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

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

#131

Post by pessimizer »

bowsamic wrote: post #45
iopq wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lay person like a politician can complain they get no return on their investment, for example

Thankfully politicians don't think of science in terms of "return on investment" Obviously it must be justified as scientifically important, but they do not expect "something back". Government agencies generally take a more blurry and general approach to R&D, since you cannot predict what comes out of a given experiment. No one predicted an absolute revolution in squeezed light from gravitational wave detection for e…

> Thankfully politicians don't think of science in terms of "return on investment"

It's a very strange thing to think you can speak for "politicians."

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

#132

Post by mannykannot »

ki_ wrote: post #56

It's my opinion that a lot of science today is theoretical BS. I'm glad sometimes, someone is pointing it out. When i do it myself, i get bombarded with hate. Sigh. even when it's not science, when it's about programming (my profession). And the one thing i learned is: PEOPLE WILL NOT CHANGE THEIR MIND. You can even come with proof and people wont change. They will just ignore u after you've proven it, and keep sayin…

When you open a conversation with as sweeping a statement as the one you presented in your first sentence, you realistically only have about a minute or two to persuade the person you are addressing that you will be able to justify it.

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

#133

Post by mistermann »

qsdf38100 wrote: post #109
qsdf38100 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah she sounds like a frustrated person seeking revenge. Because someone has to be responsible for her frustration, right? To be fair it’s a trend we see a lot currently. Angry people seeking revenge because they feel their life didn’t go as well as they deserve.

I’d appreciate feedback from people downvoting. I don’t care about HN karma, I’m just curious as to why denouncing her unconstructive and angry takes on particule physics is frowned upon.

I downvoted for clairvoyance - one of my pet peeves.

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

#134

Post by furyofantares »

quantum_mcts wrote: post #48

Quoted post unavailable.

It's incredible how bad this reply is, and how closely it follows her claim that folks that don't like what she's saying just go straight for personal attacks without engaging at all with the content of her argument.

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

#135

Post by pessimizer »

sva_ wrote: post #117
largbae wrote: post #97

This is a blogpost by Sabine Hossenfelder summarizing her criticisms of particle physics. None of the above information is in the blogpost or HN post title, which is annoying.

HN guidelines suggest that you should put the title of the page in the submission title, so there is nothing wrong with it from that standpoint. Take it out to the author of the article for not making a more descriptive title, if at all.

HN guidelines strongly encourage that for the sake of removing editorial from the submission, but adding something at least a little descriptive is good to keep people from wasting their time. This got traction because of the domain, not the title.

> Take it out to the author of the article for not making a more descriptive title, if at all.

She's not responsible for HN guidelines or our interpretations of them. She's not obligated to give her individual blog entries a name at all (or to do anything else.) Should they then just be submitted as a date?

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

#136

Post by User23 »

bowsamic wrote: post #129
User23 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politicians think of Big Science in terms of appropriations and sending cash to their principals, who are neither the electorate nor scientists. They don’t consider any money that buys their re-election a waste. They don’t give a rat’s ass if you discover anything and it sounds like you know it. So-called science these days is little different from military spending. As usual, follow the money.

Politicians generally have almost no influence in scientific spending other than "here is a big block of R&D money". Those who dish out the money are not elected officials, at least not elected by the public.

It’s certainly true that the decades long continuing wealth transfer away from the middle class to well-connected elites that incidentally funds your work involves more than just elected politicians. As you note unelected bureaucrats also have their role to play, as do lawyers, lobbyists, and a whole host of other classes of more or less directly involved grifters in addition to ancillary beneficiaries such as yourself.

It is nice to see your correct assessment of the irrelevance of the will of the electorate though. Until that becomes broadly understood I see little hope of any meaningful reform.

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

#137

Post by gramie »

qsdf38100 wrote: post #109
qsdf38100 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah she sounds like a frustrated person seeking revenge. Because someone has to be responsible for her frustration, right? To be fair it’s a trend we see a lot currently. Angry people seeking revenge because they feel their life didn’t go as well as they deserve.

I’d appreciate feedback from people downvoting. I don’t care about HN karma, I’m just curious as to why denouncing her unconstructive and angry takes on particule physics is frowned upon.

I didn't up- or down-vote you, but I would guess it is because your comment was an ad hominem, attacking her personality rather than her arguments. People can be angry for good reasons or bad, so calling her angry doesn't advance the debate at all.

I'm not a physicist, but it seems to me that her main point seems valid: for the past ~50 years, theoretical physics has been engaged in a process that is rewarding (with research money, publications, tenure, prestige, etc.) people creating theories that cannot ever be proven true or false.

Science is supposed to be founded on the scientific method: create a theory, then create an experiment that can prove or disprove it. Now we have a hamster-wheel of experiments producing theories that produce more experiments, and the goal is to keep the hamster-wheel running rather than come to a conclusion.

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

#138

Post by vihren »

Particle physicist here (relatively new to the field). I mostly do not understand the problem of Dr. Hossenfelder and others like her.

One thing I often see and it seems reiterated here is 'Why do we need more and bigger expensive colliders?'. In general, in the particle physics community right now there isn't much of a push for 'bigger colliders'. Scientists seem to have agreed that the low-energy precision physics frontier might be more fruitful for a fraction of the cost. Even the Mecca of collider physics acknowledges that and have lunched the 'Physics Beyond Colliders' study group https://pbc.web.cern.ch/ Also, there are numerous experiments done at the LHC which are not 'search for new particles'. Yes, the main goal of the LHC was to discover the Higgs boson and the great hopes were that supersymmetry (SUSY) particles will start falling from the sky. Now we know that SUSY is most probably not the way the world works and the efforts are mostly abandoned. Especially by younger physicists in the field.

The other problem that people seem to have is with the current directions in physics which in this blogpost are referred to as 'pseudo-problems' such as: "the baryon asymmetry or the smallness of the cosmological constant". These might not be problems on the same scale as "What the hell is this dark matter??" or "How do we reconcile general relativity with the Standard Model?", but in my opinion it would be a bigger waste of resources to focus all of physics in only the few big questions and leave everything else unexplored. Yes, from a certain point of view you could say that there is no reason that matter and antimatter should be equal in the universe so the baryon asymmetry is not a real problem, but still, there is no explanation yet why everything we see is matter and antimatter is next to non-existent in the Universe.

tl;dr: The money that go to collider physics are not 100% of the money that go into particle physics and generally there are no plans in the community for larger colliders at least in the next 25 years. (the Future Circular Collider has quite a long way to go before its even considered for building)

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

#139

Post by bena »

bowsamic wrote: post #36
paganel wrote: post #22

> 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.

Are we still proliferating the myth that you have to be exceedingly smart to be a physicist? The only thing that makes a physicist a physicist is that they didn't give up. Sure there are amazing geniuses out there, but a majority of physicists (including myself) are just average people who did not drop out when it got tough. And, the only reason I didn't drop out is because I was scared to. I did not know what I woul…

I forget where I read this, so bear with me.

125ish is the minimum IQ range to be mentally capable of understanding anything.

It's not _that_ far off the norm. It's an exceptionally bright person. It's like 90th-95th percentile. You're 1 in 10 or 20.

And that's to do anything. The absolute limit of our understanding can be comprehended if you are "pretty smart". It's why Feynman and Hawking didn't really give a shit about IQ. It doesn't unlock any more doors. It might get you to them faster, but at the end of the day, you gotta put in the work.

And that's where we do fail our brightest. The most important lesson to learn is that hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.

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

#140

Post by sweezyjeezy »

jhrmnn wrote: post #75
bjornsing wrote: post #9

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…

I rather think that we're past our ability to make useful yet comprehensible (to us) models in physics. The only avenue is to make useful and incomprehensible models. Using machine learning for that is one way. String theory might be on the boundary where it's borderline comprehensible (for a few select people), but at the cost of being only borderline useful (maybe).

This could well be the case, though I don't know how one could falsify this without a superhuman intelligence, so is rather unscientific.

I think the less controversial stance is that we're running out of road on what we can test with Earth-bound particle accelerators, and there are still open problems. That's a problem with what we can verify rather than what we can conceive, which could be an impasse to a grand unifying theory.

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