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> 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 wo

by 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.
- jules 6y ago
  I don't think that's Sabine's point or the parent comment's point, which is mainly about human capital opportunity cost, not funding. Regarding funding, Sabine IS against building a bigger particle collider, which WOULD cost a massive amount of money. The LHC cost ~$5000M.
  - auntienomen 6y ago
    The parent comment is explicitly discussing funding. As for the human capital question, it seems absurd to me to call string theorists the 'most brilliant' and then try to dictate what they should work on.
    - noch 6y ago
      > The parent comment is explicitly discussing funding. Funding is relevant. Tenure, graduate students, postdocs etc, all cost money. That money has to come from somewhere. Money is intimately tied to the human labour/capital question because there's a bijection between time and money. One of my main questions was: how do we measure this cost and reason about it in order to understand the past 50 years of dismal results and make reasonable decisions about the next 50 years? > As for the human capital question, it seems absurd to me to call string theorists the 'most brilliant' and then try to dictate what they should work on What is absurd is to claim that questioning the results of brilliant men and women is absurd. They are not gods to be worshipped blindly. In a startup, would it be absurd for me to question my co-founder and his team's results even though his IQ is 2 standard deviations beyond mine? Let's look further back for a sloppy analogy: is it absurd to criticise Newton's study of alchemy? Was it absurd for his contemporaries, rarely his intellectual equals, to question the results of such studies? What I want from this debate, is a rigorous way to account for the past 50 years of string theory in terms of human intellectual labour cost, general opportunity cost, and return on investment. You seem strangely hostile and defensive. But what I'm looking for is merely for the math to speak for itself so that the debate can be settled once and for all.
      - auntienomen 6y ago

by noch 6y ago

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.

jules 6y ago
I don't think that's Sabine's point or the parent comment's point, which is mainly about human capital opportunity cost, not funding. Regarding funding, Sabine IS against building a bigger particle collider, which WOULD cost a massive amount of money. The LHC cost ~$5000M.
- auntienomen 6y ago
  The parent comment is explicitly discussing funding. As for the human capital question, it seems absurd to me to call string theorists the 'most brilliant' and then try to dictate what they should work on.
  - noch 6y ago
    > The parent comment is explicitly discussing funding. Funding is relevant. Tenure, graduate students, postdocs etc, all cost money. That money has to come from somewhere. Money is intimately tied to the human labour/capital question because there's a bijection between time and money. One of my main questions was: how do we measure this cost and reason about it in order to understand the past 50 years of dismal results and make reasonable decisions about the next 50 years? > As for the human capital question, it seems absurd to me to call string theorists the 'most brilliant' and then try to dictate what they should work on What is absurd is to claim that questioning the results of brilliant men and women is absurd. They are not gods to be worshipped blindly. In a startup, would it be absurd for me to question my co-founder and his team's results even though his IQ is 2 standard deviations beyond mine? Let's look further back for a sloppy analogy: is it absurd to criticise Newton's study of alchemy? Was it absurd for his contemporaries, rarely his intellectual equals, to question the results of such studies? What I want from this debate, is a rigorous way to account for the past 50 years of string theory in terms of human intellectual labour cost, general opportunity cost, and return on investment. You seem strangely hostile and defensive. But what I'm looking for is merely for the math to speak for itself so that the debate can be settled once and for all.
    - auntienomen 6y ago