9 ms·
Two physicists who correctly predicted the mass of Higgs boson [video]
- u320 3y ago[flagged]
- Kluggy 3y agowhat does this mean?
- saagarjha 3y agoSabine is, uh, somewhat controversial.
- softdevca 3y agoThose that are worth listening to often are.
- saagarjha 3y agoMany that are worth listening to are controversial. But many that are controversial are not worth listening to. Which is which is a hard question to answer :)
- kragen 3y agoyes, but this means that if you divide people into those with controversial opinions, and those without, you should direct 100% of your listening to the first group. at some point you will have to be more selective than that, but that's clearly the first step
- mr_mitm 3y agoYou can't make that division. Controversialness is not binary. Almost every researcher has a few controversial ideas, that's just natural when trying to push the envelope. Unfortunately, some like to be controversial for the sake of being controversial, and some are so far out there that it would be a waste of time to listen to them.
- kragen 3y agohaving controversial ideas is unavoidable when you think, and sure, you can have more or less of them. but if you have none then you're not thinking and there's no benefit in listening to you
- mr_mitm 3y agoUnless I misunderstood you, you're saying that every undergrad textbook is not worth reading, which cannot be right. Are you assuming everyone is already aware of all the uncontroversial opinions? I listened to many uncontroversial opinions in undergrad and grad school, and it was well worth it because they were all new to me. It's like Picasso said: you need to know the rules before you can break them. Learn the uncontroversial status quo first, then listen to the uncontroversial stuff or come up with your own. Skipping the uncontroversial would be a mistake.
- kragen 3y agoyou have a point. while biology textbooks might be controversial among creationists, and physics textbooks might be controversial among flat-earthers, in mainstream society the only thing controversial about them is the idea that they're worth devoting attention to on the other hand, if the authors of the textbooks don't have any controversial ideas, they probably aren't qualified to write the textbooks and will fill them with their half-understood memories of what someone else told them, which is more likely than not false in the first place. (examples abound: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/01/16/12-science-textbooks-have-many-errors-study-finds/d8dab7a2-e50a-4a64-b4cc-2311dac112dd/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/01/16/1...) ideally you want the authors of your textbooks to habitually practice the kind of critical thinking that will enable them to avoid filling the textbooks with errors, and which also guarantees that they will have controversial opinions case in point: you're a lot better off learning chemistry from linus pauling's physical chemistry than from 95% of current textbooks, both because it's better written and because it's better thought out and more carefully written. as far as i can tell, the book doesn't have any controversial opinions in it, but pauling notoriously did; at some point he became convinced megadoses of vitamin c were great for your health. i'm pretty sure he was wrong about that, but at the time it was controversial
- TOMDM 3y agoThe cutting edge of progress is going to be found in controversy, but the "boring" established fact is often correct. Non controversial people are worth listening to as well.
- threatofrain 3y agoThere's also a question of who is best poised to extract value from professional or expert controversy. IMO generally not amateurs.
- kragen 3y agoclearly. ideally, in a field you don't know well, you would listen to only the uncontroversial opinions of people who also have controversial opinions, which you should ignore since you're not equipped to evaluate them
- bazoom42 3y agoThis is how you become a flat-earther.
- saagarjha 3y agoI said “many”, not all. There’s plenty of leeway to listen to established experts on boring things. You don’t have to be at the cutting edge of every single field, all the time. Nobody needs to listen to controversial opinions about the shape of the planet.
- kragen 3y agoi've known a number of established experts in different fields, and they all had controversial opinions. sometimes not in the fields they were recognized in, but somewhere
- pclmulqdq 3y agoShe is a physicist who is not into string theory or dark matter, which is definitely more controversial of a position within the physics community than outside.
- Qwertious 3y agoShe also made a video on capitalism, which was politically controversial (obviously) but also made several blatantly, objectively wrong claims that were based on no research whatsoever (cough barter economy cough).
- bawolff 3y agoMost people have bad takes outside of their field of expertise. I haven't seen her video on capitalism, but honestly no matter how horrible it is, i doubt it would change my view on her videos on physics.
- bmitc 3y agoI think, more often than not, those people are scientists and engineers, and physicists seem to be the most willing to do so.
- nostromo 3y agoHer take on capitalism is in line what most economists think though. It was only controversial amongst people outside of that field.
- Qwertious 3y agoNobody remotely agrees with the barter economy thing. She also completely omitted any mention of the political economy, while basically saying the solution to climate change is the political economy. Like, really, why does she think a carbon tax hasn't already been implemented? Political economy.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y agoIt is known that some of her positions are "somewhat controversial". But how controversial is this one?
- mr_mitm 3y agoWhich position? In the video she simply embedded an interesting anecdote into textbook knowledge. Don't know what the flagged comment said though.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y agoThe one that she articulates at 7:10 onwards in the video. Starting with "What does this all means? it means that Quantum gravity just might..."
- mr_mitm 3y agoThe position is: quantum gravity might not be that big of a mysterious problem as most physicist make it out to be so they would rather ignore that prediction by Wetterich. That's it, that's the entire position. I don't know, that's not a lot of substance to work with. I don't think it's a particular controversial stance. It does fit very well into her "I'm not like the other physicists" shtick, though.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago> That's it, that's the entire position ... that's not a lot of substance With reference to 2 specific papers, one by Weinberg, the other by Shaposhnikov and Wetterich; which she claims are overlooked; and the correct prediction in the second paper. Is that not a little more substance?
- mr_mitm 3y agoI don't think so. She's making a meta comment about those papers. Also, it feels like you're trying to get me to say something, but I don't know what. I already said that I don't think this position is particularly controversial. She thinks QG is less mysterious than other physicists believe, big deal.
- bawolff 3y ago> Sabine is, uh, somewhat controversial. At the same time people never really seem to be able to give a reasonable explanation as to why, beyond that they disagree with some of her takes.
- saagarjha 3y agoWhy she’s controversial? That’s easy, it’s because she repeatedly pushes theories that are not widely accepted and disagrees vocally with the direction that she thinks physics is going in. This means that almost every discussion of her devolves into “wow she is a genius who is speaking truth to an entrenched and rigid field” versus “she’s a crank that just says unsubstantiated stuff for popularity”. This means that any comment section that involves her is somewhat tiresome, honestly.
- oefrha 3y agoDepending on what counts as “reasonable” (the bar seems rather high for you, as I’ve seen plenty of laymen-friendly explanations reasonable to me, e.g. the sibling comment), you may need to have at least been to a PhD program in high energy physics to understand the explanation. From someone who happens to have been to one.
- huytersd 3y agoShe incompetent and generally doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
- fouc 3y agoApparently there is a boring approach to "quantum gravity" based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptotic_safety_in_quantum_gravity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptotic_safety_in_quantum_g... A prediction for the weight of Higgs boson particle using this, and it came true.
- Joel_Mckay 3y ago“My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition there.” (Indira Gandhi)
- bmitc 3y agoI think I actually disagree with Gandhi here. Lol. There are a lot of people that do the work. The numbers of those who take the credit are much less. However, there is usually a power imbalance that yields to their ability to do so. So it's not about numbers. It's about power.
- bawolff 3y agoI think that's still consistent though. Lots of people try to take credit, only a few succeed. There is no shortage of work to be done, so there is enough room for everyone to do work.
- babypuncher 3y agoFor every Elon Musk there are hundreds or even thousands of engineers with actual degrees and experience relevant to the thing that was built.
- Joel_Mckay 3y ago"For every Elon Musk" Finally confirming he is a clone and or a robot... Sure this is shocking news, but hardly surprising given the shift in behavior of late. =)
- bjornsing 3y agoAnd yet Elon outcompeted them all… ;)
- readthenotes1 3y agoGhandi did not say half the people do the work and half the people take the credit, which is what it sounds like your disagreement is with. And of course, many binary segmentations work well for most cases and fail in unusual cases that can generally ignored.
- avpix 3y agoLike most pop-sci, there's enough nuance to be found in the papers to tell its own story. I wasn't familiar with the Shaposhnikov and Wetterich paper, or asymptotic safety in general, and that 126 GeV Higgs mass prediction is the best I've seen. Their paper ends with "Detecting the Higgs scalar with mass around 126 GeV at the LHC could give a strong hint for the absence of new physics influencing the running of the SM couplings between the Fermi and Planck/unification scales" which seems surprisingly prescient after a decade of null results from the LHC. So why is this ignored in mainstream (aka not youtube) physics? Well, a quick search on InspireHEP shows a 2019 paper [1] that adds on Shaposhnikov and Wtterich's. Of note is that an updated top mass value changes the Higgs mass prediction to 132 GeV, rather in tension with 125 GeV. (The paper then cleverly tries to extend the Standard Model to adjust the prediction back to the measured Higgs mass.) The original argument doesn't look like such a slam dunk anymore. [1] Kwapisz, "Asymptotic safety, the Higgs mass and beyond the Standard Model physics"
- bjornsing 3y agoWithout the new error bounds it’s a bit hard to know what to think.
- sigmoid10 3y agoYou can calculate the error yourself for the most recent experimental values of the Higgs vacuum combined with the numerically calculated lambda from the paper linked above. You get a Higgs mass of 129.6 ± 1.0 GeV at two loops. That's more than three standard deviations from the current Higgs mass measurement. So Hossenfelder's video is - as often - some outdated half-truth. At the current level of research, these values very much suggest that there is more to the Standard Model than we know below the Planck energy. Her whole shtick of bashing CERN always falls apart when you look a bit closer, which is why she only does popsci now and noone in the field listens anymore. That being said, I still believe that asymptotic safety in quantum gravity is a really cool idea and it's well worth pursuing. It deserves better than to be used as a hammer for people bashing other legit science.
- 3y ago
- selimthegrim 3y agoWhy doesn’t she mention Kahana and Kahana (father and son)? I guess even she doesn’t care about them?
- quickthrower2 3y agoSo, are any physicists going to rerun the numbers of that paper with modern knowledge to see if the higgs mass then gets correctly predicted?