4 ms·

I'm glad that Sabine correctly describes Wolfram, Weinstein, and Lisi's theories as what they really are. I'm disappointed that she trots out the tired old "ze

by knzhou 6y ago

I'm glad that Sabine correctly describes Wolfram, Weinstein, and Lisi's theories as what they really are. I'm disappointed that she trots out the tired old "zero sum game" rhetoric. I work on small-scale experiments, a field that Sabine portrays as starved of funding because of string theory. But that's not at all how funding actually works. Generally, all of our boats rise or fall together. String theory is so distant from my field that defunding it and expecting funding for me to rise is like defunding pharmacology and expecting an immediate revolution in palaeontology. Removing funding from one subfield doesn't move it to your favorite field, it just removes it from science in general.

philwelch 6y ago
Well, maybe. Or maybe concentrating funding in less promising fields and approaches leads to disappointing results, which in turn leads to lower funding in the long term.
immmmmm 6y ago
I really like her blog, it brings a lot of critical thinking in a field that often lack of. I however think she misses the point by constantly taking string theory as the sole example of bad science.. Disclaimer: I a former string theorist who has worked in many other scientific fields.
- immmmmm 6y ago
  ... and string theory was the most badly funded field i ever worked in...
  - cygx 6y ago
    Imagine what we could have achived with all that money allocated to buy paper and pencils for string theorists!
- neutronicus 6y ago
  Yeah, in grad school the theory grad students were the ones who had to TA a bunch to cover gaps in their funding. When you have a couple million tied up in lab equipment it's easy to divert some to grad students to keep it running but us theory folk were switching projects every couple years just to keep the lights on as it were
noch 6y ago
> I work on small-scale experiments, a field that Sabine portrays as starved of funding because of string theory. But that's not at all how funding actually works. Generally, all of our boats rise or fall together. Please could you quantify this a bit? The competition for grants seems to be fierce. It's hard to see how such a competitive game is not close to zero-sum. The question is: As scientists and civilians, 1) how to we model/quantify the opportunity cost of 50 years of String Theory? 2) What was the expected value of String Theory (what promises were made?). What has been the ROI? Hypotheses: What string theory did, among other things, might have been: 1) crowd out the market for ideas. The perception was created by the media and within academia,that String Theory was/is the hottest idea available. Arguably humanity's most brilliant theoretical physicists and mathematicians seem to have been seduced/compelled into spending their lives working on it. Perhaps one might quantify how many graduate students ended up not exploring other ideas because of the primacy of string theory. 2) caused a perception that physics research is cheaper than it is, effectively reducing the cost expectation in the market. If string theory is the best idea, and it is purely mathematical, then a university or institution could easily claim to have a cutting-edge physics department, not by funding infrastructure for expensive experiments, but by hiring a string theorist. This in turn might lead to graduate students who can only be trained in string theory. Other institutions might be induced to reduce their costs to the level of string theory institutions/departments. If String Theory is the best idea, how do I justify spending 100x more money than the String Theory department in order to run experiments or train graduate students to do experiments or even work on their crazy new ideas? 3) Lowered the standards to which Physics is held. If the hottest field in Physics is not required to have any relation to reality, and requires no physical evidence by which ideas are tested for almost half a century, then one might convince themselves that physics can be done purely abstractly, rather than as physical science. For the entire field of Physics to be led in this way, is terrifying.
- auntienomen 6y ago
  You seem to assume that the people who control physics funding are a bunch of schmucks who're just shoveling money at string theorists. This is very far from the truth. If you want to understand something about high energy physics funding, a good starting place is the DoE's HEP budget. https://science.osti.gov/-/media/budget/pdf/sc-budget-request-to-congress/fy-2021/FY_2021_SC_HEP_Cong_Budget.pdf https://science.osti.gov/-/media/budget/pdf/sc-budget-reques... Headline numbers: * FY 2021 request: $818M * amount going to all theory /computation: $122M * amount going to 'Theory': $30M That theory funding is going to be split among people working on a wide variety of topics, from phenomenology to cosmology to strings. (In fact, the word 'string' doesn't even appear in the document.) In budgetary terms, string theory is a complete sideshow. It gets a lot of media attention, but most string theorists are earning their salary by teaching, rather than from grants. Likewise, very very few string theory grad students are being paid from grant money. I think your worries about string theorists leading the physics community astray are rather overblown. If it was going to happen, it would have happened twenty years ago, when string theory was at the apex of its prestige. What you generally saw was that places like Rutgers would go from having half a dozen theorists out of a department of 60 physicists to having a dozen theorists out of a department of 66. But the real physicists weren't corrupted or crowded out. They just went right on doing science.

by knzhou 6y ago

philwelch 6y ago

Well, maybe. Or maybe concentrating funding in less promising fields and approaches leads to disappointing results, which in turn leads to lower funding in the long term.

immmmmm 6y ago

I really like her blog, it brings a lot of critical thinking in a field that often lack of. I however think she misses the point by constantly taking string theory as the sole example of bad science.. Disclaimer: I a former string theorist who has worked in many other scientific fields.

immmmmm 6y ago
... and string theory was the most badly funded field i ever worked in...
- cygx 6y ago
  Imagine what we could have achived with all that money allocated to buy paper and pencils for string theorists!
neutronicus 6y ago
Yeah, in grad school the theory grad students were the ones who had to TA a bunch to cover gaps in their funding. When you have a couple million tied up in lab equipment it's easy to divert some to grad students to keep it running but us theory folk were switching projects every couple years just to keep the lights on as it were

noch 6y ago

> I work on small-scale experiments, a field that Sabine portrays as starved of funding because of string theory. But that's not at all how funding actually works. Generally, all of our boats rise or fall together. Please could you quantify this a bit? The competition for grants seems to be fierce. It's hard to see how such a competitive game is not close to zero-sum. The question is: As scientists and civilians, 1) how to we model/quantify the opportunity cost of 50 years of String Theory? 2) What was the expected value of String Theory (what promises were made?). What has been the ROI? Hypotheses: What string theory did, among other things, might have been: 1) crowd out the market for ideas. The perception was created by the media and within academia,that String Theory was/is the hottest idea available. Arguably humanity's most brilliant theoretical physicists and mathematicians seem to have been seduced/compelled into spending their lives working on it. Perhaps one might quantify how many graduate students ended up not exploring other ideas because of the primacy of string theory. 2) caused a perception that physics research is cheaper than it is, effectively reducing the cost expectation in the market. If string theory is the best idea, and it is purely mathematical, then a university or institution could easily claim to have a cutting-edge physics department, not by funding infrastructure for expensive experiments, but by hiring a string theorist. This in turn might lead to graduate students who can only be trained in string theory. Other institutions might be induced to reduce their costs to the level of string theory institutions/departments. If String Theory is the best idea, how do I justify spending 100x more money than the String Theory department in order to run experiments or train graduate students to do experiments or even work on their crazy new ideas? 3) Lowered the standards to which Physics is held. If the hottest field in Physics is not required to have any relation to reality, and requires no physical evidence by which ideas are tested for almost half a century, then one might convince themselves that physics can be done purely abstractly, rather than as physical science. For the entire field of Physics to be led in this way, is terrifying.

auntienomen 6y ago
You seem to assume that the people who control physics funding are a bunch of schmucks who're just shoveling money at string theorists. This is very far from the truth. If you want to understand something about high energy physics funding, a good starting place is the DoE's HEP budget. https://science.osti.gov/-/media/budget/pdf/sc-budget-request-to-congress/fy-2021/FY_2021_SC_HEP_Cong_Budget.pdf https://science.osti.gov/-/media/budget/pdf/sc-budget-reques... Headline numbers: * FY 2021 request: $818M * amount going to all theory /computation: $122M * amount going to 'Theory': $30M That theory funding is going to be split among people working on a wide variety of topics, from phenomenology to cosmology to strings. (In fact, the word 'string' doesn't even appear in the document.) In budgetary terms, string theory is a complete sideshow. It gets a lot of media attention, but most string theorists are earning their salary by teaching, rather than from grants. Likewise, very very few string theory grad students are being paid from grant money. I think your worries about string theorists leading the physics community astray are rather overblown. If it was going to happen, it would have happened twenty years ago, when string theory was at the apex of its prestige. What you generally saw was that places like Rutgers would go from having half a dozen theorists out of a department of 60 physicists to having a dozen theorists out of a department of 66. But the real physicists weren't corrupted or crowded out. They just went right on doing science.