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> It is unfortunate that a science communicator would express her research preference in such a way. It is disappointing, and more unfortunately pretty much he

> 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
    Characterizing all (or even just the most dismissive) criticisms as attacks or devious attempts to undermine keeps nice people from being truthful.
    - dekhn 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
        Maybe she's in it for the fame and money, but I don't think that would make her intentions malicious.
        pa7x1 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
      Which might be the right approach in a world without torches?
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
  Not really, in the sense that Hossenfelder only advocated for subtracting resources from particle physics, never about what should be funded instead.
  - robonerd 4y 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 4y ago

brabel 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
  Characterizing all (or even just the most dismissive) criticisms as attacks or devious attempts to undermine keeps nice people from being truthful.
  - dekhn 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
        Maybe she's in it for the fame and money, but I don't think that would make her intentions malicious.
        pa7x1 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
    Which might be the right approach in a world without torches?
- TheOtherHobbes 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
Not really, in the sense that Hossenfelder only advocated for subtracting resources from particle physics, never about what should be funded instead.
- robonerd 4y 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 4y ago