - an endeavor not with many successes and currently not considered to be very fruitful by most high energy physicists. I don't think she would have been able to get tenure in any major research university. [1] http://inspirehep.net/author/profile/F.Markopoulou.1 http://inspirehep.net/author/profile/F.Markopoulou.1

faitswulff 10y ago
So this article is no longer interesting if she's not qualified enough for your liking, despite the fact that she's a highly educated physicist? I'm not sure how this comment is relevant.

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago

>> She wears her hair in a tousled pixie-cut, and on this spring day, a green knit sweater and blue scarf with a pattern of fish-like scales. Ah, alright. I was wondering what she was wearing. (is your sarcasm detector working?)

elcritch 10y ago
And some people, like myself, enjoy a bit of non-technical but human details. As in, goodness, this is a real person and maybe dealing with similar questions in life aside from technical papers and research. Actually, from a narrative perspective these details tie together some of the theme of the article, that of Markopolou's approach of creativity in life and physics. As in she's not a dour academic wearing muted colors, but having a splash of color and texture.