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String theory lied to us and now science communication is hard [video]
- Arainach 3y agoIs there a good summary of the content? This sounds like a presenter who knows what they are talking about, and I'm preinclined to be interested in this since for a long time as an interested amateur I disliked how significant parts of string theory seemed untestable (and thus in my opinion unscientific), but hourlong videos are the least efficient way to communicate information out there.
- ketralnis 3y agoThe title is a good summary. Beyond that it's expanding on some history and being more detailed than the single sentence.
- globalnode 3y agothis comment shows as flagged, but why?, nvm, it seems to have corrected itself now shrug
- mvdtnz 3y agoI will always, 100% of the time, downvote a user who explicitly states they haven't read/watched the linked content. There is never a reason to comment on content you haven't seen. It's a waste of your time and ours.
- ramraj07 3y agoI disagree; if you can’t fully consume something in ten minutes it’s not lazy to ask for a tldr - I have watched this video fully and while entertaining it could have been 15 min or less and not lost anything.
- em-bee 3y agothey didn't state that. more likely they watched part of it. how else would they get the impression that the presenter knows what she is talking about? i watched 10 minutes before giving up, but can make the same observation now.
- jcranmer 3y agoThe tl;dr, as I've gleaned from what I've seen so far, is that string theory is a failed theory with a good PR department that has been saying "we're on a cusp of Einstein relativity-like revolution in physics" for about 40 years now. And the fact that the recipients of these PR have started to realize they've been duped is causing the general public to embark on an unwarranted backlash against other branches of physics.
- John7149 3y agoIt is not really failed. It is more like a mathematical tools being forced to be the physic law. Think of it like Newton law without knowing relativity. You probably keep modifying to match the relativistic result. Instead of finding Einstein GR, that modified Newtonian equations grew into incredibly complex to match reality. Then declared it is so because it looks so nice and symmetrical instead of having actual physical result supporting it. Currently ST is so complex nothing in it can be proven and yet supporters declare it can "explain" all other theories/result. And each time it cant, they just up the dimension to show the math now corrected to match the physical result. It is no longer science at this point...and it is pity so many bright minds wasted their lives enhancing this branch of physics (or at this point more correct to say mathematics).
- jcranmer 3y agoShe bounces around a bit between characterizing it as a not-a-theory versus a failed theory. It's a failed theory in the sense that the framework hasn't yielded any predictive theories nor has it provided a simpler way to understand existing theories.
- taylodl 3y agoIt provides simpler calculations in some cases. That's why physicists today elect to use the standard model, string theory, or brane theory depending upon whichever yields the easiest calculation for the problem they're trying to solve. One thing of note is that there's never been a calculation that hasn't agreed with observation. We simply have three different models that all work equally well. I think it's dishonest to not point that out.
- ricardobeat 3y agoNot everything needs to be optimized for efficiency.
- makeitshine 3y agoMany people prefer the long conversational walks with detours and such, as opposed to efficient consumption. You can run the YT subtitles an LLM to get a summary if you don't have the time.
- awilcox 3y agoI watched the video, and have been interested in this space as an amateur for a while. It's not worth the hour, would be great in a focused 10 min vid. The crux of the video is that string theory isn't really a theory since it's untestable, and that string physicists/authors have overrepresented its utility for decades. She goes through a brief history, and the broken promises (each decade: a new revolution from string theory is just a decade away). But the arguments around the public erosion of trust in physics involve a few cherry-picked examples that and ignore the wider context around academic research and issues communicating science to the public, especially scientific sensationalism from media outlets (eg God Particle). She argues that the string theorists have played into this and should have been more media savvy in the past, but is relatively unscathing of other non-string theory physicists. It just gets ranty at the end, "the string theorists lied to us for 30 years" gets repeated a lot.
- xracy 3y agoI think I watched it at 2x speed, and it was only 30m. I'm gonna say it's worth the hour, and I think you might be falling into the trap of media communication about science. If something is worth communicating to a lay-person, it's worth going into detail about to avoid the exact pitfalls that you might fall into if you were to digest a 10m version of it. If you don't want to watch the 60m version of it, I would say "stay out of the discussion on it."
- ketralnis 3y agoShe has several other good videos too. Her channel is fairly young but this one is probably her best so far. I do fear it runs afoul of being catnip to the kind of person that comments on every dark matter article with "well I've always been skeptical of dark matter" or "particle physics needs to think outside the box". And if you are, well, watch her dark matter video too but you won't like it for the opposite reason that you'll like this one. Don't say I didn't warn you. Anyway she's a great communicator and has the right kind of sass (this is probably her sassiest). Give the rest of her catalogue a look.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoShe has a ton of nerd charm. I couldn’t watch the whole video, but I skipped around and she wasn’t in any way grating or boring. I would have cut the video to 10 minutes though.
- jcranmer 3y agoNot so much that she should have cut the video, but written out a script for a 10-minute video and recorded that. For instance, there's like a 3 minute digression about a popular science book whose punchline is that string theorists sound like crackpot physicists, and that's basically all the information she wanted to convey in that digression.
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoHer glass video was awesome!
- defrost 3y agoDamn you, I had to hunt, it was the one self described with the deliberately misleading clickbait title: the most important material in science The most important material in science is glass. This is a video about the history of glass. Glass is important. Glass is complicated. Professional scientific glass blowers are the coolest people in the world. And a little discussion on art versus science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eUI38MpiYo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eUI38MpiYo
- antonvs 3y agoIt's not just string theory. Another example is the state of communication about fusion power right now, which is deplorable. The media has been full of claims about how they finally achieved "net energy gain." Except "net energy gain" is a narrow scientific description that does not, in fact, mean what we would normally consider net energy gain for viable fusion power. If we look at the actual total power input to the experiment in question, and the power output, we see a 99% energy loss: the total output power was only 1% of the total input power. That means we're 100 times, two orders of magnitude, away from achieving an actual energy gain. On HN there is probably a good amount of awareness of this, but I bet there are some people reading this comment who were not aware of it, and were misled by the reporting. Here's an article for the unfamiliar: https://whyy.org/segments/why-the-nuclear-fusion-net-energy-gain-is-more-hype-than-breakthrough/ https://whyy.org/segments/why-the-nuclear-fusion-net-energy-... So I think the headline could be generalized: science communication has a high degree of dishonesty in general, and that makes good science communication hard.
- notthemessiah 3y agoIs that science though? I would consider it nuclear engineering.
- dackerlunghack 3y ago[dead]
- antonvs 3y agoYes, it’s science, precisely for the reason I raised, which is that fundamental research is still needed and still being done before it can get to the point of being pure engineering. There’s no path to viable controlled nuclear fusion that can be achieved by simply applying engineering principles using known physics. That’s why the Fusion Energy Sciences program within the Department of Energy’s Office of Science was allocated three quarters of a billion dollars in the 2023 appropriations bill. Here’s a list of institutions involved in fusion research in the US alone: https://science.osti.gov/fes/Research/Fusion-Institutions https://science.osti.gov/fes/Research/Fusion-Institutions There are similar lists for all the countries involved in the $40+ billion ITER experiment. Of course, there’s serious engineering involved in these projects as well, just as there is for the LHC, for example. But presumably you wouldn’t call the research being done at the LHC “particle engineering”.
- AngelRamirez 3y ago[flagged]
- AngelRamirez 3y ago[flagged]
- dilyevsky 3y agoThere’s a recent Veritasium video on the same subject - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=czjisEGe5Cw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=czjisEGe5Cw
- omnicognate 3y agoHas anybody watched the whole thing and know if the video game she's playing ended up having some relevance or helping her make some point? If not, I don't think I'll bother with the rest. I watched ~10 mins and found the game a stressful distraction that impeded her communication (was that the point?). If it's just a random shtick I'll leave it for those that enjoy it.
- John7149 3y agoActually I found that she has impressive concentration...playing games and explaining such a deep subject at the same time. You can think of it more of showing off her mental capacity. Nevertheless, I grow fond of her channel and don't mind of "shtick"-ism. If you can't concentrate just set to audio mode like podcast (assuming you use libretube or vanced/revanced) or just let the audio run while uou shwitch to another tab (probably have the UB refresh the filters to block the ads). I do patron these days and heavy UB.
- omnicognate 3y agoSo it didn't have any direct relevance?
- hackeraccount 3y agoI can play (some) video games and listen to a podcast/book at the same time but I don't think I could play a game and explain something at the same time. It's actually kind of impressive though she did seem distracted but that might be because I was watching the video - maybe if I just listen to the audio it'll be better.
- idle_zealot 3y agoShe explains near the beginning that she's playing The Binding of Isaac as a sort of fidget toy, and that it isn't related to what she's talking about. This does not turn out to be a fake out or anything, it is in fact completely unrelated. She does beat the game though :)
- 3y ago
- tsunamifury 3y agoThere is a bigger and much broader crisis in science right now that academics refuse to face head on. From physics to social sciences to economics famous academics have promoted totally bumpkis theories as facts in order to justify PR and publication. Academics are more and more regularly taking data or exaggerating results and the public is starting to catch on. It’s eroding rational sciences as a whole.
- crotchfire 3y ago"science plus politics equals politics"
- api 3y agoWorks for other things too, like art or religion.
- stillwithit 3y ago[flagged]
- api 3y agoEverything's made out of meat.
- godelski 3y agoOne thing I've been trying to push is the idea of Goodhart's Hell and how we're all metric hacking. In academia, one of these things is fundamentally about how papers are written. As someone finishing up my PhD I can't wait to graduate and do real fucking research. The difference? I am not writing papers to my colleagues and fellow researchers in my niche; I'm writing papers to reviewers. These may seem like the same thing but they are very different. In a similar vein, many researchers are chasing hype and publicity. If you don't you don't get through these dumb filters. Journals and conferences do nothing (well at least conferences serve as a meetup, but not more than that). All they exist for, in modern times, is to give a signal to the bureaucrats at universities designed to operate as businesses to judge if a researcher is a good researcher or not (to be clear, this signal doesn't actually indicate such a concept, which is near impossible to tell). This, and other factors, underlines the whole replication crisis, hype (dear fucking god ML...(my area of study!)), and all this bullshit. Research papers are about scientists communicating with one another. It doesn't matter if it is a preprint like arxiv, Nature, CVPR, or a fucking blog, these are all scientists communicating with one another. I can't wait to be out to just take my time with research, post to OpenReview and my blog, and move on not wasting my time explaining to a reviewer why metric we reproduced is different from the one in the original paper despite already including references of other works who also could not reproduce the original number and getting rejected because I had a broken link to my appendix. It's a fucking waste of time and it is a complete embarrassment that we call this process science.
- totetsu 3y agoStill playing the Binding of Isaac in 2023. That's career suicide.
- ivolimmen 3y agoFor me the video is a total distraction; I can't follow it mainly because she is playing a video game. I also don't understand String theory... and I don't really care... but who plays video games while explaining something???
- hikingsimulator 3y agoYou could, you know, just listen to it.
- knose 3y agoconversations over video game footage is the zoomer mode of communication, it is simply Superior
- pfannkuchen 3y agoI don’t really get the video game thing either. I’ve seen it from other people also though. I suspect it may be easier to talk about something while slightly focusing on another task, if you are a person whose self critic is tuned high, since you are less likely to over analyze what you are saying as you are saying it. Recommend listening to the video instead, I did awhile ago and I thought it was interesting and well done.
- javitron 3y agoWell, maybe she should try communicating science while NOT playing a video game. That may be the issue making it hard?
- Animats 3y agoI didn't know string theory was dead. I'd read Smolin's critique, "The Trouble with Physics" (2006) when it came out. He wrote as if he's out of the mainstream back then. Apparently his is now the mainstream opinion. Collier is hard-line Karl Popper - theories must make testable predictions which are later confirmed by experiment. It's good to hear that. Around minute 34, she's covered the background and gets to the political point. "String theorists are liars". This has caused public hostility to physics. Which translates to funding cuts for particle physics.
- mypastself 3y agoI had a similar reaction when I read Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe . It’s a very well written book that champions the cause and explains it in some detail for a layman - and I still came out of it very suspicious about the theory’s validity.
- audunw 3y agoI think the problem is that science today, in many fields, is slower and requires more work than it used to. With physics in particular there’s a perception that science should progress fast in spectacular breakthroughs. But the 1900s was a very unique time. It’s not like that anymore. We’ve figured out the “easy” things (relatively speaking), most things left to discover are probably far harder. So we need to get used to paying scientists and researchers to just play around with whatever they feel like, over long stretches of time. There’s no guarantee that a breakthrough will come from someone strongly embedded in the science mainstream writing lots of articles with tons of citation. And there’s no guarantee that breakthroughs will happen in any reasonable time. I think we also need a shift from documenting/publishing the results, to documenting/publishing the process. YouTube is interesting in that regard. A lot of creators there doing very interesting and unique work.. and even if they don’t get great results, people still watch it if the process is interesting, and/or if the creator teaches their techniques, what they’re learning, how they failed, etc.
- fyokdrigd 3y agoher description of physicists being asked about string theory out of nowhere is what feel like being a comp sci being asked about cryptomoney or AI all the time.
- taylodl 3y agoExcuse me? String Theory didn't lie to us - it's the science popularizes who lied, and continue to lie. Don't believe me? Okay, Einstein said gravity is caused by the curvature of space, right? Wrong! Einstein never said any such thing, he merely said you can think of gravity as curved spacetime - in fact he later pointed out to others that was a crutch, not the reality. Gravity is a force. Yet the science popularizers continue to lie and display their stupid rubber sheet model to explain why things orbit the earth. Which is not only wrong, but very misleading - earth orbit are easily explained by time dilation, you don't even need to model earth gravity with all this spacetime-as-a-rubber sheet nonsense! Still don't believe me? Look how science popularizers explain voodoo mechanics, erm, I mean quantum mechanics. They still pretend that Copenhagen and the science of 100 years ago still reign supreme and completely ignore quantum field theory, which is the foundation of the standard model. When it comes to string theory they never point out that string theory, brane theory, and the standard model all yield the same results and that physicists now use the model that makes their calculations easier. No, science popularizers prefer to spout nonsense in an attempt to make science seem cool. You know what's cool? Actual, factual science!
- lerno 3y agoI was originally pursuing a career in theoretical physics. My master thesis was going to be a literature study on string theory. The more I read, the more I went “what the heck, this theory can’t possibly be true, it’s so ad hoc with rules made up just to make it pass tests that otherwise would prove it conclusively wrong” It made me disillusioned and I eventually ended up working as a developer instead. I guess my instincts were right, because there has been extremely little real progress the last 25(!) years in the field…..