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That blog keeps rambling on about the same old thing over and over. Maybe the author is crazy. What is being proposed here, to abandon all physics research beca

That blog keeps rambling on about the same old thing over and over. Maybe the author is crazy. What is being proposed here, to abandon all physics research because it has become hard? And in the end constant nagging is not fruitful to anything, unless the author can reasonably argue for a new line of research. As an aside, Physics is not even suffering from true scientific issues such as reproducibility and direction of research.

Barrin92 8y ago
>That blog keeps rambling on about the same old thing over and over. Maybe the author is crazy. What is being proposed here, to abandon all physics research because it has become hard? And in the end constant nagging is not fruitful to anything, unless the author can reasonably argue for a new line of research. she did just that in the NYT piece that is also linked to in the blog post. "And there are other avenues to pursue. For example, the astrophysical observations pointing toward dark matter should be explored further; better understanding those observations would help us make more reliable predictions about whether a larger collider can produce the dark matter particle — if it even is a particle. There are also medium-scale experiments that tend to fall off the table because giant projects eat up money. One important medium-scale project is the interface between the quantum realm and gravity, which is now accessible to experimental testing. Another place where discoveries could be waiting is in the foundations of quantum mechanics. These could have major technological impacts." There really is no argument in favour of why building a new, extremely expensive accelerator is reasonable. We don't expect to find anything at those energy levels, it is pure guesswork.
- buboard 8y ago
  i believe astronomy is not underfunded, with projects like JWT. now she might be right about medium scale projects but one would have to see the budget for it. Research directions is a difficult matter, and as evidenced by recently identified problems with medicine and biology reserach, having a ton of medium-sized projects instead of a few megaprojects is not necessarily more fruitful.
pfortuny 8y ago
No no: she rambles about (mostly) supersymmetry and related “physics”-without-refutability. She does care about science: she is tired of theories without real (as in “real world”) support.

Barrin92 8y ago

>That blog keeps rambling on about the same old thing over and over. Maybe the author is crazy. What is being proposed here, to abandon all physics research because it has become hard? And in the end constant nagging is not fruitful to anything, unless the author can reasonably argue for a new line of research. she did just that in the NYT piece that is also linked to in the blog post. "And there are other avenues to pursue. For example, the astrophysical observations pointing toward dark matter should be explored further; better understanding those observations would help us make more reliable predictions about whether a larger collider can produce the dark matter particle — if it even is a particle. There are also medium-scale experiments that tend to fall off the table because giant projects eat up money. One important medium-scale project is the interface between the quantum realm and gravity, which is now accessible to experimental testing. Another place where discoveries could be waiting is in the foundations of quantum mechanics. These could have major technological impacts." There really is no argument in favour of why building a new, extremely expensive accelerator is reasonable. We don't expect to find anything at those energy levels, it is pure guesswork.

buboard 8y ago
i believe astronomy is not underfunded, with projects like JWT. now she might be right about medium scale projects but one would have to see the budget for it. Research directions is a difficult matter, and as evidenced by recently identified problems with medicine and biology reserach, having a ton of medium-sized projects instead of a few megaprojects is not necessarily more fruitful.

pfortuny 8y ago

No no: she rambles about (mostly) supersymmetry and related “physics”-without-refutability. She does care about science: she is tired of theories without real (as in “real world”) support.