11 ms·

Fake Physics

briantakita 10y ago
This sounds like the reaction against "Fake News", "Fake History", etc. What that really tells me is this is an area of study that the Establishment does not want you to follow so it will label it to apply social pressure to mitigate the effects & discourage people from following it. The thing is, nature has a way of not caring what the Establishment thinks. It does care on a surface level, but it also conspires to cause the collapse of the socio-information paradigms that the Establishment creates. Given we have a soup of information & no grounding central authority to give us "objective reality", we ought to utilize other techniques. I don't happen to know what these techniques are, but I suspect that it has to do with network models, cognition models, perspectives (physical & information), attention schemas, faith, complexity, patterns, language, etc.
- rflrob 10y ago
  > The thing is, nature has a way of not caring what the Establishment thinks. It does care on a surface level, but it also conspires to cause the collapse of the socio-information paradigms that the Establishment creates. You're right as far as you go, but actually nature doesn't care what anyone thinks. One thing to question is how the establishment got to be established. If it was primarily through physical strength, heredity, or persuasion (as is more true for the bulk of history), then they are no more likely to be right than a plebe (except that p(persuasive | true) > p(persuasive)). But it's more true than in most of history that the odds of being an elite are much higher if you can consistently make correct predictions about the world. It's true that we don't have a central authority to give us an objective reality, but we don't need one either. Reality is there if only you choose to observe it closely. I think the best technique for dealing with the soup of information is to find bona fide experts with a track record of providing correct explanations and giving what they say more weight.
  - briantakita 10y ago
    > I think the best technique for dealing with the soup of information is to find bona fide experts with a track record of providing correct explanations and giving what they say more weight. It's up to the experts to make a persuading case & to engage the audience to think for themselves. There are many-a-con-artist who labels oneself as an "expert". That con-artist may even have credentials to make one's "authority" even more convincing. Labels justify all sorts of things, worst of all, telling one to stop thinking beyond the abstract representation of the label. In the domain that the label casts a perspective shadow upon, the con-artist is free to utilize to take advantage of the audience's ignorance.
- UhUhUhUh 10y ago
  Knowledge is seen as dangerous by people holding power over others. It always has been (e.g. the apple thing). Therefore, in an age where knowledge is more readily accessible to a much larger number of people, it behoves the groups in power to somehow thwart its development. A good way of accomplishing this is to use mass media to make the signal to noise ratio as small as possible. Which is itself accomplished nicely by paid, conscious, agents and amplified by the growing hordes of individuals humiliated, rather than motivated, by their lack of knowledge. The true becomes a moment of the false, the real a moment of the fake. I believe that "spaces", real or virtual, rather than techniques will develop for knowledge to flow and grow.
- stefantalpalaru 10y ago
  > What that really tells me is this is an area of study that the Establishment does not want you to follow Funny, what it tells me is that people with unexplained funding keep on making extraordinary claims without even ordinary proofs. The multiverse is just as absurd as creationism and just as poorly argued for (imperfect models of reality presented as facts).
- haberman 10y ago
  Is there any scientific theory outlandish enough that you are willing to call it nonsense on its face?
  - briantakita 10y ago
    A better indicator of quality of a model is to ask, "is this model useful?". At the end of the day, models are representations of another system. Like tools, some are more useful than others.
    - haberman 10y ago
      Ok, so I propose (for the sake of argument) the following model: any message posted on an electronic message board that casts aspersions on "The Establishment" was actually written by an AI running on a computer in Siberia. Let's suppose that many people find this model useful, because it allows them to dismiss such posts without having to critically engage them. They downvote/flag all such messages, and they feel good for having done so because they believe they are resisting an attempt to manipulate their opinions. Do you have any problem with this?
      - briantakita 10y ago
        It depends ;-) Useful to what systems & what aims? What's important to an Entity to engage what systems?
        paulddraper 10y ago
        AI needs tuning. Doesn't seem to be reading the posts it's relying to. ("useful, because it allows them to dismiss such posts")
      - slavik81 10y ago
        Useful in that context is typically used to refer to being able to make accurate predictions about the future.
Animats 10y ago
This is a frustrating era for physicists. In the mid 20th century they were like gods, giving the world the atomic bomb and the semiconductor. Today many branches of physics are stuck. The cosmologists can't find "dark matter", and aren't even sure it's necessary. The string theorists have pretty but un-testable theories. The fusion guys can't make fusion power work. Quantum mechanics and general relativity still haven't been reconciled. And nobody has a useful handle on gravity. These problems have been outstanding for decades now, with some churn, but little progress. (The bright spot is near absolute zero, in low, low energy physics. Lots of interesting experimental results from down there in recent years.) The multiverse approach (the universe forks at every quantum event, and all those universes continue to exist, forking further) is the default you end up at given what we know now. Hawking once said it was "trivially true". But it's unsatisfying. It means most of the fundamental constants are arbitrary, for one thing. Then there's the anthropic principle (our universe works well enough to have life because we happen to be in a fork where the constants have values which make chemistry work). That's unsatisfying, too. This un-testable stuff is more philosophy than physics. This, from a historical viewpoint, is a failure. From Lord Kelvin to Fred Hoyle, physics was about measurement and prediction. Theories which can't be grounded in experiment are of little use. Today's physicists are losers by historical standards. This has career effects. Los Alamos is a lot less prestigious than it once was, and there's been substantial downsizing.[1] [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/us/los-alamos-braces-for-deep-cuts-at-lab.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/us/los-alamos-braces-for-d...
- deleted 10y ago
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- reikonomusha 10y ago
  I think this assessment is magnificently incorrect. Over the past 30 years there have been very important experiments, many of which have reached the mainstream. This includes anything from the Higgs experiments to the LIGO experiments. What about things closer to the HN crowd, like communications infrastructure like the Internet? The discovery of the transistor didn't bring an iPhone overnight. Same with many other scientific discoveries that had to go through a long engineering phase. I see a similar trend happening now with quantum computation, which has seen great leaps over the past 20 years and continues to accelerate in both academia and industry. It's my opinion that, at least in America, we live in a less intellectually disciplined and intellectually favored society. Anti-intellectualism, even in nominally educated portions of society, seems to be on the rise. This unfortunately has the effect of making science look stagnant to the larger population, and unless there are gadgets of instant gratification that science explicitly produces, it'll remain somewhat obscure to folks uninterested in advancement for the sake of advancement. As for the multiverse stuff, I'm not sure why you think that it has to do with the arbitrary selection of constants. The multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn't say "anything happens and it all happens in separate multiverses", but rather that—in simple terms—non-deterministic events like measurements bifurcate into separate universes. But QM still posits that the results of these non-deterministic events are each probable, and each obey the same laws of physics equally. In other words, it has a more "butterfly effect" on us, keeping physical constants as truly constants, not a "splitting of universal laws effect".
akvadrako 10y ago
You have to dig down to the 2nd page of comments on his previous post about these articles to learn that when he says "multiverse" he isn't referring to the many worlds interpretation of QM: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=9027&cpage=1#comment-224637 http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=9027&cpage=1... It's very confusing and I can't help but assume he doesn't mind misleading people.
- conistonwater 10y ago
  Is it confusing? Is there a specific reason to think that the multiverse is related to the many worlds interpretation? I didn't know people thought they were the same thing.
  - akvadrako 10y ago
    From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation > MWI is one of many multiverse hypotheses in physics and philosophy.
    - conistonwater 10y ago
      I see your point, but Wikipedia isn't super reliable on the more unsettled parts of theoretical physics. For example, a cursory search gives me https://www.technologyreview.com/s/424073/multiverse-many-worlds-say-physicists/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/424073/multiverse-many-wo..., but while I can't judge https://arxiv.org/abs/1105.3796 https://arxiv.org/abs/1105.3796 on my own, it does appear the idea is new, and for something as new, and as vaguely defined as the multiverse (MWI itself is quite old), I probably should ask for more than a Wikipedia summary. I mean, it's fine by me if there's some kind of disagreement within physics, but to assume they are the same thing would require more, no?
    - musgravepeter 10y ago
      I find that a bit mis-leading. While IAAP, this is not my area. My understanding is the at the big bang there are a HUGE number of universes (the Multiverse) that are causally dis-connected, with different coupling constants for the forces and very different physics. Within our universe we have our physics, which includes QM, and one way of viewing QM is the many-worlds view.
deleted 10y ago
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bvv 10y ago
As usual I think that Woit's blog post is unnecessarily polarizing. If you decide to read his post then I would recommend you also read the excellent comment by Marty Tysanner on the same page. Also, sigh. If you dig deep into the dark corners of the internets then I am sure that you can find fake anything. Focus on the beauty and the truth, people. For example: [1] LIGO continues to work beautifully, as evidenced by its second detection of gravitational waves back in June: http://news.mit.edu/2016/second-time-ligo-detects-gravitational-waves-0615 http://news.mit.edu/2016/second-time-ligo-detects-gravitatio... [2] A fun but highly speculative 'bump' in the LHC data, which will probably go away but is fun to think about: https://profmattstrassler.com/2016/10/21/hiding-from-a-nightmare/ https://profmattstrassler.com/2016/10/21/hiding-from-a-night... [3] New precision results from a nice little experiment done 'on the side' at CERN: https://press.cern/press-releases/2017/01/cern-experiment-reports-sixfold-improved-measurement-magnetic-moment https://press.cern/press-releases/2017/01/cern-experiment-re... [4] Or just a very accessible overview of particle physics in 2016: http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/2016-year-in-particle-physics http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/2016-year-in-particl...
- ifdefdebug 10y ago
  > also read the excellent comment by Marty Tysanner on the same page. also read Woit's sensible reply to that comment and MT's re-reply. I agree Woit is polarizing but maybe not unnecessarily. because the problems he points out are not hidden in the dark corners of the internets but all over the mainstream media - and arxiv too, and backed with millions of dollars.
- theparanoid 10y ago
  I recommend Feynmans's http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
- wrsh07 10y ago
  We need to make sure we're not ignoring motives we don't understand. That happened in the Republican primary, the general election, and perhaps now, too. Don't just look away from a very real concern.
- 10y ago
umberway 10y ago
Isn't the best approach to 'fake physics' simply to publicly criticise the ideas, or, if that's too exhausting, to point to a previous criticism?
Koshkin 10y ago
The post seems to be a short rant on opinions concerning the idea of a "multiverse" published on various popular science news websites. Isn't this idea is just one of the several major interpretations of quantum mechanics? Any popularized discussion of quantum mechanics (or cosmology) could be labeled "fake physics", of course, but the point of this is not clear to me.
indolering 10y ago
I'm surprised he didn't mention pilot wave theory. Cranks love it because it doesn't violate the notion of local realism and it has infected respected popular-science publications. But any "interpretation" of quantum mechanics that leads to violations of causality should be treated as illegitimate until proven otherwise.
- effie 10y ago
  Also respected scientists like it because it dissolves many pseudoproblems of the orthodox quantum theory like the measurement problem and because it doesn't require rethinking basic scientific philosophy like Copenhagen did. I do not think it is perfect replacement for the orthodox quantum theory, but what do you mean 'it leads to violations of causality'?
tbabb 10y ago
Interesting; I didn't know that Nautilus was backed by a religious organization, but in retrospect I am not surprised at all. They get a lot more credit and traction here than they deserve. Nautilus is usually full of bull but pretending to be intellectual.
- wrsh07 10y ago
  I like a lot of Nautilus articles, but like you didn't know who funded it. (Ie Templeton) That's important to know as a critical thinker.
- EvilTerran 10y ago
  For the record, the Templeton Foundation aren't their only source of funding, and the rest appear to be entirely secular: http://nautil.us/about http://nautil.us/about (heading "Nautilus has received financial support from") Seems a little unfair to only mention the philosophical outlier. I see the list of "advisors" on that page has some pretty respectable names, too. That may not be worth much - who knows how much influence they have over the content - but having some venerable academics willing to associate their names with your output like that is surely at least a small signal in favour of legitimacy.
wrsh07 10y ago
I think this is an important data point given the powerful organizations that benefit from discrediting academics (especially in the current political climate) -- some of this is happening in climate research, and if it's also happening in physics that matters. All of this reminds me a bit of the novel Three Body Problem where certain branches of academia (including hard sciences) are discredited as "too reactionary" or "reactionary philosophy." The motives in some cases are clear: just as tobacco companies benefitted from the status quo, so now do oil companies. However in physics, the motives may be more nuanced (and more of a territory capture that I don't understand). Don't doubt for a second that legitimate climate researchers will be accused of doing fake research ... most likely within the year. I'm not sure what the physics community can do besides joining together against this and continually pushing back. Let's stay transparent. Science is well-defined and important.
Buge 10y ago
Whenever I try to load https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27129 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27129 the page crashes and Chrome says the page ran out of memory.
chmike 10y ago
There are two forces sustaining fake physics : 1. "publish or perish" 2. preserve credibility capitalization (scientist's karma points) The former is what generates fake science, and the later is what let it prosper. I would nevertheless be very cautious when someone claims he can make the difference between true and fake physics. There is a risk of error, and a higher risk of manipulation by introducing a bias by leveraging the credibility force (2). His book where he spit in the soup, and his promotional web site where we have been directed too, looks very like what he condemns. I'm curious to see if that author is able to recognize real physics [1]. [1](http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/jmp.2017.81004 http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/jmp.2017.81004)
ThePhysicist 10y ago
I think the problem is that it's quite challenging to explain something like the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics to a general audience that often doesn't have any prior knowledge of modern Physics or even linear algebra. So, in order to explain it in simple words, people use analogies. And analogies are probably the greatest tool we have in teaching, because they help people to understand a given aspect of a theory by comparing it to something they already know. However, when taken too far they will always break down. Hence, in order to do good popular science, we need to find analogies that fit very well with the theory which we want to explain, and when using them we need to make it very clear which parts of the analogous system can be mapped to the theory we explain, and which ones can't. From reading the articles the author cited as examples of "Fake Physics" I have the impression that their authors simply took the analogies they used too far, thereby saying things that are simply not true. And while this surely is problematic I wouldn't call those articles "fake", as there seems to be no malicious intent behind the misleading analogies.
brodix 10y ago
I think a big part of the problem is we look at and model time backward. It isn't the point of the present moving from past to future, which physics codifies as measures of duration, but change turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth turns. So the present is a constant state of collapsing probabilities. Duration is just the state of the present, as events form and dissolve. This makes time an effect of action, more like temperature, color, pressure, etc. Thermodynamic cycles are more fundamental than the linear, narrative effect of time. As high pressure is causation, while low pressure is direction. Time is not causal. Yesterday doesn't cause today. Energy is causal. Sunlight on a spinning planet creates the effect of days. As energy is conserved as the present, the past is consumed by the present, as much as the inertia of this energy directs present events. Time is asymmetric because action is inertial. The earth turns one direction, not the other. Clocks run at different rates because they are separate actions, not because the fabric of spacetime is curved. A faster clock will simply expend energy quicker. That's why the twin in the faster frame ages quicker.

This sounds like the reaction against "Fake News", "Fake History", etc. What that really tells me is this is an area of study that the Establishment does not want you to follow so it will label it to apply social pressure to mitigate the effects & discourage people from following it. The thing is, nature has a way of not caring what the Establishment thinks. It does care on a surface level, but it also conspires to cause the collapse of the socio-information paradigms that the Establishment creates. Given we have a soup of information & no grounding central authority to give us "objective reality", we ought to utilize other techniques. I don't happen to know what these techniques are, but I suspect that it has to do with network models, cognition models, perspectives (physical & information), attention schemas, faith, complexity, patterns, language, etc.

rflrob 10y ago
> The thing is, nature has a way of not caring what the Establishment thinks. It does care on a surface level, but it also conspires to cause the collapse of the socio-information paradigms that the Establishment creates. You're right as far as you go, but actually nature doesn't care what anyone thinks. One thing to question is how the establishment got to be established. If it was primarily through physical strength, heredity, or persuasion (as is more true for the bulk of history), then they are no more likely to be right than a plebe (except that p(persuasive | true) > p(persuasive)). But it's more true than in most of history that the odds of being an elite are much higher if you can consistently make correct predictions about the world. It's true that we don't have a central authority to give us an objective reality, but we don't need one either. Reality is there if only you choose to observe it closely. I think the best technique for dealing with the soup of information is to find bona fide experts with a track record of providing correct explanations and giving what they say more weight.
- briantakita 10y ago
  > I think the best technique for dealing with the soup of information is to find bona fide experts with a track record of providing correct explanations and giving what they say more weight. It's up to the experts to make a persuading case & to engage the audience to think for themselves. There are many-a-con-artist who labels oneself as an "expert". That con-artist may even have credentials to make one's "authority" even more convincing. Labels justify all sorts of things, worst of all, telling one to stop thinking beyond the abstract representation of the label. In the domain that the label casts a perspective shadow upon, the con-artist is free to utilize to take advantage of the audience's ignorance.
UhUhUhUh 10y ago
Knowledge is seen as dangerous by people holding power over others. It always has been (e.g. the apple thing). Therefore, in an age where knowledge is more readily accessible to a much larger number of people, it behoves the groups in power to somehow thwart its development. A good way of accomplishing this is to use mass media to make the signal to noise ratio as small as possible. Which is itself accomplished nicely by paid, conscious, agents and amplified by the growing hordes of individuals humiliated, rather than motivated, by their lack of knowledge. The true becomes a moment of the false, the real a moment of the fake. I believe that "spaces", real or virtual, rather than techniques will develop for knowledge to flow and grow.
stefantalpalaru 10y ago
> What that really tells me is this is an area of study that the Establishment does not want you to follow Funny, what it tells me is that people with unexplained funding keep on making extraordinary claims without even ordinary proofs. The multiverse is just as absurd as creationism and just as poorly argued for (imperfect models of reality presented as facts).
haberman 10y ago
Is there any scientific theory outlandish enough that you are willing to call it nonsense on its face?
- briantakita 10y ago
  A better indicator of quality of a model is to ask, "is this model useful?". At the end of the day, models are representations of another system. Like tools, some are more useful than others.
  - haberman 10y ago
    Ok, so I propose (for the sake of argument) the following model: any message posted on an electronic message board that casts aspersions on "The Establishment" was actually written by an AI running on a computer in Siberia. Let's suppose that many people find this model useful, because it allows them to dismiss such posts without having to critically engage them. They downvote/flag all such messages, and they feel good for having done so because they believe they are resisting an attempt to manipulate their opinions. Do you have any problem with this?
    - briantakita 10y ago
      It depends ;-) Useful to what systems & what aims? What's important to an Entity to engage what systems?
      - paulddraper 10y ago
        AI needs tuning. Doesn't seem to be reading the posts it's relying to. ("useful, because it allows them to dismiss such posts")
    - slavik81 10y ago
      Useful in that context is typically used to refer to being able to make accurate predictions about the future.

Animats 10y ago

This is a frustrating era for physicists. In the mid 20th century they were like gods, giving the world the atomic bomb and the semiconductor. Today many branches of physics are stuck. The cosmologists can't find "dark matter", and aren't even sure it's necessary. The string theorists have pretty but un-testable theories. The fusion guys can't make fusion power work. Quantum mechanics and general relativity still haven't been reconciled. And nobody has a useful handle on gravity. These problems have been outstanding for decades now, with some churn, but little progress. (The bright spot is near absolute zero, in low, low energy physics. Lots of interesting experimental results from down there in recent years.) The multiverse approach (the universe forks at every quantum event, and all those universes continue to exist, forking further) is the default you end up at given what we know now. Hawking once said it was "trivially true". But it's unsatisfying. It means most of the fundamental constants are arbitrary, for one thing. Then there's the anthropic principle (our universe works well enough to have life because we happen to be in a fork where the constants have values which make chemistry work). That's unsatisfying, too. This un-testable stuff is more philosophy than physics. This, from a historical viewpoint, is a failure. From Lord Kelvin to Fred Hoyle, physics was about measurement and prediction. Theories which can't be grounded in experiment are of little use. Today's physicists are losers by historical standards. This has career effects. Los Alamos is a lot less prestigious than it once was, and there's been substantial downsizing.[1] [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/us/los-alamos-braces-for-deep-cuts-at-lab.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/us/los-alamos-braces-for-d...

deleted 10y ago
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reikonomusha 10y ago
I think this assessment is magnificently incorrect. Over the past 30 years there have been very important experiments, many of which have reached the mainstream. This includes anything from the Higgs experiments to the LIGO experiments. What about things closer to the HN crowd, like communications infrastructure like the Internet? The discovery of the transistor didn't bring an iPhone overnight. Same with many other scientific discoveries that had to go through a long engineering phase. I see a similar trend happening now with quantum computation, which has seen great leaps over the past 20 years and continues to accelerate in both academia and industry. It's my opinion that, at least in America, we live in a less intellectually disciplined and intellectually favored society. Anti-intellectualism, even in nominally educated portions of society, seems to be on the rise. This unfortunately has the effect of making science look stagnant to the larger population, and unless there are gadgets of instant gratification that science explicitly produces, it'll remain somewhat obscure to folks uninterested in advancement for the sake of advancement. As for the multiverse stuff, I'm not sure why you think that it has to do with the arbitrary selection of constants. The multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn't say "anything happens and it all happens in separate multiverses", but rather that—in simple terms—non-deterministic events like measurements bifurcate into separate universes. But QM still posits that the results of these non-deterministic events are each probable, and each obey the same laws of physics equally. In other words, it has a more "butterfly effect" on us, keeping physical constants as truly constants, not a "splitting of universal laws effect".

akvadrako 10y ago

You have to dig down to the 2nd page of comments on his previous post about these articles to learn that when he says "multiverse" he isn't referring to the many worlds interpretation of QM: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=9027&cpage=1#comment-224637 http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=9027&cpage=1... It's very confusing and I can't help but assume he doesn't mind misleading people.

conistonwater 10y ago
Is it confusing? Is there a specific reason to think that the multiverse is related to the many worlds interpretation? I didn't know people thought they were the same thing.
- akvadrako 10y ago
  From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation > MWI is one of many multiverse hypotheses in physics and philosophy.
  - conistonwater 10y ago
    I see your point, but Wikipedia isn't super reliable on the more unsettled parts of theoretical physics. For example, a cursory search gives me https://www.technologyreview.com/s/424073/multiverse-many-worlds-say-physicists/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/424073/multiverse-many-wo..., but while I can't judge https://arxiv.org/abs/1105.3796 https://arxiv.org/abs/1105.3796 on my own, it does appear the idea is new, and for something as new, and as vaguely defined as the multiverse (MWI itself is quite old), I probably should ask for more than a Wikipedia summary. I mean, it's fine by me if there's some kind of disagreement within physics, but to assume they are the same thing would require more, no?
  - musgravepeter 10y ago
    I find that a bit mis-leading. While IAAP, this is not my area. My understanding is the at the big bang there are a HUGE number of universes (the Multiverse) that are causally dis-connected, with different coupling constants for the forces and very different physics. Within our universe we have our physics, which includes QM, and one way of viewing QM is the many-worlds view.

deleted 10y ago

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bvv 10y ago

As usual I think that Woit's blog post is unnecessarily polarizing. If you decide to read his post then I would recommend you also read the excellent comment by Marty Tysanner on the same page. Also, sigh. If you dig deep into the dark corners of the internets then I am sure that you can find fake anything. Focus on the beauty and the truth, people. For example: [1] LIGO continues to work beautifully, as evidenced by its second detection of gravitational waves back in June: http://news.mit.edu/2016/second-time-ligo-detects-gravitational-waves-0615 http://news.mit.edu/2016/second-time-ligo-detects-gravitatio... [2] A fun but highly speculative 'bump' in the LHC data, which will probably go away but is fun to think about: https://profmattstrassler.com/2016/10/21/hiding-from-a-nightmare/ https://profmattstrassler.com/2016/10/21/hiding-from-a-night... [3] New precision results from a nice little experiment done 'on the side' at CERN: https://press.cern/press-releases/2017/01/cern-experiment-reports-sixfold-improved-measurement-magnetic-moment https://press.cern/press-releases/2017/01/cern-experiment-re... [4] Or just a very accessible overview of particle physics in 2016: http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/2016-year-in-particle-physics http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/2016-year-in-particl...

ifdefdebug 10y ago
> also read the excellent comment by Marty Tysanner on the same page. also read Woit's sensible reply to that comment and MT's re-reply. I agree Woit is polarizing but maybe not unnecessarily. because the problems he points out are not hidden in the dark corners of the internets but all over the mainstream media - and arxiv too, and backed with millions of dollars.
theparanoid 10y ago
I recommend Feynmans's http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
wrsh07 10y ago
We need to make sure we're not ignoring motives we don't understand. That happened in the Republican primary, the general election, and perhaps now, too. Don't just look away from a very real concern.
10y ago

umberway 10y ago

Isn't the best approach to 'fake physics' simply to publicly criticise the ideas, or, if that's too exhausting, to point to a previous criticism?

Koshkin 10y ago

The post seems to be a short rant on opinions concerning the idea of a "multiverse" published on various popular science news websites. Isn't this idea is just one of the several major interpretations of quantum mechanics? Any popularized discussion of quantum mechanics (or cosmology) could be labeled "fake physics", of course, but the point of this is not clear to me.

indolering 10y ago

I'm surprised he didn't mention pilot wave theory. Cranks love it because it doesn't violate the notion of local realism and it has infected respected popular-science publications. But any "interpretation" of quantum mechanics that leads to violations of causality should be treated as illegitimate until proven otherwise.

effie 10y ago
Also respected scientists like it because it dissolves many pseudoproblems of the orthodox quantum theory like the measurement problem and because it doesn't require rethinking basic scientific philosophy like Copenhagen did. I do not think it is perfect replacement for the orthodox quantum theory, but what do you mean 'it leads to violations of causality'?

tbabb 10y ago

Interesting; I didn't know that Nautilus was backed by a religious organization, but in retrospect I am not surprised at all. They get a lot more credit and traction here than they deserve. Nautilus is usually full of bull but pretending to be intellectual.

wrsh07 10y ago
I like a lot of Nautilus articles, but like you didn't know who funded it. (Ie Templeton) That's important to know as a critical thinker.
EvilTerran 10y ago
For the record, the Templeton Foundation aren't their only source of funding, and the rest appear to be entirely secular: http://nautil.us/about http://nautil.us/about (heading "Nautilus has received financial support from") Seems a little unfair to only mention the philosophical outlier. I see the list of "advisors" on that page has some pretty respectable names, too. That may not be worth much - who knows how much influence they have over the content - but having some venerable academics willing to associate their names with your output like that is surely at least a small signal in favour of legitimacy.

wrsh07 10y ago

I think this is an important data point given the powerful organizations that benefit from discrediting academics (especially in the current political climate) -- some of this is happening in climate research, and if it's also happening in physics that matters. All of this reminds me a bit of the novel Three Body Problem where certain branches of academia (including hard sciences) are discredited as "too reactionary" or "reactionary philosophy." The motives in some cases are clear: just as tobacco companies benefitted from the status quo, so now do oil companies. However in physics, the motives may be more nuanced (and more of a territory capture that I don't understand). Don't doubt for a second that legitimate climate researchers will be accused of doing fake research ... most likely within the year. I'm not sure what the physics community can do besides joining together against this and continually pushing back. Let's stay transparent. Science is well-defined and important.

Buge 10y ago

Whenever I try to load https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27129 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27129 the page crashes and Chrome says the page ran out of memory.

chmike 10y ago

There are two forces sustaining fake physics : 1. "publish or perish" 2. preserve credibility capitalization (scientist's karma points) The former is what generates fake science, and the later is what let it prosper. I would nevertheless be very cautious when someone claims he can make the difference between true and fake physics. There is a risk of error, and a higher risk of manipulation by introducing a bias by leveraging the credibility force (2). His book where he spit in the soup, and his promotional web site where we have been directed too, looks very like what he condemns. I'm curious to see if that author is able to recognize real physics [1]. [1](http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/jmp.2017.81004 http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/jmp.2017.81004)

ThePhysicist 10y ago

I think the problem is that it's quite challenging to explain something like the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics to a general audience that often doesn't have any prior knowledge of modern Physics or even linear algebra. So, in order to explain it in simple words, people use analogies. And analogies are probably the greatest tool we have in teaching, because they help people to understand a given aspect of a theory by comparing it to something they already know. However, when taken too far they will always break down. Hence, in order to do good popular science, we need to find analogies that fit very well with the theory which we want to explain, and when using them we need to make it very clear which parts of the analogous system can be mapped to the theory we explain, and which ones can't. From reading the articles the author cited as examples of "Fake Physics" I have the impression that their authors simply took the analogies they used too far, thereby saying things that are simply not true. And while this surely is problematic I wouldn't call those articles "fake", as there seems to be no malicious intent behind the misleading analogies.

brodix 10y ago

I think a big part of the problem is we look at and model time backward. It isn't the point of the present moving from past to future, which physics codifies as measures of duration, but change turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth turns. So the present is a constant state of collapsing probabilities. Duration is just the state of the present, as events form and dissolve. This makes time an effect of action, more like temperature, color, pressure, etc. Thermodynamic cycles are more fundamental than the linear, narrative effect of time. As high pressure is causation, while low pressure is direction. Time is not causal. Yesterday doesn't cause today. Energy is causal. Sunlight on a spinning planet creates the effect of days. As energy is conserved as the present, the past is consumed by the present, as much as the inertia of this energy directs present events. Time is asymmetric because action is inertial. The earth turns one direction, not the other. Clocks run at different rates because they are separate actions, not because the fabric of spacetime is curved. A faster clock will simply expend energy quicker. That's why the twin in the faster frame ages quicker.