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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 pop

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.
      - ianai 5y ago
        Can you elaborate?
        gralx 5y ago
        ya i aint never heard the term b4 neither. colorful. wonder if middlebrow refers to furrowing between teh browz??>
        pegasus 5y ago
        Searching HN for it brings up this explanation as the first hit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5072224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5072224
    - rad88 5y ago
      Adding more because I've read her book (not to quibble). I wouldn't say the point is that new physics is out of reach until we build more expensive accelerators. She herself is a theoretical physicist, has theories she'd like to see tested and proposes experiments that could do so. I think she's saying rather that particle physics involves enormous opportunity costs -- decades long / billion dollar experiments -- and that the research agenda is not scientifically justified, but is sociological and even aesthetic in origin.
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      I am as well, because the internet isn’t designed for people to reach an objective consensus about reality nor does it account for the way humans really engage one another naturally. We need a platform designed to encourage people to reach understanding but anyone, myself included, who wants to do this is looking for a profit motive when some things are more important than profit as much as I hate to say it.
  - robonerd 5y ago
    > fox and the grapes fable, not sure if it's known to most cultures. That's one of Aesop's fables. I believe it's widely known, at least in all western cultures. The fox can't reach the grapes he desires, so he concludes the grapes were sour and he didn't want them anyway.
    - tambourine_man 5y ago
      That's the one, yes.
      - thechao 5y ago
        The idiom "sour grapes" comes from that story!
  - cwillu 5y ago
    If it's what I think it is, it's usually (in english at least) succinctly referred to as "Sour grapes"
- matthewdgreen 5y ago
  I’ve read a few of these articles and they all have basically the same format, which is similar enough that they’re not quite as interesting to read. First a headline “does the invention of Swiss Cheese mean that Cheddar Cheese is extinct?” Followed by a little bit of interesting and useful scientific summarization. Then onwards to a point about how we’re dealing with lots of theories and not enough empirical data, so the whole field is useless and also not worth spending time on. I would point out that lots of other important scientific fields have been in this situation before. Maybe there’s an interesting argument to the overfunding (but then again, developing theories is also pretty important!). But mostly it just feels like she’s made the point and while it’s an important point, getting a clear picture of the scientific results is more valuable than this particular opinion. (But I stress, it is her platform to do with as she wants.)
- elorant 5y ago
  While I don't generally like her tone, I liked her book a lot. It has a lot of stuff for further research, and there are at least a dozen book suggestions in there. On the other hand she attacks the "beautification" of physics' theories without providing any alternative approach whatsoever.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
  - bardworx 5y ago
    How is attacking her character contributing to the conversation?
dylan604 5y ago
>without substantiation Really? Pretty much every article in this field is some click bait title similar to "did this recent discovery break science?" and is quite tiresome. But a more accurate title like "Results from new experiment are so far out of norm for prior understanding that much more scrutiny is needed" doesn't gain attraction.
- folkrav 5y ago
  I wouldn't describe those pop-science articles as the scientific "papers" I assumed was talked about.
bawolff 5y ago
I feel like everytime her name comes up, its always a bunch of comments like "i don't like her tone" or whatever, but never much in way of substantiated disagreement. I can't help but wonder if she is just speaking uncomfortable truths about things a lot of the hn audience like, where nobody can really come up with a counter per se but there is still a negative gut reaction of i-don't-like-people-challenging-my-world-view so the criticism comes out as, i dont mind your view i just hate the way you say it.
- johnny22 5y ago
  I can't say I know enough to say she's "challenging my world view" since i don't necessarily know enough about the subject to have a world view. But I still have a negative reaction to the way she (and others in other fields) does it. Because whether it's true or not, it doesn't tend to get results in changing how things are done.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    > Because whether it's true or not, it doesn't tend to get results in changing how things are done. But at the same time, several comments on this post are talking about how they think her diatribes will have an undue influence on funding decisions, so i doubt that accounts for all the negativity.
    - davrosthedalek 5y ago
      I do think that her "the mainstream scientists are doing it wrong/lying/wasting money" shtick advances mistrust in science in general. That worries me.
      - bawolff 5y ago
        I would argue its important to meet such arguments head on. The reason people trust science is because it listens to skeptics and critics and refutes their arguments. Of course some people are cranks that cannot be reasoned with, but this person clearly does not fall into the category. Sweeping disenting voices under the rug is how people lose faith in institutions in the long term.
rapjr9 5y ago
I agree with her, I've been seeing the same problems with the physics community for decades. Everything kind of stopped after Einstein, and in particular I think nuclear weapons scared the heck out of everyone. I have long suspected that physics research since that time has been intentionally limited to "safe" areas like semiconductors, cosmology, and string theory. The old guard essentially decided that having physicists come up with death rays, superbombs, gravity warpers, and space travel was too risky. In the last several years the younger crowd of physicists have been re-examining some of the old physics and finding interesting gaps, so there may soon be much more progress. SpaceX may have found it relatively easy to be inventive in the space transportation arena because governments had final approval on any space projects for decades, leading to the stagnation of rocket development. I think there was a great desire to slow things down and keep technology from progressing faster than society could cope with it. You can argue whether that was good or bad.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  If I was a physicist, I'd be working on a warp drive.
- ehvatum 5y ago
  > Everything kind of stopped after Einstein Einstein passed away in 1955. Quarks were theorized in 1964 and experimentally confirmed in 1968. Quarks are necessary to explain how a neutron can become a proton, how an atom with more than one proton can possibly be stable, what pions and kaons from cosmic ray impacts even are, and many other everyday things. Less has happened since Feynman passed; I would say it was Feynman dying and glam metal taking over the music scene that finally made the world realize technology had gone too far. Indeed, grunge was the next wave.
zone411 5y ago
Agree. I stopped watching her stuff after her really terrible video about the Simulation Hypothesis, which showed that she didn't even grasp the argument. Since she feels free to opine about things she clearly knows nothing about, I can't know if she's also talking about other topics without any real understanding (Gell-Mann Amnesia).
- killerstorm 5y ago
  Her video on many-worlds interpretation was also rather disappointing, the main point being "Well, we can't test it, so it's not science".
Steko 5y ago
A passing familiarity with her blog has the substantiation. The fact that the last few decades of particle physics has led nowhere is the truth but I don't see anyone else brave enough to tell that story because they all work for the emperor with no clothes.

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.
    - ianai 5y ago
      Can you elaborate?
      - gralx 5y ago
        ya i aint never heard the term b4 neither. colorful. wonder if middlebrow refers to furrowing between teh browz??>
      - pegasus 5y ago
        Searching HN for it brings up this explanation as the first hit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5072224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5072224
  - rad88 5y ago
    Adding more because I've read her book (not to quibble). I wouldn't say the point is that new physics is out of reach until we build more expensive accelerators. She herself is a theoretical physicist, has theories she'd like to see tested and proposes experiments that could do so. I think she's saying rather that particle physics involves enormous opportunity costs -- decades long / billion dollar experiments -- and that the research agenda is not scientifically justified, but is sociological and even aesthetic in origin.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    I am as well, because the internet isn’t designed for people to reach an objective consensus about reality nor does it account for the way humans really engage one another naturally. We need a platform designed to encourage people to reach understanding but anyone, myself included, who wants to do this is looking for a profit motive when some things are more important than profit as much as I hate to say it.
- robonerd 5y ago
  > fox and the grapes fable, not sure if it's known to most cultures. That's one of Aesop's fables. I believe it's widely known, at least in all western cultures. The fox can't reach the grapes he desires, so he concludes the grapes were sour and he didn't want them anyway.
  - tambourine_man 5y ago
    That's the one, yes.
    - thechao 5y ago
      The idiom "sour grapes" comes from that story!
- cwillu 5y ago
  If it's what I think it is, it's usually (in english at least) succinctly referred to as "Sour grapes"
matthewdgreen 5y ago
I’ve read a few of these articles and they all have basically the same format, which is similar enough that they’re not quite as interesting to read. First a headline “does the invention of Swiss Cheese mean that Cheddar Cheese is extinct?” Followed by a little bit of interesting and useful scientific summarization. Then onwards to a point about how we’re dealing with lots of theories and not enough empirical data, so the whole field is useless and also not worth spending time on. I would point out that lots of other important scientific fields have been in this situation before. Maybe there’s an interesting argument to the overfunding (but then again, developing theories is also pretty important!). But mostly it just feels like she’s made the point and while it’s an important point, getting a clear picture of the scientific results is more valuable than this particular opinion. (But I stress, it is her platform to do with as she wants.)
elorant 5y ago
While I don't generally like her tone, I liked her book a lot. It has a lot of stuff for further research, and there are at least a dozen book suggestions in there. On the other hand she attacks the "beautification" of physics' theories without providing any alternative approach whatsoever.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
- bardworx 5y ago
  How is attacking her character contributing to the conversation?

dylan604 5y ago

>without substantiation Really? Pretty much every article in this field is some click bait title similar to "did this recent discovery break science?" and is quite tiresome. But a more accurate title like "Results from new experiment are so far out of norm for prior understanding that much more scrutiny is needed" doesn't gain attraction.

folkrav 5y ago
I wouldn't describe those pop-science articles as the scientific "papers" I assumed was talked about.

bawolff 5y ago

I feel like everytime her name comes up, its always a bunch of comments like "i don't like her tone" or whatever, but never much in way of substantiated disagreement. I can't help but wonder if she is just speaking uncomfortable truths about things a lot of the hn audience like, where nobody can really come up with a counter per se but there is still a negative gut reaction of i-don't-like-people-challenging-my-world-view so the criticism comes out as, i dont mind your view i just hate the way you say it.

johnny22 5y ago
I can't say I know enough to say she's "challenging my world view" since i don't necessarily know enough about the subject to have a world view. But I still have a negative reaction to the way she (and others in other fields) does it. Because whether it's true or not, it doesn't tend to get results in changing how things are done.
- bawolff 5y ago
  > Because whether it's true or not, it doesn't tend to get results in changing how things are done. But at the same time, several comments on this post are talking about how they think her diatribes will have an undue influence on funding decisions, so i doubt that accounts for all the negativity.
  - davrosthedalek 5y ago
    I do think that her "the mainstream scientists are doing it wrong/lying/wasting money" shtick advances mistrust in science in general. That worries me.
    - bawolff 5y ago
      I would argue its important to meet such arguments head on. The reason people trust science is because it listens to skeptics and critics and refutes their arguments. Of course some people are cranks that cannot be reasoned with, but this person clearly does not fall into the category. Sweeping disenting voices under the rug is how people lose faith in institutions in the long term.

rapjr9 5y ago

I agree with her, I've been seeing the same problems with the physics community for decades. Everything kind of stopped after Einstein, and in particular I think nuclear weapons scared the heck out of everyone. I have long suspected that physics research since that time has been intentionally limited to "safe" areas like semiconductors, cosmology, and string theory. The old guard essentially decided that having physicists come up with death rays, superbombs, gravity warpers, and space travel was too risky. In the last several years the younger crowd of physicists have been re-examining some of the old physics and finding interesting gaps, so there may soon be much more progress. SpaceX may have found it relatively easy to be inventive in the space transportation arena because governments had final approval on any space projects for decades, leading to the stagnation of rocket development. I think there was a great desire to slow things down and keep technology from progressing faster than society could cope with it. You can argue whether that was good or bad.

WalterBright 5y ago
If I was a physicist, I'd be working on a warp drive.
ehvatum 5y ago
> Everything kind of stopped after Einstein Einstein passed away in 1955. Quarks were theorized in 1964 and experimentally confirmed in 1968. Quarks are necessary to explain how a neutron can become a proton, how an atom with more than one proton can possibly be stable, what pions and kaons from cosmic ray impacts even are, and many other everyday things. Less has happened since Feynman passed; I would say it was Feynman dying and glam metal taking over the music scene that finally made the world realize technology had gone too far. Indeed, grunge was the next wave.

zone411 5y ago

Agree. I stopped watching her stuff after her really terrible video about the Simulation Hypothesis, which showed that she didn't even grasp the argument. Since she feels free to opine about things she clearly knows nothing about, I can't know if she's also talking about other topics without any real understanding (Gell-Mann Amnesia).

killerstorm 5y ago
Her video on many-worlds interpretation was also rather disappointing, the main point being "Well, we can't test it, so it's not science".

Steko 5y ago

A passing familiarity with her blog has the substantiation. The fact that the last few decades of particle physics has led nowhere is the truth but I don't see anyone else brave enough to tell that story because they all work for the emperor with no clothes.