31–40 of 196 posts
Wasn't high-temperature superconductivity explained more recently than 1970? Or is "particle physics" not supposed to include that? https://www.quantamagazine.org/high-temperature-superconduct...
> There have also been several instances in the past where particle physicists called senior people at my workplace to complain about me, probably in the hope to intimidate me or to get me fired You would think people as smart as particle physicists most probably are wouldn't go that low, but here we are.
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…
Unfortunately for her, the only people who are really strongly swayed by her arguments are her following of lay people, because the physicists are either 1) enough into theoretical particle physics that they immediately reject her undiplomatic comments (even if they may be right) or 2) like me a physicist who knows they know so little about theoretical particle physics that they should not have an opinion on it.
Physics twitter is very cordial and positive if you simply ignore Sabine.
> There have also been several instances in the past where particle physicists called senior people at my workplace to complain about me, probably in the hope to intimidate me or to get me fired You would think people as smart as particle physicists most probably are wouldn't go that low, but here we are.
The interesting experimental results in recent years mostly seem to come from very low energy physics. Down around absolute zero, many interesting effects have been demonstrated.
> There have also been several instances in the past where particle physicists called senior people at my workplace to complain about me, probably in the hope to intimidate me or to get me fired You would think people as smart as particle physicists most probably are wouldn't go that low, but here we are.
And, the only reason I didn't drop out is because I was scared to. I did not know what I would do otherwise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 presen…
If you read the literature of the time, the issue was considered as largely understood. I would highly recommended science and hypothesis by Poincare (1905). You'll see a lot of concepts and equations that you might have assumed came from special relativity or even general relativity.
Additionally, we already know that the luminiferous aether model would have soon hit other major problems with quantum mechanics, which was already starting to be intuited by Einstein and others. So even if SR would have been seen as just a mathematical curiosity at the time of publishing (solving a non-problem), it would have soon become even more important.
Very importantly, SR also had much fewer assumptions (free parameters) than any of the other successful models it replaced. Contrast this with String Theory, which has numerous free parameters, doesn't fully explain currently-known phenomena, and has accumulated more than thirty years of study from a vast amount of physicists. SR was one physicist's individual work for a handful of years, and the moment it was presented, it was a short and complete theory that could immediately replace more complex ones.
If any individual physicist wants to similarly individually investigate some of the non-problems listed in the article, and were to come up with a new formulation of QM/QFT that explains them with a similar theory - then by all means, I am certain Dr Hossenfelder has no problem with that. It is when the search for such a theory becomes a decades-long approach sucking up most of the funding in the field with no results at all that it becomes a problem.
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…
I know it's not an excuse but Sabine definitely "starts it". Just look at her wording in the blog post? She is always combative at the outset. She does not seem to have the kind of people skills required to harshly (and you can't deny it's harsh) and publicly criticise an entire field without upsetting everyone in that field. It takes skill to do that in a good way. Unfortunately for her, the only people who are real…
1) 'undiplomatic' and 'truth' aren't mutually exclusive. While science is highly social in it's game, it is not in its object. Otherwise the discipline is scientism, not science.
2) even if I knew nothing about the intricacies of counting angles on the head of a pin, I can still have an opinion on its usefulness, lack of verifiability or predictive power. In a software analogy: A black box test still reveals errors even when it doesn't show how the errors are produced.
Science and everything else humans do is social and cliquey. There's nothing that brings a group with some power over others together more than being able to agree that someone outside the group should be sidelined or punished.
I only have a master in (engineering) physics but working with statistical modeling and AI I’ve come to appreciate the “all models are wrong but some models are useful”-mindset, and I’ve started applying that to physical “laws” as well: I no longer see them as some divine truths waiting to be discovered, but more like models of the world that will always be wrong but sometimes useful. From that point of view what’s h…