7 ms·

FWIIW, Horgan is a well known science writer and author of a 1996 book called "the end of science" which pointed out that science in general and physics in part

FWIIW, Horgan is a well known science writer and author of a 1996 book called "the end of science" which pointed out that science in general and physics in particular has reached a point where there is no appreciable forward progress and is obsessed with non falsifiable woo like string theory. It's a provocative book; and people have raised the issue that Kelvin said something similar 120 years ago, but it's really worth reading. He was 100% on the money that Noodle Theory was a lot of non-scientific mathematical baloney; a super unpopular position at the time (1996); pretty much the only prominent person in agreement with him was Nobel Prize Winner Phil Warren Anderson, who disagrees with him in many other respects. Ultimately many other writers came out in agreement on this issue at least; Woit and Smolin most notably, though others agreed. At this point I'm pretty sure even the physics establishment is a little nervous about hiring new noodle theorists. He's basically right about stuff like "complexity theory" as well. I had a couple buddies who were prominent string theorists; some involved in its inception. One in particular retired a very disappointed man.

haolez 7y ago
What’s wrong with complexity theory? I remember seeing a talk about it a long time ago and the concepts were super interesting, but I didn’t (I don’t) have the mathematical maturity to understand it in depth.
- jessriedel 7y ago
  I don't think it ever congealed into a coherent field, say, with an established canon of techniques and a heirarchy of results that built on itself.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- knzhou 7y ago
  It hasn't become concrete enough to make sharp, striking, correct predictions. It turns out the real world is extremely messy. Complexity theory can produce specific predictions ("disease spread will follow a power law with a critical exponent of...") but they won't be quantitatively correct. Or it can produce correct predictions ("airplanes increase disease spread because they increase the global network's connectivity") but they're generally obvious, and certainly don't require the full formalism of complexity theory to get.
meowface 7y ago
There are still a lot of prominent, respectable theoretical physicists who work on string theory. Leonard Susskind, for example. While no evidence of it has been found so far, is calling it "Noodle Theory" and a bunch of baloney really fair? There are plenty of big theories for which there's no evidence, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're certain yet that they're pseudoscience or unfalsifiable. Supersymmetry, Many Worlds, etc.
- jessriedel 7y ago
  I don't think Susskind works on string theory proper at all anymore. He works on the AdS/CFT stuff, which is compatible with and motivated by stringy approaches, but is logically quite independent. Related: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6252 https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6252
- kelnos 7y ago
  IMO calling it "noodle theory" is just a juvenile means to make fun of people who study it. If you want to tell people something is wrong, tell them why; don't invent childish names to put other people down by association.
jessriedel 7y ago
I like Horgan a lot, but it's notable he also made a very wrong prediction that traditional proofs in math would start losing out to less rigorous means of collecting evidence for correctness. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/okay-maybe-proofs-arent-dying-after-all/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/okay-maybe-... Although being a string theory skeptic was certainly a minority position in both academia and journalism in 1996, I think it's somewhat of an exaggeration to characterize it as a "super unpopular position" and Horgan and Anderson as the only prominent holders.
Merrill 7y ago
There seems to be lots of forward progress in physics, e.g. in condensed matter physics, quantum computing, etc. Grand unified theories are sort of irrelevant so long as there are not measurable phenomena that cannot be explained without them.
- sampo 7y ago
  > There seems to be lots of forward progress in physics, e.g. in condensed matter physics, quantum computing The theory of quantum computing is based on real physics, unlike string theory. But we have no idea if or when we will be able to build a quantum computer that actually calculates something useful. So far the progress has been only in theory. Edit: To downvoters, let's make a bet: In the next 18 years, no one will have used a quantum computer to break any encryption that hasn't also been broken by traditional computers?
  - chrisdirkis 7y ago
    Progress does not mean "Commercial success". Your bet is like hearing "my kid seems to be making lots of progress on their bike", and responding with "I bet he'll never cycle around the world in 18 years".
    - sampo 7y ago
      The bet in the posted news was also about winning the Nobel prize, not about making just lots of progress.
  - comicjk 7y ago
    Breaking a cryptosystem is not a good metric for whether quantum computers have become useful. Calculating energy levels of molecules, for example, is a much easier problem in the near term, and is of benefit to humanity. Breaking a cryptosystem takes vastly more and higher-quality qubits, and the end result is just that everyone upgrades to different math. As a computational chemist, I assign 50% probability to the idea that quantum computers will be able to do useful molecular calculations cheaper than classical computers (for large batches) within 18 years. For small batches, classical computers will remain cheapest much longer because of overhead.
knzhou 7y ago
> a super unpopular position at the time (1996); pretty much the only prominent person in agreement with him was Nobel Prize Winner Phil Warren Anderson, who disagrees with him in many other respects. Ultimately many other writers came out in agreement on this issue at least; Woit and Smolin most notably, though others agreed. Ugh, almost everything about this narrative is wrong; see my other comment. Science writers didn't invent skepticism of string theory, that was in good supply among physicists even 50 years ago. You only think they did because, well, you rely on them to tell you what happened, and they puff up their own roles. They turn it into "me vs. the establishment" while cribbing off conversations that are already happening within the field. For example, Glashow, one of the architects of the Standard Model, tried to bar string theorists from ever being hired at Harvard, but you never hear about that.
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  Thousands of grad student careers, faculty appointments, glowing documentaries and ruined lives later and "oh, we knew that all along." They sure didn't act like they knew it at the time. Horgan deserves credit for making the right call. Even more credit because he wasn't even a physicist. Credit to Glashow, and apologies for forgetting him, but Horgan deserves his victory lap.
  - knzhou 7y ago
    I mean, do you think literally everybody was doing string theory? There have always been plenty of theorists focused on more concrete things -- string theorists are not and have not been the majority. Grad students entering even in the 90s knew they had to make a choice between concrete, more easily testable physics and a long-shot approach to quantum gravity. String theorists have stories of faculty going out of their way, back in grad school, to discourage them from going into it. (It wasn't just Glashow, either, it was most of the Harvard physics department.) To say that string theory comprises all of theoretical physics is to uncritically accept the "me vs. the establishment" narrative some pop scientists put out. I think it does real damage inside the field, too, because it distorts the perspectives people have coming in.
anon1m0us 7y ago
oh, I wonder if this is fitting with my current obsession with truth and lies. Not only are we increasing the number of lies in the world, using lies to get what we want has become more and more acceptable through social media, politics, capitalism, etc... But we are increasing the number of things you can't prove are lies. You can't falsify me, therefore I am right. OMG, this is very religious. This is all because of postmodernism! Prior to today, you couldn't prove that my religion was wrong. The more people I could get to believe my lie about the origins of the universe, the more powerful I was. Tribalism requires agreed upon unfalsifiable lies. I am with you because I believe the same thing you do. Postmodernism has done this to us. With religion and an omniscient being watching us, heaven for the good, hell for the bad, we had a -- conscience. Now, it's the internet. The internet is omniscient. Facebook is watching us. Google is watching us. The CIA and FBI are watching us through the internet. We've replaced god with ... the internet. The internet is the new god. And thus, we are evolving toward the biblical God that created us in his image. We are walking down the path to omniscience via the internet.
- undershirt 7y ago
  I wonder if you might try the subtler word myths instead of lies. Reality is formless, and we reason about it through what Foucault called grids I think, where every structure that we impose on it to bring something new into view necessarily obscures something else. This is a bit like what Alan Watts talks about when saying that stories are like music, in which it wouldn’t have any form unless there were notes left out. I think of a fact as a compressed statement of experience in service to some story. This is like the surprising observation that bits of information seem to always have some color that cannot be captured[1]. And there is the type of myth I like to call Fruith, as opposed to Truth. Most myths comprising culture might be these—in that we pretend things are true in the belief that it brings something more important to fruition, and that is the truth which overrides the seminal “lie”. I see your despair, but I think it’s bigger than what you may be suggesting. [1] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
  - anon1m0us 7y ago
    When you say, "... it's bigger than what you may be suggesting." What is ... "it"? My despair? I understand your point about lies vs myths. If I substitute the two words in my mind according to your explanation of myths and their purpose, then everything actually does seem to make more sense and is more acceptable in my mind. If someone tells a lie the connotation is that it's meant to harm others to their own benefit. If it's a myth, then they need that ... not accurate portrayal of the world in order to keep going... to survive, perhaps as an individual or group.
secraetomani 7y ago
> noodle theorists Lovely name
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
agota 7y ago
Thank you for mentioning the book, it sounds interesting!

haolez 7y ago

What’s wrong with complexity theory? I remember seeing a talk about it a long time ago and the concepts were super interesting, but I didn’t (I don’t) have the mathematical maturity to understand it in depth.

jessriedel 7y ago
I don't think it ever congealed into a coherent field, say, with an established canon of techniques and a heirarchy of results that built on itself.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
knzhou 7y ago
It hasn't become concrete enough to make sharp, striking, correct predictions. It turns out the real world is extremely messy. Complexity theory can produce specific predictions ("disease spread will follow a power law with a critical exponent of...") but they won't be quantitatively correct. Or it can produce correct predictions ("airplanes increase disease spread because they increase the global network's connectivity") but they're generally obvious, and certainly don't require the full formalism of complexity theory to get.

meowface 7y ago

There are still a lot of prominent, respectable theoretical physicists who work on string theory. Leonard Susskind, for example. While no evidence of it has been found so far, is calling it "Noodle Theory" and a bunch of baloney really fair? There are plenty of big theories for which there's no evidence, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're certain yet that they're pseudoscience or unfalsifiable. Supersymmetry, Many Worlds, etc.

jessriedel 7y ago
I don't think Susskind works on string theory proper at all anymore. He works on the AdS/CFT stuff, which is compatible with and motivated by stringy approaches, but is logically quite independent. Related: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6252 https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6252
kelnos 7y ago
IMO calling it "noodle theory" is just a juvenile means to make fun of people who study it. If you want to tell people something is wrong, tell them why; don't invent childish names to put other people down by association.

jessriedel 7y ago

I like Horgan a lot, but it's notable he also made a very wrong prediction that traditional proofs in math would start losing out to less rigorous means of collecting evidence for correctness. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/okay-maybe-proofs-arent-dying-after-all/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/okay-maybe-... Although being a string theory skeptic was certainly a minority position in both academia and journalism in 1996, I think it's somewhat of an exaggeration to characterize it as a "super unpopular position" and Horgan and Anderson as the only prominent holders.

Merrill 7y ago

There seems to be lots of forward progress in physics, e.g. in condensed matter physics, quantum computing, etc. Grand unified theories are sort of irrelevant so long as there are not measurable phenomena that cannot be explained without them.

sampo 7y ago
> There seems to be lots of forward progress in physics, e.g. in condensed matter physics, quantum computing The theory of quantum computing is based on real physics, unlike string theory. But we have no idea if or when we will be able to build a quantum computer that actually calculates something useful. So far the progress has been only in theory. Edit: To downvoters, let's make a bet: In the next 18 years, no one will have used a quantum computer to break any encryption that hasn't also been broken by traditional computers?
- chrisdirkis 7y ago
  Progress does not mean "Commercial success". Your bet is like hearing "my kid seems to be making lots of progress on their bike", and responding with "I bet he'll never cycle around the world in 18 years".
  - sampo 7y ago
    The bet in the posted news was also about winning the Nobel prize, not about making just lots of progress.
- comicjk 7y ago
  Breaking a cryptosystem is not a good metric for whether quantum computers have become useful. Calculating energy levels of molecules, for example, is a much easier problem in the near term, and is of benefit to humanity. Breaking a cryptosystem takes vastly more and higher-quality qubits, and the end result is just that everyone upgrades to different math. As a computational chemist, I assign 50% probability to the idea that quantum computers will be able to do useful molecular calculations cheaper than classical computers (for large batches) within 18 years. For small batches, classical computers will remain cheapest much longer because of overhead.

knzhou 7y ago

> a super unpopular position at the time (1996); pretty much the only prominent person in agreement with him was Nobel Prize Winner Phil Warren Anderson, who disagrees with him in many other respects. Ultimately many other writers came out in agreement on this issue at least; Woit and Smolin most notably, though others agreed. Ugh, almost everything about this narrative is wrong; see my other comment. Science writers didn't invent skepticism of string theory, that was in good supply among physicists even 50 years ago. You only think they did because, well, you rely on them to tell you what happened, and they puff up their own roles. They turn it into "me vs. the establishment" while cribbing off conversations that are already happening within the field. For example, Glashow, one of the architects of the Standard Model, tried to bar string theorists from ever being hired at Harvard, but you never hear about that.

scottlocklin 7y ago
Thousands of grad student careers, faculty appointments, glowing documentaries and ruined lives later and "oh, we knew that all along." They sure didn't act like they knew it at the time. Horgan deserves credit for making the right call. Even more credit because he wasn't even a physicist. Credit to Glashow, and apologies for forgetting him, but Horgan deserves his victory lap.
- knzhou 7y ago
  I mean, do you think literally everybody was doing string theory? There have always been plenty of theorists focused on more concrete things -- string theorists are not and have not been the majority. Grad students entering even in the 90s knew they had to make a choice between concrete, more easily testable physics and a long-shot approach to quantum gravity. String theorists have stories of faculty going out of their way, back in grad school, to discourage them from going into it. (It wasn't just Glashow, either, it was most of the Harvard physics department.) To say that string theory comprises all of theoretical physics is to uncritically accept the "me vs. the establishment" narrative some pop scientists put out. I think it does real damage inside the field, too, because it distorts the perspectives people have coming in.

anon1m0us 7y ago

oh, I wonder if this is fitting with my current obsession with truth and lies. Not only are we increasing the number of lies in the world, using lies to get what we want has become more and more acceptable through social media, politics, capitalism, etc... But we are increasing the number of things you can't prove are lies. You can't falsify me, therefore I am right. OMG, this is very religious. This is all because of postmodernism! Prior to today, you couldn't prove that my religion was wrong. The more people I could get to believe my lie about the origins of the universe, the more powerful I was. Tribalism requires agreed upon unfalsifiable lies. I am with you because I believe the same thing you do. Postmodernism has done this to us. With religion and an omniscient being watching us, heaven for the good, hell for the bad, we had a -- conscience. Now, it's the internet. The internet is omniscient. Facebook is watching us. Google is watching us. The CIA and FBI are watching us through the internet. We've replaced god with ... the internet. The internet is the new god. And thus, we are evolving toward the biblical God that created us in his image. We are walking down the path to omniscience via the internet.

undershirt 7y ago
I wonder if you might try the subtler word myths instead of lies. Reality is formless, and we reason about it through what Foucault called grids I think, where every structure that we impose on it to bring something new into view necessarily obscures something else. This is a bit like what Alan Watts talks about when saying that stories are like music, in which it wouldn’t have any form unless there were notes left out. I think of a fact as a compressed statement of experience in service to some story. This is like the surprising observation that bits of information seem to always have some color that cannot be captured[1]. And there is the type of myth I like to call Fruith, as opposed to Truth. Most myths comprising culture might be these—in that we pretend things are true in the belief that it brings something more important to fruition, and that is the truth which overrides the seminal “lie”. I see your despair, but I think it’s bigger than what you may be suggesting. [1] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
- anon1m0us 7y ago
  When you say, "... it's bigger than what you may be suggesting." What is ... "it"? My despair? I understand your point about lies vs myths. If I substitute the two words in my mind according to your explanation of myths and their purpose, then everything actually does seem to make more sense and is more acceptable in my mind. If someone tells a lie the connotation is that it's meant to harm others to their own benefit. If it's a myth, then they need that ... not accurate portrayal of the world in order to keep going... to survive, perhaps as an individual or group.

secraetomani 7y ago

> noodle theorists Lovely name

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

agota 7y ago

Thank you for mentioning the book, it sounds interesting!