121–130 of 164 posts
What about dark matter?
Sabine Hossenfelder basically posted a rant about particle physicists on Youtube last week, about how they are doing science wrong. Basically she said you are supposed to change your theory based upon results that don't match the theory, and what they have been doing for decades is looking at gaps in the results, and imagining particle theories that don't alter the expected results in the currently explored energy le…
the thing is that this pattern of pushing to unexplored energy levels did work before. Unicorns were found in the unexplored forests of Congo. In fact an entire zoo of unicorns of all shapes and forms was found, an incredible achievement that stands among the most important stuff our gray-tinted gel has managed to internalize about the universe. You can't blame modern day particle physicists for being born late for t…
1950s, 1950, 1970s, particle physics was a fast-moving field, theory and experiment moved hand in hand. Guided by the intuition of what is mathematically elegant, you propose an extension of current theories, and soon someone in experimental physics with particle colliders publishes results that confirm your theory. Or the other way round: Experimental physicists publish new collider results, and theorists rush in to explain them with new theories.
But you had to be fast, and greedy (in a good way). If you didn't work out and publish the new mathematical expansion of current theories, someone else surely did.
It was also a good time to be a scientist in academia: Population was growing (15% per decade in USA, 10% per decade in Europe), economy was growing, and graduates from a previous (smaller) generation found jobs and careers in the expanding university system, to teach the next (larger) generation of students.
The standard model was competed in the 1970s. Theoretical particle physics was a well-oiled, battle tested fast spinning machine. Ready to continue the mad gold rush of past 30 years. Follow your intuition of mathematical elegance, propose new theories, wait for experiments to confirm them.
But experiments stopped finding traces of new particles. The standard model of particle physics was complete, and apparently all its particles were already discovered. Well, you had to wait a bit longer for: Top quark 1995, tau neutrino 2000, Higgs boson 2012.
The fast machine of theoretical physics kept rotating and spinning out mathematical structures and theories. But experiments were no longer confirming, or even guiding, the development of theory. The mode of work that had worked beautifully up to mid-1970s didn't work anymore. Supersymmetry made predictions, but all turned out to be wrong. String theory was such a complicated mathematical construction, that we don't even know if it makes predictions (in the Popperian sense) at all.
So yes, we can blame particle physics. What first worked for 30 years, hasn't been working anymore for 40 years. You should try something different.
>I say that’s also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would he better in some other state. If you don’t publish such a result, it seems to me you’re not giving scientific advice. You’re being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicia…
In Nature / Science / Cell, your article submissions are likely to be rejected if they go against the ideas supported by highly cited researchers in your particular subfield, as these will be the reviewers.
Just see what happened in case of e.g. Alzheimer's disease [1]. Eventually, new ideas push through, but it takes too long due to the issue I mentioned above.
[1] https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarte...
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When people talk about essential oils in contexts like these, they're most likely referring to some people having the belief that they have medicinal properties; can cure autism etc.
Lots of people believe essential oils can cure cancer. Any big oncology center has stories about people who show up presenting horrible symptoms well beyond what's normally seen. They spent 2 years just doing essential oils or whatever (often encouraged by some a quack) on some readily treatable thing and when they do finally give in and come to the ER it's basically too late.
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Tragedies like these make me very hesitant about "harmless" falsehoods. I also wonder what cancer survival rates look like if you filter people who self select out of conventional healthcare for a period of time like your example above.
I wonder if belief in alternate medicine correlates with unaffordable healthcare. It is much easier to believe that there is a better way if the correct procedure would ruin you financially.
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That would've been a great reply had the title of the main post not been "Cargo Cult Science". For me, a "career scientist" is someone that publishes papers solely to hold a position at an org / institute / uni / etc (yes, yes, everyone needs food on the table... not the point here. One can still have integrity). The career scientist couldn't care less about being right, only about how many citations he's gonna get a…
>The career scientist couldn't care less about being right What you are describing is philosophically, definitively, not science. The career scientist is a scientist who is committed to the scientific method. The career crank is committed to selling the notion that they have all the answers. That could be a citation chaser or a youtube contrarian.
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This is a lot of patronizing hair tearing over what amounts to a pretty banal HN greatest hit: “intelligent” people don’t really need school, and everyone else can get fucked.
Yeah, he seems to be making it a matter of "well the smart people, the ones who really matter, don't need education, so all the sub 99th percentile students don't really matter because the smart ones aren't benefitting" So teaching kids to read, understand logical inference, showing them different parts of the world and how to look at it, doesn't matter because the wonderful gifted kids would have happened upon those…
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Exactly. And it was about experts questioning the beliefs of other experts, particularly experts in the past. Galileo questioning Aristotle. Einstein questioning Newton. Not about random quacks thinking they have opinions equal to the experts.
There's a huge set of potentially politically fraught middle grounds that exist between Einstein -> Newton and random quack -> some modern distinguished scientist. And by politically fraught I mean career politics that directly impact the scientific landscape, not "politics". It is my impression that back in the day it was more common for academics with differing opinions to banter or at times straight up disrespect…
If you stumble upon a website that makes the stylistic choice that text should take the whole width of your whole screen, you can toggle the "Reader view" feature in Firefox to put it back into a more usual format (F9 on Windows). If you use Chrome-based browsers, there's bookmarklets (bookmarks with a `javascript:` URI) javascript:(function(){var bod = document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0]; bod.style.margin = "40…
Stylistic choice? Isn’t that literally basic html the way it was meant to be used? I think you were supposed to display it in an actual browser window.
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the thing is that this pattern of pushing to unexplored energy levels did work before. Unicorns were found in the unexplored forests of Congo. In fact an entire zoo of unicorns of all shapes and forms was found, an incredible achievement that stands among the most important stuff our gray-tinted gel has managed to internalize about the universe. You can't blame modern day particle physicists for being born late for t…
> You can't blame modern day particle physicists for being born late for the Unicorn chasing party... 1950s, 1950, 1970s, particle physics was a fast-moving field, theory and experiment moved hand in hand. Guided by the intuition of what is mathematically elegant, you propose an extension of current theories, and soon someone in experimental physics with particle colliders publishes results that confirm your theory.…
We know that we are far from having figured out all fundamental physics: All the "dark" stuff in cosmology points to the pieces of the puzzle not fitting well together, if at all.
The question is what sort of local experiments can help lift that next weil of ignorance and if we are collectively capable to imagine them and pursue them.
The issue with local physics is that it is what it is (as Feynman who triggered this thread might say) and what is accessible to us to explore does not match to perfection the socioeconomic convulsions of homo sapiens.
The high energy accelerator physics paradigm (which is but one of the possible local physics windows) may have been exhausted for our current cirumstances but I would bet not in general. The pattern of all physical systems we know is that if you keep pushing them they keep revealing new behavior. We may have hit an energy gap that requires too many resources to cross. But maybe the only resource missing is imagination. Who is to tell?
What is my conclusion? I would agree the success patterns of the past will not repeat on a cookie cutter basis. And theoretical physics is certainly gyrating uncontollably in the absence of experimental anchors. This only raises the bar for people to do a better job at connecting the dots.