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Well this is kind of funny and I mostly agree so TLDR: > "I’m afraid all of this sounds rather negative. Well. There’s a reason I left particle physics. Partic

Well this is kind of funny and I mostly agree so TLDR: > "I’m afraid all of this sounds rather negative. Well. There’s a reason I left particle physics. Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal progress or for progress in any other discipline of science. The only reason we still hear so much about it is that a lot of funding goes into it and so a lot of people still work on it, most of them don’t like me. But the disciplines where the foundations of physics currently make progress are cosmology and astrophysics, and everything quantum, quantum information, quantum computing, quantum metrology, and so on, which is why that’s what I mostly talk about these days." The popular science literature is also full of string theory this and god particle that, and it's really not very satisfying or illuminating. If people want to get into this general subject, I'd recommend instead Stephen Hawking's compendium of classic papers on quantum physics, with commentary, "The Dreams That Stuff is Made Of."

beezle 5y ago
There are a lot of other areas of physics, some even involving the use of colliders, that are in better position and value to make discoveries that either advance our understanding and/or have applied/commercial application. One example is the National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven. The money spent nationally and globally on these types of facilities are a fraction of what goes to LHC or, not long ago, the Tevatron at Fermilab.
- photochemsyn 5y ago
  Yes, those kind of projects have a lot more uses and deserve more funding and attention. Stanford's Linac Coherent Light Source is another example: > "The Linac Coherent Light Source at SLAC takes X-ray snapshots of atoms and molecules at work, revealing fundamental processes in materials, technology and living things."
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    Moin. > "The European XFEL is a research facility of superlatives: It generates ultrashort X-ray flashes—27 000 times per second and with a brilliance that is a billion times higher than that of the best conventional X-ray radiation sources." [bzzt bzzt bzzt] https://www.xfel.eu/facility/overview/index_eng.html https://www.xfel.eu/facility/overview/index_eng.html
d0mine 5y ago
This part also stand out to me. It is unfortunate that a science communicator would express her research preference in such a way. It is true there were no breakthrough in ages in the particle physics (standard model works extremely well), it is true "paper production" has disproportionate influence on funding (applicable to academia in general), personally I'm excited about the recent deployment of Webb space telescope (new instruments are often good for scientific progress), and quantum computing is gobbledygook (theoretically there were some exciting algorithms, in practice I expect at best modest but nonetheless important [cryptography] applications--that we could duplicate in less elegant way in a classical way) but for people unfamiliar with science it may sound like "defund LHC" (that would be unfortunate)
- katmannthree 5y ago
  > It is unfortunate that a science communicator would express her research preference in such a way. It is disappointing, and more unfortunately pretty much her personal brand now. There are, as she seems to have discovered, a lot of eyeballs to be had when you bash things that are poorly understood and already looked down upon for it. She's a fine physicist and her points have merit, but she's smart enough to be perfectly aware that rather than improving the field through discussions with peers what she's doing here is just capitalizing on that distaste people have for their work and doing what she can to undermine them.
  - brabel 5y ago
    > doing what she can to undermine them. She's not trying to undermine anyone, just giving her opinion about where funding should go in order to actually advance our knowledge of the world.
    - dekhn 5y ago
      She definitely tried to undermine LIGO. This is a very carefully written article designed to cast shade: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/09/whats-up-with-ligo.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/09/whats-up-with-ligo....
bigbillheck 5y ago
> But the disciplines where the foundations of physics currently make progress are cosmology and astrophysics, and everything quantum, quantum information, quantum computing, quantum metrology, and so on Everybody ignores the condensed matter people!
- davrosthedalek 5y ago
  Ah, come on, that's essentially chemistry.
robonerd 5y ago
> "Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal progress [...] But the disciplines where the foundations of physics currently make progress are cosmology and astrophysics [...]" Can anybody explain the relevance of cosmology and astrophysics to societal progress? I'm sure these are very worthwhile fields of study in other respects.. but societal progress?
- photochemsyn 5y ago
  Pale Blue Dot, the snapshot of Earth taken by Voyager I, comes to mind. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/536/voyager-1s-pale-blue-dot/ https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/536/voyager-1s-pale-b... The effect is more psychological than technological, but it shows the foolishness of global warfare and resource exhaustion in the name of short-term profit, and encourages people to live together peacefully and work together to solve global-scale problems.
  - FollowingTheDao 5y ago
    > and encourages people to live together peacefully and work together to solve global-scale problems. Hey, guess what? It didn't work. Have you read the news lately? Besides, I know a few sociopaths that would look at that Pale Blue Dot and think "I want it all".
    - r3trohack3r 5y ago
      According to many metrics, it seems the world is indeed improving over time. The news is a poor source for evaluating the net sum of human suffering - the incentive model is all wrong. https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_is_the_world_getting_better_or_worse_a_look_at_the_numbers https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_is_the_world_getting...
      - FollowingTheDao 5y ago
        As the island of improvement grows, so grows the shores of suffering. But can a dataset really encapsulate human suffering? Is there a lower percent of people suffering but are they each suffering more individually? What is the quality of the suffering? Is it better to suffer 30 years with pain or to die after a month of it?
octonion 5y ago
Contrarianism should never be confused with intelligence. When someone says "most of them don’t like me", you can hear the underlying hisses of "because I am right and they are wrong" and "because I am smart and they are dumb". If most people don't like you, there's a very simple reason for it.
- stubish 5y ago
  She never said 'most people don't like me'. She said 'most [particle physicists] don't like me'. It just means she has touched on a point of contention that particle physicists care a lot about.
gotaquestion 5y ago
> string theory this and god particle that, and it's really not very satisfying or illuminating I think what would be interesting would be a study of why researchers are drawn to string theory. I remember reading about it in OMNI magazine as a teen back in the 80's. During my studies at university, I learned about many proposals in physics that failed after people spend decades trying to hammer into reality (like the electrical ether, or planetary motion), only to have a genius show up and resolve the dilemmas with a completely different proposal. Going on its 5th decade, string theory feels like one of these ancient red herrings, but maybe it just needs a few more centuries?
- planck01 5y ago
  It's because everyone wants to be the new Einstein and his special and general relativity theory were mathematically beautiful. Those theories prophesied new phenomena that were actually found to exist and are real and measurable. I don't think any subsequent new big theory like string theory accomplished that and Einstein-emulation seems a dead end. However theorist don't give up on the approach and quite a lot of them seem to argue that beauty without testability is good enough, while that is really really iffy.
tambourine_man 5y ago
Sabine went on full rant/iconoclastic/grudge mode IMO recently. It's a shame, as she a good communicator, but I just see myself skipping her content when it pops up. “I left the field because it's a paper production machine that adds no value to society” without substantiation is simply a frustration ridden meme.
- ralfn 5y ago
  She wrote a book about this topic. So the claim that there is no substantiation is false. You just didn't bother to find out.
  - tambourine_man 5y ago
    Fair enough, I wasn't aware. I'll check it out. I think you mean this: “Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray” https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Math-Beauty-Physics-Astray/dp/0465094252 https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Math-Beauty-Physics-Astray/dp/04... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1KFTPqc0nQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1KFTPqc0nQ I still find the tone off putting, reminds me of the fox and the grapes fable, not sure if it's known to most cultures. Nevertheless, I'll watch the video and reexamine my opinion.
    - ianai 5y ago
      I’m just generally increasingly off put by the internets incessant “quibbling”. This seemingly endless juxtaposition of antithesis to follow any thesis. At some point that becomes just more noise, and that can be used by an agenda. I still found her point valid and interesting and not at all noise. My takeaway is more that new physics might well be out of our energetic grasps until we build some much larger accelerators. Little idea how to convince society of the worth of that expense. Maybe if it can produce useful substances for industrial use. I’d love more knowledge on expansions to the periodic table, for example.
      - thechao 5y ago
        The HN-centric term for this is "middlebrow"; a good middlebrow filter is definitely required to navigate HN.
DrBazza 5y ago
Another reason many leave is that new ideas don’t get funding. So physics, in particular becomes a monoculture. There is always merit in bad ideas even if the only conclusion is that it was wrong.
noobermin 5y ago
While she makes the rounds on HN, it is really worth noting that as she says, Sabine Hossenfelder is more or less a pariah amongst particle physicists, as was Lee Smolin before her. It's disappointing though because I largely agree with her assessment, too much of particle physics has left what I would consider science and is now a paper generation exercise (not that that isn't throughout science, but particle theory is even more so in that direction). This is one of those places where peer-review fails, if you study or proclaim something against the prevailing norms. There is a slight hope for you if you're a well known name already, like Hossenfelder, but it's pretty much a death sentence for you if you're at a no-name university somewhere. There really is no motivation to pierce the wall vs. just silently doing little incremental work that continues the current established theory even when on a whole that theory is leading the field nowhere. Usually, at some point the funding dries up but they're lucky all the big famous names are sympathetic to particle physics and it continues to command a large amount of funding amongst those studying fundamental physics. So things march on.
oneoff786 5y ago
I’m sure the compendium is good but man does that sound like the perfect name for a stupidly misleading pop science summary of quantum whatever

beezle 5y ago

There are a lot of other areas of physics, some even involving the use of colliders, that are in better position and value to make discoveries that either advance our understanding and/or have applied/commercial application. One example is the National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven. The money spent nationally and globally on these types of facilities are a fraction of what goes to LHC or, not long ago, the Tevatron at Fermilab.

photochemsyn 5y ago
Yes, those kind of projects have a lot more uses and deserve more funding and attention. Stanford's Linac Coherent Light Source is another example: > "The Linac Coherent Light Source at SLAC takes X-ray snapshots of atoms and molecules at work, revealing fundamental processes in materials, technology and living things."
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Moin. > "The European XFEL is a research facility of superlatives: It generates ultrashort X-ray flashes—27 000 times per second and with a brilliance that is a billion times higher than that of the best conventional X-ray radiation sources." [bzzt bzzt bzzt] https://www.xfel.eu/facility/overview/index_eng.html https://www.xfel.eu/facility/overview/index_eng.html

d0mine 5y ago

This part also stand out to me. It is unfortunate that a science communicator would express her research preference in such a way. It is true there were no breakthrough in ages in the particle physics (standard model works extremely well), it is true "paper production" has disproportionate influence on funding (applicable to academia in general), personally I'm excited about the recent deployment of Webb space telescope (new instruments are often good for scientific progress), and quantum computing is gobbledygook (theoretically there were some exciting algorithms, in practice I expect at best modest but nonetheless important [cryptography] applications--that we could duplicate in less elegant way in a classical way) but for people unfamiliar with science it may sound like "defund LHC" (that would be unfortunate)

katmannthree 5y ago
> It is unfortunate that a science communicator would express her research preference in such a way. It is disappointing, and more unfortunately pretty much her personal brand now. There are, as she seems to have discovered, a lot of eyeballs to be had when you bash things that are poorly understood and already looked down upon for it. She's a fine physicist and her points have merit, but she's smart enough to be perfectly aware that rather than improving the field through discussions with peers what she's doing here is just capitalizing on that distaste people have for their work and doing what she can to undermine them.
- brabel 5y ago
  > doing what she can to undermine them. She's not trying to undermine anyone, just giving her opinion about where funding should go in order to actually advance our knowledge of the world.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    She definitely tried to undermine LIGO. This is a very carefully written article designed to cast shade: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/09/whats-up-with-ligo.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/09/whats-up-with-ligo....

bigbillheck 5y ago

> But the disciplines where the foundations of physics currently make progress are cosmology and astrophysics, and everything quantum, quantum information, quantum computing, quantum metrology, and so on Everybody ignores the condensed matter people!

davrosthedalek 5y ago
Ah, come on, that's essentially chemistry.

robonerd 5y ago

> "Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal progress [...] But the disciplines where the foundations of physics currently make progress are cosmology and astrophysics [...]" Can anybody explain the relevance of cosmology and astrophysics to societal progress? I'm sure these are very worthwhile fields of study in other respects.. but societal progress?

photochemsyn 5y ago
Pale Blue Dot, the snapshot of Earth taken by Voyager I, comes to mind. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/536/voyager-1s-pale-blue-dot/ https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/536/voyager-1s-pale-b... The effect is more psychological than technological, but it shows the foolishness of global warfare and resource exhaustion in the name of short-term profit, and encourages people to live together peacefully and work together to solve global-scale problems.
- FollowingTheDao 5y ago
  > and encourages people to live together peacefully and work together to solve global-scale problems. Hey, guess what? It didn't work. Have you read the news lately? Besides, I know a few sociopaths that would look at that Pale Blue Dot and think "I want it all".
  - r3trohack3r 5y ago
    According to many metrics, it seems the world is indeed improving over time. The news is a poor source for evaluating the net sum of human suffering - the incentive model is all wrong. https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_is_the_world_getting_better_or_worse_a_look_at_the_numbers https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_is_the_world_getting...
    - FollowingTheDao 5y ago
      As the island of improvement grows, so grows the shores of suffering. But can a dataset really encapsulate human suffering? Is there a lower percent of people suffering but are they each suffering more individually? What is the quality of the suffering? Is it better to suffer 30 years with pain or to die after a month of it?

octonion 5y ago

Contrarianism should never be confused with intelligence. When someone says "most of them don’t like me", you can hear the underlying hisses of "because I am right and they are wrong" and "because I am smart and they are dumb". If most people don't like you, there's a very simple reason for it.

stubish 5y ago
She never said 'most people don't like me'. She said 'most [particle physicists] don't like me'. It just means she has touched on a point of contention that particle physicists care a lot about.

gotaquestion 5y ago

> string theory this and god particle that, and it's really not very satisfying or illuminating I think what would be interesting would be a study of why researchers are drawn to string theory. I remember reading about it in OMNI magazine as a teen back in the 80's. During my studies at university, I learned about many proposals in physics that failed after people spend decades trying to hammer into reality (like the electrical ether, or planetary motion), only to have a genius show up and resolve the dilemmas with a completely different proposal. Going on its 5th decade, string theory feels like one of these ancient red herrings, but maybe it just needs a few more centuries?

planck01 5y ago
It's because everyone wants to be the new Einstein and his special and general relativity theory were mathematically beautiful. Those theories prophesied new phenomena that were actually found to exist and are real and measurable. I don't think any subsequent new big theory like string theory accomplished that and Einstein-emulation seems a dead end. However theorist don't give up on the approach and quite a lot of them seem to argue that beauty without testability is good enough, while that is really really iffy.

tambourine_man 5y ago

Sabine went on full rant/iconoclastic/grudge mode IMO recently. It's a shame, as she a good communicator, but I just see myself skipping her content when it pops up. “I left the field because it's a paper production machine that adds no value to society” without substantiation is simply a frustration ridden meme.

ralfn 5y ago
She wrote a book about this topic. So the claim that there is no substantiation is false. You just didn't bother to find out.
- tambourine_man 5y ago
  Fair enough, I wasn't aware. I'll check it out. I think you mean this: “Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray” https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Math-Beauty-Physics-Astray/dp/0465094252 https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Math-Beauty-Physics-Astray/dp/04... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1KFTPqc0nQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1KFTPqc0nQ I still find the tone off putting, reminds me of the fox and the grapes fable, not sure if it's known to most cultures. Nevertheless, I'll watch the video and reexamine my opinion.
  - ianai 5y ago
    I’m just generally increasingly off put by the internets incessant “quibbling”. This seemingly endless juxtaposition of antithesis to follow any thesis. At some point that becomes just more noise, and that can be used by an agenda. I still found her point valid and interesting and not at all noise. My takeaway is more that new physics might well be out of our energetic grasps until we build some much larger accelerators. Little idea how to convince society of the worth of that expense. Maybe if it can produce useful substances for industrial use. I’d love more knowledge on expansions to the periodic table, for example.
    - thechao 5y ago
      The HN-centric term for this is "middlebrow"; a good middlebrow filter is definitely required to navigate HN.

DrBazza 5y ago

Another reason many leave is that new ideas don’t get funding. So physics, in particular becomes a monoculture. There is always merit in bad ideas even if the only conclusion is that it was wrong.

noobermin 5y ago

While she makes the rounds on HN, it is really worth noting that as she says, Sabine Hossenfelder is more or less a pariah amongst particle physicists, as was Lee Smolin before her. It's disappointing though because I largely agree with her assessment, too much of particle physics has left what I would consider science and is now a paper generation exercise (not that that isn't throughout science, but particle theory is even more so in that direction). This is one of those places where peer-review fails, if you study or proclaim something against the prevailing norms. There is a slight hope for you if you're a well known name already, like Hossenfelder, but it's pretty much a death sentence for you if you're at a no-name university somewhere. There really is no motivation to pierce the wall vs. just silently doing little incremental work that continues the current established theory even when on a whole that theory is leading the field nowhere. Usually, at some point the funding dries up but they're lucky all the big famous names are sympathetic to particle physics and it continues to command a large amount of funding amongst those studying fundamental physics. So things march on.

oneoff786 5y ago

I’m sure the compendium is good but man does that sound like the perfect name for a stupidly misleading pop science summary of quantum whatever