5 ms·

Some tangential thoughts: even though I like these popular science (physics, to be precise) books, I have hard times to imagine their writers as a real scientis

by dyukqu 8y ago

Some tangential thoughts: even though I like these popular science (physics, to be precise) books, I have hard times to imagine their writers as a real scientists. Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli... So many writers author so many books about these hey-look!-so-fascinating! things. It looks like a bandwagon and more and more scientists (yes, physicists especially) are getting on it - like they don't have any important research to do, like they are so hopeless and desperate about the current state of physics and they stopped caring about it and found a proxy to monetize their knowledge. But hey, that's not a secret anymore - everyone knows about the crisis, from the Queen of England to the hounds of hell. Sabine Hossenfelder is a legend for me. A few years back, when I was taking a Physics101 class, even the lecturer almost begged for help after the last lecture at the end of the semester: "my fellow students, please, please, consider (to continue your career in the field of) physics. Physics is stuck. It needs new ideas, new theories, new minds. Please consider this." I was stunned. That was some real thing. I guess the fast advancement of technology in the late ~100 years made even the most brilliant minds (relatively) lazy. They gradually stopped thinking, beating their brains out year after year and here we are. No serious discovery after the quantum theory. String theory? Yeah, gazillions of dimensions - good luck with that. Higgs boson, Gravitational waves? Come on, nothing revolutionary - we're still waiting for the revolution to emerge from (upgraded!) LHC. For me, they are cleverly and beautifully marketed (minor) findings. (Maybe some of you have heard of, some (if not many) of the top universities have teams working hard doing all the "scientific-marketing" for the Nobel Prize - it's a precious prestige win in this popular world we live in). Minds get eroded by technology by heavily relying on it. And it's getting worse and worse by the distraction caused by all the digital "life" surrounding us, pulling and tightening its ropes every day. I imagine a true scientist as a monk. S/he doesn't think about writing a pop-sci book, appearing on TV and s/he got a distantiation even for interviews about her/his latest important research/discovery. "Monks" are needed more than ever for science nowadays. Those were my humble 2 cents.

blueprint 8y ago
It's funny because as much as you recognize this, the people you describe as being needed are treated terribly not only by the establishment but those who think they are outside of it. Perhaps that explains this state.
dmfdmf 8y ago
The crisis in physics is due to Kant. As long as physicists are disdainful of philosophy the crisis and deterioration will continue. They are Kantians and don't even know it. Ayn Rand identified Kant's error in his Critique of Pure Reason and destroyed his program, she rejected Hume's rank skepticism (which Kant was answering) and showed Descartes how to validate reason (i.e. to be certain) without being omniscient. Descartes was the intellectual who started this ball rolling by turning reason unto itself and asking how does it work. He was not up to the task and injected a crude circularity at the base of reason, i.e. "I think therefore I am", which Rand identified and fixed but she is now completely ignored.
- woodandsteel 8y ago
  I agree that Descartes, Hume, and Kant were wrong. However, modern scientists are not influenced by them. Their own views are much closer to Pragmatism (which is not surprising given that two of the three founders of Pragmatism, namely Peirce and James, were professional scientists).
  - dmfdmf 8y ago
    Popper/Kuhn are both derivatives of Kant and very popular in physics when physicists grasp for a philosophy to justify their epistemology. Mach, also a Kantian, was Einstein's pole star but to Einstein's credit defended realism contra Mach's ideas.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - woodandsteel 8y ago
      That's because they haven't studied philosophy. I have a background in the sciences, and what I observed is that, in terms of how they think when they are actually doing science, as opposed to explaining it to people who are not scientists, they work out of a set of assumptions pretty much the same as Pragmatism.
jerf 8y ago
"I have hard times to imagine their writers as a real scientists. Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli..." If you mean by "real scientist" that they are doing real work that advances the field, some of them are and, yes, some of them aren't. I don't mean that as a criticism, because there is real value in being a PR person for science. (Some danger if they do it poorly, but a lot of value, too.) Hawking, for instance, was certainly a real scientist by any measure, right up until his unfortunate passing, but also did good PR and wrote some very popular books. And not to pick on him, but according to his CV [1], Neil deGrasse Tyson hasn't published a paper in a decade, and if you skip three related papers in 2007-2008, hadn't published prior to that since 1998. Doesn't mean he's not doing useful stuff, or that he wasn't at least a scientist in the past, but he's certainly not on the same sort of track as Hawking was.
- smallnamespace 8y ago
  I think that science is grossly lacking in good spokespeople who are respected in the field, and it should be rewarded more within the academy, not less. When a large fraction of the population has frankly anti-scientific beliefs and when funding for continued scientific endeavor depends on votes, science needs to continually justify and promote itself in the public eye. Are there dangers to that? Yes. But it's worse than holing up in the ivory tower to only quietly do research.
  - yashevde 8y ago
    I agree, but it's unlikely that they will get respect and reward within the academy. They are just as susceptible to feelings of envy as people outside the academy. You can see this manifest itself in the academy's treatment of Carl Sagan, and in the many ramblings of Murray Gell-Mann about Richard Feynman. Sure, their expositions of the science may not have been rigorous and they weren't perfect human beings, but maybe that's what it takes to popularize science and draw people in. I often see the role of science popularization as that of turned the science illiterate to literate, not the uneducated to the educated.
- HopDavid 8y ago
  I would call Tyson a good spokesman for science if he had a high regard for rigor and accuracy. But he does not. http://hopsblog-hop.blogspot.com/2016/01/fact-checking-neil-degrasse-tyson.html http://hopsblog-hop.blogspot.com/2016/01/fact-checking-neil-...
wallace_f 8y ago
Reminds me of: >I have been thinking of how very gently I have always been dealt with. I have never so much as had a violent shove in my entire life -Maxwell Also: do we need monks in other places? In the courts--removed from the carrots and sticks society can throw at them?
acqq 8y ago
> humble 2 cents Sadly, not humble, and, from my point of view, uninformed, that is, exactly what would be expected from an otherwise uninformed reader of the newspaper articles about the topics touched, especially from one not understanding how science actually works. In reality, the "failed" fulfillment of some expectations when the best experiments up to now are performed is also what advances our knowledge, greatly, you can read, for an example, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17363056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17363056 Look from this perspective: not only that what some theoretical scientists whose direct "expectations" came to be unconfirmed by the LHC experiments "expected" would remain just a "plain imagination" without a huge investment in extremely advanced experiments, the same would remain for any scientist having some other ideas. We need so advanced experiments because anything else is already known. And what we know today we wouldn't without the experiments, especially such producing "unexpected" results. There's is not an actual "crisis" in science advancing, exactly by doing experiments never before done the science does advance. The experiments like LHC are indeed a precondition for any new advancement. For every complex problem there exists a nice and easily understandable solution... that is wrong. Even the basic explanation in many articles written about the science the authors get wrong, and the casual readers get even more wrong. The typical complaint is that the experiments "cost much" and then the wishes of some aren't "confirmed"? Well they cost peanuts compared to the investment in military. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning... "Program cost US$1.508 trillion (through 2070 in then-year dollars), US$55.1B for RDT&E, $319.1B for procurement, $4.8B for MILCON, $1123.8B for operations & sustainment (2015 estimate)" Compare with the total budget of LHC experiment of just €7.5 billion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider You'd get surely more than 200 LHCs for just one type of a military plane. Also, the expected cost of measuring gravitational waves from space, the way that would also give us a new and otherwise inaccessible information about the Universe is 1000 times smaller than the cost of the above military plane. The typical complaint goes on with the idea that the if scientists work on something, and it's unconfirmed by the experiment, it was unnecessary work. That's also not true at all. Most of hypotheses of what is behind the limits of our current experiments will not be confirmed by definition. If we knew, we wouldn't need to perform the experiments.
glorkk 8y ago
> Minds get eroded by technology by heavily relying on it This has been said for thousands of years. Socrates/Plato was complaining about how writing weakens the human memory. We need to accept that human minds are limited and technology is meant to extend them. Science has advanced considerably due to computers despite the appearances. The way out of the current “impasse” is through even more technology. We might not be able to solve all the mysteries of the universe without intelligence augmentation or superintelligent AI.
- orand 8y ago
  Computers used to be bicycles for the mind. Now with things like Facebook they’re self-driving cars for the mind.

by dyukqu 8y ago

blueprint 8y ago

It's funny because as much as you recognize this, the people you describe as being needed are treated terribly not only by the establishment but those who think they are outside of it. Perhaps that explains this state.

dmfdmf 8y ago

The crisis in physics is due to Kant. As long as physicists are disdainful of philosophy the crisis and deterioration will continue. They are Kantians and don't even know it. Ayn Rand identified Kant's error in his Critique of Pure Reason and destroyed his program, she rejected Hume's rank skepticism (which Kant was answering) and showed Descartes how to validate reason (i.e. to be certain) without being omniscient. Descartes was the intellectual who started this ball rolling by turning reason unto itself and asking how does it work. He was not up to the task and injected a crude circularity at the base of reason, i.e. "I think therefore I am", which Rand identified and fixed but she is now completely ignored.

woodandsteel 8y ago
I agree that Descartes, Hume, and Kant were wrong. However, modern scientists are not influenced by them. Their own views are much closer to Pragmatism (which is not surprising given that two of the three founders of Pragmatism, namely Peirce and James, were professional scientists).
- dmfdmf 8y ago
  Popper/Kuhn are both derivatives of Kant and very popular in physics when physicists grasp for a philosophy to justify their epistemology. Mach, also a Kantian, was Einstein's pole star but to Einstein's credit defended realism contra Mach's ideas.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - woodandsteel 8y ago
    That's because they haven't studied philosophy. I have a background in the sciences, and what I observed is that, in terms of how they think when they are actually doing science, as opposed to explaining it to people who are not scientists, they work out of a set of assumptions pretty much the same as Pragmatism.

jerf 8y ago

"I have hard times to imagine their writers as a real scientists. Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli..." If you mean by "real scientist" that they are doing real work that advances the field, some of them are and, yes, some of them aren't. I don't mean that as a criticism, because there is real value in being a PR person for science. (Some danger if they do it poorly, but a lot of value, too.) Hawking, for instance, was certainly a real scientist by any measure, right up until his unfortunate passing, but also did good PR and wrote some very popular books. And not to pick on him, but according to his CV [1], Neil deGrasse Tyson hasn't published a paper in a decade, and if you skip three related papers in 2007-2008, hadn't published prior to that since 1998. Doesn't mean he's not doing useful stuff, or that he wasn't at least a scientist in the past, but he's certainly not on the same sort of track as Hawking was.

smallnamespace 8y ago
I think that science is grossly lacking in good spokespeople who are respected in the field, and it should be rewarded more within the academy, not less. When a large fraction of the population has frankly anti-scientific beliefs and when funding for continued scientific endeavor depends on votes, science needs to continually justify and promote itself in the public eye. Are there dangers to that? Yes. But it's worse than holing up in the ivory tower to only quietly do research.
- yashevde 8y ago
  I agree, but it's unlikely that they will get respect and reward within the academy. They are just as susceptible to feelings of envy as people outside the academy. You can see this manifest itself in the academy's treatment of Carl Sagan, and in the many ramblings of Murray Gell-Mann about Richard Feynman. Sure, their expositions of the science may not have been rigorous and they weren't perfect human beings, but maybe that's what it takes to popularize science and draw people in. I often see the role of science popularization as that of turned the science illiterate to literate, not the uneducated to the educated.
HopDavid 8y ago
I would call Tyson a good spokesman for science if he had a high regard for rigor and accuracy. But he does not. http://hopsblog-hop.blogspot.com/2016/01/fact-checking-neil-degrasse-tyson.html http://hopsblog-hop.blogspot.com/2016/01/fact-checking-neil-...

wallace_f 8y ago

Reminds me of: >I have been thinking of how very gently I have always been dealt with. I have never so much as had a violent shove in my entire life -Maxwell Also: do we need monks in other places? In the courts--removed from the carrots and sticks society can throw at them?

acqq 8y ago

> humble 2 cents Sadly, not humble, and, from my point of view, uninformed, that is, exactly what would be expected from an otherwise uninformed reader of the newspaper articles about the topics touched, especially from one not understanding how science actually works. In reality, the "failed" fulfillment of some expectations when the best experiments up to now are performed is also what advances our knowledge, greatly, you can read, for an example, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17363056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17363056 Look from this perspective: not only that what some theoretical scientists whose direct "expectations" came to be unconfirmed by the LHC experiments "expected" would remain just a "plain imagination" without a huge investment in extremely advanced experiments, the same would remain for any scientist having some other ideas. We need so advanced experiments because anything else is already known. And what we know today we wouldn't without the experiments, especially such producing "unexpected" results. There's is not an actual "crisis" in science advancing, exactly by doing experiments never before done the science does advance. The experiments like LHC are indeed a precondition for any new advancement. For every complex problem there exists a nice and easily understandable solution... that is wrong. Even the basic explanation in many articles written about the science the authors get wrong, and the casual readers get even more wrong. The typical complaint is that the experiments "cost much" and then the wishes of some aren't "confirmed"? Well they cost peanuts compared to the investment in military. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning... "Program cost US$1.508 trillion (through 2070 in then-year dollars), US$55.1B for RDT&E, $319.1B for procurement, $4.8B for MILCON, $1123.8B for operations & sustainment (2015 estimate)" Compare with the total budget of LHC experiment of just €7.5 billion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider You'd get surely more than 200 LHCs for just one type of a military plane. Also, the expected cost of measuring gravitational waves from space, the way that would also give us a new and otherwise inaccessible information about the Universe is 1000 times smaller than the cost of the above military plane. The typical complaint goes on with the idea that the if scientists work on something, and it's unconfirmed by the experiment, it was unnecessary work. That's also not true at all. Most of hypotheses of what is behind the limits of our current experiments will not be confirmed by definition. If we knew, we wouldn't need to perform the experiments.

glorkk 8y ago

> Minds get eroded by technology by heavily relying on it This has been said for thousands of years. Socrates/Plato was complaining about how writing weakens the human memory. We need to accept that human minds are limited and technology is meant to extend them. Science has advanced considerably due to computers despite the appearances. The way out of the current “impasse” is through even more technology. We might not be able to solve all the mysteries of the universe without intelligence augmentation or superintelligent AI.

orand 8y ago
Computers used to be bicycles for the mind. Now with things like Facebook they’re self-driving cars for the mind.