8 ms·

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 lik

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.
- Ma8ee 7y ago
  They weren't discouraged to do string theory in particular, they were discouraged from getting into the whole "trying to find something better than the standard model." If they anyway went into th hep, they would have slim chances of having any career if they didn't do string theory. They were encouraged to do things like condensed matter physics, not trying to find some alternative to string theory.
- bjornsing 7y ago
  So as long as there is one physicist on the right side of the fence the “field” is somehow in the know...? Would you be willing to extend that kind of reasoning to the “pop scientists”? I often wish Feynman (or anyone of his kind really) was still here. Science nowadays seems more and more like one big appeal to authority...
  - madhadron 7y ago
    Something that most people don't understand is that most physicists won't talk to the public. What you hear as a layman is usually the few people who have a public axe to grind and bears no resemblance to the majority of the field. When I was in physics in the early 2000's, the general feeling was that it's a probably nonsense, but having someone out at the far end of the mathematical spectrum like that in your theory group was a good investment. And even if they were doing string theory, there's a good chance they were using it as a vehicle, a kind of generalized, more flexible version of field theory, to poke at some mathematical rabbit hole. The majority of physicists are not in HEP. The majority of HEP physicists are experimentalists. The majority of HEP theorists are phenomenologists. But phenomenologists aren't generally good fodder for science journalists because statements like, "I'm calculating scattering cross sections in the kaon sector for CP violation measurements" isn't going to get clicks. And the experimentalists are even worse: "I've been working eight hour night shifts for the past two years. I'll probably go back to my home university and spend another couple years processing data to get an estimate for this parameter in this scattering calculation. It might be a fraction of a percent off what we expected!" Faced with that, "I'm playing with a high dimensional extension of quantum field theory to see if I can generate a spin 2 field in an expanding spacetime" sounds really sexy.
    - QuesnayJr 7y ago
      Honestly, I think physicists can't win here. Tommaso Dorigo (an HEP experimentalist) likes to talk to the public, so he has a blog. If you look right now his Plot of the Week is about how ATLAS "produced an improved bound on the rate at which Higgs bosons may decay to electron-positron pairs". This is the kind of thing that inspires people to write about how academic writing is inaccessible. Alternatively, physicists can write something more exciting, which is almost certainly highly speculative, and then they get dinged when the speculation turns out to be wrong.
    - bjornsing 7y ago
      I don’t pay much attention to the popular science depictions. Many of my friends are academic physicists (while I got out after my masters). I think what I’m objecting to is that as the discoveries within physics become less and less impactful, the “field” seems to turn more and more inwards. Also, egos seem to expand approximately proportionally to the inverse of the utility of their work...
2muchcoffeeman 7y ago
It’s difficult to know what kind of politicking led to this though. It preposterous to think that all the physicists were on board with string theory. Do you really think the experts in the field didn’t have doubts and it took an non physicist to work it out?
bllguo 7y ago
Why does he get more credit for not being a physicist?? So he made an uninformed conjecture that turned out to be true? (whether it is true also seems up in the air right now?) I don't understand why that deserves kudos. I would very much prefer top scientists to listen to people who know what they're talking about, instead of paying heed to the less informed on the off chance their wild speculation bears fruit.
- wolco 7y ago
  That's biased. I will only accept the correct answer from people I choose. Experts in the field should provide the most insight overtime but don't ignore non-experts. That's foolish and limiting.

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.

Ma8ee 7y ago
They weren't discouraged to do string theory in particular, they were discouraged from getting into the whole "trying to find something better than the standard model." If they anyway went into th hep, they would have slim chances of having any career if they didn't do string theory. They were encouraged to do things like condensed matter physics, not trying to find some alternative to string theory.
bjornsing 7y ago
So as long as there is one physicist on the right side of the fence the “field” is somehow in the know...? Would you be willing to extend that kind of reasoning to the “pop scientists”? I often wish Feynman (or anyone of his kind really) was still here. Science nowadays seems more and more like one big appeal to authority...
- madhadron 7y ago
  Something that most people don't understand is that most physicists won't talk to the public. What you hear as a layman is usually the few people who have a public axe to grind and bears no resemblance to the majority of the field. When I was in physics in the early 2000's, the general feeling was that it's a probably nonsense, but having someone out at the far end of the mathematical spectrum like that in your theory group was a good investment. And even if they were doing string theory, there's a good chance they were using it as a vehicle, a kind of generalized, more flexible version of field theory, to poke at some mathematical rabbit hole. The majority of physicists are not in HEP. The majority of HEP physicists are experimentalists. The majority of HEP theorists are phenomenologists. But phenomenologists aren't generally good fodder for science journalists because statements like, "I'm calculating scattering cross sections in the kaon sector for CP violation measurements" isn't going to get clicks. And the experimentalists are even worse: "I've been working eight hour night shifts for the past two years. I'll probably go back to my home university and spend another couple years processing data to get an estimate for this parameter in this scattering calculation. It might be a fraction of a percent off what we expected!" Faced with that, "I'm playing with a high dimensional extension of quantum field theory to see if I can generate a spin 2 field in an expanding spacetime" sounds really sexy.
  - QuesnayJr 7y ago
    Honestly, I think physicists can't win here. Tommaso Dorigo (an HEP experimentalist) likes to talk to the public, so he has a blog. If you look right now his Plot of the Week is about how ATLAS "produced an improved bound on the rate at which Higgs bosons may decay to electron-positron pairs". This is the kind of thing that inspires people to write about how academic writing is inaccessible. Alternatively, physicists can write something more exciting, which is almost certainly highly speculative, and then they get dinged when the speculation turns out to be wrong.
  - bjornsing 7y ago
    I don’t pay much attention to the popular science depictions. Many of my friends are academic physicists (while I got out after my masters). I think what I’m objecting to is that as the discoveries within physics become less and less impactful, the “field” seems to turn more and more inwards. Also, egos seem to expand approximately proportionally to the inverse of the utility of their work...

2muchcoffeeman 7y ago

It’s difficult to know what kind of politicking led to this though. It preposterous to think that all the physicists were on board with string theory. Do you really think the experts in the field didn’t have doubts and it took an non physicist to work it out?

bllguo 7y ago

Why does he get more credit for not being a physicist?? So he made an uninformed conjecture that turned out to be true? (whether it is true also seems up in the air right now?) I don't understand why that deserves kudos. I would very much prefer top scientists to listen to people who know what they're talking about, instead of paying heed to the less informed on the off chance their wild speculation bears fruit.

wolco 7y ago
That's biased. I will only accept the correct answer from people I choose. Experts in the field should provide the most insight overtime but don't ignore non-experts. That's foolish and limiting.