22 ms·

Sabine’s niche seems to be a confident cynicism or learned skepticism and is a much appreciated addition to the space. I like Sabine’s personality and the fact

by mungal 4y ago

Sabine’s niche seems to be a confident cynicism or learned skepticism and is a much appreciated addition to the space. I like Sabine’s personality and the fact she stands in defiance of the status quo of scientific outreach, namely my two least favorite tropes: “science is fun” and “let me explain something using terrible metaphors because I fail to understand the math myself”. Sabine, if you’re reading this… please create more technical content. Maybe a companion video to your more general takes. One that shows the numerical side of things. Your experience and personality already lend itself to this effort. You say “the math is insufficient” show us the math! Show us how it’s insufficient using numerical examples. Scientific outreach has a real “draw the rest of the owl” problem and I think Sabine is perfectly poised to fill the gap. There’s a George Carlin quote I’ll paraphrase ~“never talk down to your audience, they’ll catch up eventually.”

in3d 4y ago
I find PBS Space Time to be superior to her videos in pretty much every case. https://youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime https://youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime
bsder 4y ago
> Sabine’s niche seems to be a confident cynicism or learned skepticism and is a much appreciated addition to the space. I think Sabine has settled into a niche with a few other physicists of "If you don't even have a hope of testing your theory, what's the point? Let's direct those resources into things that can be tested sometime in the next century." Theoretical physics seems to have a few arenas where it has just completely left the realm of reality. It's not even like "Well, maybe we can test these in a few years when technology gets better" but more like "We would need 15 orders of magnitude more energy than exists in the universe to test this."
zone411 4y ago
Her video on the Simulation Hypothesis was very poor https://lech.substack.com/p/sabine-hossenfelders-video-the-simulation https://lech.substack.com/p/sabine-hossenfelders-video-the-s....
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  Disappointing since it’s so easy to find problems with it in other ways.
- astrange 4y ago
  The responder appears to consider Nick Bostrom an actual philosopher instead of some sort of AI-worshipping SF writer which is never the impression I'd gotten. > Classic Poisoning the Well fallacy. The audience will be predisposed to compare the hypothesis to religion and not take it seriously before any argument is even made. Why shouldn't you take religion seriously? Pretty rude to religions. > There are many theories in theoretical physics where it is very difficult or impossible to come up with experiments to prove or disprove them, e.g. Everett’s Many-Worlds Interpretation or the String Theory. One might call these sorts of theories metaphysical, fine, but it doesn’t make them into disproven pseudoscience or religions. On the other hand, yes it does do that, which is one of her most common points. > Again, it doesn’t mean much that nobody currently knows how to do it. No practical quantum computers exist yet, so obviously, nobody tried to run anything useful on them and more quantum algorithms will be found that run with lower time complexities than on classical computers. This doesn't help him because there aren't any algorithms that are uncomputable on classical computers but computable on quantum computers. She's also correct than quantum computers are special-purpose things and otherwise fairly useless. Though I don't know why the universe wouldn't be a computable function if you allow the computer to have a true random number generator.
  - hither_shores 4y ago
    Bostrom is a full professor of philosophy at Oxford. Whatever you think of his arguments (or more likely, whatever mangled summary of them you ended up getting after the internet played a multi-year game of telephone with them first), he's as actual a philosopher as any living person can be.
    - astrange 4y ago
      I don’t have a degree in the field but one of my parents is a professor of philosophy and the other is a Cambridge MA in it so I think I’m qualified to disrespect him. (I can at least tell you that being a philosophy professor isn’t the same thing as being a philosopher.) More importantly, I know that believing in superintelligence means you’ve been reading too much SF and have forgotten that things can’t exist just because you can imagine them existing. Spend any time worrying about that and next thing you know you’ll have moved to a group home in Berkeley and joined an effective altruism cult.
in3d 4y ago
I find PBS Space Time to be better https://youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime https://youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BurningFrog 4y ago
My random Sabine observation is that her accent is very similar to Albert Einstein's. It took me a while to realize why I thought everything she said sounded so authoritative :)
dj_mc_merlin 4y ago
This is like having someone try to explain what a database is in layman's terms, and then having a member of the audience who has written one HTML webpage demand code. They simply do not even have the basic blocks needed to comprehend databse code down: variables, types etc. You cannot teach them that in any acceptable length of time. Just showing code and pointing at various parts: "this does x", "this other thing does y" is no more useful than using abstract art: the subtle syntax and semantics you are so accustomed to interpreting that you do not even notice it (array subscripts, point dereferences, etc.), they cannot even realize is there. This is why science educators don't show the math. They're not talking down because they want to, but for the same reason you can't explain object relational impedance mismatch to a 7 year old.
mungal 4y ago
I’ll add to this to give an example of someone who I feel is doing a great job of satisfying this very request in the field of mathematics: Timothy Gowers. His yt channel is an excellent resource of theoretical understanding through numerical methods. Here’s my favorite series where he confirms/elucidates a “strange” theoretical fact with an explorative numerical style: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=byjhpzEoXFs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=byjhpzEoXFs Simply superb content.
paufib 4y ago
rrss 4y ago
> Scientific outreach has a real “draw the rest of the owl” problem It seems like this is just the “you need to study the problem and it’s dependencies for many years to understand the physics and mathematical details” problem. Which does not actually seem like much of a problem to be solved, just a reality. Your example in the other comment depends on linear algebra, so ~first year undergraduate of most technical fields. IMO that’s fundamentally more accessible than the black hole information paradox, with its dependencies on general relativity and quantum field theory. I’m sure more technical videos and posts could be made about this, but how small would the target audience be?
- headsoup 4y ago
  > It seems like this is just the “you need to study the problem and it’s dependencies for many years to understand the physics and mathematical details” problem. Which does not actually seem like much of a problem to be solved, just a reality. Which is exactly the "draw the rest of the owl" problem. Something that takes substantial time, skill and knowledge to achieve is demonstrated as "three easy steps."
- mungal 4y ago
  I wonder if we’re in agreement? The key word is ‘numerical’. Maybe you’ve yet to see or do numerical analysis of both general relativity and quantum field theory but they are in fact both linear algebra. Which as you point out is “fundamentally more accessible”.
  - WhitneyLand 4y ago
    >Maybe you’ve yet to see or do numerical analysis of both >general relativity and quantum field theory I call you out. Don’t think you’ve done either one after reading your comments.
  - hither_shores 4y ago
    Numerical relativity is not just or even mostly linear algebra. Even in the weak-field limit, where linearized GR is qualitatively correct, you still have to actually solve the resulting PDE.
mhh__ 4y ago
If you think numerical examples would help you probably need to read a quantum field theory book and understand that this is really complicated stuff. Physicists for the most part aren't talking down spiritually, they're just talking to the equivalent of a child.
- mungal 4y ago
  I made sure to say “outreach” stead “education”. I think it’s a paradox to say “you need to be fully educated on a subject to engage with an explanation intended for lay people”.
- sandpaper26 4y ago
  There's a wonderful textbook, I think by Griffiths, that starts from the premise that if you learn the math of quantum mechanics first (i.e. how to actually set up and solve relevant systems of equations) then it's much easier to learn the meaning and implications after. It gives you a lot of problems up front to give you a rock-solid grounding in numerical examples, and only in part 2 does he delve into what it all means.
  - vmilner 4y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Quantum_Mechanics_(book) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Quantum_Mech...
  - mhh__ 4y ago
    His book on elementary particles perhaps? I think there's a General Relativity book that does the same thing only with the schwarzchild solution, but I'm not sure who wrote it.
  - peteradio 4y ago
    Yes indeed, very early on it shows the equivalence of summing over position/momentum states. Depending on the desired answer one is much easier to calculate.
gotaquestion 4y ago
> “let me explain something using terrible metaphors because I fail to understand the math myself”. Some of these channels have millions of viewers, and the one I think you are referring to has 11M. Remember when the Reimann Zeta function summation of -1/12 was all the rage, or the Banach-Tarsky paradox? Google either of those and there are a dozen YouTube videos for each one. These are post-doctoral topics that become name-dropping buzzwords, I would never claim to understand these, yet people who watched the video do. Which seems like a lot what the internet has given us: information, not knowledge. To quote a speaker I saw at Siggraph in ~1996, "Information is not power, knowledge is power." This hit home. We've seen it from people reading WebMD in the 2000's and then trying to teach their doctors, to the crazy scientific ignorance about mask mandates today. All because of internet edutainment or in the worst-case misinformation. Anyway, yes, her article got cynical fast, but I think it was because she bounded with realism because plotted on the arch of technology evolution: it would take thousands of generations (even at an exponential pace) to create tech that can take actual measurements. That seems like good science to me.
- TillE 4y ago
  Popular science has leaned heavily on terrible, unhelpful metaphors for decades, long before any YouTube channel existed. Of course you can't quickly teach the general public the actual math of quantum mechanics or whatever, but I think it's far far better to explain things in simple terms without further complicating the subject with awkward analogies.
- gus_massa 4y ago
  I agree that most videos in YouTube simplify the problem too much or are just wrong. My recommendations anyway: * Mathologer: "Ramanujan: Making sense of 1+2+3+... = -1/12 and Co." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcKRGpMiVTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcKRGpMiVTw * Vsauce: "The Banach–Tarski Paradox" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s86-Z-CbaHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s86-Z-CbaHA Each one is like half an hour long, but you may need to pause them and rewatch them a few times to understand the details.
  - gotaquestion 4y ago
morelandjs 4y ago
I'll just add that I appreciate her cynicism because there is a staggering amount of bullshit in the high energy theory community. Embracing creativity is absolutely paramount, but people need to grow up and accept their own theory failures when they occur.
- patrick451 4y ago
  This seems to be all of academia. Maybe high energy physics is the worst offender, but from what I saw in gradschool, you need to be half charlatan to make it as a tenured professor, otherwise your grants don't get funded and your papers don't get published.
aeonik 4y ago
Completely agreed. I was skeptical about her at first. My first exposure to her was the panel interview hosted by PBS Space Time "Theories of Everything" https://youtu.be/N_aN8NnoeO0 https://youtu.be/N_aN8NnoeO0 At first I thought she was biased because she was was so skeptical about almost every point during the discussion, but her logic and arguments were all so solid and well thought out, they were impossible to ignore. I checked out her channel, and she was the first YouTuber that I found who actually explained the syntax of Quantum Mechanics equations and what Kets are. https://youtu.be/ctXDXABJRtg https://youtu.be/ctXDXABJRtg More detailed content would be greatly welcomed from her.
- billfruit 4y ago
  Doesn't Feynman Lectures book III explain kets fairly well?
  - hobo_mark 4y ago
    Feynman was a YouTuber?
    - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      How did you go from "Feynman Lectures Book III" to "Youtube"? billfruit was asking about a book.
      - goldenkey 4y ago
        Let me answer for OP. Because all these lectures are actual recorded lectures that have been uploaded to YouTube.
    - 8note 4y ago
      Somebody put his lectures up on YouTube a long time ago. If "person who's content is available on YouTube" qualifies one as a YouTuber, then yes
      - 4y ago
willis936 4y ago
To me it seems more like she failed at creation and found an easier path forward in arson. In a world where FUD spreads faster than truth and not everyone is an expert in every topic: her work does as much, if not more, harm than good. Particularly in fields she is not an expert in.
wildmanx 4y ago
> Sabine’s niche seems to be a confident cynicism or learned skepticism and is a much appreciated addition to the space. While I also appreciate a healthy dose of skepticism, and in weaker moments I can also get very cynical, this is not a very constructive attitude to science or life in general. If we were all doing science like that, we'd not have gotten anywhere. As mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, a "solution" will not only consist of a theory that "solves" the problem in the sense that Sabine described, but even propose experiments that can actually be executed within a time frame (and budget) in order to validate the theory. Just because her colleagues (and Sabine herself) have failed at that so far should not be a reason to give up. With that attitude, there wouldn't be much science left today.
- toast0 4y ago
  > While I also appreciate a healthy dose of skepticism, and in weaker moments I can also get very cynical, this is not a very constructive attitude to science or life in general. If we were all doing science like that, we'd not have gotten anywhere. What I read in this article is pointing out that these black hole information loss papers are not doing science. There are no falsifiable predictions, because we can't actually run a meaningful experiment on black holes. At least in regard to information loss. As someone else in the thread said, thinking about how things might work without a way to tell if your idea is right is philisophy. Last I heard, physics was supposed to be science and not philisophy.
  - wildmanx 4y ago
    Lots of results in theoretical physics couldn't be verified in experiments until decades later. It doesn't mean that it's not science if you can't make an experiment at the moment. "Not falsifiable" commonly refers to no experiment being possible in principle. That's quite different from what you mean.
- throwawayrf 4y ago
  > a reason to give up I don't think Sabine is telling us to "give up". Let me give an example. Suppose there is an experiment that is solvable by building a super collider whose diameter is the diameter of the moon. Should we be rushing to fund it now? Or should we wait for lunar construction techniques to bring the costs down first? Even a lot of physics myths around doing the hard thing to seed other tech is flat out wrong. There's an often claim that the ssc tech resulted in MRI superconducting magnets; but that tech was actually descended from NMR research done by petrochem (and if you can believe it, dairy) industries that precedes the SSC by 1.5 to 2 decades.
squeaky-clean 4y ago
Check out the youtube channel Physics Explained. I don't think you can get much simpler than his videos yet still be numeric. They're great videos though, not pop-sci at all and his explanations are great. But don't expect something you can watch casually.
edgyquant 4y ago
It isn’t talking down to your audience to relate that mathematical logic to them in understandable ways. A lot of people are curious about physics or astronomy but don’t have the time or energy to learn high level math to do so.

by mungal 4y ago

in3d 4y ago

I find PBS Space Time to be superior to her videos in pretty much every case. https://youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime https://youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime

bsder 4y ago

> Sabine’s niche seems to be a confident cynicism or learned skepticism and is a much appreciated addition to the space. I think Sabine has settled into a niche with a few other physicists of "If you don't even have a hope of testing your theory, what's the point? Let's direct those resources into things that can be tested sometime in the next century." Theoretical physics seems to have a few arenas where it has just completely left the realm of reality. It's not even like "Well, maybe we can test these in a few years when technology gets better" but more like "We would need 15 orders of magnitude more energy than exists in the universe to test this."

zone411 4y ago

Her video on the Simulation Hypothesis was very poor https://lech.substack.com/p/sabine-hossenfelders-video-the-simulation https://lech.substack.com/p/sabine-hossenfelders-video-the-s....

zeroonetwothree 4y ago
Disappointing since it’s so easy to find problems with it in other ways.
astrange 4y ago
The responder appears to consider Nick Bostrom an actual philosopher instead of some sort of AI-worshipping SF writer which is never the impression I'd gotten. > Classic Poisoning the Well fallacy. The audience will be predisposed to compare the hypothesis to religion and not take it seriously before any argument is even made. Why shouldn't you take religion seriously? Pretty rude to religions. > There are many theories in theoretical physics where it is very difficult or impossible to come up with experiments to prove or disprove them, e.g. Everett’s Many-Worlds Interpretation or the String Theory. One might call these sorts of theories metaphysical, fine, but it doesn’t make them into disproven pseudoscience or religions. On the other hand, yes it does do that, which is one of her most common points. > Again, it doesn’t mean much that nobody currently knows how to do it. No practical quantum computers exist yet, so obviously, nobody tried to run anything useful on them and more quantum algorithms will be found that run with lower time complexities than on classical computers. This doesn't help him because there aren't any algorithms that are uncomputable on classical computers but computable on quantum computers. She's also correct than quantum computers are special-purpose things and otherwise fairly useless. Though I don't know why the universe wouldn't be a computable function if you allow the computer to have a true random number generator.
- hither_shores 4y ago
  Bostrom is a full professor of philosophy at Oxford. Whatever you think of his arguments (or more likely, whatever mangled summary of them you ended up getting after the internet played a multi-year game of telephone with them first), he's as actual a philosopher as any living person can be.
  - astrange 4y ago
    I don’t have a degree in the field but one of my parents is a professor of philosophy and the other is a Cambridge MA in it so I think I’m qualified to disrespect him. (I can at least tell you that being a philosophy professor isn’t the same thing as being a philosopher.) More importantly, I know that believing in superintelligence means you’ve been reading too much SF and have forgotten that things can’t exist just because you can imagine them existing. Spend any time worrying about that and next thing you know you’ll have moved to a group home in Berkeley and joined an effective altruism cult.

in3d 4y ago

I find PBS Space Time to be better https://youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime https://youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

BurningFrog 4y ago

My random Sabine observation is that her accent is very similar to Albert Einstein's. It took me a while to realize why I thought everything she said sounded so authoritative :)

dj_mc_merlin 4y ago

This is like having someone try to explain what a database is in layman's terms, and then having a member of the audience who has written one HTML webpage demand code. They simply do not even have the basic blocks needed to comprehend databse code down: variables, types etc. You cannot teach them that in any acceptable length of time. Just showing code and pointing at various parts: "this does x", "this other thing does y" is no more useful than using abstract art: the subtle syntax and semantics you are so accustomed to interpreting that you do not even notice it (array subscripts, point dereferences, etc.), they cannot even realize is there. This is why science educators don't show the math. They're not talking down because they want to, but for the same reason you can't explain object relational impedance mismatch to a 7 year old.

mungal 4y ago

I’ll add to this to give an example of someone who I feel is doing a great job of satisfying this very request in the field of mathematics: Timothy Gowers. His yt channel is an excellent resource of theoretical understanding through numerical methods. Here’s my favorite series where he confirms/elucidates a “strange” theoretical fact with an explorative numerical style: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=byjhpzEoXFs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=byjhpzEoXFs Simply superb content.

paufib 4y ago

rrss 4y ago

> Scientific outreach has a real “draw the rest of the owl” problem It seems like this is just the “you need to study the problem and it’s dependencies for many years to understand the physics and mathematical details” problem. Which does not actually seem like much of a problem to be solved, just a reality. Your example in the other comment depends on linear algebra, so ~first year undergraduate of most technical fields. IMO that’s fundamentally more accessible than the black hole information paradox, with its dependencies on general relativity and quantum field theory. I’m sure more technical videos and posts could be made about this, but how small would the target audience be?

headsoup 4y ago
> It seems like this is just the “you need to study the problem and it’s dependencies for many years to understand the physics and mathematical details” problem. Which does not actually seem like much of a problem to be solved, just a reality. Which is exactly the "draw the rest of the owl" problem. Something that takes substantial time, skill and knowledge to achieve is demonstrated as "three easy steps."
mungal 4y ago
I wonder if we’re in agreement? The key word is ‘numerical’. Maybe you’ve yet to see or do numerical analysis of both general relativity and quantum field theory but they are in fact both linear algebra. Which as you point out is “fundamentally more accessible”.
- WhitneyLand 4y ago
  >Maybe you’ve yet to see or do numerical analysis of both >general relativity and quantum field theory I call you out. Don’t think you’ve done either one after reading your comments.
- hither_shores 4y ago
  Numerical relativity is not just or even mostly linear algebra. Even in the weak-field limit, where linearized GR is qualitatively correct, you still have to actually solve the resulting PDE.

mhh__ 4y ago

If you think numerical examples would help you probably need to read a quantum field theory book and understand that this is really complicated stuff. Physicists for the most part aren't talking down spiritually, they're just talking to the equivalent of a child.

mungal 4y ago
I made sure to say “outreach” stead “education”. I think it’s a paradox to say “you need to be fully educated on a subject to engage with an explanation intended for lay people”.
sandpaper26 4y ago
There's a wonderful textbook, I think by Griffiths, that starts from the premise that if you learn the math of quantum mechanics first (i.e. how to actually set up and solve relevant systems of equations) then it's much easier to learn the meaning and implications after. It gives you a lot of problems up front to give you a rock-solid grounding in numerical examples, and only in part 2 does he delve into what it all means.
- vmilner 4y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Quantum_Mechanics_(book) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Quantum_Mech...
- mhh__ 4y ago
  His book on elementary particles perhaps? I think there's a General Relativity book that does the same thing only with the schwarzchild solution, but I'm not sure who wrote it.
- peteradio 4y ago
  Yes indeed, very early on it shows the equivalence of summing over position/momentum states. Depending on the desired answer one is much easier to calculate.

gotaquestion 4y ago

> “let me explain something using terrible metaphors because I fail to understand the math myself”. Some of these channels have millions of viewers, and the one I think you are referring to has 11M. Remember when the Reimann Zeta function summation of -1/12 was all the rage, or the Banach-Tarsky paradox? Google either of those and there are a dozen YouTube videos for each one. These are post-doctoral topics that become name-dropping buzzwords, I would never claim to understand these, yet people who watched the video do. Which seems like a lot what the internet has given us: information, not knowledge. To quote a speaker I saw at Siggraph in ~1996, "Information is not power, knowledge is power." This hit home. We've seen it from people reading WebMD in the 2000's and then trying to teach their doctors, to the crazy scientific ignorance about mask mandates today. All because of internet edutainment or in the worst-case misinformation. Anyway, yes, her article got cynical fast, but I think it was because she bounded with realism because plotted on the arch of technology evolution: it would take thousands of generations (even at an exponential pace) to create tech that can take actual measurements. That seems like good science to me.

TillE 4y ago
Popular science has leaned heavily on terrible, unhelpful metaphors for decades, long before any YouTube channel existed. Of course you can't quickly teach the general public the actual math of quantum mechanics or whatever, but I think it's far far better to explain things in simple terms without further complicating the subject with awkward analogies.
gus_massa 4y ago
I agree that most videos in YouTube simplify the problem too much or are just wrong. My recommendations anyway: * Mathologer: "Ramanujan: Making sense of 1+2+3+... = -1/12 and Co." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcKRGpMiVTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcKRGpMiVTw * Vsauce: "The Banach–Tarski Paradox" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s86-Z-CbaHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s86-Z-CbaHA Each one is like half an hour long, but you may need to pause them and rewatch them a few times to understand the details.
- gotaquestion 4y ago

morelandjs 4y ago

I'll just add that I appreciate her cynicism because there is a staggering amount of bullshit in the high energy theory community. Embracing creativity is absolutely paramount, but people need to grow up and accept their own theory failures when they occur.

patrick451 4y ago
This seems to be all of academia. Maybe high energy physics is the worst offender, but from what I saw in gradschool, you need to be half charlatan to make it as a tenured professor, otherwise your grants don't get funded and your papers don't get published.

aeonik 4y ago

Completely agreed. I was skeptical about her at first. My first exposure to her was the panel interview hosted by PBS Space Time "Theories of Everything" https://youtu.be/N_aN8NnoeO0 https://youtu.be/N_aN8NnoeO0 At first I thought she was biased because she was was so skeptical about almost every point during the discussion, but her logic and arguments were all so solid and well thought out, they were impossible to ignore. I checked out her channel, and she was the first YouTuber that I found who actually explained the syntax of Quantum Mechanics equations and what Kets are. https://youtu.be/ctXDXABJRtg https://youtu.be/ctXDXABJRtg More detailed content would be greatly welcomed from her.

billfruit 4y ago
Doesn't Feynman Lectures book III explain kets fairly well?
- hobo_mark 4y ago
  Feynman was a YouTuber?
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    How did you go from "Feynman Lectures Book III" to "Youtube"? billfruit was asking about a book.
    - goldenkey 4y ago
      Let me answer for OP. Because all these lectures are actual recorded lectures that have been uploaded to YouTube.
  - 8note 4y ago
    Somebody put his lectures up on YouTube a long time ago. If "person who's content is available on YouTube" qualifies one as a YouTuber, then yes
    - 4y ago

willis936 4y ago

To me it seems more like she failed at creation and found an easier path forward in arson. In a world where FUD spreads faster than truth and not everyone is an expert in every topic: her work does as much, if not more, harm than good. Particularly in fields she is not an expert in.

wildmanx 4y ago

> Sabine’s niche seems to be a confident cynicism or learned skepticism and is a much appreciated addition to the space. While I also appreciate a healthy dose of skepticism, and in weaker moments I can also get very cynical, this is not a very constructive attitude to science or life in general. If we were all doing science like that, we'd not have gotten anywhere. As mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, a "solution" will not only consist of a theory that "solves" the problem in the sense that Sabine described, but even propose experiments that can actually be executed within a time frame (and budget) in order to validate the theory. Just because her colleagues (and Sabine herself) have failed at that so far should not be a reason to give up. With that attitude, there wouldn't be much science left today.

toast0 4y ago
> While I also appreciate a healthy dose of skepticism, and in weaker moments I can also get very cynical, this is not a very constructive attitude to science or life in general. If we were all doing science like that, we'd not have gotten anywhere. What I read in this article is pointing out that these black hole information loss papers are not doing science. There are no falsifiable predictions, because we can't actually run a meaningful experiment on black holes. At least in regard to information loss. As someone else in the thread said, thinking about how things might work without a way to tell if your idea is right is philisophy. Last I heard, physics was supposed to be science and not philisophy.
- wildmanx 4y ago
  Lots of results in theoretical physics couldn't be verified in experiments until decades later. It doesn't mean that it's not science if you can't make an experiment at the moment. "Not falsifiable" commonly refers to no experiment being possible in principle. That's quite different from what you mean.
throwawayrf 4y ago
> a reason to give up I don't think Sabine is telling us to "give up". Let me give an example. Suppose there is an experiment that is solvable by building a super collider whose diameter is the diameter of the moon. Should we be rushing to fund it now? Or should we wait for lunar construction techniques to bring the costs down first? Even a lot of physics myths around doing the hard thing to seed other tech is flat out wrong. There's an often claim that the ssc tech resulted in MRI superconducting magnets; but that tech was actually descended from NMR research done by petrochem (and if you can believe it, dairy) industries that precedes the SSC by 1.5 to 2 decades.

squeaky-clean 4y ago

Check out the youtube channel Physics Explained. I don't think you can get much simpler than his videos yet still be numeric. They're great videos though, not pop-sci at all and his explanations are great. But don't expect something you can watch casually.

edgyquant 4y ago

It isn’t talking down to your audience to relate that mathematical logic to them in understandable ways. A lot of people are curious about physics or astronomy but don’t have the time or energy to learn high level math to do so.