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I've said it all before but here we go again

backreaction.blogspot.com

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Re: I've said it all before but here we go again

#11

Post by perihelions »

Twitter 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.

Re: I've said it all before but here we go again

#13

Post by russdill »

russdill wrote: post #12

This 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"

I'll add that many huge advances have been made by solving what could be described as psuedo problems, most notably special relativity.

Re: I've said it all before but here we go again

#15

Post by vbarrielle »

russdill wrote: post #13
russdill wrote: post #12

This 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"

I'll add that many huge advances have been made by solving what could be described as psuedo problems, most notably special relativity.

In 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_exper...) can be considered as solving a pseudo problem?

Re: I've said it all before but here we go again

#16

Post by defrost »

frozenport wrote: post #8
DocTomoe wrote: post #4

This 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 s…

It 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.

And 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.

Re: I've said it all before but here we go again

#17

Post by tsimionescu »

russdill wrote: post #13
russdill wrote: post #12

This 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"

I'll add that many huge advances have been made by solving what could be described as psuedo problems, most notably special relativity.

That may well be the worse example you could have given, seeing as how special relativity was necessary to reconcile Maxwell's equations with Newtonian mechanics, a major inconsistency in physics.

Perhaps a better example could have been GR explaining why gravitational mass and inertial mass happen to be identical (except that GR also solves other real problems - notably, how to apply special relativity in the presence of gravity).

Re: I've said it all before but here we go again

#18

Post by russdill »

vbarrielle wrote: post #15
russdill wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll add that many huge advances have been made by solving what could be described as psuedo problems, most notably special relativity.

In 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_exper... ) can be considered as solving a pseudo problem?

The 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.

Re: I've said it all before but here we go again

#19

Post by kryptiskt »

russdill wrote: post #18
vbarrielle wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 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_exper... ) can be considered as solving a pseudo problem?

The 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.

Anti-particles had a very short life as a theoretical construct, Dirac predicted them in 1931 and Carl Anderson discovered the positron in 1932.

Re: I've said it all before but here we go again

#20

Post by mw888 »

perihelions wrote: post #11

Twitter 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…

Because 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.
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