181–190 of 196 posts
Internet Drama is so easily ignored, why would you post it on HN?
This internet drama made it to the front page of the Guardian the other day. And it relates to billions of research funding.
> 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.
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I understand that her critizism goes beyond the models that are usefull, but address the problem that there is a whole industry (wasting money and human resources) of inventing and promoting models that do not solve any urgent 'gap' and/or are not even practically testable.
It's like the entire discipline is getting paid to keep adding epicycles. So - yes - that's a problem.
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what does she propose instead? spend more on theorists? spend less on experiments? spend less on the whole?
She's proposing that the combined brain power of the community can be put to better propose.
Scientists are individually working on theories/ideas that they find most interesting.
The only way this sounds like practically enforceable is if we have a situation where funding agencies are only funding a single theory and refusing to fund people doing research in other areas. But I don’t believe that is the case.
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The world wide web, which came out of the LHC project, alone was worth perhaps millions of experiments.
It didn’t came out of the LHC project. (The LHC project was approved in 1994. There had been a decade of planning but that had nothing to do with the creation of the web.)
> Should China build the Great Collider?
> Stephen Hawking and Gordon Kane 2018
> [...]
> This has shown up in the past from the LHC in a number of well documented areas, including inventing the World Wide Web with its huge impact on economies world-wide and then grid computing. Someone said imagine that CERN (where the World Wide Web was invented for particle physics) had one penny for each use, then particle physics would have all the funding it could use. More industries include magnet technology and superconducting wire technology, a multi-billion dollar accelerator industry, a multi-billion dollar imaging industry that owes its existence to the development of particle physics detectors, other billion dollar industries, and many tangible benefits. Such technologies generate revenues far exceeding the investment for collider construction.
> Arguably the third industrial revolution was triggered by the invention of the World Wide Web at CERN. The requirements for data acquisition and storage and access, and the materials and technologies needed for CEPC and SPPC could help lead to the fourth industrial revolution. For the first decades of the third industrial revolution High Energy Physics led, and only in recent years industry has overtaken HEP. History may repeat itself for the fourth.
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The opinions of lay people are not relevant to the funding of physics at all. Feel free to construct anything else I say into a form that does not contradict that statement, because that's the only one I really care about.
Completely unprincipled naked self interest. I admire the chutzpah.
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…
And yet plans do continue for FCC as well as ILC/NLC, though of the two the latter seem to be the better "investment". As to SUSY, while it is good if young post docs are avoiding it, that does not mean it has gone away (not if PRD table of contents is any indicator). It will take a long time for that paper mill to end, likely with the retirement/death of current researchers or sooner if funding agencies finally come…
Also: what makes you say a linear collider would be a better investment?
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…
I think you get bombarded with hate because of the larger problem of extreme polarization on social media. All subtlety is lost, you are associated with the one anti-science group, opposed to the one pro-science group.
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This internet drama made it to the front page of the Guardian the other day. And it relates to billions of research funding.
If it's about funding, then it just sounds like she wants more money for her projects rather than the other things that are being funded. Waste of time her writing it, not going to waste my time reading it.