5 ms·

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

by i386 10y ago

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.

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

by i386 10y ago

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

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.