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“We will never know” is such a contradictory statement. On the surface, it implies the limits of our knowledge while simultaneously indicating that the author p

“We will never know” is such a contradictory statement. On the surface, it implies the limits of our knowledge while simultaneously indicating that the author possesses the omnipotence required to know what humans will learn throughout the entirety of our future. Add it to your list of things to never write.

jmyeet 4y ago
I think "fatalistic" is a better word than "contradictory". I otherwise agree. There are a lot of misconceptions about the Big Bang. The Universe is a metric space. The "metric" part here is deliberate, specific and technical. It really means that given two points the metric can tell us what we call the "distance" between them. Abstract maths deals with spaces that do and don't have metrics. The best explanation I've heard of the Big Bang is not that the Universe originated from a single point but rather the metric between all points in the Universe at the time of the Big Bang was 0. There's an open question about whether the Universe is finite or infinite. I mean the actual Universe not the observable Universe. This is almost a metaphysical question since we'll probably never know. We don't really know how gravity and space acts in such extreme environments but with black holes (that we also don't understand at the quantum level) we have plenty of examples of admittedly less extreme but still exxtreme corollaries. It is kind of mind-bending though. One description I read says that time acts like space and space acts like time within the event horizon. As in, you can see light entering the black holes behind you but that's the past and we can view the past all around us (eg distant galaxies are us viewing the past). Towards the singularity is the "future" and we can no more see that than we can see any future. We, as sentient beings, have a difficult time comprehending things beyond our existence. What I mean is that before we were born, we didn't exist. After we die, we don't exist. We can't really comprehend that intuitively because our perception of the world is predicated on our cognizance. The past is easier. Stuff happened before we were born. But now we do exist. So at some point in the future we won't exist. How can you comprehend your own lack of existence? I feel in some ways similar about the Universe. Our observations are predicated on concepts like "time" and "space" that at some point didn't exist. How do you reason about the lack of existence of space let alone time when everything we know is predicated on that? Still, I too feel like the author is too pessimistic about how much more we can learn here. Assuming we aren't extinguished in the next few centuries (which is actually more difficult than it sounds at this point) we are going to be here for an inconceivably long time. Given our understanding of the Universe, that's likely to be >10^100 years. That's a long time to figure stuff out.
jackmott 4y ago
DemocracyFTW2 4y ago
That's a very narrow reading of it. There's always an implicit "to the best of our current knowledge" caveat with every sound scientific statement. And it's true, to the best of our current knowledge, we can never know what it's like inside a black hole or very close to the time our universe began because the physics that we know tells us no person or probe can ever go there and come back to tell. If you're no so generous as to accept the implicit caveat you just end up being fun at parties because you go around and tell people to "never say never and always avoid always".
- synu 4y ago
  I watched the video, and the sense I got was you don’t need to bother to read anything where scientists talk about having figured out what happened at the beginning of the universe because we can never know. This seems to explicitly exclude the possibility that there could ever be a discovery you might read about that would change that.
  - twiss 4y ago
    She explicitly says that the scientific method is insufficient to give an answer to this question. So reading anything written by scientists won't give a conclusive answer. I think it's implicitly hinted that you might as well read something by a religious person, or a philosopher, or anyone with a random theory, as none of the theories can be proven or disproven by the scientific method, and so all of their answers will be equally (un)satisfying. It's theoretically possible that we'll one day find some other method of finding out the truth (perhaps a god will descend from the heavens and tell us? or perhaps we manage to find a bug / exploit in the simulation?) but personally I find it unlikely.
    - pronlover723 4y ago
      She did make an appeal to simplicity, claiming that simpler is better, and she stated that religious origins are way more complicated so while they can't be proven wrong, if you accept the idea that simpler is better then religious explanations are unlikely to be true.
jschveibinz 4y ago
I see what you did there. ;)
melling 4y ago
Someone wrote an article so people can waste hours debating this, accomplishing nothing. When will people learn?
- throwoutway 4y ago
  Well there are some who claim to know, and will argue that “it happened this way” when in reality it’s a guess, based on some assumptions, and measurements, fit to a model. We don’t know everything, and it’s worth the contradiction to point out the fallacy of those who postulate
coldtea 4y ago
>On the surface, it implies the limits of our knowledge while simultaneously indicating that the author possesses the omnipotence required to know what humans will learn throughout the entirety of our future That's no contradiction though. A contradiction would be "I know everything about X" and at the same time "There's a limit to our knowledge of X". It's no contradiction to claim that there are limits to our knowledge but still claim to absolutely know Y about Z. In other words, the idea that "there are limits to our knowledge" is not incompatible with the idea that we fully know this or that. You just mean that those limits only apply to other things. (Heck, in math we can even prove that some things can never be proven, thus both implying limits to our knowledge and that we know something with 100% certainty).
- bumbledraven 4y ago
  > in math we can even prove that some things can never be proven No we can't. We can only prove that certain formal systems cannot resolve certain statements. We might still invent other formal systems that are acceptable to us and that can resolve those statements.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >We might still invent other formal systems that are acceptable to us and that can resolve those statements. That's irrelevant, though, because a mathematical proof or a statement X is considered in the context of a specific formal system (and any isomorphic system). Proving that S can't be proven under formal system F will always be true regardless if you are able to prove the same statement in the formal system Z. For example, you can't say "I just disproved that triangle angles add to 180 degrees" just because you've proved they add to more than 180 degrees under a non-flat surface or non-Euclidean geometry. People saying "triangle angles add to 180 degrees" implicitly already mean "under Euclidean geometry and in a flat plane". It's just left implied, because it's goes without saying that they mean it within the system they expressed the problem and did the proof in.
  - lanstin 4y ago
    And for those other systems, iF they embed arithmetic, we can effectively produce a statement that is visibly true and which that other system cannot prove.
kristopolous 4y ago
There's unknowable material real facts that nobody will ever know though. I read into one a few years ago when I was trying to find when the last American slave died. The problem is they were considered property so no documentation or birth records were produced. The lack of record keeping made this an impossible question. The last documented one was in the 1930s but the last civil war veteran died in the 1950s, surely there was some baby of the 1860s that was born into the system that probably survived until at least the Montgomery bus boycott or Brown v. Board. But this is something I discovered is a factual statement that's impossible to verify and will never be resolved.
Kranar 4y ago
This is just about the most shallow critique of the article you can make, and it's unfortunate it got so much attention.
gjsman-1000 4y ago
Perhaps, if there is a God, he does not desire us to learn about him by knowledge or by science, but by love for him and seeking him out. For who is man to say, that man must only learn about God through objectively verifiable facts, because man said so? Perhaps this God wants seeking. If we were born without eyes, color would still exist, but we would never perceive it, and how would we believe it if someone said it did exist?
- Zigurd 4y ago
  Our knowledge of the cosmos, in just a few hundreds of years, expanded from the Earth, Moon, planets and stars of the firmament, a kind of cozy neighborhood, to that of unfathomable numbers of galaxies stretching out to unimaginable distances of space and time. Strange that gods who were so occupied with matters on this planet, who live in a nearby heaven up by the firmament of stars, are also still credible candidates for "creator" of the universe. The real universe is so much more vast and so much more strange than any scriptures had ever imagined. One could be forgiven for excusing that underestimation of the universe as a limitation of the imagination of man. In other words, "the god of the gaps" has to keep finding new gaps to fill, and the gaps are ever less tenable.
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    You’re taking an unbelievably literal interpretation of a faith you don’t believe in and literally projecting it on to the parent comment as a form of criticism. Safe to say that I don’t think you can expect a response from them.
    - Zigurd 4y ago
      My view of gods as being too small for the universe is grounded in the history of religions. If the OP is making up a new god for the newly discovered gaps, he faces no such limitations.
      - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
jjcon 4y ago
And yet it is provable that there are things we know we can’t know https://youtu.be/HeQX2HjkcNo https://youtu.be/HeQX2HjkcNo
yibg 4y ago
I don’t know if the statement is correct in this case but in general saying “we will never know” about a subject which we have incomplete knowledge isn’t a contradiction. I can say, we will never know what the first human that got to North America had for lunch on their 20th birthday, and I think that’s as true as it could reasonably be. Sure maybe we’ll invent a time machine or some other technology in the future that invalidates it, but if you apply that logic then nothing can ever be stated as a fact.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ithkuil 4y ago
  Furthermore there is the complication caused by ambiguous problem statements. In your example, how we define the first human that got to North America? Which immigration wave? What if there were immigration waves that were completely wiped out without leaving any effects of the subsequent populations? What is the 20th birthday? According to which calendar? (Leap days etc)? What is lunch? Not every people subdivide their meals in a predictable way that you can pinpoint to what "lunch" is Etc etc EDIT: forgot the most obvious: define what counts for human. It's not clear cut to distinguish boundaries between species
  - goldenkey 4y ago
    Furthermore if a human time travels back to the past and then sets up shop and lives amongst the first humans, maybe they are the first human? Semantics and ambiguity have a way of making unspecific questions paradoxical
- martinko 4y ago
  > I can say, we will never know what the first human that got to North America had for lunch on their 20th birthday, and I think that’s as true as it could reasonably be. if there is a large mirror a few hundred light years away we might be able to see his lunch in the reflection ;)
  - 4y ago
throwawayacc2 4y ago
In full disclosure I haven’t read the article yet, I will do so after this comment. But reading, I just wanted to mention something that sprang to mind. Gödels incompleteness theorem. In that case, we know for sure that we will never find a list of complete and consistent axioms for all mathematics. We do not need omniscience for this, it’s something we know for sure we will never learn. I think there are more examples, I remember one of my professors mentioning off the cuff he believes P vs NP will never be proven one way or another because it’s most likely one of those problems that simply don’t have a solution. Or, maybe the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is another example. We know for sure there are limitations on the knowledge we can have. I don’t think it’s unfair to imply a limit to our knowledge. I’m not saying the universe’s beginning necessarily falls into this category, I honestly don’t know. But there are for sure classes of problems that by their very nature cannot be known, or cannot be known with certainty.
verisimi 4y ago
Define 'know'. Is it something you have personally verified and found to have been the case as you established the principles in play, or is it (at the other end of the spectrum) that a science paper says such-and-such and you read a summary on HN?
_aavaa_ 4y ago
“Finite picture whose dimensions are a certain amount of space and a certain amount of time; the protons and electrons are the streaks of paint which define the picture against its space-time background. Traveling as far back in time as we can, brings us not to the creation of the picture, but to its edge; the creation of the picture lies as much outside the picture as the artist is outside his canvas. On this view, discussing the creation of the universe in terms of time and space is like trying to discover the artist and the action of painting, by going to the edge of the canvas. This brings us very near to those philosophical systems which regard the universe as a thought in the mind of its Creator, thereby reducing all discussion of material creation to futility.” — James Leans
kosh2 4y ago
You can exchange "We will never know" for anything that we currently think of as impossible then.
bagels 4y ago
Do you mean omniscience?
Inu 4y ago
Depends on the field, Gödel's theorems make claims of impossibility.
benreesman 4y ago
Hossenfelder is a polarizing figure. “Lost In Math” was a thought-provoking book in the tradition of the other string iconoclasts (Smolin, Woit, Rovelli, roughly “the Perimeter crowd”). “Three Roads to Quantum Gravity” was the last general audience book that Smolin did before he’d fucking had it and did “The Trouble with Physics”. Woit went straight for the jugular with “Not Even Wrong”. These people have (for better or worse) burnt the ships with the people of their generation who write grants and sit on tenure committees. Hossenfelder’s pivot to “wildly over-credentialed pop-sci YouTuber” is interesting. My gut flinch reaction is like, “you’re better than this”, but… I have not walked a mile in her shoes, and if this is an end-run around a corrupt job market for particle/high-energy people who won’t won’t get on board with The Landscape? Maybe more power to her. I give that context so that people will know (my opinion on) the backstory for why she’s in an adversarial relationship with The Academy. The “will never know” phrasing might be unfortunate. But the epistemological principle goes back to Hawking at least: “asking what happened before the Big Bang or where it came from is like asking what is north of the North Pole”. It’s a fun thing to theorize about, but the Big Bang is almost definitionally “the bound on observable causality”. It’s not a statement about what we won’t ever know, it’s a statement about what’s knowable.
- SiempreViernes 4y ago
  The trouble with Hossenfelder isn't so much that she rejects string theory, lots of people do that. No the problem is that she's pivoted into declaring the entire enterprise of cosmology and particle physics pointless, when she says """How about you wait, and we talk again in 10 billion years.""" this is not so much a joke as a thinly disguised a deeply held conviction. There's no need for a secret cabal to explain why someone who clearly thinks the job should not even be done has trouble finding further employment in an extremely harsh job market.
  - benreesman 4y ago
    You sound very knowledgable about this, so I guess I'm mostly addressing any readers of this thread when I recommend Lost in Math as a prerequisite for making that judgement. Of the four I mentioned, it's the most personal / autobiographical / reflective. She's obvious pissed off, and that should be taken into account when evaluating her assertions. Woit is way more pissed off, and probably the better mathematician. Smolin seems like, sad and resigned more than angry, but he also got a great gig wither Perimeter (which he might still hold?), which has to soften the blow. Frankly my layman's knowledge of all this is badly dated, because after decades of avid interest going back to childhood I got so dispirited about it I've kind of stopped paying attention outside of a few bright spots (Deutsch/Marletto have my rapt attention). So I don't doubt you that lots of people reject Stringworld now maybe even to the point of that being a fairly mainstream view, but 10 or 20 years ago that was a CLM at best and usually tenure-track suicide, and there's a whole generation of people who did in fact operate under the dictates of something that could, with a little poetic license, be called a "cabal". Dismantling the scientific method to admit the Landscape was, at least to an avid outsider, dogma not long ago. I'm enheartened to hear that people are starting to try new stuff again, but it's not difficult for me to have sympathy for people who just kinda gave up.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

jmyeet 4y ago

I think "fatalistic" is a better word than "contradictory". I otherwise agree. There are a lot of misconceptions about the Big Bang. The Universe is a metric space. The "metric" part here is deliberate, specific and technical. It really means that given two points the metric can tell us what we call the "distance" between them. Abstract maths deals with spaces that do and don't have metrics. The best explanation I've heard of the Big Bang is not that the Universe originated from a single point but rather the metric between all points in the Universe at the time of the Big Bang was 0. There's an open question about whether the Universe is finite or infinite. I mean the actual Universe not the observable Universe. This is almost a metaphysical question since we'll probably never know. We don't really know how gravity and space acts in such extreme environments but with black holes (that we also don't understand at the quantum level) we have plenty of examples of admittedly less extreme but still exxtreme corollaries. It is kind of mind-bending though. One description I read says that time acts like space and space acts like time within the event horizon. As in, you can see light entering the black holes behind you but that's the past and we can view the past all around us (eg distant galaxies are us viewing the past). Towards the singularity is the "future" and we can no more see that than we can see any future. We, as sentient beings, have a difficult time comprehending things beyond our existence. What I mean is that before we were born, we didn't exist. After we die, we don't exist. We can't really comprehend that intuitively because our perception of the world is predicated on our cognizance. The past is easier. Stuff happened before we were born. But now we do exist. So at some point in the future we won't exist. How can you comprehend your own lack of existence? I feel in some ways similar about the Universe. Our observations are predicated on concepts like "time" and "space" that at some point didn't exist. How do you reason about the lack of existence of space let alone time when everything we know is predicated on that? Still, I too feel like the author is too pessimistic about how much more we can learn here. Assuming we aren't extinguished in the next few centuries (which is actually more difficult than it sounds at this point) we are going to be here for an inconceivably long time. Given our understanding of the Universe, that's likely to be >10^100 years. That's a long time to figure stuff out.

jackmott 4y ago

DemocracyFTW2 4y ago

That's a very narrow reading of it. There's always an implicit "to the best of our current knowledge" caveat with every sound scientific statement. And it's true, to the best of our current knowledge, we can never know what it's like inside a black hole or very close to the time our universe began because the physics that we know tells us no person or probe can ever go there and come back to tell. If you're no so generous as to accept the implicit caveat you just end up being fun at parties because you go around and tell people to "never say never and always avoid always".

synu 4y ago
I watched the video, and the sense I got was you don’t need to bother to read anything where scientists talk about having figured out what happened at the beginning of the universe because we can never know. This seems to explicitly exclude the possibility that there could ever be a discovery you might read about that would change that.
- twiss 4y ago
  She explicitly says that the scientific method is insufficient to give an answer to this question. So reading anything written by scientists won't give a conclusive answer. I think it's implicitly hinted that you might as well read something by a religious person, or a philosopher, or anyone with a random theory, as none of the theories can be proven or disproven by the scientific method, and so all of their answers will be equally (un)satisfying. It's theoretically possible that we'll one day find some other method of finding out the truth (perhaps a god will descend from the heavens and tell us? or perhaps we manage to find a bug / exploit in the simulation?) but personally I find it unlikely.
  - pronlover723 4y ago
    She did make an appeal to simplicity, claiming that simpler is better, and she stated that religious origins are way more complicated so while they can't be proven wrong, if you accept the idea that simpler is better then religious explanations are unlikely to be true.

jschveibinz 4y ago

I see what you did there. ;)

melling 4y ago

Someone wrote an article so people can waste hours debating this, accomplishing nothing. When will people learn?

throwoutway 4y ago
Well there are some who claim to know, and will argue that “it happened this way” when in reality it’s a guess, based on some assumptions, and measurements, fit to a model. We don’t know everything, and it’s worth the contradiction to point out the fallacy of those who postulate

coldtea 4y ago

>On the surface, it implies the limits of our knowledge while simultaneously indicating that the author possesses the omnipotence required to know what humans will learn throughout the entirety of our future That's no contradiction though. A contradiction would be "I know everything about X" and at the same time "There's a limit to our knowledge of X". It's no contradiction to claim that there are limits to our knowledge but still claim to absolutely know Y about Z. In other words, the idea that "there are limits to our knowledge" is not incompatible with the idea that we fully know this or that. You just mean that those limits only apply to other things. (Heck, in math we can even prove that some things can never be proven, thus both implying limits to our knowledge and that we know something with 100% certainty).

bumbledraven 4y ago
> in math we can even prove that some things can never be proven No we can't. We can only prove that certain formal systems cannot resolve certain statements. We might still invent other formal systems that are acceptable to us and that can resolve those statements.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >We might still invent other formal systems that are acceptable to us and that can resolve those statements. That's irrelevant, though, because a mathematical proof or a statement X is considered in the context of a specific formal system (and any isomorphic system). Proving that S can't be proven under formal system F will always be true regardless if you are able to prove the same statement in the formal system Z. For example, you can't say "I just disproved that triangle angles add to 180 degrees" just because you've proved they add to more than 180 degrees under a non-flat surface or non-Euclidean geometry. People saying "triangle angles add to 180 degrees" implicitly already mean "under Euclidean geometry and in a flat plane". It's just left implied, because it's goes without saying that they mean it within the system they expressed the problem and did the proof in.
- lanstin 4y ago
  And for those other systems, iF they embed arithmetic, we can effectively produce a statement that is visibly true and which that other system cannot prove.

kristopolous 4y ago

There's unknowable material real facts that nobody will ever know though. I read into one a few years ago when I was trying to find when the last American slave died. The problem is they were considered property so no documentation or birth records were produced. The lack of record keeping made this an impossible question. The last documented one was in the 1930s but the last civil war veteran died in the 1950s, surely there was some baby of the 1860s that was born into the system that probably survived until at least the Montgomery bus boycott or Brown v. Board. But this is something I discovered is a factual statement that's impossible to verify and will never be resolved.

Kranar 4y ago

This is just about the most shallow critique of the article you can make, and it's unfortunate it got so much attention.

gjsman-1000 4y ago

Perhaps, if there is a God, he does not desire us to learn about him by knowledge or by science, but by love for him and seeking him out. For who is man to say, that man must only learn about God through objectively verifiable facts, because man said so? Perhaps this God wants seeking. If we were born without eyes, color would still exist, but we would never perceive it, and how would we believe it if someone said it did exist?

Zigurd 4y ago
Our knowledge of the cosmos, in just a few hundreds of years, expanded from the Earth, Moon, planets and stars of the firmament, a kind of cozy neighborhood, to that of unfathomable numbers of galaxies stretching out to unimaginable distances of space and time. Strange that gods who were so occupied with matters on this planet, who live in a nearby heaven up by the firmament of stars, are also still credible candidates for "creator" of the universe. The real universe is so much more vast and so much more strange than any scriptures had ever imagined. One could be forgiven for excusing that underestimation of the universe as a limitation of the imagination of man. In other words, "the god of the gaps" has to keep finding new gaps to fill, and the gaps are ever less tenable.
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  You’re taking an unbelievably literal interpretation of a faith you don’t believe in and literally projecting it on to the parent comment as a form of criticism. Safe to say that I don’t think you can expect a response from them.
  - Zigurd 4y ago
    My view of gods as being too small for the universe is grounded in the history of religions. If the OP is making up a new god for the newly discovered gaps, he faces no such limitations.
    - DiggyJohnson 4y ago

jjcon 4y ago

And yet it is provable that there are things we know we can’t know https://youtu.be/HeQX2HjkcNo https://youtu.be/HeQX2HjkcNo

yibg 4y ago

I don’t know if the statement is correct in this case but in general saying “we will never know” about a subject which we have incomplete knowledge isn’t a contradiction. I can say, we will never know what the first human that got to North America had for lunch on their 20th birthday, and I think that’s as true as it could reasonably be. Sure maybe we’ll invent a time machine or some other technology in the future that invalidates it, but if you apply that logic then nothing can ever be stated as a fact.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ithkuil 4y ago
Furthermore there is the complication caused by ambiguous problem statements. In your example, how we define the first human that got to North America? Which immigration wave? What if there were immigration waves that were completely wiped out without leaving any effects of the subsequent populations? What is the 20th birthday? According to which calendar? (Leap days etc)? What is lunch? Not every people subdivide their meals in a predictable way that you can pinpoint to what "lunch" is Etc etc EDIT: forgot the most obvious: define what counts for human. It's not clear cut to distinguish boundaries between species
- goldenkey 4y ago
  Furthermore if a human time travels back to the past and then sets up shop and lives amongst the first humans, maybe they are the first human? Semantics and ambiguity have a way of making unspecific questions paradoxical
martinko 4y ago
> I can say, we will never know what the first human that got to North America had for lunch on their 20th birthday, and I think that’s as true as it could reasonably be. if there is a large mirror a few hundred light years away we might be able to see his lunch in the reflection ;)
- 4y ago

throwawayacc2 4y ago

In full disclosure I haven’t read the article yet, I will do so after this comment. But reading, I just wanted to mention something that sprang to mind. Gödels incompleteness theorem. In that case, we know for sure that we will never find a list of complete and consistent axioms for all mathematics. We do not need omniscience for this, it’s something we know for sure we will never learn. I think there are more examples, I remember one of my professors mentioning off the cuff he believes P vs NP will never be proven one way or another because it’s most likely one of those problems that simply don’t have a solution. Or, maybe the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is another example. We know for sure there are limitations on the knowledge we can have. I don’t think it’s unfair to imply a limit to our knowledge. I’m not saying the universe’s beginning necessarily falls into this category, I honestly don’t know. But there are for sure classes of problems that by their very nature cannot be known, or cannot be known with certainty.

verisimi 4y ago

Define 'know'. Is it something you have personally verified and found to have been the case as you established the principles in play, or is it (at the other end of the spectrum) that a science paper says such-and-such and you read a summary on HN?

_aavaa_ 4y ago

“Finite picture whose dimensions are a certain amount of space and a certain amount of time; the protons and electrons are the streaks of paint which define the picture against its space-time background. Traveling as far back in time as we can, brings us not to the creation of the picture, but to its edge; the creation of the picture lies as much outside the picture as the artist is outside his canvas. On this view, discussing the creation of the universe in terms of time and space is like trying to discover the artist and the action of painting, by going to the edge of the canvas. This brings us very near to those philosophical systems which regard the universe as a thought in the mind of its Creator, thereby reducing all discussion of material creation to futility.” — James Leans

kosh2 4y ago

You can exchange "We will never know" for anything that we currently think of as impossible then.

bagels 4y ago

Do you mean omniscience?

Inu 4y ago

Depends on the field, Gödel's theorems make claims of impossibility.

benreesman 4y ago

Hossenfelder is a polarizing figure. “Lost In Math” was a thought-provoking book in the tradition of the other string iconoclasts (Smolin, Woit, Rovelli, roughly “the Perimeter crowd”). “Three Roads to Quantum Gravity” was the last general audience book that Smolin did before he’d fucking had it and did “The Trouble with Physics”. Woit went straight for the jugular with “Not Even Wrong”. These people have (for better or worse) burnt the ships with the people of their generation who write grants and sit on tenure committees. Hossenfelder’s pivot to “wildly over-credentialed pop-sci YouTuber” is interesting. My gut flinch reaction is like, “you’re better than this”, but… I have not walked a mile in her shoes, and if this is an end-run around a corrupt job market for particle/high-energy people who won’t won’t get on board with The Landscape? Maybe more power to her. I give that context so that people will know (my opinion on) the backstory for why she’s in an adversarial relationship with The Academy. The “will never know” phrasing might be unfortunate. But the epistemological principle goes back to Hawking at least: “asking what happened before the Big Bang or where it came from is like asking what is north of the North Pole”. It’s a fun thing to theorize about, but the Big Bang is almost definitionally “the bound on observable causality”. It’s not a statement about what we won’t ever know, it’s a statement about what’s knowable.

SiempreViernes 4y ago
The trouble with Hossenfelder isn't so much that she rejects string theory, lots of people do that. No the problem is that she's pivoted into declaring the entire enterprise of cosmology and particle physics pointless, when she says """How about you wait, and we talk again in 10 billion years.""" this is not so much a joke as a thinly disguised a deeply held conviction. There's no need for a secret cabal to explain why someone who clearly thinks the job should not even be done has trouble finding further employment in an extremely harsh job market.
- benreesman 4y ago
  You sound very knowledgable about this, so I guess I'm mostly addressing any readers of this thread when I recommend Lost in Math as a prerequisite for making that judgement. Of the four I mentioned, it's the most personal / autobiographical / reflective. She's obvious pissed off, and that should be taken into account when evaluating her assertions. Woit is way more pissed off, and probably the better mathematician. Smolin seems like, sad and resigned more than angry, but he also got a great gig wither Perimeter (which he might still hold?), which has to soften the blow. Frankly my layman's knowledge of all this is badly dated, because after decades of avid interest going back to childhood I got so dispirited about it I've kind of stopped paying attention outside of a few bright spots (Deutsch/Marletto have my rapt attention). So I don't doubt you that lots of people reject Stringworld now maybe even to the point of that being a fairly mainstream view, but 10 or 20 years ago that was a CLM at best and usually tenure-track suicide, and there's a whole generation of people who did in fact operate under the dictates of something that could, with a little poetic license, be called a "cabal". Dismantling the scientific method to admit the Landscape was, at least to an avid outsider, dogma not long ago. I'm enheartened to hear that people are starting to try new stuff again, but it's not difficult for me to have sympathy for people who just kinda gave up.

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