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> 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 experien

by 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).
nautilius 5y ago
All of science is model building, or will advance to it (from counting leaves to biochemical models of photosynthesis). When we say we have an understanding of some phenomenon, it means that we have a model that correlates with observations (simplified). It's a failure of an education system that leaves its citizens with no conception of what science is, or how 'progress' is made. That's become very clear with regards to Dr. Fauci and the CDC. They can explain all they want about the current state of understanding (modeling) when they are called out by the public as charlatans when the insight and thus guidelines change.
- hpcjoe 5y ago
  This 1000x. I am flabbergasted at the attacks on scientists explaining current understanding, until I realize that the people attacking very rarely comprehend the process. This isn't a slap at people attacking scientists, it's very much an indictment of our educational and scicomm system, that we say "here is a fully functional adult, who doesn't have the slightest clue as to how this stuff actually works, and we are totally fine with it." As well as experts saying "insert random domain specific jargon here" for said individuals to consume. I've (PhD in physics) taken long (6-8hour) car rides with my Sensei (2 years of college) to tournaments. On the way, we talk about science, and I put in consumable, non-jargon terms, things like the big bang, quantum physics, steller lifecycles, etc. I'm not an expert in some of these, and out of practice in others, but being able to explain to an intelligent and curious person is feature IMO for scientists. One should not be mysterious, or assume mantles of superiority. We all put pants on, one leg at a time. Being able to explain the joy of discovery in an approachable way is a skill. One I'd love to see in graduate schools. My own anecdote on the crackpot bits ... I'd started at SGI in 1995 ABD. I was writing, and it was going slowly. My manager knew I was a physics type, and he forwarded me an email he'd received from someone on a new theory of relativity. Don't ask me why someone would email SGI (a workstation company) about this. I don't know. He asked me to look it over. This is like 4 weeks into the job (my first full time professional job post grad school). I thought this was an assignment worth doing. So I reviewed their paper. I caught a bunch of sign and other related errors they made, and wrote up a summary. He asked me to interact with them. So I sent it back to the people. I got all sorts of weirdness coming back from them. It was a conspiracy to keep their breakthrough out of the public mind. "No", I said, "it was a set of mathematical errors." I pointed out that if they fixed them, they would get normal special relativity. They didn't want to. And complained to my manager. Thus my introduction to internet cranks.
pdonis 5y ago
> I think she should replace "science writers" with physicists. The two are not mutually exclusive. What you're describing is physicists being science writers (or talkers, if they are doing videos or PBS specials). And yes, they are just as sloppy when they do it as non-physicists. > I think physicists have done a poor job explaining that what they do is model building. The models are not reality. I agree. I think this is one of the key sources of confusion for non-physicists trying to learn about physics.
- bmitc 5y ago
  > The two are not mutually exclusive. What you're describing is physicists being science writers That is of course true, but I was trying to point out that it's a much more dangerous situation when writers, presenters, etc. are scientists themselves (whether active or perceived as active), because it allows people to say "well, that's how the experts talk". It's somewhat expected of popular science writers who are not active scientists to speak in a loose way. I do agree that popular science writers need to tighten up their publications, but scientists need to be especially careful when they write for the so-called laymen. I'll take this as a moment to again push my favorite science writing ever, and that's the Scientific American Library book series. It's some of the best written scientific literature for the interested amateur out there, that I know of, written by experts in the fields in very honest (to the source material) ways. https://www.thriftbooks.com/series/scientific-american-library-series/92985/ https://www.thriftbooks.com/series/scientific-american-libra...
  - balsam 5y ago
    Heck, as a physicist let me clue you in: most physicists simply use single words or short phrases to describe a whole vague bunch of related concepts. What the hell is “entanglement”. Oh my if physicists from two different subfields would try to unpack each others conception they would spend a whole day arguing like those old theologians about the nature of the Holy Ghost. Another is the interchangeable usage of “Lie groups” and “Lie algebra.” It helps, I guess, to realize that these words are actually labels for certain heuristics or sequences of mathematical operations. They work more or less when everyone is taught to use the same techniques but a farce when squeezed for puns.. not looking forward to the emergence of “hair loss” in both professional and journalistic black hole discourse— and yes, another religious term, “emergence”. Bastards.
mhh__ 5y ago
Physicists probably do do a poor job, but the general public are literally incapable of understand at any level so I don't think they should lose too much sleep over it. The over use of anthropomorphization and metaphor is an issue but equally they're usually not completely made up.
crispyambulance 5y ago
I think physicists are "careful enough" with their communications to the general public and amongst themselves. At the end of the day, they got work to do after all. The weird thing about physics is that it attracts a lot of strange fellows that want to grapple with these ideas much like the OP is working with. As far as I know, no other field attracts such folks, and no, people who cargo-cult Kubernetes into their small company workflow for resume bullet-points are NOT the same kind of person as someone who would waltz into a general relativity colloquium, from the street, sporting no degree whatsoever (it happens). There's whole categories of outsiders, some call them cranks, who get involved with physics. John Baez even has a purity test of sorts for this (the crackpot index): https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  I agree, it is oddly unique to physics.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > I think physicists are "careful enough" By what standard? The general public doesn't understand physics and makes little use of it. > The weird thing about physics is that it attracts a lot of strange fellows that want to grapple with these ideas much like the OP is working with. Isn't that what attracts all physicists, and humanity in its quest to understand its world?
  - crispyambulance 5y ago
    > ...general public doesn't understand physics and makes little use of it. There's plenty of general science interest in the public and a significant fraction is focused on physics. It doesn't matter if folks don't "make use of it" aside from a bit of enlightenment and wonder. Some physicists have developed quite a public persona and have used that to reach out to the public. Others stay focused on communications within their own community-- both are fine. The particular kind of autodidactic "cranks" Sabine Hossenfelder (too) generously wrote about are, in my opinion, a very different kind of beast than merely curious folks who want to learn stuff.
newaccount74 5y ago
I think a big problem is that phycisists in particular and scientists in general like to come up with colorful stories that go along with their work, that have little resemblance to their actual work. They end up telling stories that have nothing to do with the science they are supposedly talking about. For example, "quantum teleportation" has nothing to do with the common meaning of the word "teleportation", but boy do people love talking and writing about it. The popular articles that are written about them don't tell you anything about what they are actually doing, even if you actually know the theory behind it.
- gowld 5y ago
  That's a strong accusation against the people who predicted and then found the God Particle.
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    A terrible nickname, if there was ever one !
- a-dub 5y ago
  i suspect this is largely driven by pressures to publish in high profile journals, which can tend to take interest in flashy sounding introductions and conclusions.
wallfacer120 5y ago
For those popular science communicators that you mentioned, do you feel that they are misinforming their audience by oversimplifying? Or by leaving them with genuinely wrong ideas?
- gowld 5y ago
  For people who can study physics (such as students) it's confusing and misleading, and harms their efforts to understand the real material. (Source: studied physics in college, and had a hard time dislodging the nonsense metaphors about things like "virtual particles".) For people who can, it's just fairy tales, so what's the point of instilling a false sense of understanding? Physics is mathematical models + experimental data. Good physical intiution comes from familiarity bred of working through math problems and observing experiments. Bad intuition comes from metaphors.
  - andi999 5y ago
    The 'virtual particle' non-sense (or very limited sense as artefacts of pertubation theory) goes very deep. Ask and 9 out of 10 physicists will tell you there are such thing (otherwise how do you explain Casimir effect), even at a reputable high energy lab the 'reason' for the range of interaction was given by Heisenbergs uncertainty applied to the creation of (massive) interactive virtual particles. If it is interesting: from 10:00 onwards discussion about the reality of individual terms of the pertubation series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72us6pnbEvE&t=1367s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72us6pnbEvE&t=1367s
  - wallfacer120 5y ago
    "For people who can, it's just fairy tales, so what's the point of instilling a false sense of understanding?" I think this statement is worth examining a little bit. This statement implies that, unless you are going to develop a working knowledge of the math and become a practicing physicist, then you shouldn't bother reading anything about it.
- mrjangles 5y ago
  They definitely misinform their audience for money.
gowld 5y ago
Briane Greene is very knowledgeable about physics, and brilliant at math, but his main life's work isn't as physicist. His work is embedding physics in mathematical models in a way that is does not generate empirically testable predictions. His string theory work has the same amount of support as real-Universe physics as does a Baptist preacher's sermons.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  I used to think the string theorists were a bunch of charlatans. But matching first-principles entropy at the event horizon gives me pause. Even if they are all wrong about anything beyond the Standard Model, they have a sort of encoding of it in its entirety that ought to suggest places to look for interesting phenomena. Maybe the math is too hard to predict what happens in such places, but they will have done something useful in pointing at them. It's not exactly science, as such, but not everything useful has to be. (I gather that in the stringy black hole model, there is no actual space inside the horizon, so no need for a singularity. I may have misunderstood.)
  - selimthegrim 5y ago
    Bethe Ansatz solutions too if you like condensed matter stuff.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  To be fair, it's not their fault that the energies required for testing are way outside our reach.
robocat 5y ago
> 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 That is beautifully appropriate to the article — thank you.
- bmitc 5y ago
  If you haven't seen the movie, I highly recommend it. It's a bit of a sleeper hit I think, even for Coen brothers fans. It's really quite perfect and nails all the colloquialisms it gets at, which are a plenty. I rewatch it every now and then and just laugh my ass off.
  - selimthegrim 5y ago
    There are some mistakes on the board in the scene where Abelman pounds his head into it but I assure you other grad students in my department and I enjoyed the movie immensely nonetheless.
    - bmitc 5y ago
      I almost mentioned that, so it's funny you did. Lol. I noticed when I saw it in the theater that the formula for the variance was written wrong. If I recall correctly, it was zero because it was subtracting the same term twice since either both squares were either inside or outside the brackets instead of the proper formula. I never went back to take a look at the rest of the board. Upon rewatches, my eyes always go back to that same spot.
alecst 5y ago
In undergrad physics we had a saying: "the only thing we know for sure is that all of our equations are wrong."
paulpauper 5y ago
I think physicists have done a poor job explaining that what they do is model building. The models are not reality. They can be considered approximations of reality. To say they are not reality seems dismissive. Newtonian physics is as close to 'real' as anyone is going to find.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  Putting it another way : physical models are not Truth.
Koshkin 5y ago
> One should note that he actually has the speaking style of one. Indeed, just one quote from his recent opus Until the End of Time..., "the uncertainty principle demonstrated that there are features of the world - like the position and the speed of a particle - that a classical physicist in the mold of Isaac Newton would adamantly claim can be specified with complete certainty but that a quantum physicist realizes are burdened by a quantum fuzziness", says it all.
silicon2401 5y ago
> 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. Do you have examples of this? sounds interesting
codethief 5y ago
> 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, As someone with a degree in mathematical physics, my experience with many string theorists in general (however – and I want to stress this – not with Ed Witten in particular) is that their statements and claims don't all strictly follow from known math and physics. Quite often there are huge logical gaps, implicit assumptions or implicit redefinitions of commonly used terminology. For instance, when a string theorist says that "We know that quantum theory dictates XY" or that "Any theory of quantum gravity needs to obey XY", then it might very well be that their implicit assumption is that string theory is the right fundamental theory of nature (i.e. that it makes correct predictions) and that they rather mean something like "We know that quantum theory dictates XY if we model the universe as AdS_5 × S⁵" or "Any stringy theory of quantum gravity needs to obey XY". More generally, my experience has been that a significant number of people doing string theory lack a sufficiently deep mathematical foundation. Theoretical physicists in general are already quite cavalier when it comes to mathematical rigor and in string theory it's even worse because most quantum field theories are not even mathematically well-defined. So everyone grows up learning to ignore mathematical issues and a large number of people then end up thinking they can just "wing" the math and pick up the required mathematical bits and pieces on the go. So they end up using the same terminology as mathematicians while not really understanding it and/or not really being precise with their words nor in their arguments. At least for me this makes it extremely difficult to tell whether someone is (unknowingly) bullshitting or their claims need to be taken seriously.

by bmitc 5y ago

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).

nautilius 5y ago

All of science is model building, or will advance to it (from counting leaves to biochemical models of photosynthesis). When we say we have an understanding of some phenomenon, it means that we have a model that correlates with observations (simplified). It's a failure of an education system that leaves its citizens with no conception of what science is, or how 'progress' is made. That's become very clear with regards to Dr. Fauci and the CDC. They can explain all they want about the current state of understanding (modeling) when they are called out by the public as charlatans when the insight and thus guidelines change.

hpcjoe 5y ago
This 1000x. I am flabbergasted at the attacks on scientists explaining current understanding, until I realize that the people attacking very rarely comprehend the process. This isn't a slap at people attacking scientists, it's very much an indictment of our educational and scicomm system, that we say "here is a fully functional adult, who doesn't have the slightest clue as to how this stuff actually works, and we are totally fine with it." As well as experts saying "insert random domain specific jargon here" for said individuals to consume. I've (PhD in physics) taken long (6-8hour) car rides with my Sensei (2 years of college) to tournaments. On the way, we talk about science, and I put in consumable, non-jargon terms, things like the big bang, quantum physics, steller lifecycles, etc. I'm not an expert in some of these, and out of practice in others, but being able to explain to an intelligent and curious person is feature IMO for scientists. One should not be mysterious, or assume mantles of superiority. We all put pants on, one leg at a time. Being able to explain the joy of discovery in an approachable way is a skill. One I'd love to see in graduate schools. My own anecdote on the crackpot bits ... I'd started at SGI in 1995 ABD. I was writing, and it was going slowly. My manager knew I was a physics type, and he forwarded me an email he'd received from someone on a new theory of relativity. Don't ask me why someone would email SGI (a workstation company) about this. I don't know. He asked me to look it over. This is like 4 weeks into the job (my first full time professional job post grad school). I thought this was an assignment worth doing. So I reviewed their paper. I caught a bunch of sign and other related errors they made, and wrote up a summary. He asked me to interact with them. So I sent it back to the people. I got all sorts of weirdness coming back from them. It was a conspiracy to keep their breakthrough out of the public mind. "No", I said, "it was a set of mathematical errors." I pointed out that if they fixed them, they would get normal special relativity. They didn't want to. And complained to my manager. Thus my introduction to internet cranks.

pdonis 5y ago

> I think she should replace "science writers" with physicists. The two are not mutually exclusive. What you're describing is physicists being science writers (or talkers, if they are doing videos or PBS specials). And yes, they are just as sloppy when they do it as non-physicists. > I think physicists have done a poor job explaining that what they do is model building. The models are not reality. I agree. I think this is one of the key sources of confusion for non-physicists trying to learn about physics.

bmitc 5y ago
> The two are not mutually exclusive. What you're describing is physicists being science writers That is of course true, but I was trying to point out that it's a much more dangerous situation when writers, presenters, etc. are scientists themselves (whether active or perceived as active), because it allows people to say "well, that's how the experts talk". It's somewhat expected of popular science writers who are not active scientists to speak in a loose way. I do agree that popular science writers need to tighten up their publications, but scientists need to be especially careful when they write for the so-called laymen. I'll take this as a moment to again push my favorite science writing ever, and that's the Scientific American Library book series. It's some of the best written scientific literature for the interested amateur out there, that I know of, written by experts in the fields in very honest (to the source material) ways. https://www.thriftbooks.com/series/scientific-american-library-series/92985/ https://www.thriftbooks.com/series/scientific-american-libra...
- balsam 5y ago
  Heck, as a physicist let me clue you in: most physicists simply use single words or short phrases to describe a whole vague bunch of related concepts. What the hell is “entanglement”. Oh my if physicists from two different subfields would try to unpack each others conception they would spend a whole day arguing like those old theologians about the nature of the Holy Ghost. Another is the interchangeable usage of “Lie groups” and “Lie algebra.” It helps, I guess, to realize that these words are actually labels for certain heuristics or sequences of mathematical operations. They work more or less when everyone is taught to use the same techniques but a farce when squeezed for puns.. not looking forward to the emergence of “hair loss” in both professional and journalistic black hole discourse— and yes, another religious term, “emergence”. Bastards.

mhh__ 5y ago

Physicists probably do do a poor job, but the general public are literally incapable of understand at any level so I don't think they should lose too much sleep over it. The over use of anthropomorphization and metaphor is an issue but equally they're usually not completely made up.

crispyambulance 5y ago

I think physicists are "careful enough" with their communications to the general public and amongst themselves. At the end of the day, they got work to do after all. The weird thing about physics is that it attracts a lot of strange fellows that want to grapple with these ideas much like the OP is working with. As far as I know, no other field attracts such folks, and no, people who cargo-cult Kubernetes into their small company workflow for resume bullet-points are NOT the same kind of person as someone who would waltz into a general relativity colloquium, from the street, sporting no degree whatsoever (it happens). There's whole categories of outsiders, some call them cranks, who get involved with physics. John Baez even has a purity test of sorts for this (the crackpot index): https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

whimsicalism 5y ago
I agree, it is oddly unique to physics.
wolverine876 5y ago
> I think physicists are "careful enough" By what standard? The general public doesn't understand physics and makes little use of it. > The weird thing about physics is that it attracts a lot of strange fellows that want to grapple with these ideas much like the OP is working with. Isn't that what attracts all physicists, and humanity in its quest to understand its world?
- crispyambulance 5y ago
  > ...general public doesn't understand physics and makes little use of it. There's plenty of general science interest in the public and a significant fraction is focused on physics. It doesn't matter if folks don't "make use of it" aside from a bit of enlightenment and wonder. Some physicists have developed quite a public persona and have used that to reach out to the public. Others stay focused on communications within their own community-- both are fine. The particular kind of autodidactic "cranks" Sabine Hossenfelder (too) generously wrote about are, in my opinion, a very different kind of beast than merely curious folks who want to learn stuff.

newaccount74 5y ago

I think a big problem is that phycisists in particular and scientists in general like to come up with colorful stories that go along with their work, that have little resemblance to their actual work. They end up telling stories that have nothing to do with the science they are supposedly talking about. For example, "quantum teleportation" has nothing to do with the common meaning of the word "teleportation", but boy do people love talking and writing about it. The popular articles that are written about them don't tell you anything about what they are actually doing, even if you actually know the theory behind it.

gowld 5y ago
That's a strong accusation against the people who predicted and then found the God Particle.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  A terrible nickname, if there was ever one !
a-dub 5y ago
i suspect this is largely driven by pressures to publish in high profile journals, which can tend to take interest in flashy sounding introductions and conclusions.

wallfacer120 5y ago

For those popular science communicators that you mentioned, do you feel that they are misinforming their audience by oversimplifying? Or by leaving them with genuinely wrong ideas?

gowld 5y ago
For people who can study physics (such as students) it's confusing and misleading, and harms their efforts to understand the real material. (Source: studied physics in college, and had a hard time dislodging the nonsense metaphors about things like "virtual particles".) For people who can, it's just fairy tales, so what's the point of instilling a false sense of understanding? Physics is mathematical models + experimental data. Good physical intiution comes from familiarity bred of working through math problems and observing experiments. Bad intuition comes from metaphors.
- andi999 5y ago
  The 'virtual particle' non-sense (or very limited sense as artefacts of pertubation theory) goes very deep. Ask and 9 out of 10 physicists will tell you there are such thing (otherwise how do you explain Casimir effect), even at a reputable high energy lab the 'reason' for the range of interaction was given by Heisenbergs uncertainty applied to the creation of (massive) interactive virtual particles. If it is interesting: from 10:00 onwards discussion about the reality of individual terms of the pertubation series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72us6pnbEvE&t=1367s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72us6pnbEvE&t=1367s
- wallfacer120 5y ago
  "For people who can, it's just fairy tales, so what's the point of instilling a false sense of understanding?" I think this statement is worth examining a little bit. This statement implies that, unless you are going to develop a working knowledge of the math and become a practicing physicist, then you shouldn't bother reading anything about it.
mrjangles 5y ago
They definitely misinform their audience for money.

gowld 5y ago

Briane Greene is very knowledgeable about physics, and brilliant at math, but his main life's work isn't as physicist. His work is embedding physics in mathematical models in a way that is does not generate empirically testable predictions. His string theory work has the same amount of support as real-Universe physics as does a Baptist preacher's sermons.

ncmncm 5y ago
I used to think the string theorists were a bunch of charlatans. But matching first-principles entropy at the event horizon gives me pause. Even if they are all wrong about anything beyond the Standard Model, they have a sort of encoding of it in its entirety that ought to suggest places to look for interesting phenomena. Maybe the math is too hard to predict what happens in such places, but they will have done something useful in pointing at them. It's not exactly science, as such, but not everything useful has to be. (I gather that in the stringy black hole model, there is no actual space inside the horizon, so no need for a singularity. I may have misunderstood.)
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  Bethe Ansatz solutions too if you like condensed matter stuff.
BlueTemplar 5y ago
To be fair, it's not their fault that the energies required for testing are way outside our reach.

robocat 5y ago

> 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 That is beautifully appropriate to the article — thank you.

bmitc 5y ago
If you haven't seen the movie, I highly recommend it. It's a bit of a sleeper hit I think, even for Coen brothers fans. It's really quite perfect and nails all the colloquialisms it gets at, which are a plenty. I rewatch it every now and then and just laugh my ass off.
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  There are some mistakes on the board in the scene where Abelman pounds his head into it but I assure you other grad students in my department and I enjoyed the movie immensely nonetheless.
  - bmitc 5y ago
    I almost mentioned that, so it's funny you did. Lol. I noticed when I saw it in the theater that the formula for the variance was written wrong. If I recall correctly, it was zero because it was subtracting the same term twice since either both squares were either inside or outside the brackets instead of the proper formula. I never went back to take a look at the rest of the board. Upon rewatches, my eyes always go back to that same spot.

alecst 5y ago

In undergrad physics we had a saying: "the only thing we know for sure is that all of our equations are wrong."

paulpauper 5y ago

I think physicists have done a poor job explaining that what they do is model building. The models are not reality. They can be considered approximations of reality. To say they are not reality seems dismissive. Newtonian physics is as close to 'real' as anyone is going to find.

BlueTemplar 5y ago
Putting it another way : physical models are not Truth.

Koshkin 5y ago

> One should note that he actually has the speaking style of one. Indeed, just one quote from his recent opus Until the End of Time..., "the uncertainty principle demonstrated that there are features of the world - like the position and the speed of a particle - that a classical physicist in the mold of Isaac Newton would adamantly claim can be specified with complete certainty but that a quantum physicist realizes are burdened by a quantum fuzziness", says it all.

silicon2401 5y ago

> 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. Do you have examples of this? sounds interesting

codethief 5y ago

> 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, As someone with a degree in mathematical physics, my experience with many string theorists in general (however – and I want to stress this – not with Ed Witten in particular) is that their statements and claims don't all strictly follow from known math and physics. Quite often there are huge logical gaps, implicit assumptions or implicit redefinitions of commonly used terminology. For instance, when a string theorist says that "We know that quantum theory dictates XY" or that "Any theory of quantum gravity needs to obey XY", then it might very well be that their implicit assumption is that string theory is the right fundamental theory of nature (i.e. that it makes correct predictions) and that they rather mean something like "We know that quantum theory dictates XY if we model the universe as AdS_5 × S⁵" or "Any stringy theory of quantum gravity needs to obey XY". More generally, my experience has been that a significant number of people doing string theory lack a sufficiently deep mathematical foundation. Theoretical physicists in general are already quite cavalier when it comes to mathematical rigor and in string theory it's even worse because most quantum field theories are not even mathematically well-defined. So everyone grows up learning to ignore mathematical issues and a large number of people then end up thinking they can just "wing" the math and pick up the required mathematical bits and pieces on the go. So they end up using the same terminology as mathematicians while not really understanding it and/or not really being precise with their words nor in their arguments. At least for me this makes it extremely difficult to tell whether someone is (unknowingly) bullshitting or their claims need to be taken seriously.