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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 brea

• 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....
      • pessimizer 5y ago
        Characterizing all (or even just the most dismissive) criticisms as attacks or devious attempts to undermine keeps nice people from being truthful.
        • dekhn 5y ago
          I'm not sure what that means, but she definitely was outright wrong on that one, and she used all her skills to make what looked like a convincing argument for "there just isn't enough data there to conclude gravity waves".
          • robonerd 5y ago
            I don't think the contention here is whether she's right or wrong. Phrasing like 'undermine' and 'cast shade' seems to imply malicious intent, which is going too far. Being wrong isn't the same as being wrong with malicious intent.
            • davrosthedalek 5y ago
              The fact that she chooses to bring forward here doubts via youtube, books, and blogs (i.e. the things she earns money with) instead of/in addition to a well written paper on arxiv (i.e. like everyone else who wants to partake in a honest physics discussion*) lets me question her intent. (She has papers to some of the things she complains about, which normally get answered by rebuttals. This is normal scientific discourse. A blog with locked comments is not.)
              • robonerd 5y ago
                Maybe she's in it for the fame and money, but I don't think that would make her intentions malicious.
                • pa7x1 5y ago
                  She abuses an information asymmetry and social conventions. Scientific discourse is usually conducted in academic papers, for better or worse this is how the community conducts itself. When she criticizes others work or the usefulness of the fields outside this channel she is addressing as a singular voice the general public. Which gives her voice an outsized presence with a public that is not prepared to engage on equal terms on that discourse or prepare any rebuttal. Meanwhile the rest of the physics community looks dumbfounded because she is escaping the typical means of discourse and ratting them out to the general public, that can´t really make an informed judgement. Either she is socially clueless on how this can be seen negatively by the rest of the scientific community or she is malicious in her attempts to defund parts of science she believes shouldn't get funding.
  • photochemsyn 5y ago
    There is a limited pool of resources available to do basic fundamental science and it's fair to argue that things like LHC have absorbed a disproportionate share of these scare resources, without a whole lot to show for it. Since it's the general public that ultimately funds these projects (unless the LHC can attract its own Jeff Bezos), I think it is OK to have a public discussion about it.
    • XorNot 5y ago
      > LHC have absorbed a disproportionate share of these scare resources As opposed to? This sentiment was bandied around a lot before the LHC went online, but no one ever had a proposition of what the alternative was is the goal was to advance fundamental particle physics. You've got exactly 2 ways to probe subatomic interactions: (1) particle accelerator measurement and (2) incidental measurements of high-energy spaceborne collisions. We're doing both. Theoreticians being unable to conclusively find a new measurement is a problem independent of the fact the LHC exists to do those sorts of measurements that they'd need.
      • JackFr 5y ago
        Maybe the physicists are looking for their car keys under the streetlight. Unable to find, them the only solution they can conceive of is a bigger streetlight.
        • davrosthedalek 5y ago
          Which might be the right approach in a world without torches?
      • TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
        As opposed to open season on new theory - or even new kinds of theory. The Standard Model is a bit of a franken-theory of a thing, a kit of parts bolted together in awkward ways. It looks a lot like the pre-quantum ad-hoc theories that attempted to describe quantum effects before QM was invented. It's hard to believe that physics can't do better. But easy to believe that physics won't do better while most of the money and all of the mental space is owned by concepts that are more than a hundred years old now.
  • rout39574 5y ago
    I think her perspective is quite a bit more productive than just capitalizing on distaste. For example, in this discussion she's making concrete criticisms of specific communications patterns. I don't think it's too strong to call it "disinformation" out of the journals. They claimed that the next big toy will prove or disprove supersymmetry. They never acknowledged that their claim had been incorrect, or that it was misleading. Calling out that repeated pattern is, I think, on the respectful side of the public gadfly playbook. I think she wants to "improve the field" by incenting theoretical advances that actually lead to testable predictions. Unfortunately, that transition will put a lot of e.g. string theorists out of work.
    • SiempreViernes 5y ago
      Not really, in the sense that Hossenfelder only advocated for subtracting resources from particle physics, never about what should be funded instead.
      • robonerd 5y ago
        > never about what should be funded instead. This isn't entirely true. In this blog post (http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/04/does-world-need-larger-particle.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/04/does-world-need-lar...) she recommends: > "One of the key motivations for building a larger particle collider that particle physicists like to bring up is that we still do not know what dark matter is made of. But we are not even sure that dark matter is made of particles. And if it’s a particle, we do not know what mass it has or how it interacts. If it’s a light particle, you would not look for it with a bigger collider. So really it makes more sense to collect more information about the astrophysical situation first. That means concretely better telescopes, better sky coverage, better redshift resolution, better frequency coverage, and so on." Though she goes on to say > "But really my intention here is not to advocate a particular alternative. I merely think that physicists should have an honest debate about the evident lack of progress in the foundations of physics and what to do about it."
        • SiempreViernes 5y ago
• kingkawn 5y ago
  Then the Trisolarans will win without question
• adrian_b 5y ago
  Unfortunately the standard model does not work "extremely well". Even if we suppose that the standard model is completely correct, it does not allow the computation of the majority of the useful physical quantities. What is needed is a model that would be able to compute all the physical quantities that are important in practice, e.g. the masses of all hadrons and of all atomic nuclei, also their magnetic moments, the energies of their excited states, the energies of the excited states of the atoms and of the ions, and so on, starting from the properties of the elementary particles and of their interactions. Despite the huge progresses which have happened in experimental physics, we are now no closer of having a useful theory able to compute what we need ab initio, than we were exactly one hundred years ago, before the most influential work in quantum physics was published by de Broglie, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Born et al (from the point of view of the computable values, the Dirac theory of the hydrogen atom was only a minor improvement over what could be done using the Wilson-Sommerfeld quantization condition from 1915 and the more complex systems remained uncomputable; the quantum field theory improved a little the precision of some previously computable values, but only very few other additional quantities became computable ab initio). All the useful applied physics, e.g. the theory of the semiconductor devices, or theory of the lasers, and any other theory used to design real devices, do not have any use for the standard model, but they use various empirical mathematical models, which contain lots of parameters that are determined experimentally, in order to match the predictions of those models with the experiments.
  • selimthegrim 5y ago
    Would you be complaining about Copernicus not adding anything to equants and epicycles if you lived then?
    • robonerd 5y ago
      Copernican heliocentrism still used epicycles, so fans of those would not have been completely disappointed.
    • adrian_b 5y ago
      While another poster rightly pointed that Copernicus still used epicycles, you are correct in implying that the greatest contribution of the theories created after 1920, e.g. quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, chromodynamics etc. has been in the enhancement of our qualitative understanding of the physics of the elementary particles and of their interactions. This qualitative understanding has been very helpful as a guidance in the development of various approximate methods used for the modeling of the systems that are too complex to be computable ab initio, e.g. atomic nuclei, atoms with many electrons, molecules, semiconductors, superconductors and so on. Nevertheless, while the qualitative understanding was improved by the more recent theories, they remain useless for obtaining quantitative results. All physical systems that are interesting are too complex to be computable ab initio, so in order to predict anything about them, wild approximations must be used, which are different for every physical system. There are no universal rules about how to develop such approximations. If an approximation method is found, which after measuring experimentally the values of various parameters allows a model to predict other experiments with sufficient precision, then good. If not, there is no way to know if some other acceptable method can be found, and how to search for it.
• slibhb 5y ago
  > It is unfortunate that a science communicator would express her research preference in such a way. Why is it a bad thing to have preferences? > but for people unfamiliar with science it may sound like "defund LHC" (that would be unfortunate) She's on the record against building bigger colliders. It follows from her views that we should fund other stuff and not colliders.