4 ms·

> if this kind of reporting sparks the interest of a young physicist out there, I guess its mostly harmless I'm not sure I agree. If reporting like this funnel

by pdonis 4y ago

> if this kind of reporting sparks the interest of a young physicist out there, I guess its mostly harmless I'm not sure I agree. If reporting like this funnels more young physicists into doing this kind of research, which has been going on for decades without making any successful experimental predictions, then I don't think it's harmless. Not only that, but this kind of reporting has a subtext: Science is the Authority. Even when Science tells you what seems like obvious nonsense. And that pernicious effect goes far beyond a few young physicists. That is not to say that there aren't scientific claims that seem highly counterintuitive to the lay person, but which are nevertheless true. There are. But those claims are nailed down by massive quantities of experimental evidence that matches the predictions of the models to many decimal places. The speculative claims discussed in this article have no evidence to support them. Big difference. But you'll never find that out by reading these kinds of articles.

random314 4y ago
Einstein's relativity was purely theoretical when it was accepted world wide based on abstract principles. So, your characterization of how modern physics works is completely wrong.
- pdonis 4y ago
  No, your claim regarding the historical facts is completely wrong. If by "relativity" you mean special relativity, nobody used it for anything when it was published. The first real use of it theoretically was to explain the Compton effect in 1921, based on experimental results. It took another decade or so for it to be routinely used, mainly due to its success in explaining the fine structure of atomic spectra and in developing quantum field theory. If you mean general relativity, the first event that could be said to have gotten it "accepted world wide" was the 1919 eclipse expeditions organized by Eddington, which confirmed the GR prediction of bending of light by the Sun. And even then acceptance of it was still limited (see below). Also, even before that, GR was known to correctly predict the extra precession of Mercury's perihelion, which could not be explained by Newtonian gravity. So that was a piece of evidence for GR that was known before it was published. Note that even after the 1919 eclipse expedition and the 1921 explanation of the Compton Effect, relativity was still considered too "out there" to justify a Nobel Prize; when Einstein got the prize in 1922 the Nobel committee specifically excluded relativity from the scientific work by Einstein that was the basis for it.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    I believe that GR being true implies the truth of SR, so the 1919 eclipse expedition is actually evidence of both.
  - random314 4y ago
    Einstein's speech in the Nobel ceremony was entirely about relativity, which had been accepted as fact since 1908 within the physics community. General relativity was immediately accepted as fact on being published. The same is true for the discovery of gravitational waves. Relativity was excluded from the prize for relatively obscure reasons, the then famous philosopher Henry Bergson objected to Einstein's concept of time at the time that the committee met to decide on the prize[1]. To top it off Alfred Nobel was not a fan of theoretical physics and made it clear that only experimentally verified theoretical results should be awarded[3]. This is at odds with the physics community. No prominent physicist has objected to relativity since 1910. If you have actually studied physics, you will see that special relativity is "obviously" correct. There is no reasonable explanation of electromagnetism that doesn't logically imply special relativity. If you accept Maxwell's electromagnetic field equations, special relativity follows mathematically from it. Theoretical Physics proceeds by exposing contradictions within theories and solving them. 1. Galileo challenged Aristotle's physics by assaulting the contradictory laws for heavenly and earthly bodies 2. Newton gave it a sound mathematical footing resolving contradictions between the laws of heavenly and earthly bodies 3. Maxwell resolved contradictions in Biot Savarts law by introducing displacement current and thus predicting that light is an EM wave 4. Special relativity eliminated the extra ordinary coincidence that prevented any physical experiment from distinguishing an electric field from a magnetic field, even in a theoretical setting, by proposing that the speed of light is constant wrt the observer [2] 5. General relativity solved the extra ordinary coincidence that we cannot distinguish gravity from acceleration while also resolving contradictions between gravity and special relativity. These theoretical explanations were adequate by itself and did not need experimental verification to be celebrated. Because they solved long standing contradictions and coincidences in a simple compact explanation that reduced the axiom set in physics, not increase them. That's what differentiates theoretical physics from experimental physics. Alfred Nobel had an aversion to theoretical physics, that's why Higgs had to wait for his prize for decades. But the physics community always knew that the Higgs boson existed. Otherwise, they wouldn't spend billion plus dollars on speculation. Stanford would not hire Susskind as a professor in theoretical physics if the physics community thought his works are flights of fancy. The same goes for the Lucasian chair conferred on Stephen Hawking, who worked almost entirely in theory with very little experimental verification for his work. Einstein was offered professorships in theoretical physics at various institutions in the 1910s, including the prestigious ETH Zurich well before any sort of experimental verification of his theories. [1] https://nautil.us/this-philosopher-helped-ensure-there-was-no-nobel-for-relativity-235898/ https://nautil.us/this-philosopher-helped-ensure-there-was-n... [2] https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ [3] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/63049/can-a-theoretical-physicist-win-a-nobel-prize-anymore https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/63049/can-a-the...
zethus 4y ago
> The speculative claims discussed in this article have no evidence to support them. Can you highlight which claims that you find to be speculative without evidence? There's a mix of existing theories that are being actively studied in theoretical physics (holographic cosmology), and some claims that the author seems to call out in rhetorical question. I get that either will whoosh over the lay person.
- pdonis 4y ago
  > There's a mix of existing theories that are being actively studied in theoretical physics (holographic cosmology), and some claims that the author seems to call out in rhetorical question. All of those are speculative claims without evidence to support them.
  - zethus 4y ago
    I'd argue that in the case of AdS/CFT correspondence, they've been mathematically proven to be _possible_. Doesn't mean that it is true. We also don't have all of the answers to AdS/CFT questions to prove a holographic universe theory with utmost certainty. I would, however, agree that evidence could have been presented in the article, but I'm guessing the target audience for this piece may have never clicked into an array of academic papers. The classical wormhole as an extreme fold in spacetime is mathematically _possible_, but given what we've observed in the universe, extremely unlikely to naturally occur.
    - pdonis 4y ago
      "Mathematically possible" is a much lower bar than "has evidence to support it". Yes, AdS/CFT is mathematically consistent, as are classical GR wormhole models. But there is no evidence to support either. > I would, however, agree that evidence could have been presented in the article, but I'm guessing the target audience for this piece may have never clicked into an array of academic papers. If you know of any scientific papers that present evidence for AdS/CFT (or for wormholes, for that matter), please post links. I'm not aware of any such papers.
throwaway81523 4y ago
If physicists are getting their research directions from pop-sci NYT articles than we are in bigger trouble than merely having interesting theories not pan out.
- kalimanzaro 4y ago
  GP probably meant young people deciding to go into physics after reading these articles. I'm a physicist and many of us were massively influenced by the pop-sci books we read as kids before we knew better. You don't get specific research directions from NYT but you do get educated in what kind of ideas will get media attention, and that is as bad as the hypothetical big troubles you allude to.
  - throwaway81523 4y ago
    Meh, lots of scientists first got that tendency by watching Star Trek and the like. NYT articles are a huge step upward in rigor, compared to that. I wouldn't worry.
nathan_compton 4y ago
Now you've made me feel like I was too hard on ADS/Cft! Empirical confirmation is not, in my opinion, a requirement for taking a scientific idea seriously. There is a lot of discussion of relativity in the threads on this comment, but most of it misses what I think is the salient point: _general_ relativity was formulated not because of any compelling physical observation which demanded a theory of curved spacetime or some other relativistically invariant theory of gravity. General Relativity was formulated because _special relativity_ more or less demanded that the effect of gravity propagate in some way coherent with the idea that causes and effects are ordered and move from place to place at a finite speed. There is nothing wrong, in my opinion, with undertaking a research program on the basis of a compelling outstanding but purely theoretical problem. I don't think the existence of such research programs alone, nor their discussion in public per se, tends towards a kind of scientific authoritarianism. My problem with the article is entirely in how it communicates the ideas here, which is badly and, more importantly, without situating them in the greater epistemological context of progress in physics. I suppose the presenting the material without that context does kind of support "scientism" but such is so common in media that this doesn't seem like a particularly outstanding example. Really, the inability of the public or the press to understand science is a deep cultural and political problem of which this kind of reporting is just a symptom.
- pdonis 4y ago
  > Empirical confirmation is not, in my opinion, a requirement for taking a scientific idea seriously. Taking it seriously as far as investigating it, I agree; you don't need empirical confirmation for that, indeed it would make no sense to insist on it, since at least one major point of investigating it is to see if you can find empirical confirmation (though you might have to expend a lot of theoretical effort to get to that point). Taking it seriously as far as claiming it is true, no. For that you need empirical confirmation.
  - atoav 4y ago
    You can investigate whatever, but at a certain scale of investigation it starts to make sense to think about how wise it is to spend the resources, time and collective effort on any given investigation carried out in the way it was meant to be carried out. E.g. we could do a really hardcore investigation into whether the moon is made of cheese despite all evidence to the contrary. Then we could fly there have one guy be like "Yep it is not cheese". Then have a psychological analysis of that guy and send another one just to be sure, ad infinitum leaving nothing for actual serious, on the edge of knowledge investigations. That overdriven would dadaist investigation is of course just a carricature I made up now, but the underlying issue is real: science costs us all and we should spend it where it helps. Sometimes that must also mean not knowing to which ends we do investigate something. But it should not become dadaist in a way similar to the outlined story.

by pdonis 4y ago

random314 4y ago

Einstein's relativity was purely theoretical when it was accepted world wide based on abstract principles. So, your characterization of how modern physics works is completely wrong.

pdonis 4y ago
No, your claim regarding the historical facts is completely wrong. If by "relativity" you mean special relativity, nobody used it for anything when it was published. The first real use of it theoretically was to explain the Compton effect in 1921, based on experimental results. It took another decade or so for it to be routinely used, mainly due to its success in explaining the fine structure of atomic spectra and in developing quantum field theory. If you mean general relativity, the first event that could be said to have gotten it "accepted world wide" was the 1919 eclipse expeditions organized by Eddington, which confirmed the GR prediction of bending of light by the Sun. And even then acceptance of it was still limited (see below). Also, even before that, GR was known to correctly predict the extra precession of Mercury's perihelion, which could not be explained by Newtonian gravity. So that was a piece of evidence for GR that was known before it was published. Note that even after the 1919 eclipse expedition and the 1921 explanation of the Compton Effect, relativity was still considered too "out there" to justify a Nobel Prize; when Einstein got the prize in 1922 the Nobel committee specifically excluded relativity from the scientific work by Einstein that was the basis for it.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  I believe that GR being true implies the truth of SR, so the 1919 eclipse expedition is actually evidence of both.
- random314 4y ago
  Einstein's speech in the Nobel ceremony was entirely about relativity, which had been accepted as fact since 1908 within the physics community. General relativity was immediately accepted as fact on being published. The same is true for the discovery of gravitational waves. Relativity was excluded from the prize for relatively obscure reasons, the then famous philosopher Henry Bergson objected to Einstein's concept of time at the time that the committee met to decide on the prize[1]. To top it off Alfred Nobel was not a fan of theoretical physics and made it clear that only experimentally verified theoretical results should be awarded[3]. This is at odds with the physics community. No prominent physicist has objected to relativity since 1910. If you have actually studied physics, you will see that special relativity is "obviously" correct. There is no reasonable explanation of electromagnetism that doesn't logically imply special relativity. If you accept Maxwell's electromagnetic field equations, special relativity follows mathematically from it. Theoretical Physics proceeds by exposing contradictions within theories and solving them. 1. Galileo challenged Aristotle's physics by assaulting the contradictory laws for heavenly and earthly bodies 2. Newton gave it a sound mathematical footing resolving contradictions between the laws of heavenly and earthly bodies 3. Maxwell resolved contradictions in Biot Savarts law by introducing displacement current and thus predicting that light is an EM wave 4. Special relativity eliminated the extra ordinary coincidence that prevented any physical experiment from distinguishing an electric field from a magnetic field, even in a theoretical setting, by proposing that the speed of light is constant wrt the observer [2] 5. General relativity solved the extra ordinary coincidence that we cannot distinguish gravity from acceleration while also resolving contradictions between gravity and special relativity. These theoretical explanations were adequate by itself and did not need experimental verification to be celebrated. Because they solved long standing contradictions and coincidences in a simple compact explanation that reduced the axiom set in physics, not increase them. That's what differentiates theoretical physics from experimental physics. Alfred Nobel had an aversion to theoretical physics, that's why Higgs had to wait for his prize for decades. But the physics community always knew that the Higgs boson existed. Otherwise, they wouldn't spend billion plus dollars on speculation. Stanford would not hire Susskind as a professor in theoretical physics if the physics community thought his works are flights of fancy. The same goes for the Lucasian chair conferred on Stephen Hawking, who worked almost entirely in theory with very little experimental verification for his work. Einstein was offered professorships in theoretical physics at various institutions in the 1910s, including the prestigious ETH Zurich well before any sort of experimental verification of his theories. [1] https://nautil.us/this-philosopher-helped-ensure-there-was-no-nobel-for-relativity-235898/ https://nautil.us/this-philosopher-helped-ensure-there-was-n... [2] https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ [3] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/63049/can-a-theoretical-physicist-win-a-nobel-prize-anymore https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/63049/can-a-the...

zethus 4y ago

> The speculative claims discussed in this article have no evidence to support them. Can you highlight which claims that you find to be speculative without evidence? There's a mix of existing theories that are being actively studied in theoretical physics (holographic cosmology), and some claims that the author seems to call out in rhetorical question. I get that either will whoosh over the lay person.

pdonis 4y ago
> There's a mix of existing theories that are being actively studied in theoretical physics (holographic cosmology), and some claims that the author seems to call out in rhetorical question. All of those are speculative claims without evidence to support them.
- zethus 4y ago
  I'd argue that in the case of AdS/CFT correspondence, they've been mathematically proven to be _possible_. Doesn't mean that it is true. We also don't have all of the answers to AdS/CFT questions to prove a holographic universe theory with utmost certainty. I would, however, agree that evidence could have been presented in the article, but I'm guessing the target audience for this piece may have never clicked into an array of academic papers. The classical wormhole as an extreme fold in spacetime is mathematically _possible_, but given what we've observed in the universe, extremely unlikely to naturally occur.
  - pdonis 4y ago
    "Mathematically possible" is a much lower bar than "has evidence to support it". Yes, AdS/CFT is mathematically consistent, as are classical GR wormhole models. But there is no evidence to support either. > I would, however, agree that evidence could have been presented in the article, but I'm guessing the target audience for this piece may have never clicked into an array of academic papers. If you know of any scientific papers that present evidence for AdS/CFT (or for wormholes, for that matter), please post links. I'm not aware of any such papers.

throwaway81523 4y ago

If physicists are getting their research directions from pop-sci NYT articles than we are in bigger trouble than merely having interesting theories not pan out.

kalimanzaro 4y ago
GP probably meant young people deciding to go into physics after reading these articles. I'm a physicist and many of us were massively influenced by the pop-sci books we read as kids before we knew better. You don't get specific research directions from NYT but you do get educated in what kind of ideas will get media attention, and that is as bad as the hypothetical big troubles you allude to.
- throwaway81523 4y ago
  Meh, lots of scientists first got that tendency by watching Star Trek and the like. NYT articles are a huge step upward in rigor, compared to that. I wouldn't worry.

nathan_compton 4y ago

Now you've made me feel like I was too hard on ADS/Cft! Empirical confirmation is not, in my opinion, a requirement for taking a scientific idea seriously. There is a lot of discussion of relativity in the threads on this comment, but most of it misses what I think is the salient point: _general_ relativity was formulated not because of any compelling physical observation which demanded a theory of curved spacetime or some other relativistically invariant theory of gravity. General Relativity was formulated because _special relativity_ more or less demanded that the effect of gravity propagate in some way coherent with the idea that causes and effects are ordered and move from place to place at a finite speed. There is nothing wrong, in my opinion, with undertaking a research program on the basis of a compelling outstanding but purely theoretical problem. I don't think the existence of such research programs alone, nor their discussion in public per se, tends towards a kind of scientific authoritarianism. My problem with the article is entirely in how it communicates the ideas here, which is badly and, more importantly, without situating them in the greater epistemological context of progress in physics. I suppose the presenting the material without that context does kind of support "scientism" but such is so common in media that this doesn't seem like a particularly outstanding example. Really, the inability of the public or the press to understand science is a deep cultural and political problem of which this kind of reporting is just a symptom.

pdonis 4y ago
> Empirical confirmation is not, in my opinion, a requirement for taking a scientific idea seriously. Taking it seriously as far as investigating it, I agree; you don't need empirical confirmation for that, indeed it would make no sense to insist on it, since at least one major point of investigating it is to see if you can find empirical confirmation (though you might have to expend a lot of theoretical effort to get to that point). Taking it seriously as far as claiming it is true, no. For that you need empirical confirmation.
- atoav 4y ago
  You can investigate whatever, but at a certain scale of investigation it starts to make sense to think about how wise it is to spend the resources, time and collective effort on any given investigation carried out in the way it was meant to be carried out. E.g. we could do a really hardcore investigation into whether the moon is made of cheese despite all evidence to the contrary. Then we could fly there have one guy be like "Yep it is not cheese". Then have a psychological analysis of that guy and send another one just to be sure, ad infinitum leaving nothing for actual serious, on the edge of knowledge investigations. That overdriven would dadaist investigation is of course just a carricature I made up now, but the underlying issue is real: science costs us all and we should spend it where it helps. Sometimes that must also mean not knowing to which ends we do investigate something. But it should not become dadaist in a way similar to the outlined story.