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What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists (2016)

• ipnon 5y ago
  Turns out physics is actually really easy once you get rid of all the pesky mathematics!
  • archontes 5y ago
    This is what I kept trying to explain to the freshmen and sophomores I used to tutor. The physics is easy once you learn the conservations: energy flows and transforms, can you see where it goes and add it up? The math is hard. Same deal in calculus. Conceptually very easy, you can determine the total by adding up the amount in the slices. Calculus is easy, algebra is hard. For anyone out there beginning their journey reading this, there is nothing I would recommend more than this: do the work; chew the pencil; become very good at algebra.
    • mhh__ 5y ago
      Physics is actually still pretty hard without the maths: if you imagine you have a new phenomena (e.g. a whole bunch of seemingly bizarre "elementary" particles a la hadrons before quarks) characterising them in a way that they can be modelled let alone modelling them is very hard.
      • archontes 5y ago
        I agree, but I think we're talking about slightly different things. I was more referring to the judicious division and encapsulation of concepts that we already understand very well. More science education than science the philosophical pursuit. Which was more the concern of the folks I was tutoring.
    • TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
      I once derived the equation in the Mark's handbook for sizing a drive shaft from first principles for a project, not knowing I could have just looked it up. I can't even imagine being able to do it now. This is what I miss, 30 years post B.S.M.E. as a programmer. I can't do the math any more, because I can't remember the algebra.
      • Teknoman117 5y ago
        It's been 7 years for me and I'm certain I would fail a test in anything past Calc 1 now. I can still remember derivatives, limits, and basic integrals but anything past that would be a wash without going over a textbook first. Ironically I actually did really well in multivariable calculus in college. I had tremendous trouble focusing on anything I didn't find interesting, but once I recognized that all the computer graphics papers I was reading at the time were all based in multivariable calculus and differential equations I was hooked.
        • Qem 5y ago
          I share this experience. It seems advanced math skills are hard to "mothball" properly. Either you keep using them day-to-day, or you'll will lose them real fast.
    • snowwrestler 5y ago
      The challenge of physics is that the relationship between concept and math reverses as the further you go. Early on, studying Newtons laws, the concepts are way easier than the math for most people. Inertia, parabolas, friction, angles.. we can see it and use it every day. But the current state of knowledge is that we can reliably use math to calculate phenomena that seem to have no analog in the familiar concepts that govern our everyday experience. The math of dark matter is fairly straightforward but the concept is so weird that tons of people reject it out of hand (as seen in the comments whenever it comes up on HN).
• tomcat27 5y ago
  I'm probably in the same boat as those people, but in AI. Some of the problems I find interesting are just out of my depth. I don't know exactly what's required and from where to catch up to attempt a particular question in mind. A PhD student's story on this. https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/73n9pm/d_confession_as_an_ai_researcher_seeking_advice/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/73n9pm/d_c...
  • cinntaile 5y ago
    The references should allow you to follow some sort of red thread. They will probably aid in closing the knowledge gap as well. It's probably like in this article (it was a good article btw) though, you need more maths. Either you use university curricula to find out what maths you need as a starting point or you focus on the maths that pops up in the papers and work your way from there.
    • tomcat27 5y ago
      I can't speak for others, but I find scientific literature is not written general audience to understand, for a variety of reasons such as (a) publisher limitation on number of pages (b) to communicate core message right without distraction (c) to not bore a certain people etc. Not to mention, depending on the sub-fields, at least in AI, there is quite a bit of noise in papers as they are explaining _their_ viewpoint which might differ from broad consensus or disproven in future. I find papers are typically written keeping in mind a specific set of people, who are typically in that particular sub-field for some time. In sub-fields like quantum computation, that specific set of people authors have in mind while writing paper are <100, and those are not newbies. Newbies can quickly get discouraged reading a paper out of the blue. Picking the right papers at the beginning requires exposure to the field. It's not simple. I really hope what you said is practical. I tried. Hope it's my fault because the alternative option doesn't exist for me.
  • bmitc 5y ago
    I think part of the problem is that science is not honest with itself. There is some sense that getting a Ph.D. is an institutionalization process, one that does not really reward non-conservative, long-term, or high probability of failure work. And god forbid if someone wants to revisit "known" ideas and results to help clarify them, apply them, or place them in better context. There is very much an "in" crowd in science, which leaves a lot of people, people who could positively contribute, feeling "out". We have commoditized academic research, at least in the science and engineering fields, which makes things very streamlined and on rails. I've spent some time in both academic and industrial circles of mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, and physicists. It is a bit astonishing just how people in each one of these groups all sound like each other and distinct from the other groups. There are particular mannerisms and even idiomatic phrases that each group uses. Some simple ones are that physicists like to say "it goes like" and use the word "codes" to refer to code, as in software code. Computer scientists like to say "it better be". There are many others that I've lost track of and should have written down over these years. Yes, in many ways, the little idiomatic phrases make sense, but it at least lends credence to the question that if they all use the same phrases, something very simple and harmless, how else are they "conditioned"? The book Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives by Jeff Schmidt covers some of this. It all makes me wonder if someone like John Archibald Wheeler, a personal favorite, could be successful in today's academic climate.
• ben_w 5y ago
  Nice to see. I know myself well enough to know that, despite working my way through the physics modules of brilliant.org [0], despite the A-levels in maths and further maths, despite watching and listening to a lot of popsci, I fail any professional scientist’s shibboleth tests. [0] actually all of brilliant.org, but the rest of the learning paths aren’t important to this context
  • cosmojg 5y ago
    Which shibboleth tests would you fail?
    • ben_w 5y ago
      The ones that would allow me to ask questions and get responses like I’m a fresher at university rather than like I mistook Star Trek for a documentary. I absolutely understand not having time for the later — I don’t have time for politicians and pundits who mistake fiction for fact in computer science — but it does mean I can’t use Physics Stack Exchange to learn stuff by asking questions because my questions are, essentially, too dumb.
• bmitc 5y ago
  > Science writers should be more careful to point out when we are using metaphors. I think she should replace "science writers" with physicists. In my experience, it's when physicists give overflowing and superfluous explanations of things that cause the most trouble, because they are viewed as authorities. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, Brian Greene, PBS Space Time, and many others. It's interesting, because I once read an interview with Brian Green, and the question was: what career would you have chosen if you weren't a physicist? His answer was both surprising and unsurprising: a Baptist preacher. One should note that he actually has the speaking style of one. It brings up an interesting point in that physics at the highest level sounds almost like what ill-informed amateurs produce. I have degrees in mathematics and some understanding of physics, but I've watched a few lectures of Ed Witten before, and he might as well be just making it all up. I know, it can all be backed out such that it all follows from known mathematics and physics, but one does have to marvel at the similarity, and I think this is what so-called cranks get emboldened by. It makes it worse when physicists use words like "believe". I think physicists have done a poor job explaining that what they do is model building. The models are not reality. What reality is currently lies in the realm of philosophy. The models physicists build are simply our best descriptions based on what we observe (string theory aside). The article gets at this a bit with mentioning metaphors, but it still doesn't drive home the point because she's referring to metaphors of metaphors (i.e., metaphors for the physical models). Once you understanding that physics is about building models that describes what we observe in physical reality, it lowers the barrier of "authority". In that, in some sense, the entire point of physics is often to find out how we're wrong just as much as it is to clarify where we're right. I think many don't understand that when "is" is used in physics, it really means "is modeled by" (or something to that effect). I'm reminded of this scene from one of my favorite movies, A Serious Man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbzWYjVrvpI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbzWYjVrvpI
  • hilbert42 5y ago
    “I think physicists have done a poor job explaining that what they do is model building. The models are not reality.” I’m not a physicist although I’ve had training in the subject and I’m inclined to agree with you. It seems to me there are at least three issues here; the first is many physicists just aren’t good at drawing analogies or describing what they’re trying to explain; few, say, have Feynman's talent. The second is they aren’t good at pitching their explanation at the right level (to the recipient’s level of knowledge)—they don’t judge the recipient’s level of knowledge well before they answer. And third is that they’ve a level of impatience when it comes to such explanations—that is they’re out of their comfort zone in that they cannot use their usual jargon as they would do with other physicists who talk at their level. (I've seen comments to the effect that 'that cannot be explained, you just have to believe the math' — then they don't bother to actually provide the equation or its reference because it's a text-based web page (not that dissimilar to the explanation of the eqn in the video.) However, it’s not fair to single out physicists alone, this problem often occurs when there’s a disparity of understanding between professionals and others. For example, I’ve experienced the problem here on HN in both directions (that is when I’m replying to a post where I have greater knowledge than the recipient and vice versa). Let’s say we have a physics topic that’s somewhat tricky to explain such as the Aharonov–Bohm effect and I ask a professional physicist who works in the area a general question that to me may be a complex matter but which is a trite one for him/her then the moment he/she gets a whiff of understanding that I’m not at his/her level of understanding—or that I’m not using the proper vernacular then one either doesn't get a reply or alternatively only a short nonchalant one that doesn't answer my question. This isn’t always the case but it often is—in my example the reply may be along the lines 'you’d better get a better understanding of potentials before you tackle that problem.' In the reverse situation when I’m providing an explanation then I’ll often go to considerable lengths to provide a simple explanation but this is not easy as it takes considerable time (especially so if the reply is comparatively short, succinct AND easy to understand). I don’t often succeed and as a result my comments are often too long, tedious and boring thus few people bother to read them. Essentially, one needs to learn how to best answer questions where there's no really good, simple or obvious analogy and I, like many others, don't claim great expertise in doing so. This poor communication amongst technical processionals is a serious problem. One only has to take a glance at the scientific and technical literature to see the problem. Frankly, I’ve often seen papers on topics that I’m competent in that I struggle to read as the language is so strained and obtuse, it’s as if the writers are deliberately going out of their way to sound erudite—but in reality what they’ve written is essentially gobbledygook until the paper has been read and reread multiple times over. This should not be necessary. Moreover, the same problem arises when it comes to math equations. Often there’s an assumption that readers are fully cognizant with the mathematical treatment of the subject and thus writers often leave out intermediate stages that would make the understanding easier or they don’t provide proper explanations and or legends where the symbols are adequately defined, and so on. Again, this smacks of trying to prove how smart they are, but in the end it doesn't do justice to their cause. It seems to me the only way around this problem is to include some communications training in their courses. Incidentally, I don’t think the ‘math problem’ is quite as bad as Hossenfelder makes out (although it is a problem). Most people who are going to ask physicists questions on advanced topics actually do have a reasonable amount of math training behind them, so physicists need to keep the math simple as is possible and spend a little time leading questioners through the tricky bits. On the whole I think Sabine Hossenfelder does a truly excellent job at explaining physics (from my experience of watching her on YouTube), especially so given that she’s doing so in her second language English (if my German were as good as her excellent English then I’d be very pleased). If I have any criticism of her talks then it’s that she pitches her topics lower than I’d like, similarly she uses almost no math in her explanations (but then, I can’t complain, she’s primarily not aiming her talks at people like me).
• overthemoon 5y ago
  Wow, I love this. What a thoughtful, empathetic project. This passage really stuck out to me-- "A typical problem is that, in the absence of equations, they project literal meanings onto words such as ‘grains’ of space-time or particles ‘popping’ in and out of existence. Science writers should be more careful to point out when we are using metaphors. My clients read way too much into pictures, measuring every angle, scrutinising every colour, counting every dash. Illustrators should be more careful to point out what is relevant information and what is artistic freedom. But the most important lesson I’ve learned is that journalists are so successful at making physics seem not so complicated that many readers come away with the impression that they can easily do it themselves. How can we blame them for not knowing what it takes if we never tell them?" Of course, this writing often isn't for the layperson, it's for an audience who can tell the difference between diagram, artistic license, and metaphor, but even so, it's good to think about, especially when communicating science to the general public.
  • bee_rider 5y ago
    I also liked: "I still get the occasional joke from colleagues about my ‘crackpot consultant business’, but I’ve stopped thinking of our clients that way. They are driven by the same desire to understand nature and make a contribution to science as we are. They just weren’t lucky enough to get the required education early in life, and now they have a hard time figuring out where to even begin." In some sense, labeling somebody a "crackpot" assigns a sort of malicious wrongness to them. It is interesting to see somebody who's dealt with a significant subset of these people and discovered more actual, honest misunderstanding than we (or at least I) would have expected.
    • ganzuul 5y ago
      The unfortunate truth is that humans derive status from belittling others. Being highly educated is apparently no defense against this common weakness.
      • jjoonathan 5y ago
        I don't get a status boost from letting google label 80% of my incoming email as spam, but I am quite glad that it does.
• commandlinefan 5y ago
  > After exchanging a few sentences, we can tell if you’re one of us I feel the same way about computer programming/computer programmers, but we get into trouble for saying things like that...
• Gunax 5y ago
  Over 10 years ago I listened to this radio show about a crackpot physicist: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/293/transcript https://www.thisamericanlife.org/293/transcript It's fascinating that this is so well known among physicists but to those of us outside, we are totally unaware that these people exist and that email addresses get deluged. It seems to be a logical trap: physics is interesting enough to attract amateurs but complex enough that no amateur can hope to contribute. Which makes me think the reason biology or sociology doesn't have crackpots (or maybe they do... Ive never heard of it though) is either that they just are not interesting to the retired engineer, or they dont take as many years of intense study.
  • paulpauper 5y ago
    Non-math fields have more subjectiveness, for one. Second, much higher barrier to entry. Someone can investigate something, read some relevant literature, and become an amateur historian, but the barriers to being competent at math and physics are way higher.
  • zmgsabst 5y ago
    They manifest in different ways: - naturopaths, etc - fad diets - cult farming practices - “real” histories - pickup artists Etc.
  • kansface 5y ago
    > Which makes me think the reason biology or sociology doesn't have crackpots ...either that they just are not interesting to the retired engineer, or they dont take as many years of intense study. An alternative, cynical interpretation is that crackpots are indistinguishable from the ordinary output of some fields.
  • nullc 5y ago
    Every sufficiently non-obscure field has crackpots. Most only see ones in their own field, but if you end up as a volunteer handling the wikipedia email queues, you'll see them across all fields. Some fields have more crackpots and more persistent ones, I think it's an open question if that's due to to the field itself or how it's presented in the media. I'm confident that if there are frequent high profile articles on the field that talk about "unsolved problems" or "fundamental limits" that this acts like crackpot catnip.
• kwhitefoot 5y ago
  Brilliant! We should all start thinking more charitably of those who paddle in the shallows of our fields. As Sabine Hossenfelder says "Who knows, we might be the first to hear .." But also it's good to be good to others.
  • mistrial9 5y ago
    this kindness and empathetic thinking is at the core of real educational theory, in some cases.. worthy
  • paulpauper 5y ago
    it's not charity though. she is charging a lot of money, about the same as a lawyer.
    • bsedlm 5y ago
      well, but she's kinda famous, so she can do it, I suppose less famous physicist could still provide similar service for less (like a less prestigious law firm)
      • digisign 5y ago
        Yes, it says the work is now done by para-physicists.
    • JasonFruit 5y ago
      Responding charitably, as in with a loving, understanding attitude, not with charity on the sense of a handout.
• ganzuul 5y ago
  Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal is a great resource if you are looking for a little more than pop-sci. I think the problem science communicators have is that the English speaking tradition divorced itself from natural philosophy so long ago that it seems intractable to build a bridge back to intuition and meaning from algebraic structures and faculty blessings. Fortunately luminaries such as for example Stephen Wolfram and Eric Weinstein are pulling ears, so the entrenched narrative of the nature of reality is no longer the exclusive purview of the pseudomathematical priestly class. :o) I warmly recommend listening to Curt's Salvatore Pais interview, as you will quickly dismiss certain doubts about the intent behind certain patents.
• amtamt 5y ago
  A person willing to spend time, trying to understand nature, rather than wasting countless hours on scrolling pages is very noble, even if one did not get or missed opportunity in earlier years of life. Who knows who ends up being a role model for a bright kid who otherwise would not have taken interest in physics, science or nature, and then goes on to become next Einstein or Tesla or Edison. Also, I am deeply impressed by the group who are continuing spread of knowledge, giving better direction to the fellow explores without judgement. I wish more professionals could spend an hour or two a week/ month in such a way.
  • green_on_black 5y ago
    While that is noble, what isn't is their arrogance and stubborn belief in their own correctness -- and sometimes -- that everyone else is a bumbling idiot.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • dsign 5y ago
      > While that is noble, what isn't is their arrogance and stubborn belief in their own correctness While a lot of very cutting-edge physics is just mathematical theory without experimental proof, another whole lot of it do have enough experimental proof to be considered correct and complete under the right point of view. > that everyone else is a bumbling idiot. But that's exactly the issue :-) ! Well, not really, but how hard can it be? Let's do an example. I'm one of those people who doesn't understand quantum mechanics, so I'll do a search. The first result is a page in Wikipedia, which is heavy with historical fluff but it links to the right places under "Mathematical Formulation". Right in the page it mentions and links to Hilbert spaces, and to all other needed mathematical concepts. If I were to become an armchair quantum physicist, it would take me a few minutes to understand it's all about the math. My next steps would be to buy a $1 paper notebook and a $2 pen, and start my journey. I'm sure that with a little digging, textbooks on quantum mechanics can be found for free. Will it take years for my understanding to advance from point A to point B? Very likely. There is one thing however that I see causes severe issues over the place: people won't do math. It is not just about quantum-physics, but also stuff as mundane as compound interest or investment risk. The amount of missed opportunities and well-being for the dislike of math is astounding. Maybe, as a society, we should do better in that area.
• Xcelerate 5y ago
  And then at the other end of the spectrum, these same types of people decide to go into other fields and end up doing spectacularly well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
• Animats 5y ago
  "As long as you have funding, quantum gravity is basic research at its finest. If not, it’s pretty much useless knowledge." Hm. That bears thinking about. pseudomathematical priestly class Would that be string theory, which doesn't seem to lead to any falsifiable experiments? Smolin is very critical of string theory for that reason. It's apparently mathematically plausible but doesn't seem to lead anywhere. "Science is prediction, not explanation" - Fred Hoyle
  • anon_123g987 5y ago
    > "Science is prediction, not explanation." - Fred Hoyle I don't know about string theory, but this is totally wrong. Exploiting a simple correlation gives you the ability to predict to a certain extent, but that's not science, that's numerology. I couldn't find the source of the quote, but I looked up the guy and found what I expected. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle#Other_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle#Other_controversies: Hoyle also supported the following controversial hypotheses and speculations: The correlation of flu epidemics with the sunspot cycle, with epidemics occurring at the minimum of the cycle. The idea was that flu contagion was scattered in the interstellar medium and reached Earth only when the solar wind had minimum power. [...]
    • Fomite 5y ago
      The best predictive model I've ever made tied rotavirus seasonality to prom dress sales. Science is explanation, which suggests testable predictions.
    • thechao 5y ago
      Hoyle wrote an entire — very entertaining — book at as indictment of the Big Bang hypothesis, which he didn't like. It's called "The Black Cloud".
  • mcguire 5y ago
    That's kind of an odd statement for an astronomer.
  • ganzuul 5y ago
• g8oz 5y ago
  The article comments on the site are thick with the autodidacts with an intuition that the author describes. They all seem to have missed a primary point made in the essay - if you can't describe it with math you have nothing.
  • paulpauper 5y ago
    on the other hand, the curvature of space can be described visually (famous gravity well example)
    • solveit 5y ago
      If that were the only way to describe the curvature of space then it would indeed be useless.
    • jodrellblank 5y ago
      I have never found it comfortable to imagine gravity as a rubber sheet with a weight on it, where Earth's gravity is making the 'model' work by pulling the weight and stretching the sheet. Trying to turn that into a 3D Sun with a planet orbiting it when there is no 'down' separate to the system, trying to imagine gravitational lensing when there is no way to imagine a NASCAR style banked corner in a stretched void, trying to imagine why a black hole can be so dense that light cannot get away. Imagine a rubber sheet and light as a toy car climbing up the well, it's easy to imagine the well becoming so steep that the car wheels cannot grip it, or the car motor cannot lift the weight of the car. Try imagining light heading directly 'out' from a black hole, space is compressed so much that ... what? Light loses its grip on spacetime? Spacetime is not just stretched but is being pulled inwards like a conveyor belt at 3e8 meters/second so light is at an effective standstill? (yet all frames of reference see light moving away from them at the speed of light). It doesn't fit a rubber sheet for anything, really, even the basic planet orbiting the gravity well has no easy imagining in 3D. It's somehow ... Earth taking the path of least action? a straight line in curved spacetime?
      • ncmncm 5y ago
        It was never a productive metaphor, in any way, but it let people with no mathematics feel like they had a sense of things. If you want to reason correctly, it is a trap.
• TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
  I wonder if the author could understand why no one on this board has done the same thing for people who have an idea for "an app," and, hey, they just need you to "program" it all for a 10% cut.
• paulpauper 5y ago
  They are paying her fees comparable to lawyers. of course she is going to be patient. ‘Talk to a physicist. Call me on Skype. $50 per 20 minutes.’ lol i am not poor and that still seems like a lot to me. This is what irked me about the article. They are making it seem like this is some sort of charity or altruistic endeavor. It's a business.
  • fatbird 5y ago
    $150/hour is pretty cheap for a lawyer these days. But even still, a lawyer has a bachelors and a law degree, while this gets 20 minutes talking to someone with a PhD--and in this case, someone with a lot of experience both doing physics and communicating it. The lawyerly equivalent to Sabine Hossenfelder would a partner at a major law firm, whose hourly rate is likely around $1,000. Even if she's now farming it out postgraduates in physics, it still seems like a fair price to me.
    • Fomite 5y ago
      That's half my "I find this project interesting" consulting rate.
  • gowld 5y ago
    She charges very little for what she offers. Memmo.me charges $50 per minute and up. > I now have a small team of consultants on the ‘talk to a physicist’ service. None of us makes great money, and I don’t think we ever will because the market is too small. But broken down to dollars or euros per hour, I’ve had many freelance writing jobs that paid worse.
  • analog31 5y ago
    I gladly play music for $25/hr.
• SilasX 5y ago
  > And I put up a note on my blog offering physics consultation, including help with theory development: ‘Talk to a physicist. Call me on Skype. $50 per 20 minutes.’ Interesting! A lot of times, this is what I want (as the asker) -- to be able to do quick back-and-forth with someone genuinely knowledgeable to identify where my understanding is right and wrong, and where I need to look next. I'd be interested if there were a general platform where you can hire experts on these terms. (Not interested in physics though.)
  • cobertos 5y ago
    I would love a platform like this as well. About 1 hour into an intensive search, I find that I have so many questions that are hard to Google that an expert would easily be able to walk me through. $50 for 20 minutes would be an incredible boon in those situations.
  • tren 5y ago
    How about https://www.kolabtree.com/ https://www.kolabtree.com/? Disclaimer: I have never tried it.
    • SilasX 5y ago
      Close, but that seems to be more for big long-term projects, not “let me pick your brain for an hour”.
• wallfacer120 5y ago
  I don't share the conviction of many in these comments that "is", and "is modeled by" are clearly different concepts, or that distinction is the source of hubris or ignorance about science. Moreover, I don't see any of the science communicator bad guys being mentioned in the comments saying "remember everyone, you DON'T have to understand math to practice high level theoretical physics." I don't think its on those communicators to explain this to people. People are allowed to have interests in stuff that they don't have a practitioners knowledge of, which is good because I'm sure that you have interests and opinions in fields that you don't practice or never studied as well.
• stretchwithme 5y ago
  Sabine is on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1yNl2E66ZzKApQdRuTQ4tw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1yNl2E66ZzKApQdRuTQ4tw
  • john-tells-all 5y ago
    Her video essays are very entertaining and educational. She has a hilarious sense of humor :) Recommended!
  • csours 5y ago
    Edit: disregard this comment, see reply for context I find it odd that this is not acknowledged or linked from the article. Perhaps this is a signal that Aeon is ashamed of YouTube or perhaps they do not want to share traffic to another platform??
    • spxtr 5y ago
      The article is from 2016, before she started her YouTube channel.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • zone411 5y ago
    I stopped watching her channel after her video on the simulation theory. It was very poor. https://lech.substack.com/p/sabine-hossenfelders-video-the-simulation https://lech.substack.com/p/sabine-hossenfelders-video-the-s...
    • ncmncm 5y ago
      Every culture thinks the universe is whatever they just invented. Victorians imagined it was a clock. Now we imagine it's a video game. You can tell from that that it is vacuous.
• mcguire 5y ago
  As a computer scientist, I've only encountered this once. My grad school advisor pointed the guy to me, who insisted on having phone conversations. He was interested in compiler technology; I suggested the Dragon Book, EOPL, and a few other of the usual suspects. He said, "Oh, that's all academic nonsense." I don't think I ever properly thanked Mohammed for that...
  • Banana699 5y ago
    That's the first time I heard about someone rejecting the theoretical basis of compilers on a conspiratorial basis, are you sure that person was rejecting your suggestions out of literally disbelieving in the theory, and not, for example, doing it from the "this 10-line regex is better than any fancy parsing technique out there" angle? It just seems weird to me for somebody to know what a "compiler" is yet refuse to believe the fundamentals. Compilers are pretty niche, there is no glory or mainstream pop science around them.
• paultopia 5y ago
  What a cool project! As a law professor, I get a bunch of crank letters all the time too, but it's typically from people who want legal representation to defend themselves against an imagined conspiracy (often involving the CIA, China/Russia/etc., any of the usual paranoia-suspect churches, etc.). Sadly, setting up a "pay me to talk about it" service would in that case would really not help matters.
• alerax 5y ago
  I'm curious why the author's clients tend to fit my demographic: "Many of them are retired or near retirement, typically with a background in engineering or a related industry. All of them are men." I'm a male engineer in my 40s, and I've recently developed an interest in trying to understand quantum mechanics. I wonder if people like me, seeing the arc of our lives curving closer to its end, develop a natural curiosity about How It All Works/What It All Means.
  • a9h74j 5y ago
    Many things can emerge at different times. > Many of them are retired or near retirement, typically with a background in engineering or a related industry I have heard there is such a thing referred to as "the retiree's patent" -- presumably not fantastically market-worthy, but motivated in part by desire to make a difference or leave a mark.
  • sterlind 5y ago
    I'm a female engineer in my early 30s and I'm very interested in this stuff, to offer a counter-example. I'd be interested in paying a physicist to explain the Scharnhorst effect (predicted travel of photons very slightly faster than c between Casimir plates), and the implications for whether c is a core constant. I can't find much written about this - some papers were published about it in creditable journals iirc, it just hasn't gotten much attention for whatever reason. Something about Hossenfelder rubs me the wrong way though.
• dang 5y ago
  Related: What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28019659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28019659 - July 2021 (2 comments) The Problem with Crackpot Emails from Amateur Physicists (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26590983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26590983 - March 2021 (1 comment) What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12268362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12268362 - Aug 2016 (318 comments)
  • randomsilence 5y ago
    Also related, taking compassion one step further: Study conspiracy theories with compassion https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00879-w https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00879-w https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30859796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30859796
• cft 5y ago
  "All of them are men." I have a PhD in physics and one of Nobel prize laureates in theoretical physics made the following observation in my presence (I will leave him anonymous for obvious reasons): "All crackpots with zero knowledge of physics that have ever emailed me are men. It shows that there's more to the STEM gender gap than discrimination".
  • gifnamething 5y ago
    That's entirely compatible with the concept of girls being pushed away from STEM via social pressure
  • sterlind 5y ago
    I don't understand the point. couldn't it just mean that men are more likely to be crackpots? or that women are more likely to read up before confidently asserting they know the answer? fwiw I'm a woman who's interested in physics, though I haven't contributed any crackpot ideas.
    • digisign 5y ago
      Weren't the "crackpots" lumped in with quite a few folks that weren't confident, merely curious?
• wly_cdgr 5y ago
  When she writes about needing a lot of mathematics, what specifically does she mean and how many thousands of hours of problem solving and proof writing practice are we talking about for a person of average aptitude?
  • relaytheurgency 5y ago
    I can't speak to a doctoral level of knowledge, it's probably not really formalized and will differ on your specialization. But just for my bachelor's degree I took the following courses: Calculus 1, Calculus 2, Vector Calculus, Elementary Linear Algebra, Differential Equations, Linear Algebra. Those are just the courses specifically in the mathematics department. You also cover mathematics within the physics courses themselves of course. Especially in quantum mechanics and E&M. You also might be required to take more math depending on the structure of your degree program, I did a focus in chemistry as well so took more chemistry and less math than other students. I also can't say how many hours I spent on this. But the overwhelming amount of my homework time, every night, was spent writing proofs and solving mathematical equations. To a lay person physics work probably looks no different than mathematics. It was all math all the time :) Sometimes I would have a homework assignment that was only a few "problems" that would take me a dozen hours to solve. As for aptitude, I was probably in the middle amongst other physics students, but that group overall was above average already.
    • wly_cdgr 5y ago
      Thank you!
  • ncmncm 5y ago
    Gather textbooks and work all the problems, and you will do fine. Most of us need to be set straight once in a while.
• joshu 5y ago
  I would love to have access to this in general (but maybe not for a physicist specifically) - sometimes I just am having trouble understanding a paper and want someone to walk me through it. Hire a biologist / computer scientist / etc
  • JabavuAdams 5y ago
    Yeah, me too. I guess investors get this, although there's usually spin.
  • _carbyau_ 5y ago
    Agreed. Personally, I'm interested in circuit board electronics. If people can get a personal trainer for fitness, why not for hobbies/topics of interest?
    • joshu 5y ago
      i want this one specifically, too
  • physicles 5y ago
    Check upwork or fiver. There are people offering a wide variety of expertise in a format similar to that outlined in the article. I know someone who hired someone to talk about designing building ventilation systems for two hours — it was relevant to his work, so he basically found a way to hire a consultant for a fraction of the normal price.
• AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  Well, to be fair, current theory for vacuum energy is 120 orders of magnitude off from observed values from what I've read (IANAPhysicist). That's a lot of runway for crackpot physics.
• robertlagrant 5y ago
  If light is a wave, is it rude to not wave back?
• iainctduncan 5y ago
  This is really interesting, I'll be forwarding to my science writer friends for opinions. Potentially interesting to some: we get the same phenomenon right here on HN regularly! To someone an advanced understanding of music theory (including western harmony, tuning systems, acoustics, psychoacoustics, doing a graduate degree, etc) HN is a regular source of armchair music theorists putting forth their own musical grand unified theories of everything without understanding the foundations. I guess, much like the field the author works in, the nature of it is that a strong understanding of a small piece leads one to easily believe there is this neat and tidy system of well behaving patterns when the reality is vastly more complex. I'd say once a week or so I see posts on HN that are the musical equivalents. I used to answer with pointers to what one might want to learn or suggests books, but really, I have no idea what the right response to that sort of thing is. It's way, way more complicated than one would think coming from a tangentially related field. Perhaps similarly, the popular music theory writing out there creates the same effect.
  • paulpauper 5y ago
    what is an example of this. I find the idea of armchair music experts to be amusing.
    • iainctduncan 5y ago
      hmm, hard to summon one, but mostly about stuff spanning probability/machine learning and tuning systems/harmony. Lots of very naive statistical inferences with conclusions that seem supported by the data - because they don't understand the data. Like "we found out X because of our analysis of the intervals/chords/whatever they are counting" in these pieces. Where the numerical prevalence really doesn't mean anything similar to what they are positing it means. Tuning and systems and harmony are a) freaking complicated b) almost neat, but so, so not neat on closer examination. :-)
    • smartscience 5y ago
      If you want to go digging on Usenet, check out Albert Silvermann (I think it was) on rec.music.theory.
• lucidbee 5y ago
  I have to admit I occasionally have crackpot physics ideas floating around in my head and I actually have seen that Dr Hossenfelder has this service and thought of contacting her. But my tech job took too much time to even clarify my thoughts. (I had probably 5 undergrad physics/astronomy courses.) How many of us have these thoughts I wonder? It's a fun way to pass the time. Recently I thought that rather than thinking of these ideas as physics I should look at them as science fiction and write an amusing story.
  • JabavuAdams 5y ago
    Same here. The crackpot side of me is trying to create intelligent tools to augment my own intelligence, so that I can get smart/fast/wise enough to understand / predict / control enough biology so I don't die of something boring before having a good long time to figure out how to get to a Neutron star or something. Beginning to realize that biology is more complicated than physics (the models, not the scope).
• Animats 5y ago
  I've encountered people with a cult interest in quaternions. To anyone who does 3D graphics, they're just a convenience. But they can be visualized as a point on the surface of a 4D hypersphere, and there are generalizations to higher dimensions and to representations where you can express "rotate 720 degrees". For some, that way lies madness.
  • ncmncm 5y ago
    When you find a quaternion cultist, turn them onto octonions.
    • earleybird 5y ago
      Blasphemer :-) Affine transforms
      • ncmncm 5y ago
        TIL there is an affine cult.
• krisoft 5y ago
  This reminds me a story about my mom. She was a beautiful person, gave me and my brother all she could. She also believed in all kind of pseudo-science. Talking with her I think I gained a deeper understanding of why pseudo scientific things were alluring to her. I remember one day as I was visiting her. She brightened up, like someone who just remembered that they know a cool new story, and told me that scientist has discovered that some people have their sixth (or sevent?) chakra open! I could not act enthusiastically over this. Tried to explain to her politely that based on what I know about the world that does not sound like the kind of thing a real scientist would or could do. She accused me of having a closed mind, and we left the topic. Better be on friendly terms than having a disagreement ruin the mood. A few months later I was visiting with my then girlfriend. She was a medical student and my mom politely inquired what kind of doctor she wanted to be. The girlfriend told her that she is interested in specialising in endocrinology. My mom got really upset that we were using complicated words instead of talking plainly. We realised that she might not know the term, so we explained that an endocrinologist measures hormone levels, diagnoses and cures disorders of the hormone system, etc. Once explained thus, she declared that she never would have thought that hormones can be measured. That was a really surprising to me, because I have clear memories of my mom having an operative understanding about hormones. My grandad had diabetes, and she helped him with stuff related to that. One of her friends had some hormonal disorder and she referred to it as such. What i realised, that i understood hormones on a deeper level than her. Not the way a doctor would, but like I did know that they are molecules which signal cells in our bodies to do or not do specific things. I understood that molecules are just atoms clumped together. And I understood that atoms are just the lego bricks everything around us is built out of. I don't know how exactly one would measure the level of some hormone in ones blood, but I did understand that they are just chemicals, so through complicated analytical means they can be measured. And then I realised that if someone doesn't know these things about hormones, then when she reads a pop-science article talking about this or that hormone, then reads a different article talking about chakras they both sound the exact same kind of gobbledok. They sound both mystical and somehow connected to health. One might hear a story about how someone gained weight after their hormones went out of whack, or one might hear a story how someone cured their depression after they unblocked their heart chakra. If you don't know better, how would you know that one is bulsh*t and the other is a measurable, real thing. In fact here is the thing, the chakras are simpler, easier and nicer. You can see a nice drawing of them! They make sense. Hormones? I know a lot about chemistry, and more than what I would like to know about hormones secreted by the pancreas and even I can't keep all of them straight. There are many of them. They have complicated scientific names. They act in all kind of bizarro complicated ways. Too much is bad, too little is bad. Some are easier to measure analytically, some are harder. Chakras are so much simpler: they can be blocked or open, they have colours, they are associated with organs you have heard of. Simple! Also ... not real in the same sense hormones are. So I guess now I understand how it was hard for my mom to navigate the boundary of science and pseudo-science.
• javajosh 5y ago
  Oddly, most programming seems to lack good models at intermediate levels of complexity. (In physics, those levels are called things like "chemistry" or "cellular biology"). Relational databases have a rigorous model; but what about OOP? What is it? It feels like some sort of weird, misbehaved algebra. I've been doing it a long time, but properly characterizing it escapes me. I'd pay $50 if I thought someone had the answer, but I suspect they don't. (Or if they do, it's more of an opinion).
  • sterlind 5y ago
    on the other hand, you can (sorta) go from lambda calculus up through all the sugar of a nice Lisp. or start with types and evolve dependent types and get all the way to ZFC and theorem proving. there's ways of reasoning about imperative code mathematically too, though I know less about them. OOP itself is more of a style, imo. you can boil it down into the things above if you want to think of it as such. I'm just not sure there's much there mathematically.
  • graycat 5y ago
    Yes, on OOP, once I got into a big battle: We had developed an OOP repository (cache, scoreboard, etc.), then along came CMIS/CMIP, and I was asked to modify our repository to handle CMIS/CMIP. So, off I went, got copies of as many of the CMIS/CMIP documents as I could, read and studied, learned about the registration hierarchy, etc. Finally I concluded the CMIS/CMIP OOP was just for data definitions and was not programming at all. E.g., a CMIS/CMIP object could not do even 1 + 2 = 3, if-then-else, read, write, do while, etc. So, just for storing CMIS/CMIP data, and data is all it was about, the repository we had was already up to the task. So, CMIS/CMIP was OOP only in the sense of inheriting definitions of data. So could define an object for a computer, i.e., list all the data were going to keep on a computer, and then inherit (borrow, copy) from that definition to define a laptop computer.
  • Banana699 5y ago
    http://lucacardelli.name/TheoryOfObjects.html http://lucacardelli.name/TheoryOfObjects.html https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/theoretical-aspects-object-oriented-programming https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/theoretical-aspects-object-or... I'm not any of the ones who wrote those, so I will just accept 10% of your reward :).
• dav_Oz 5y ago
  A very thoughtful piece by Sabine. My advice to college freshmen is to consider universities as a place for meaningful interaction between explorers at different stages. The "learning" (curriculum) part is just a prerequisite done (mostly) all by yourself (through exercise) at your study desk. At the campus you show up prepared to be able to engage with the community (of peers, graduates, postgraduates, professors ...) as you climb up the ranks yourself. At its heart it is very much a social endeavor. But ime especially in physics or mathematics this is much less emphasized. Maybe understandably so in order to encourage working on a "simple" problem for weeks on end ("frustration tolerance") and not to cheat by consulting others immediately after a failed attempt without even trying the "deep dive" of carefully going through the reasoning. >During a decade of education, we physicists learn more than the tools of the trade; we also learn the walk and talk of the community, shared through countless seminars and conferences, meetings, lectures and papers. After exchanging a few sentences, we can tell if you’re one of us. You can’t fake our community slang any more than you can fake a local accent in a foreign country. My clients know so little about current research in physics, they aren’t even aware they’re in a foreign country. This also reminds me of the life of Alexander Grothendieck who after a decade of brilliant work ("Golden Age" in his 30's to 40's) in which he stayed in touch with the mathematical community through unsurmountable correspondence and singlehanendly spread a lot of remarkable seeds which later blossomed wonderfully in the field --- one day vehemently and visibly protested the military-industrial complex in France (because of his traumatic WWII experience), was left alone by his intimidated fellow academics (who were fearful to simply cut off a tremendous amount of funding resources) and then simply stopped engaging with the community all together and never in his later life found a way to come back in (despite his brilliant "track record") but instead grew more and more sour and frustrated becoming isolated, in the end even suffering from (mild) paranoid delusions while only a handful of people/acolytes kept him in touch with the outside world.
  • rileyphone 5y ago
    Re Grothendieck, I'd recommend the book When We Cease to Understand the World, which somewhat romantically tells his story alongside Schwarzschild, Schrodinger, and Heisenberg. It's put me in quite the spirit!
• phkahler 5y ago
  Only problem I saw in there was this: >> Sociologists have long tried and failed to draw a line between science and pseudoscience. In physics, though, that ‘demarcation problem’ is a non-problem, solved by the pragmatic observation that we can reliably tell an outsider when we see one. My issue isn't with the apparent arrogance of the in-club. It's with the certainty she expresses that there isn't any pseudoscience going on inside that club.
  • DantesKite 5y ago
    What’s funny is that she constantly criticizes certain members of the physics community for the very reason you point out.
• bigcat123 5y ago
• mikewarot 5y ago
  What an awesome idea, talk to an expert in X for 20 minutes for a reasonable amount of money. I'd like to talk to someone to designs integrated circuits.
• mynegation 5y ago
  This is awesome! I watched multiple videos by Sabine. She stays on popular level there, pretty much like the journalists she mentions. I am interested in physics. I am one of those middle aged men. Not that I aspire to suddenly come up with a theory of everything that people who dedicated their life to it could not think of. I am just curious. I have a solid applied mathematical background with all the usual basics like linear algebra, real and complex calculus, functional analysis, information theory, probability, statistics, ODEs and PDEs, but I quickly realized that I would need to fill multiple gaps in my math before understanding modern physics: quarternions, tensors, Lie groups and algebras, differential geometry etc. so I am slowly working through this. My problem is: it is pretty hard for me to find a good set of books/textbooks that fill the specific gaps in my math knowledge. I even started to work on DAG of areas and associated textbooks myself but any pointers would be appreciated.
  • mathgenius 5y ago
    You already should be able to get the basics of quantum physics. Have you tried starting there? (Feynman Vol III is a good place to start.) Or are you more interested in general (or special) relativity? Definitely check out John Baez's TWF's [1]. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.04168 https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.04168
  • mrjangles 5y ago
    I can tell immediately that you have never actually picked up a physics textbook. The main reason is that most physicists only have the most elementary understanding of the mathematics underlying what they are doing. This is for historical reasons because usually the physics came first, then the mathematicians came and cleaned everything up. The result is that every physics textbook teaches you exactly what you need to know and not a thing more. Most physicists wouldn't understand group theory or lie groups any better than an undergrad having done the first 3 weeks of an algebra course. I'm telling you this because by listening to too much popular physics rather than actually reading a physics textbook you are going well on your way to becoming one of these people from the article. Anyway, Gerard 't Hooft made a great little website to help people in your situation. https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/theorist.html https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/theorist.html
• msdrigg 5y ago
  A few years ago I was getting a undergraduate degree in physics and I was dating a girl who had a theory of gravity. I don't totally remember the theory now and I never fully understood it at the time, even though she tried to explain it to me. The few times we talked about it, I tried to argue against her theory rather than just listening. This article reminded me of that experience—especially the description of vague images. I think I could have used some advice from this guy, or at least some empathy.
• Dig1t 5y ago
  This was a super interesting article, it makes me sad though. As someone who loves studying physics for fun, it's disheartening to hear how hard it is to be really good at it and how people at the highest levels kind of look down on all the people who are not researchers in the field. I mean, I get it, it's a very difficult field and it requires an incredible rigor to contribute to it. It gives me a kind of "what's the point?" feeling though. The best I can ever be is a crackpot.
  • paulpauper 5y ago
    Academics should see themselves as public servants, not a priest class.
    • _carbyau_ 5y ago
      Agreed. But then funding/employment terms has to be reworked to match.
    • ad404b8a372f2b9 5y ago
      Then why does a PhD include a vow of celibacy, years of silent seclusion to meditate, and the abandonment of greed and ego in favor of beliefs in a greater power?
    • wittycardio 5y ago
      They are doing a public service by calling out the crackpots
  • _carbyau_ 5y ago
    2nd year physics, my first lecture was one of the professors rambling away about quarks and other tiny particles. During that lecture I saw my future life: 1. Highly unlikely best case scenario : Academic treadmill and all that implies, PhD, Postdoc, applying for grants, tenuous employment forevermore etc. The rest of society view me as a crackpot even if my fellow physicists like my ideas. I mean even if you have a Nobel it's not like society in general would value you as much as say Linus. 2. Highly Likely scenario I fail or find something else interesting to do, at some point - all that effort and agony and knowledge of quarks and tiny particles is of very little use in my day to day life. So, like you, "What's the point?" I chose option 2. - go do something else. I walked away and never came back. Studying computers was relevant to my daily decisions every day of my life - even if I were to have a career not directly in IT.
• chadcmulligan 5y ago
  Reminds me of one of my lecturers saying he stopped responding, after a few years of teaching, to people who had built a perpetual motion machine. Also makes me glad I moved into IT, though the bug never leaves you, for anyone in a similar position this is a wonderful book on general rel, and requires very little maths - "Visual Differential Geometry and Forms: A Mathematical Drama in Five Acts"
• larodi 5y ago
  Now translate this to people in IT who never went to university and try to write the next Facebook…
  • bogwog 5y ago
    Or people on internet forums who think software engineering is science
    • triyambakam 5y ago
      Well, by definition any engineering is not science. Engineering is applied science.
  • triyambakam 5y ago
    Well, he didn't write Facebook, but Dan Abramov only took a semester of college and is now one of Facebook's most well known engineers, due to creating Redux.
    • larodi 5y ago
      And how is Redux science? And is it provenly correct? Perhaps Abramov took discreet math class the first year… what is the invention or new theory in Redux? Abramov didn’t write Facebook either. Actually Mark going to university was important for Facebook to take off.
      • triyambakam 5y ago
        You just sound angry and bitter. Why are you shifting the conversation to if it "is science"? You started with "going to university" as the requirement. > Abramov didn’t write Facebook either Yeah, I said that already. > Actually Mark going to university was important for Facebook to take off. Not from what he learned there, though. It was the social benefit. So what's your point - is it education or social benefit? You're not clear.
        • 5y ago
• da39a3ee 5y ago
  One source of crackpots is people who encountered "postmodernist" ideas telling them that science is sexist/racist/whatever, and who then make the jump to thinking that anyone can contribute scientific theories without having to understand the canon, because the canon is part of the sexist/racist institution.
• ThinkBeat 5y ago
  >Sociologists have long tried and failed to draw a line between science and pseudoscience. In physics, though, that ‘demarcation problem’ is a non-problem, solved by the pragmatic observation that we can reliably tell an outsider when we see one. During a decade of education, we physicists learn more than the tools of the trade; we also learn the walk and talk of the community, shared through countless seminars and conferences, meetings, lectures and papers. After exchanging a few sentences, we can tell if you’re one of us. You can’t fake our community slang any more than you can fake a local accent in a foreign country I wanted so badly to find this to be sarcasm or a bit of a joke. I hope it is there, I hope I missed it. If not the arrogance and hubris is monumental. Worthy of some oldschool strictly hieraracal priesthood. We have nice roboes, leather bound books and speak many languages. You will never understand. You cannot understand. Your thinking is of no interest or importance. We shall speak the truth and ye shall listen and obey. The earth is flat. It has always been flat. It shall always remain flat All else is hersay and yes blasphemy. We have spoken. Historically, good ideas have often come from somewhere outside the high priesthood, and for that sin are usually ridiclued and ostracized, sometimes punished in hideaous ways. Now historiclaly yes it happens. But history does not record the 1000000 gazillion times the idea was idiotic. We get a biased view of it when we think about pioneers. Yet it does happen. I know a lot of smart people. I know a couple that I wold rate as geniuses. All of them know far more than me in one or more diciplines. (which is not difficult I may add) I know a few things and a couple of specific things well. They have all suffered my pedestrian inquiries into their realm, and in general done so politely and I have learned so much from them "dumbing it down" for me. A few times I approach a topic from such an odd angle that the discourse turns quite interesitng for both parties. Cross pollination is a real and fascinating thing. A few times I have been on the other end of it. A dear friend who is a neurosurgon, which I still call brain surgery, She is in my opinion a genius and was in the periphery of a Nobel prize. She has called me at odd hours of the night when some technical IT disasters has occured and she needs it to work. If I can I try to diagnose it and talk her trought it. (Or I have to go over there) For her these weird spells and nonsense text strings I have her type have no meaning to her and its all quite mysterious. She is happy when it works again. Just as her «victims» as I like to call them “patients” are happy to have their brainbox doing its thing better Given that I am “neurodivergent” she is usually fascinated with the highly inaccurate theories I have as to how our brains work just because they are at times different. Sometimes she will prompt me for them. We will have lunch and she will tell me about an upcoming case and describe symptoms to me, curious as to what (an idiot) would come up with. One thing my smart friends have in common is the ability to decompose and leave much of the nomenclature out of it. The specific model of abstractions and metaphors that allow people within the know to communicate vastly faster and more accurate with each other is not a hard requirement. to explain how something works. .
• ta988 5y ago
  I've seen a lot of self-taught doctor/pharmacists, touting the latest "antioxidant", "radical scavenging", homeopathy, hormesis... For all kind of diseases, developping their own regimen based on their experience of n=2 or 3. This has exploded with COVID. Even some friends that were presenting themselves as science-driven were taking ivermectin when they got infected and came up with all kind of justifications for it.
• graycat 5y ago
  Thanks Professor Hossenfelder. You mentioned that the amateur physicists don't know enough math. Well, some of us amateur physicists have concluded that the academic physicists don't know enough math. E.g., when I was trying to be a ugrad physics major, the prof in the E&M course tried to prove the divergence theorem. His proof was, in one word, junk. Sadly as a ungrad math major, the math department didn't prove it either. By now, sure, I've gone through fairly careful treatments including the Jacobian, ..., exterior algebra of differential forms (texts by Fleming, Rudin, Apostol, ...). Even some of those treatments are a bit fishy in places and incomplete: Physicists keep using old versions of differentials, and the math books got rid of those 50+ years ago; clean ups are not too difficult but need to be done by either physics or math. The Riemann integral over the whole real line is fishy (smells like old fish). The improper integral approach of integrating from -a to a and then taking the limit as a goes to infinity is also fishy. There is a good clean up -- the Lebesgue theory. Back to the divergence theorem, physics wants to have a 2 dimensional measure they write as dA and a three dimensional measure they write as dV, but there is a gap in their argument: They are necessarily working with what measure theory calls product measure and in particular Fubini's theorem, and there needs to be some orthogonality that is not made clear, in either math or physics. I'm tired of screaming myself to a sore throat over the claims that the wave functions of quantum mechanics form a Hilbert space. Hilbert space is a math idea, and in math departments we know quite well what a Hilbert space is, a complete inner product space. The "complete" part is in the sense of Cauchy, that every Cauchy convergent sequence converges. Well, the wave functions fail that completeness assumption. You mentioned that you can tell backgrounds just from use of language: Right, so can math people! So, when an MIT physics guy teaches quantum mechanics and says that "the wave functions are differentiable and also continuous" we know his background is in physics, not math -- EVERY differentiable function is continuous. It goes on this way: Net, to us math people, it is the physics people who are short on the math. Then beyond the math, some of us amateurs have some other issues with physics: Physics in quantum mechanics keeps talking about superposition and linearity. Us math people know in fine detail just what linearity is -- it's central to linear algebra, Banach space, Hilbert space, integration, differentiation, and more. I have to question if the physics people have a clear understanding of linearity. Then there is superposition -- tough even to make a mathematically credible guess just what physics means by superposition. The last time I was reading from Feynman's Lectures on Physics I recall, before I wanted to get my money back, that he claimed that a particle of unknown position had probability distribution uniform over all of space. WRONG! It's a trivial argument, maybe even at the middle school level, to show that no such distribution can exist. Then setting aside the math and going for something like actual physics, a particle goes through a beam splitter such as the one in the Mach-Zehnder interferometer. On one path from the beam splitter there is a detector. We send in one particle. The beam splitter yields the wave function in two physically separated parts on two very different paths; we believe this from our experience with the full Mach-Zehnder interferometer. This trial we get a signal from the detector. Okay, but what happens to the other part of the wave function? The quantum mechanics lectures and texts don't say. Professor Hossenfelder, some of us amateur physics people are actually math people (e.g., with a Ph.D. degree from a world famous research university and have published peer-reviewed original research in math with theorems and proofs) and look at physics people as very short on math and also sometimes even their physics. Uh, for $50 an hour, I will tutor you in linearity, Lebesgue theory, Hilbert space, and probability theory (based on sigma algebras).
• s-t-876 5y ago
  >"As long as you have funding, quantum gravity is basic research at its finest. If not, it’s pretty much useless knowledge" the issue of the public seeing basic research as useless has always bothered me. and I'm not sure if basic research is truly useless because of its innate nature or if basic researchers themselves make it look useless on purpose because they like it to be secluded from "real life" or maybe it's too exhausting to try to explain to people while it's still ongoing. reading Rutherford's own notes and biography was truly enlightening and refreshing, there is more to physics than the purely theoretical part.he didn't think he was too good to work with his hands. Engineering physics / applied physics / medical physics are all interesting interdisciplinary fields where you can see physics come to life.
  • ravi-delia 5y ago
    Notably none of these use quantum gravity, and none will for a while. I'd really really like us to collectively figure out where the hell spacetime comes from, and I definitely think it's worth the money, but let's not pretend that if theoretical quantum physicists would just roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty there'd be lots of practical applications.
• ggm 5y ago
  My favourite is the language used to describe the moons orbit around the earth. I've had a great conversation about how it works if a rod extends through the earths core to the moon (libration aside) and how it differs from other rotations we describe. Personally, I think it may be wrong to call this "rotating" when it is an orbit with a fixed face presented to the frame of reference in question. Massive chops to anyone prepared to deal with loonies like me, and worse!
• throwaway2474 5y ago
  When I was at university, all the physicists loved to humblebrag about the “crackpots” that came to them, and how much dumber they were than real physicists. They had a similar but less pronounced snobbish dislike for students from other faculties, like engineering. The thing is, most of them (with a couple of exceptions) weren’t actually any smarter. They just “knew the language”, exactly as this article says. Sadly, their attitude turned a number of people off physics I think. The tone of this article is similar. The author kindly took the time to talk to the unwashed masses because he felt sorry for them, or something. But, as he said, he never learnt anything real from them, except how to communicate better with idiots.
  • playpause 5y ago
    I couldn't disagree more about the tone of this article. Is it possible you are projecting your past experience of that snobbish attitude onto this article? To me it seems to be an article about a real, practical attempt to bridge the gap between autodidacts and academics, and is written with empathy and honesty.
    • playpause 5y ago
      Adding to clarify: I agree the snobbish attitude you describe does exist. I just think it’s exactly what this article addresses. He gives an honest report of what it’s like from his perspective, in good humour. And sums it all up with this: > I still get the occasional joke from colleagues about my ‘crackpot consultant business’, but I’ve stopped thinking of our clients that way. They are driven by the same desire to understand nature and make a contribution to science as we are. They just weren’t lucky enough to get the required education early in life, and now they have a hard time figuring out where to even begin. At the same time, the physicists on my team like to help others understand more about science and appreciate the opportunity to apply their knowledge outside academia. In connecting both sides, everybody wins. And who knows? Maybe we’ll be the first to learn of the new Theory of Everything.
• isolli 5y ago
  Conversely, Einstein started as a patents clerk. He had his idea for general relativity when he read about a worker falling off his ladder. Then, with the help of a friend, he spent the next three years learning the mathematical techniques that would help him formalize his idea.
• petesergeant 5y ago
  > Some of them cherish the opportunity to talk to a physicist because one-to-one conversation is simply more efficient than Google. They can shoot up to 20 questions a minute, everything from: ‘How do we know quarks exist?’ to ‘Can atoms contain tiny universes?’ They’re normally young or middle-aged men who want to understand all the nerdy stuff but have no time to lose. Some years ago when I wanted to quickly expand my knowledge of React, I hired some guy to sit with me for four hours and build something with me. I had 1,000 questions and I felt like I got exceptional value for money by just being able to ask them directly and not have to try and extract these from the docs or out of date articles
  • willlma 5y ago
    Where did you find them? I've had experience working with such people and progressed so fast. At other times it's back to hours on docs and StackOverflow. Would love to find mentors for hire.
  • poulpy123 5y ago
    You mean a teacher. That's a bit the principle, yes
• grumple 5y ago
  I like the idea of this consultant work, but I also find the idea that people are incapable of learning a new field because they missed out on lessons earlier in life outrageous and simply incorrect (I don't think the author was intentionally disrespectful here, they've just always been in a community where their life is on rails). Precociousness is one type of intelligence, and early schooling is valuable, but people can always learn, even at the highest level. It is unfortunate that most of our higher education/research programs for science are structured in such a way that entry into those programs is difficult for people that are older and need to maintain a good income. Really we'd need alternate program structures like those for many master's degrees, or more advanced online courses.
• naveen99 5y ago
  Problem of time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_time
• naveen99 5y ago
  His customers could just post on stackoverflow instead: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-relativity?tab=Votes https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-r... I went down a rabbit hole there looking into numerical methods for general relativity.