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The crisis in physics is not only about physics

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Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#71

Post by scott_s »

ColanR wrote: post #63
scott_s wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your suggestion about jumping on the EM drive is in direct opposition to what Sabine suggests: "The only way to avoid being sucked into this vicious cycle is to choose carefully which hypothesis to put to the test. But physicists still operate by the “just look” idea like this was the 19th century. They do not think about which hypotheses are promising because their education has not taught them to do so. Such self-r…

You call the originator of the EM drive a crank; I am proposing that the widespread adoption of your dismissive attitude is in large part the cause of the current scientific stagnation observed by the author. I also suggested that the other large cause of the current stagnation is that we do not have enough scientists pursuing outlandish theories - we should hear about things like the EM drive far more frequently, an…

Your suggestions would lead to absolute paralysis, as you are advocating against using basic plausibility tests before pursuing any hypothesis.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#72

Post by knzhou »

hitekker wrote: post #56
knzhou wrote: post #8

As usual with Sabine, this article blatantly misrepresents how science is done and how actual scientists think, and serves mainly to portray herself as the only person in the field capable of rational thought. People in the comments here are picking up on this when it takes an unfair swipe at medicine, but it really applies to the whole article. I am not going to bother doing a line-by-line rebuttal, because I've alr…

Yesterday you proclaimed that the status quo of physics is free from "bad science", and today you're engaging in a character assassination against a well-renowned female physicist who is questioning the status quo. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21389029

No, that's very different. Yesterday I proclaimed that our experimental colleagues do an excellent job of avoiding false positives, because they use great scientific practices. Sabine would agree with me on that.

This article is not about doing data analysis in experiment, it's more about how we should choose the theories that guide our choices in experiments in the first place. I disagree with Sabine because I see her as painting an unfair picture of theorists, as if we were all completely unreflective and she was the only one in the world to think seriously about theory selection. Most of her vague suggestions are things that people (sometimes, hundreds of people) have been already doing for decades.

That breaks the cardinal rule of science popularization: don't trash people or take credit for insights without giving a careful, fair picture of everything that is going on, because the scientists affected don't have the right of reply.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#73

Post by jean23 »

YayamiOmate wrote: post #36
OnlineGladiator wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his point is the science would be better served if it focused on solving problems for people, rather than exploring knowledge for the sake of it. But really I think that is the realm of engineering, and science is really just pursuing knowledge for the sake of it. It's impossible to know what will be useful - Richard Feynman thought it would be fun to analyze the flight characteristics of a flying plate. He l…

Reading your 1st sentence made me think "But that's engineering, it's application. Basic science is getting knowledge just for the sake of it." And you basically followed with it. Basic science is the foundation engineering builds on. I believe 1st semiconductors were a science experiment. Em waves were. Gigantomagnetoresistance was. The internet was an academic curiosity. It think it's important to blow some of huma…

My favourite example is number theory, which was either hailed or ridiculed for millennia as being pure mathematics that can and will never be applied to real life problems.

Today number theory is the basis for several important fields of application, including computation theory, modern cryptography, and numerical calculation.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#74

Post by knzhou »

pdonis wrote: post #35
knzhou wrote: post #8

As usual with Sabine, this article blatantly misrepresents how science is done and how actual scientists think, and serves mainly to portray herself as the only person in the field capable of rational thought. People in the comments here are picking up on this when it takes an unfair swipe at medicine, but it really applies to the whole article. I am not going to bother doing a line-by-line rebuttal, because I've alr…

> this article blatantly misrepresents how science is done and how actual scientists think Her factual statements, that every high-energy physics experiment since the 1970s has only confirmed an existing theory (the Standard Model) and that every prediction made by physicists about possible extensions to that existing theory has turned out to be wrong, are correct. If you think that the underlying cause for these fac…

> Her factual statements, that every high-energy physics experiment since the 1970s has only confirmed an existing theory (the Standard Model) and that every prediction made by physicists about possible extensions to that existing theory has turned out to be wrong, are correct.

Well, the snarky answer is that the equivalent of the LHC (America's SSC) was defunded halfway through construction in the 1990s. This set back the field by nearly 20 years. It's rather unfair to say that no progress was made in the 1990s and 2000s if the very instrument that could have done so was defunded.

Anyway, the real answer is that the vast majority of scientific theories ever formulated were completely wrong. Some people say the early 20th century was the golden age of physics. But there were several failed theories of relativitistic gravity proposed in the 1910s, many failed attempts to formulate the quantum theory of fields in the 1920s, and within particle physics, a slew of failed theories of the atomic nucleus and the fine structure constant. None of this appears in textbooks.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Recall that back then the journals were still getting filled with theoretical papers weekly -- the fact that we teach the material that was right to undergraduates in slim textbooks shows that the vast majority was wrong or irrelevant.

Experimental confirmation has always taken a long time, e.g. see the long disputes over the ether that stretched well into the 1940s, 40 years after the proposal of special relativity, complicated by false positives and systematic uncertainties.

Fundamental science is simply hard, and it only looks like it used to be easy because we forgot 99% of the failures. There is a perfectly valid point to be made that it may be getting harder, but it is insufficient to just point to failures to prove it.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#75

Post by ColanR »

scott_s wrote: post #71
ColanR wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You call the originator of the EM drive a crank; I am proposing that the widespread adoption of your dismissive attitude is in large part the cause of the current scientific stagnation observed by the author. I also suggested that the other large cause of the current stagnation is that we do not have enough scientists pursuing outlandish theories - we should hear about things like the EM drive far more frequently, an…

Your suggestions would lead to absolute paralysis, as you are advocating against using basic plausibility tests before pursuing any hypothesis.

Isn't that what the author says we have (or are approaching) already?

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#76

Post by vo2maxer »

stan_rogers wrote: post #33
pxhb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Almost any material hard metrics you look at like life expectancy, economic growth or whatever you could consider a sign of technological advancement, even tens of billions in investment seem to produce only marginal improvements. We are not living in the golden age of science. As a knit pick, these metrics are all derivatives of science output, and not science itself. For example, detecting gravity waves does move…

Speaking of nitpicking, it's nitpicking - literally speaking, removing the eggs of the lice you've probably already removed from someone's hair. It's a fussy activity (of necessity), takes forever, and would probably seem quite an annoying thing to someone (likely a child) who thinks you've already solved their pressing problem and should maybe leave them alone now.

Speaking of nitpicking or the more practical nit combing, none is needed if a 0.9% suspension of Spinosad (1) is applied to a child’s dry hair and washed off after 10 minutes. You may happily and confidently send your kids back to school after this one treatment despite the horrified looks of parents and teachers ;-)

(1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3273925/

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#77

Post by yaseer »

This article should reflect on it's own philosophical assumptions.

The differential return on progress with time is not linear.

Intuitively, progress is harder, the deeper we probe.

We have reached the point where we are probing the fundamentals of matter at the smallest and largest scales in the universe.

This is much harder to progress on than newton's laws, which could be arrived at through human observation.

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#78

Post by [deleted] »

trixie_ wrote: post #18

It feels from the outside, academic research is performed by an individual or small group that culminates into a paper at the end. When attacking large problems in physics or biology this seems short sighted. A potentially better way would be to attack the problem in an organized manner with teams researching various aspects of the problem and building off of each other. Remove the whole 'paper writing/journal articl…

[deleted]

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#79

Post by dekhn »

yummypaint wrote: post #4

There is alot going on in physics besides things directly related to the standard model. Running out of important things to study is of no concern. As a random example check out the microscopy work by recent nobel prize winner Eric Betzig. I think people fail to appreciate the many frontiers that exist in just understanding how matter interracts with itself. The past was exciting because we got to discover new buildi…

Another frontier is light/matter interactions. This is an area where a ton of progress has occurred in a wide range of areas. And that work often has direct implications. I worked on a microscope recently that coupled 6 different lasers into a single fiber for fluorescent illumination. The tools we got to work with... some are from 100 years ago and are still great, others, like spatial light modulators and other light-conditioning tools are really amazing. These days you can reproduce the Michelson Morely experiment (technically VERY challenging at the time) in an afternoon. Or do a basic quantum eraser experiment with $2K in optical components(!)

Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics

#80

Post by dekhn »

jcranmer wrote: post #68
dannykwells wrote: post #2

This was great until the bit about medicine. Medicine has made huge, tremendous progress in the past 30 years. And there are still many serendipitous discoveries happening that lead to new drugs. I mean jesus for the first time ever, a company is going to put up a drug for approval to treat alzheimers. Let's not lump medicine in with physics, please. Medicine has always been skeptical of theories without data and, wh…

> I mean jesus for the first time ever, a company is going to put up a drug for approval to treat alzheimers. Derek Lowe isn't quite so optimistic about it: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/10/23/th... (tl;dr--the anti-amyloid hypothesis you should be extremely skeptical about, and the inconsistency in the trial data here is signalling that statistical fluke should be a high concern).

if you really want to read more, check out https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/aducanumab-analysis.html

There's a reason I went back to being a software engineer at an internet company working on ML models that actually work- clinical trials have a long way to go before they produce results that can be really trusted.

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