4 ms·
The title is misleading. It's an opinion from some blogspot blog without sources. "Aspects of theoretical physics not always taught in school" would be more ap
by dschuetz 8y ago
The title is misleading. It's an opinion from some blogspot blog without sources.
"Aspects of theoretical physics not always taught in school" would be more appropriate.
- saagarjha 8y agoThese are commonly accepted theories. It would be like citing Darwin every time you talked about evolution–nobody does this because you can easily do this yourself if you were in the unlikely event of being unaware of the science behind it.
- dschuetz 8y agoI'd like to see quantum gravity as a "commonly accepted theory". But it's not. It's a hypothesis.
- lostmyoldone 8y agoIf you are saying that the issue apperently most contentious to you is a hypothesis, why did you call the entire article opinion to begin with? Seems contradictory to me. As far as I can tell, she's really only saying is that we would have easily seen QG effects of some sort if it wasn't because it's only relevant at high curvatures, for some measure of high. Hence all of the relevant theories in the QG fields can with high probability only be relevant at high curvatures, because we should have seen them otherwise. Which part of that do you consider to be incorrect?
- robinhouston 8y agoI think it’s misleading to characterise Sabine Hossenfelder’s blog as “some blogspot blog”. She is a serious and respected theoretical physicist, not some random blogger.
- dschuetz 8y agoShe's a pop-science writer. She is a random blogger. She has a job as a physicist. It doesn't make her opinion a fact, just because she's a theoretical physicist with a job and a blog.
- nabla9 8y agoWhat she says are all kind of basic facts for any physicist, not something new research that needs to be sourced and skeptically considered. He just blogged educational insights.
- aklemm 8y agoThis is skepticism of the most useless kind. I can feel it sucking away my time and energy.
- noobermin 8y agoHmm, she has a PhD and does research in one of the most prestigious institutions in the world.
- mehrdadn 8y agoThis seems like a good example of why dismissing everything with [citation needed] isn't a great idea.
- nabla9 8y agoEducational material that covers basic facts without controversy is rarely sourced. The Feynman Lectures on Physics is not well sourced, but people eat it up year after year without any skepticism :)
- skybrian 8y agoWhat do you mean? Even if the information happens to be correct in this case, it's still not a good idea to believe everything you read. There's plenty of bad info about physics out there, and it's not that easily to tell the difference.
- mehrdadn 8y ago>> dismissing everything with [citation needed] isn't a great idea > it's still not a good idea to believe everything you read This is not a binary option. In particular my point is you should click a couple of links and do some holistic assessment of how/why something might be wrong before knee-jerking with "citation needed".
- skybrian 8y agoI see "citation needed" as a terse and (outside Wikipedia) rude way of asking for sources. In the article, some list items have links and others don't. It's reasonable to ask politely for sources.
- mehrdadn 8y agoThe phrasing of "citation needed" was very much not the point here. It wasn't even an actual quote for us to debate its rudeness or politeness. If you read my original response, I merely used it as a terse placeholder representing the reaction in the top comment, which is the topic I was actually addressing. The point was that a lack of sources does not grant the reader an automatic license to dismiss and/or disparage the text without further investigation.