16 ms·
I've said it all before but here we go again
- dataflow 4y agoWasn't high-temperature superconductivity explained more recently than 1970? Or is "particle physics" not supposed to include that? https://www.quantamagazine.org/high-temperature-superconductivity-understood-at-last-20220921/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/high-temperature-superconduct...
- spxtr 4y agoParticle physics does not include that. There is no evidence that superconductivity requires any physics outside of the standard model.
- outsomnia 4y agoScience and everything else humans do is social and cliquey. There's nothing that brings a group with some power over others together more than being able to agree that someone outside the group should be sidelined or punished.
- an1sotropy 4y agoThat may be too relativist. The outlines of her critiques of particle physics do not stick in the same way, I think, against astronomy and astrophysics (witness questions being answered by Webb), or against computational climate science (witness new ability to quantitatively attribute part of given storm to global warming), or against machine learning research (lots of hype but lots of value like predicting protein structure). So saying “well everyone can poo-poo everyone else not in their field” is still true of course, but I think her specific critiques of particle physics are biting (and provoke responses) because her experience allows those critiques to be more accurate and more trenchant.
- nraynaud 4y agoShe has criticized her own field too, and changed her research topic.
- readthenotes1 4y agoScience advances one gravestone at a time...
- DocTomoe 4y agoThis is a surprisingly bad headline for an article, giving absolutely no context about what I am supposed to take an interest in as a reader. This is about a physicist claiming she is being ostracised because she has professional views about particle physics that run counter to the accepted mainstream. She also explains the ideas behind her views (which comes down to "particle physics are no longer useful") and how she is being made the target of particle physicists rage. Given how particle physics is an area in which expensive machinery is needed (the LHC doesn't come cheap), I wonder how much of this conflict is about the allocation of scientific funding.
- an1sotropy 4y agoI agree it’s an unhelpful headline. But it’s also one that is completely consistent with her voice in her YouTube videos on the subject, of which I may have seen too many. I think I even imagined her voice saying it as I read the headline.
- frozenport 4y agoIt is entirely about the allocation. LHC is a massive jobs program that wastes money and time, perhaps a hundred thousand experiments could fill its place. Large part of the jobs and $$$ go to someone other than a physicist.
- defrost 4y agoAnd for "all" that we can throw at this kind of program it should be pointed out that perhaps nothing of interest might happen until it scales to energy levels of several of our suns with observations over a scale a little longer than human evolution .. still barely a scratch on the breadth and depth of the universe.
- DocTomoe 4y agoThat's the crux with all kinds of fundamental research, isn't it? Everyone considers it a basically useless wild goose change until sometimes, something comes along that completely restructures our understanding of the universe. I wonder if people made the same argument against funding of research in nuclear fission...
- shmde 4y agoI don't like article titles which provides me with no information on what I am about to get. This is no worse than clickbait.
- omgmajk 4y agoCame here to say the same thing, titles like these gives me a head ache.
- amatic 4y agoFor me, the fact it comes from the backreaction blog was enough background information. She is always going on about particle physics.
- gilgoomesh 4y agoHacker News’ preference for the page title conflicts here with the fact that this is a personal blog and implies knowledge of the author. You either know who Sabine Hossenfelder is (theoretical physicist and educator) or you don’t.
- bjornsing 4y agoI only have a master in (engineering) physics but working with statistical modeling and AI I’ve come to appreciate the “all models are wrong but some models are useful”-mindset, and I’ve started applying that to physical “laws” as well: I no longer see them as some divine truths waiting to be discovered, but more like models of the world that will always be wrong but sometimes useful. From that point of view what’s happening in physics today is no surprise, but it is a bit depressing: we’ve probably passed the level of complexity where models are useful and are now adding detail that make them less so. I guess you can see it as a form of overfitting, like when less scrupulous AI researchers use the test set for validation.
- bowsamic 4y agoRejoice in the fact that this is only one specific area of physics, and that physics in general is making faster progress than it ever has before, particularly in quantum optics and quantum fundamentals
- xialvjun 4y agoEinstein discovered the theory of relativity purely through thought experiments. I don't think he thought those thought experiments are that useful.
- just-tom 4y agoWhy wouldn't Einstein think that his thought experiments are that useful?
- xialvjun 4y agoThought experiments are mostly interesting, hardly to be useful. Something about speed of light, how can we make use of it. Nuclear bombs, he didn't like it. “all models are wrong but some models are useful” tells us just to go find useful models, and the beautiful truth is not important. I don't think it is not important.
- deorder 4y ago
- nomercy400 4y agoTo me it sounds like she is similar to a food/book/movie critic, but instead for particle physics. Sounds like a good thing. It might shake things up and result in actual progress/change. (not saying there is not actual progress, but think of it more like swaying some physicists to take a more adventurous road. Who knows where it will lead.)
- perihelions 4y agoTwitter seems so persistently corrosive and unhappiness-inducing. Why is it? The author's complaints are about other physicists' behaviors and attitudes to her writing, but it looks like much of it is specifically about Twitter interactions: about unhappy, defective people on Twitter (smart physicists, even) drawing other people into their miasma. These are people using Twitter with good intentions: smart people who login simply intending to have interesting discussions about philosophical topics. Professionals interacting with other professionals, or writing about their field of expertise. They don't seek out to waste time and serotonin on unpleasant social drama, but it finds them anyway.
- mw888 4y agoBecause spreading negativity is easy, and clearing it up is hard. Clearing it up is hard, but worth it, but Twitter’s structure makes that hard type of work even harder by having character limits and measuring value by popularity.
- pasquinelli 4y ago"it" didn't find them. they joined twitter for some reasons, they stay on twitter for other reasons.
- warpech 4y agoI don't know why exactly, but Reddit seems to promote negativity much less so. It seems to me that unpleasant comments get buried by the algorithm and the people's votes.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y agoModerators and community standards.
- bowsamic 4y agoI know it's not an excuse but Sabine definitely "starts it". Just look at her wording in the blog post? She is always combative at the outset. She does not seem to have the kind of people skills required to harshly (and you can't deny it's harsh) and publicly criticise an entire field without upsetting everyone in that field. It takes skill to do that in a good way. Unfortunately for her, the only people who are really strongly swayed by her arguments are her following of lay people, because the physicists are either 1) enough into theoretical particle physics that they immediately reject her undiplomatic comments (even if they may be right) or 2) like me a physicist who knows they know so little about theoretical particle physics that they should not have an opinion on it. Physics twitter is very cordial and positive if you simply ignore Sabine.
- russdill 4y agoThis reads entirely as "everyone else's approach to problems have been unsuccessful, therefore they should use my approach instead, which also had been unsuccessful solving the same problems"
- russdill 4y agoI'll add that many huge advances have been made by solving what could be described as psuedo problems, most notably special relativity.
- vbarrielle 4y agoIn what respect building a theory that explains an experiment that was not consistent with the then prevalent theories (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper...) can be considered as solving a pseudo problem?
- russdill 4y agoThe equations that students must often learn for special relativity were already known, hence the Lorentz naming. The question at the time was largely about how this undetectable substance called the ether behaved. Another example might be the "discovery" of anti particles or of black holes. Both of which were long regarded as just mathematical curiosities.
- kryptiskt 4y agoAnti-particles had a very short life as a theoretical construct, Dirac predicted them in 1931 and Carl Anderson discovered the positron in 1932.
- russdill 4y agoAlso I'll add that there were many "outs" for those that supported aether theories such as frame dragging or simply experimental error as those themselves doing the experiments often believed and kept trying to develop more refined experiments to prove the existence of the aether even into the 20s
- paganel 4y ago> There have also been several instances in the past where particle physicists called senior people at my workplace to complain about me, probably in the hope to intimidate me or to get me fired You would think people as smart as particle physicists most probably are wouldn't go that low, but here we are.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoAre they smart, or do they get to boast about being smart because they work in a niche field? It doesn't excuse dickish, childish or petty behavour. Like, grow up, deal with criticism in a professional fashion, and if you feel like it was an underhanded attack, be the bigger person and all.
- mellavora 4y agoI think you are equivalating oh, let's call it mathematical ability, with, again for lack of a better term, social skills. There is no a priori reason why high innate talent at abstract reasoning would correlate with high innate talent at reading subtle social signals.
- bowsamic 4y agoAre we still proliferating the myth that you have to be exceedingly smart to be a physicist? The only thing that makes a physicist a physicist is that they didn't give up. Sure there are amazing geniuses out there, but a majority of physicists (including myself) are just average people who did not drop out when it got tough. And, the only reason I didn't drop out is because I was scared to. I did not know what I would do otherwise.
- bena 4y agoI forget where I read this, so bear with me. 125ish is the minimum IQ range to be mentally capable of understanding anything. It's not _that_ far off the norm. It's an exceptionally bright person. It's like 90th-95th percentile. You're 1 in 10 or 20. And that's to do anything. The absolute limit of our understanding can be comprehended if you are "pretty smart". It's why Feynman and Hawking didn't really give a shit about IQ. It doesn't unlock any more doors. It might get you to them faster, but at the end of the day, you gotta put in the work. And that's where we do fail our brightest. The most important lesson to learn is that hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.
- amelius 4y ago> More importantly, everyone can see that nothing useful is coming out of particle physics, it’s just a sink of money. So is most of botany.
- stdbrouw 4y agoThat's not what the author means by "useful". If you spend a year describing a particular kind of plant, then you know that much more about it and that's a useful contribution to science if not society. If you keep coming up with zany theories and predictions that do not just turn out to be wrong (that's fine, "I've successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work") but where there's really no reason to even suppose they might have been right, then that's scientific busywork.
- quantum_mcts 4y agoI'd suggest you read on scientific outputs of collider experiments. They do perform precision experiments and detailed measurements of particle properties and fundamental parameters of the settled fundamental models. The picture you are painting of "some theorists come up with crazy ideas and then we spend billions on colliders and then nothing" - is completely bogus. And that is very illustrative of the harm that Dr. Hosssenfelder does as a popularizer.
- Animats 4y agoWell, high energy physics does seem to be kind of stuck. The cosmology and big collider crowd don't seem to get much in the way of new results for the amount of effort expended. How are the string theorists doing? The interesting experimental results in recent years mostly seem to come from very low energy physics. Down around absolute zero, many interesting effects have been demonstrated.
- beezle 4y agoI would argue there are also advances at the various light sources as well has facilities like CBAF/RHIC
- noobermin 4y agoHey much has been done in high energy density or high temperature physics, we have a freaking fusion article every week here. Don't count us all out, were not all lost in space like particle theorists.
- quantum_mcts 4y ago
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y agoGood lord, what an insane comment...
- 867-5309 4y agohow is slamming the lady in an HN comment any different? have you peer reviewed or criticised her in a professional manner? talk about hypocrisy
- quantum_mcts 4y ago> how is slamming the lady in an HN comment any different I'm not complaining about it being personal and unconstructive.
- qsdf38100 4y agoYeah she sounds like a frustrated person seeking revenge. Because someone has to be responsible for her frustration, right? To be fair it’s a trend we see a lot currently. Angry people seeking revenge because they feel their life didn’t go as well as they deserve.
- qsdf38100 4y agoI’d appreciate feedback from people downvoting. I don’t care about HN karma, I’m just curious as to why denouncing her unconstructive and angry takes on particule physics is frowned upon.
- mistermann 4y agoI downvoted for clairvoyance - one of my pet peeves.
- mistermann 4y ago
- smeagull 4y agoInternet Drama is so easily ignored, why would you post it on HN?
- martopix 4y agoThis internet drama made it to the front page of the Guardian the other day. And it relates to billions of research funding.
- smeagull 4y agoIf it's about funding, then it just sounds like she wants more money for her projects rather than the other things that are being funded. Waste of time her writing it, not going to waste my time reading it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ki_ 4y agoIt's my opinion that a lot of science today is theoretical BS. I'm glad sometimes, someone is pointing it out. When i do it myself, i get bombarded with hate. Sigh. even when it's not science, when it's about programming (my profession). And the one thing i learned is: PEOPLE WILL NOT CHANGE THEIR MIND. You can even come with proof and people wont change. They will just ignore u after you've proven it, and keep saying you're wrong. Of course, not everyone is like this, but most of the time it's the "experts" who are like this. Probably because they feel like their entire self image is under attack. Anyway.. life is life, people are people, we live in a society. Frustrating as it is, just remember to enjoy life from time to time, that's what's truly important.
- tarsinge 4y agoI think you get bombarded with hate because of the larger problem of extreme polarization on social media. All subtlety is lost, you are associated with the one anti-science group, opposed to the one pro-science group.
- ki_ 4y agoIt's kind of mixture of online and real-life experiences. In real-life you dont get the hate, but only because they know, it would be extremely rude. But they have other things, eg. make jokes about you to others.
- sva_ 4y ago> Probably because they feel like their entire self image is under attack. In science it's also their grant funding and reputation, that is at stake.
- mannykannot 4y agoWhen you open a conversation with as sweeping a statement as the one you presented in your first sentence, you realistically only have about a minute or two to persuade the person you are addressing that you will be able to justify it.
- wussboy 4y ago
- cientifico 4y agoI can only think in the book "Mastery" from Robert Greene when I read the article. That book explains why geniuses in the history were not listened by the community and how to approach the concerns the author of the article has.
- ajdegol 4y agoThat started off like it was going to have useful suggestions, but then devolved into "me against particle physicists", and became a bit of a self-promotion-cum-pre-defence. I'd like to hear more about these suggestions.
- QuadmasterXLII 4y agoYou’ll never see a Sabine post with equations in it. Make of that what you will.
- beezle 4y agoThat is because her audience is not expected to be physics or math grads and is best viewed as interested laypeople who may have some very basic background in math/science. Contrast to a blog like Tomasso's which is targeted at those in/near HEP those who have a reasonably advanced physics/math background at the BS level. https://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor https://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor
- floxy 4y ago>That started off like it was going to have useful suggestions https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/good-problems-in-foundations-of-physics.html https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/good-problems-in-f...
- d--b 4y agoThis is likely connected to this other article (alsa commented on HN): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31651086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31651086
- stdbrouw 4y agoFWIW, Hossenfelder sounds a bit like a crackpot contrarian in this article, but her book "Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray" is incredibly nuanced and well-argued.
- noobermin 4y agoI didn't feel that way at all, she seemed fine and reasonable if not upset at how she has been treated by particle physicists.
- vonwoodson 4y ago“More importantly, everyone can see that nothing useful is coming out of particle physics, it’s just a sink of money.” -cry of a (wo)man hypnotized by capitalism. You cannot waste money, we made it up and can make more. Alternatively, you can explore the universe. I would be more open to the idea that the only reason some people want to understand anything is because they want control over it. Here we see that the author only find value in what can be exploited for profit; (s)he wants to control the absolute minutiae of existence and is upset that (s)he cannot claim it as property to lord over. If I were to give an ounce of sympathy to the profit motive of science, then I’d say that the way to profit off the unknown is to get people interested and willing to give money in order to create knowledge of it. In this way, particle physicists are wildly successful in both accumulating “Lots of money”, and in generating new mysteries to (be paid to) explore. Some factories generate fidget spinners, and the LGC generates wonder in existence. I’m happy for the latter.
- largbae 4y agoThis is a blogpost by Sabine Hossenfelder summarizing her criticisms of particle physics. None of the above information is in the blogpost or HN post title, which is annoying.
- conorcleary 4y agoAh yes, summarize particle physics into a title. /s I agree, though.
- sva_ 4y agoHN guidelines suggest that you should put the title of the page in the submission title, so there is nothing wrong with it from that standpoint. Take it out to the author of the article for not making a more descriptive title, if at all.
- pessimizer 4y agoHN guidelines strongly encourage that for the sake of removing editorial from the submission, but adding something at least a little descriptive is good to keep people from wasting their time. This got traction because of the domain, not the title. > Take it out to the author of the article for not making a more descriptive title, if at all. She's not responsible for HN guidelines or our interpretations of them. She's not obligated to give her individual blog entries a name at all (or to do anything else.) Should they then just be submitted as a date?
- mola 4y agoAs someone who has no skin in the game at all, I find her way of presenting criticism very contrarian argumentative and snarky. She might be completely right, but I can definitely understand the reluctance to hear her out on merit of style.
- analog31 4y agoTo be fair, the personality and style of an author are invariably raised as issues when someone takes a contrary public position. If only she had asked more nicely.
- mola 4y agoWell, as I said, I have no skin in the game. I'm only a spectator, I have no incentives to find a nonreason to dismiss her. Still I do think her style is disrespectful although entertaining, and can imagine that if her criticism was against me, I'll have a very hard time taking it as constructive.
- louwrentius 4y agoTone policing women is so on-brand for the HN bros, great job.
- klik99 4y agoI just have to say it - obviously the problem isn't with the models, it's the trisolaran sophons disrupting the observations
- vihren 4y agoParticle physicist here (relatively new to the field). I mostly do not understand the problem of Dr. Hossenfelder and others like her. One thing I often see and it seems reiterated here is 'Why do we need more and bigger expensive colliders?'. In general, in the particle physics community right now there isn't much of a push for 'bigger colliders'. Scientists seem to have agreed that the low-energy precision physics frontier might be more fruitful for a fraction of the cost. Even the Mecca of collider physics acknowledges that and have lunched the 'Physics Beyond Colliders' study group https://pbc.web.cern.ch/ https://pbc.web.cern.ch/ Also, there are numerous experiments done at the LHC which are not 'search for new particles'. Yes, the main goal of the LHC was to discover the Higgs boson and the great hopes were that supersymmetry (SUSY) particles will start falling from the sky. Now we know that SUSY is most probably not the way the world works and the efforts are mostly abandoned. Especially by younger physicists in the field. The other problem that people seem to have is with the current directions in physics which in this blogpost are referred to as 'pseudo-problems' such as: "the baryon asymmetry or the smallness of the cosmological constant". These might not be problems on the same scale as "What the hell is this dark matter??" or "How do we reconcile general relativity with the Standard Model?", but in my opinion it would be a bigger waste of resources to focus all of physics in only the few big questions and leave everything else unexplored. Yes, from a certain point of view you could say that there is no reason that matter and antimatter should be equal in the universe so the baryon asymmetry is not a real problem, but still, there is no explanation yet why everything we see is matter and antimatter is next to non-existent in the Universe. tl;dr: The money that go to collider physics are not 100% of the money that go into particle physics and generally there are no plans in the community for larger colliders at least in the next 25 years. (the Future Circular Collider has quite a long way to go before its even considered for building)
- beezle 4y agoAnd yet plans do continue for FCC as well as ILC/NLC, though of the two the latter seem to be the better "investment". As to SUSY, while it is good if young post docs are avoiding it, that does not mean it has gone away (not if PRD table of contents is any indicator). It will take a long time for that paper mill to end, likely with the retirement/death of current researchers or sooner if funding agencies finally come to their senses. I don't think she is suggesting there should be no efforts in some of the other areas you have mentioned, just that there needs to be a reassessment of how much effort and money should continued to be funneled in those directions.
- mikewarot 4y agoSabine seems to be promoting a twist on Newton's flaming laser sword, also known as Alder's razor: What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating. What cannot be disproven by experiment, is not worth funding I'd say she's right.
- smadge 4y agoThese hypothetical particles can be disproven by experiment; they are falsifiable. However it is very expensive and there’s no reason to believe they exist.
- quantum_mcts 4y agoHow would you disprove Big Bang cosmology by an experiment?
- floxy 4y agohttps://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/inflation-status-update.html https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/inflation-status-u...
- quantum_mcts 4y agoI think you are confusing Big Bang Cosmology with theory of cosmic inflation.
- lamontcg 4y agoDiscussion about this on Woit's blog ("Not Even Wrong"), including a response from Hossenfelder: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13070 https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13070 I've never really followed Sabine Hossenfelder but I think I prefer Peter Woit's skeptical takes over hers. It is kind of weird how they both agree more than disagree about the current state of high energy physics, but she seems to see the need to attack him over the details (and where I think Woit gets it more right than she does).
- noobermin 4y agoA bit of a meta comment, but a lot of people are calling Hossenfelder "crack potty" or "ranty" and I just don't get that at all reading this post or the many before. She seems upset yes from the abuse she's received, but that seems understandable. I don't understand how people feel she is so combative unless you already disagree with her.
- andy-x 4y agoFrom all her posts I got quite different impression. I feel like she is abusing her position to spread misinformation about how particle physics actually works. Repeating again and again "You are all idiots and do not know what you do and only care about funding" does not help her much in building a valid scientific argument.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]