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The point of publishing those articles is...to publish them though. Like, you have an idea, you write it up, submit it and note that it can fit known data but i

by XorNot 4y ago

The point of publishing those articles is...to publish them though. Like, you have an idea, you write it up, submit it and note that it can fit known data but isn't currently testable. Done, and important. Maybe it goes nowhere, maybe it inspires someone, but the point of journals is in the name: they're journals of work in the field, shared so the community can explore and benefit from them. They're not publications of "what is definitely true", they are fundamentally explorations of what could be, or the more important "this is kind of interesting where could it lead?".

tsimionescu 4y ago
> note that it can fit known data but isn't currently testable. But the thing is, theories about the beginning of the universe will never be testable, they aren't just not currently testable. So, if your theory has no novel predictions about the future, but it adds extra parameters to obtain a different prediction about a past which exists beyond what can be measured, then you're wasting your time creating this theory, and wasting reviewers' and readers' time publishing it; and you're wasting money researching it. This is what Sabine usually writes and complains about - research money being spent on research that is at best unlikely to bear any fruit, and at worst navel-gazing, especially when there are very real problems in physics that are not receiving significant research. This is why she complains about people researching the beginning of the universe, or black hole entropy, or grand unified theories, or the hierarchy "problem", or looking for supersimmetry or for WIMPs in ever larger particle accelerators. Instead, she wishes more people were researching the measurement problem, non-linearity in quantum mechanics, high-energy physics through radio-telescopes instead of particle accelerators, to name a few things. Now, I don't know anywhere near enough to say that she is right, but I do believe she is not trivially wrong, like you seem to be suggesting.

by XorNot 4y ago

tsimionescu 4y ago

> note that it can fit known data but isn't currently testable. But the thing is, theories about the beginning of the universe will never be testable, they aren't just not currently testable. So, if your theory has no novel predictions about the future, but it adds extra parameters to obtain a different prediction about a past which exists beyond what can be measured, then you're wasting your time creating this theory, and wasting reviewers' and readers' time publishing it; and you're wasting money researching it. This is what Sabine usually writes and complains about - research money being spent on research that is at best unlikely to bear any fruit, and at worst navel-gazing, especially when there are very real problems in physics that are not receiving significant research. This is why she complains about people researching the beginning of the universe, or black hole entropy, or grand unified theories, or the hierarchy "problem", or looking for supersimmetry or for WIMPs in ever larger particle accelerators. Instead, she wishes more people were researching the measurement problem, non-linearity in quantum mechanics, high-energy physics through radio-telescopes instead of particle accelerators, to name a few things. Now, I don't know anywhere near enough to say that she is right, but I do believe she is not trivially wrong, like you seem to be suggesting.