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The crisis in physics is not only about physics
- buboard 7y agoFFS what crisis. Oh I get it, soon they 'll be talking about a "physics emergency" to get clicks.
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- nxpnsv 7y agoThis is exactly what she’s doing. I don’t understand why, but she seems to love controversy and has a very high opinion of herself. She’s clearly not stupid, but it is so tiresome.
- pnako 7y agoThere is a market for experts saying "how the experts (except me) got it all wrong". It's pretty common in economics as well.
- dannykwells 7y agoThis was great until the bit about medicine. Medicine has made huge, tremendous progress in the past 30 years. And there are still many serendipitous discoveries happening that lead to new drugs. I mean jesus for the first time ever, a company is going to put up a drug for approval to treat alzheimers. Let's not lump medicine in with physics, please. Medicine has always been skeptical of theories without data and, while maybe facing issues, they aren't the same as physics. Its ironic that a physicist, criticizing others physicists, make a common mistake that all physicists make: over simplification and acting like everything is just like physics with slight modifications.
- achillesheels 7y agoI’m going to have to disagree. Anyone in pharma or med devices can tell you that major innovation is basically outsourced to venture capitalists, where if successful through clinical trials (always a big if), it can become acquired. This is not a method for radical innovation, e.g. a device to stop a hazardous insulin metabolic response to digestion versus the current insulin-pump market.
- czbond 7y agoI disagree at the 'rank and file' level, which is different than Pharma. Pharma is mainly scientists and engineers paid for years to noodle a problem. Rank and file physicians are often Sensors (immediate world around them) and Feelers (tuned to people's feelings) - which are different than the personality traits required to push past status quo, take risks, and innovate.
- YayamiOmate 7y agoYeah, I am not sure about that. To keep up with pace and statistical rigorousness medicine would have to be disturbingly and outrageously unethical. It also deals with more complex issues. To me it's bound to work on less reliable data.
- letitgo12345 7y agoLet's not take just her word for the entire field of physics (even fundamental physics) either.
- jcranmer 7y ago> I mean jesus for the first time ever, a company is going to put up a drug for approval to treat alzheimers. Derek Lowe isn't quite so optimistic about it: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/10/23/the-return-of-aducanumab https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/10/23/th... (tl;dr--the anti-amyloid hypothesis you should be extremely skeptical about, and the inconsistency in the trial data here is signalling that statistical fluke should be a high concern).
- dekhn 7y agoif you really want to read more, check out https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/aducanumab-analysis.html https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/aducanumab-analysis.html There's a reason I went back to being a software engineer at an internet company working on ML models that actually work- clinical trials have a long way to go before they produce results that can be really trusted.
- otabdeveloper4 7y agoMedicine is not about "drugs". You might at well claim that medicine made great strides because so many new and exciting leeches were discovered.
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- nisuni 7y agoThe author is talking about the crisis of a particular subfield of physics, i.e. particle physics. Other subfields are thriving (AMO, quantum information) and maybe it’s just time to accept the relevance of different subfields changes with time.
- whatshisface 7y agoActually particle physics is doing just fine, the crisis is within a subfield of particle physics, fundamental beyond-standard-model particle physics.
- the6threplicant 7y agoOne could say that particle physics is more a victim of its own success.
- poelzi 7y agoBullshit, crises in astronomy for example. The Big Bang Bullshit has be falsified for years now. http://cosmology.info http://cosmology.info has links to dozens of papers. Show me one paper that measured Lorenz contraction, you can't because it does not exist. The whole standard model is based on wrong assumptions. In fact If you would actually talk with scientist in the respected fields that don't take every explanation but ask critically, you will see that most of them are stuck.
- yummypaint 7y agoThere is alot going on in physics besides things directly related to the standard model. Running out of important things to study is of no concern. As a random example check out the microscopy work by recent nobel prize winner Eric Betzig. I think people fail to appreciate the many frontiers that exist in just understanding how matter interracts with itself. The past was exciting because we got to discover new building blocks, but that only provides information on the periphery of whats going on. We know all sorts of stuff about the proton, but put it in a nucleus with a few dozen other nucleons and its a whole different story. All sorts of virtual particles are exchanged, its really complicated, and there literally arent any models that can predict the properties of the nucleus purely from first principles. There are important conceptual and computational innovations happening continuously to make progress on hundreds of problems just like this.
- ImaCake 7y agoI was briefly involved in Single Molecule Biophysics, where microscopes push the limits of what you can do with visible light in order to understand protein behaviour, where I heard the often repeated warning: "the microscope is an experiment itself". This was born out of the incredibly fancy and poorly understood microscope, which was experimental, and it was no guarantee that you were measuring the protein and not some weird light physics effect!
- Balgair 7y ago> and it was no guarantee that you were measuring the protein and not some weird light physics effect! My thesis was in fluorescent bio physics at the nano scale (STED). We literally had a PI effect. Normally, the 'PI effect' is that when the professor comes in, the experiment stops working, mostly due to Murphy's law. With our case, it was because the extra body heat caused the mirrors to expand and drift out of place, ruining the alignment. This also meant it took a while for the mirrors to come back into alignment after lunch and first thing in the morning. What a mess! So yes, in microscopy, the apparatus very much is part of the experiment and it takes ages to get things controlled and imaging correctly.
- jbob2000 7y ago> They do not think about which hypotheses are promising because their education has not taught them to do so. Yes! Thank you! Are the days of Rationalism behind us? Everyone these days seems focused on trying to prove if the sun will rise tomorrow.
- knzhou 7y agoAs usual with Sabine, this article blatantly misrepresents how science is done and how actual scientists think, and serves mainly to portray herself as the only person in the field capable of rational thought. People in the comments here are picking up on this when it takes an unfair swipe at medicine, but it really applies to the whole article. I am not going to bother doing a line-by-line rebuttal, because I've already done this for nearly a hundred of her previous articles, in forums across the internet. It just doesn't matter, because tomorrow she will put out another massively popular article with the same oversimplifications and misrepresentations, and it will get 1000 times the views any response I write could. That is what it means to be a public intellectual. I am a working scientist, which means I have neither the time to keep up nor the audience.
- qnsi 7y agoSeriously, this quote „I am the only physicist who has at least come up with an idea for what to do.” Seemed pretty arrogant. But I have no knowledge of her
- xpuente 7y agoKevin was also pretty arrogant, but when you see is a newcomer to the field, it is understandable.
- knzhou 7y agoYeah, do call me out if I'm still this arrogant in 10 years. ;-)
- poelzi 7y agoStoyan Sarg understood this problem in the 90 and fixed it by building a model from scratch that actually works :)
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoNot being familiar with this author, the biggest reason I dismissed it is because I didn't see any kind of honest discussion that, well, maybe fundamental particle physics is just harder now, in that that next step of what can be probed by experiments isn't actually possible by humans, now or really ever (e.g. requiring a particle accelerator with the radius of Pluto's orbit, etc.) So instead you get all this hand-wringing about the process, about how theorists come up with elegant math that isn't testable, yada yada, without at least an honest statement that "It is at least possible that the universe's final secrets will never be amenable to human inquiry."
- trixie_ 7y agoIt feels from the outside, academic research is performed by an individual or small group that culminates into a paper at the end. When attacking large problems in physics or biology this seems short sighted. A potentially better way would be to attack the problem in an organized manner with teams researching various aspects of the problem and building off of each other. Remove the whole 'paper writing/journal article' from the equation and just keep moving forward. Does this exist? Are teams of researchers coordinated from a high level and moving through problem spaces with clear direction? Or is everyone working on their small piece, trying to get their bit of credit?
- dwaltrip 7y agoYes, they do exist. See the CERN supercollider, LIGO, the DEMO fusion reactor, and many other projects.
- trixie_ 7y agoBut is the research using these tools coordinated? Or are these tool created and then independent researchers schedule time to use them?
- nxpnsv 7y agoI worked many years in particle physics. It is coordinated within each experiment. You can’t just publish as a lot of people stand behind the work there must be consensus. There are abundances of physics sub groups, article review boards, research strategies, etc.q
- trixie_ 7y agoIs it coordinated across experiments?
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- ColanR 7y agoI wonder if what the author is observing is an effect of the industrialization of science. As she pointed out, > Because the existing scientific system does not encourage learning. Physicists today can happily make career by writing papers about things no one has ever observed, and never will observe. Maybe what's really going on is that almost every scientist out there is forced to chase grants and maintain a steady stream of publications. We have to give our scientists the ability to put long-term effort into projects that have a low likelyhood of payoff; otherwise research stagnates. Also, it seems like the 'groupthink' she pointed out is a very real problem. Remember that weird EM drive associated with NASA? We all know that it's nearly impossible that it could be a valid phenomenon; but as a global scientific community, almost everyone dismissed it outright. We should all have jumped on it, to see if it could possibly be true, regardless of how outlandish. If we are unwilling to explore the boundaries of what we know, then we deserve to stagnate, and we will.
- btrettel 7y agoThe inability to make long-term investments is a major reason I don't intend to stay in academia after my PhD. Government and corporate labs don't seem better in my view either. At present my plan is the following: Keep the amount of time spent making money to the minimum needed to support myself. Then I can invest my own time and money into research. I could make money from research via grants/contracts like normal academics, but that's not necessary in this scheme. I'm thinking about starting several SaaS businesses.
- jonbronson 7y ago"In the foundations of physics, we have not seen progress since the mid 1970s when the standard model of particle physics was completed." This seems to discount the explosion of work in the foundations of theoretical physics. Most notably the many variations of String Theory. Just because the work has not yet produced experiments that can validate them do not mean they are not progress. It's some of the most exciting foundational work that's come for decades.
- mindcrime 7y agoJust because the work has not yet produced experiments that can validate them do not mean they are not progress. The argument I've seen expressed about this, is that these advances should more properly be considered advances in mathematics not physics. Or to put it another way "the math works, but we have no idea if it applies to the real world or not." It's a question for the episemologists, I suppose, whether or not we should consider an advance "real new knowledge" if there's no experimental validation.
- Ma8ee 7y agoFor many people that have followed fundamental physics it has become more and apparent that string theory, with its variations, is a dead end. The problem isn’t that no ones has managed to experimentally validate the theory. The problem is that string theory has failed to even make predictions that even in theory could be experimentally tested. Edit: since I’m getting downvoted, is there anything factually wrong with what I have written?
- garmaine 7y agoFellow (former) physicist here. I think you got downvotes because you merely asserted the death of string theory, and didn’t provide any facts. Ironic because string theory doesn’t present any new facts either. Down voters don’t know that what you state about string theory being dead is not just some guys opinion, but a general observation that any unbiased person in the field would infer. String theory was a fad that came and is now out of fashion.
- baked_ziti 7y ago> They do not think about which hypotheses are promising because their education has not taught them to do so. Such self-reflection would require knowledge of the philosophy and sociology of science, and those are subjects physicists merely make dismissive jokes about. Accusing working scientists of being insufficiently reflective on any topic, let alone themselves or the field they work in, seems without merit on its face, and frankly so bizarre as to be silly or even dim-witted. Further, the assertion that only the humanities will save science, or indeed the accusation that scientists are ignorant of the history of science, is a weighty charge that I see no reason to even consider believing. > They believe they are too intelligent to have to think about what they are doing. Come on.
- Ma8ee 7y agoI have a PhD in physics. Even though I have left the field, I’ve hung around with enough of them, and occasionally tried to raise some more philosophical questions with them. Sabine is unfortunately spot on.
- baked_ziti 7y ago> tried to raise some more philosophical questions with them. Like what? Genuinely interested, not seeking to argue.
- Ma8ee 7y agoThis is 10 years ago, so unfortunately I don’t remember details about discussions I never got going. Some were able to argue for their favourite interpretation of QM, or rather, how to resolve the measurement problem, but I mostly got blank stares when I tried to probe a bit more about the ontology. One of the reasons I left academia was that I never found the intellectual and curios environment I longed for. The successful people were successful mostly because they knew how to write grant proposals and which committees they should be on, not because they did really interesting science.
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- at_a_remove 7y agoAlthough I am only in physics by degree and not by practice, I think this is "physics as expected." Old measurements do not change. Over bog standard Newtonian physics, special relativity provides additional decimals in the form of significant figures and mostly in particular circumstances. For plotting the trajectory of a large rock at comparably low speeds, Newton's equations work rather well on Earth, once you take air resistance into account. Even if another theory supplants special relativity for the extreme situations, old ballistic tables will still work. Each advance will have smaller and smaller corrections to the experimental values, in narrower edge cases, even if the mathematics of the newer theory looks completely different. This in turn means that discarding an old theory in favor of a new one by experimental confirmation of what was unexpected in the old system must only come either in the more extreme values (more Telsa to a magnetic field, for example) or with greater precision and accuracy via more elaborate and finely-calibrated equipment. Both are expensive, requiring more time and more work. I believe she is right in that we are certainly on course for some very time-consuming and expensive science. However, I do not see an easy way out of it, nor should we, I believe, expect one. Flip open a CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics; many of the basic values have been long-known. We have added a few more numbers to the right of the decimal in many cases, but that is it. Two hundred years ago, a single person with a modest budget could discover new physics and chemistry. A hundred years ago, a handful of collaborators with some backing could advance these most basic of sciences. By only fifty years back, we are looking at budgets in the millions and teams of scientists working in harness. It may simply be out of reach to disassemble a galaxy to build a collider large enough to test some theories and at that juncture, one might well consider physics "close enough to done." A mote of dust is always going to fall on some surface no matter how often you polish and buff. At some point you have to stop fussing and enjoy your furniture. Yes, it is handy to look for the cases where we can find a way to test our hypotheses for under a million dollars, in no more than a few years. We will run out of those, too. This is "unsexy" to many. The ratcheting noose of entropy in a closed system, which we can only try to run away from at pedestrian sub-light speeds is, bluntly put, a drag.
- c3534l 7y agoI find it strange that the author thinks physicists speculate too much, then says they should turn to philosophy.
- perlgeek 7y agoFor a less negative view, I recommend the podcast by Sean Carrol, another physicist: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/ There's a broad spectrum of topics there, and quite a few episodes talk about the foundation of physics, including the quantum measurement problem (several episodes about that, in fact), string theory and several cosmology topics.
- yaseer 7y agoThis article should reflect on it's own philosophical assumptions. The differential return on progress with time is not linear. Intuitively, progress is harder, the deeper we probe. We have reached the point where we are probing the fundamentals of matter at the smallest and largest scales in the universe. This is much harder to progress on than newton's laws, which could be arrived at through human observation.
- scythe 7y agoPlenty of good points being made in this thread. I'd like to point out that discoveries in fundamental physics do not always come from work in fundamental physics. Physical systems exhibit some "holographic" or "self-similar" tendency where high-level statistical effects will often mimic low-level fundamental dynamics. For example, wave propagation was originally described for pressure waves propagating in a physical medium, then applied to light waves after the work of Maxwell. More recently, the Lorentz transformations, originally used to calculate the effects of finite-speed electric fields on susceptible particles, turned out to be a fundamental property of the universe. And the Hamiltonian path integral formulation, originally a mathematical curiosity, turned out to be crucial for describing relativistic quantum interactions. Some of the work that `yummypaint describes which is being done in quantum chromodynamics -- a field in which we have a working "lattice" approximation but almost no real analytical solutions -- may eventually prove useful for a theory of quantum gravity. However, QCD is still very immature. Those with a little experience will recognize the phrase "non-perturbative" which describes some QCD problems -- this also appears in quantum gravity, where perturbation theory fails. The lattice gauge theory model used to solve QCD problems today cannot be extended to gravity, but other methods might not have this limitation. So the lack of clear and demonstrated progress in fundamental physics does not mean that we are not learning real facts which can eventually be useful for describing fundamental physics. The situation is not so dire. As for critiques of Hossenfelder, it's certainly true that her writing tends to the dramatic. Just last year she was optimistic about asymptotically safe quantum gravity: https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-an-old-theory-of-everything-is-gaining-new-life-20180108/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-an-old-theory-of-everythi... technical FAQ: http://www.percacci.it/roberto/physics/as/faq.html http://www.percacci.it/roberto/physics/as/faq.html One might guess that her tone of despair here is a little performative as well.
- gridlockd 7y agoI approve of the message that perhaps a 40 billion dollar particle accelerator is an unwise investment. Otherwise, I'm not sure there's useful information here. "I try to explain to a cosmologist or particle physicists that we need smarter ways to share information and make decisions in large, like-minded communities." Making decisions in large, like-minded communities? When has that ever been successful? Isn't that pretty much the opposite of what has led to physics breakthroughs, up and to this point? "And please spare me the complaints that I supposedly do not have anything better to suggest, because that is a false accusation. I have said many times that looking at the history of physics teaches us that resolving inconsistencies has been a reliable path to breakthroughs, so that’s what we should focus on." If I was a physicists and some random other physicist of little renown was to suggest that I (and everyone else) need to "focus more on the inconsistencies", I wouldn't exactly be swayed. I would be rolling my eyes. It's just not a very useful suggestion to make.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago>> But for all I can tell at this moment in history I am the only physicist who has at least come up with an idea for what to do. What, in the whole world? That sounds a bit messianic, if I may.
- andy-x 7y agoWith that kind of ego she will soon claim "in the known or visible universe" :)
- senderista 7y agoSour grapes from an underachieving researcher.
- mikorym 7y ago> crisis in physics Me: Hmm... interesting. Personally I think they should spend time consolidating the different mathematical techniques. > Maybe all these string theorists have been wasting tax-money for decades, alright, but in the large scheme of things it’s not all that much money. I grant you that much. Theorists are not expensive. > String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There’s math for it, alright. Pretty math, even. But that doesn’t mean this math describes reality. I don't really understand this part. I am not convinced that her post says much [], because consider this: she is encouraging observation at the expense of speculation and then arguing that observational techniques are more expensive and hence prohibitive in the long run? Is the real "unhappiness" in academia not just as simple as information overflow and the fact that only a few can be famous, whether there are a few or whether there are many? I don't know if that is what people get at with these kinds of blog posts. In any case, what I have found in mathematics is that the names of people whose work are worth reading are not necessarily the ones that you'll encounter first. OP does actually hint at this as well, but again, is it not just information overflow (and shouldn't be made more complicated than that)? [] The one good takeaway that I see is "focus on inconsistencies".
- yummypaint 7y agoFor most problems in the history of physics, people have been able to use pre-existing math that had been developed sometimes hundreds of years before. String theory in an exception to this, and the math needed to do what people want doesn't exist yet. This is part of why im willing to give people who do string theory research a pass on not having testable predictions yet. They are still developing the tools, which is why there tends to be alot of collaboration with mathematicians. Even if this line of research doesnt ultimately yield physical insight, its still moving math forward, and that will ultimately benefit everyone.
- mikorym 7y agoWow, forgot about the \asterisk being a reserved character.
- mikorym 7y ago> crisis in physics Me: Hmm... interesting. Personally I think they should spend time consolidating the different mathematical techniques. > Maybe all these string theorists have been wasting tax-money for decades, alright, but in the large scheme of things it’s not all that much money. I grant you that much. Theorists are not expensive. > String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There’s math for it, alright. Pretty math, even. But that doesn’t mean this math describes reality. I don't really understand this part. I am not convinced that her post says much [1], because consider this: she is encouraging observation at the expense of speculation and then arguing that observational techniques are more expensive and hence prohibitive in the long run? Is the real "unhappiness" in academia not just as simple as information overflow and the fact that only a few can be famous, whether there are a few or whether there are many? I don't know if that is what people get at with these kinds of blog posts. In any case, what I have found in mathematics is that the names of people whose work are worth reading are not necessarily the ones that you'll encounter first. OP does actually hint at this as well, but again, is it not just information overflow (and shouldn't be made more complicated than that)? [1] The one good takeaway that I see is "focus on inconsistencies".
- calhoun137 7y agoThis is an extremelly well written and well thought out post. Thank you. Here is my suggestion: how about for the next LHC scale physics project we get all the governments in the world to put in manhatten project levels of funding to research machines which can control the climate and the weather to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change. This would be a lot more practical and better for science and the future of the human species than confirming what everyone has known with 99%+ confidence for over 30 years. Just my 2 cents.