3 ms·

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 t

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
      I've been a bit short with you because you've written long speculative comments without making any attempt to look up the numbers yourself. That's something to be embarrassed about. I don't have anything at stake here, personally. I am not a string theorist, nor am I dependent on grant funding. But I've worked in and out of academia as a scientist, and it offends me to see you play-acting as a critic of science without even understanding the lay of the land.
      - noch 6y ago
        > I've been a bit short with you because you've written long speculative comments without making any attempt to look up the numbers yourself. That's something to be embarrassed about. That's an assumption on your part, one that is both incorrect and unfortunate. (as far as theoretical physics is concerned.) Embarrassment, however, is largely irrelevant when trying to understand anything in a systematic way. > and it offends me to see you play-acting as a critic of science without even understanding the lay of the land. Offendedness. Well, we simply have different experiences and perspectives within academia. We see the land differently. If that's your threshold for offence then life must be difficult indeed. I don't envy your position. If it will somewhat assuage your being offended I should tell you that, as a mathematician, I champion science above any other human activity. But who I am and what I do should be irrelevant when testing hypotheses.

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
    I've been a bit short with you because you've written long speculative comments without making any attempt to look up the numbers yourself. That's something to be embarrassed about. I don't have anything at stake here, personally. I am not a string theorist, nor am I dependent on grant funding. But I've worked in and out of academia as a scientist, and it offends me to see you play-acting as a critic of science without even understanding the lay of the land.
    - noch 6y ago
      > I've been a bit short with you because you've written long speculative comments without making any attempt to look up the numbers yourself. That's something to be embarrassed about. That's an assumption on your part, one that is both incorrect and unfortunate. (as far as theoretical physics is concerned.) Embarrassment, however, is largely irrelevant when trying to understand anything in a systematic way. > and it offends me to see you play-acting as a critic of science without even understanding the lay of the land. Offendedness. Well, we simply have different experiences and perspectives within academia. We see the land differently. If that's your threshold for offence then life must be difficult indeed. I don't envy your position. If it will somewhat assuage your being offended I should tell you that, as a mathematician, I champion science above any other human activity. But who I am and what I do should be irrelevant when testing hypotheses.