Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up • Hacker News Board

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#31

Post by ceejayoz » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:38 PM UTC

onraglanroad wrote: post #23

ceejayoz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall had to drink a beaker of Helicobacter pylori because no one would believe it caused ulcers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis wound up in an insane asylum for suggesting surgeons should wash their hands. Scientists get hidebound just like the rest of us, at times.

Both examples from medicine rather than physics. Can you give an example from physics? Preferably from the last century or two?

The parent post said scientists; medicine is something I've more knowledge of. You can carry the goalposts yourself, if you wanna move them around!

(The parent post also already mentions Einstein on quantum physics.)

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#32

Post by traes » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:40 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #30

traes wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very interesting story that's worth reading up on. "Natural philosophers" of the day refused to accept the idea of a particle too small to directly observe on purely philosophical grounds. They essentially bullied him out of the field for championing the idea of the atom, despite his math yielding numerous correct results. They fruitlessly pursued the idea of energetics instead. (One of the many instances of die ha…

> See also why Emmy Noether wasn't given a professorship despite a letter of recommendation from Albert Einstein I thought that was sexism rather than philosophers? This was the same era and place that mostly ignored Bertha Benz. (Or did you mean after moving to the USA?)

It was indeed sexism, but it was not sexism from the math department, who very much wanted to hire her. In fact, the Chair of Mathematics David Hilbert (of Hilbert space fame) personally recruited her.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#33

Post by sigbottle » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:56 PM UTC

traes wrote: post #29

ben_w wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the boldest chapter one introductions I've ever seen comes to mind: Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. - "States of Matter", David L. Goodstein, https://archive.org/details/statesofmatter0000good_e2n5/page...

A very interesting story that's worth reading up on. "Natural philosophers" of the day refused to accept the idea of a particle too small to directly observe on purely philosophical grounds. They essentially bullied him out of the field for championing the idea of the atom, despite his math yielding numerous correct results. They fruitlessly pursued the idea of energetics instead. (One of the many instances of die ha…

I looked this up, and sure enough, Ernst Mach was the one who lead the charge (a self proclaimed positivist, which is a position that many scientists would gladly say they support).

Sure enough, it's what I thought - you don't mean that some evil boogeyman named Hegel lead a worldwide charge against physics. (I doubt Hegel even understood physics, lol. But you get my point.)

You mean that two physicists had a disagreement, one held institutional power, and ostracized the other.

Fine, but then why attack philosophy? Things are philosophy until they're not. Dogma happens in every field.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#34

Post by glenstein » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 6:01 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #25

glenstein wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are definitely unfortunate examples and I can see how those environments pushed them to their limits. But if we're talking large-scale systematic thinking about what kind of data would be necessary to show that there's such a thing as a typical, characteristic civilization scale negative reaction to scientific revolutions, these don't demonstrate that this is the usual case. Obviously they're important in their…

> In the book, it's a very intentional sabotage campaign. Active malice seems more likely to succeed, doesn't it? They can gaslight people in their own heads, after all.

Yeah, I think we're agreeing. The breakdown of scientific progress in the book is due to an actively malicious campaign that scrambles data, intimidates researchers and worse.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#35

Post by leoc » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 6:03 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #9

pavel_lishin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you mean? I cannot remember any particular scientific revolution where scientists were suicidal, or even particularly crestfallen. Quantum Mechanics is the closest thing I can think of, where Einstein famously refused to accept some of the implications, and where scientists had great disagreements about things like the Copenhagen interpretation and what it means for the actual nature of reality - but I don't t…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall had to drink a beaker of Helicobacter pylori because no one would believe it caused ulcers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis wound up in an insane asylum for suggesting surgeons should wash their hands. Scientists get hidebound just like the rest of us, at times.

Neither Richard Feynman nor the quantum-physics community in general reacted very well to the first efforts to test Bell's theorem experimentally, at first: https://web.archive.org/web/20250723224559/https://arxiv.org... .

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#36

Post by gertop » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 6:05 PM UTC

tansey wrote: post #24

storywatch wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good for the world but terrible for the practitioners in academia. Imagine you are in your last year of your PhD and then something new comes out and completely invalidates/obsoletes your results. Cough natural language processing PhDs during COVID when GPT-3 came around..

Academic here. It's actually great for us. You're usually the first to see the implications for your niche area and have a chance to get a hot paper out rather than a moderately impactful one.

The perspective changes if you're in your last year of PhD as GP said. I'm sure the system is built in a way that you'll still graduate because your supervisor knows this is about learning how to conduct research and not about being right. But it's likely still soul crushing to come out with no published paper (unless you still publish knowing you're wrong, which in some cases might be valuable).

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#37

Post by Hikikomori » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 6:05 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #4

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #2

That's the best part about science.

I remember reading the Three Body Problem, and thinking to myself: this is implausible. If scientists started getting weird results, they'd be thrilled , not suicidal!

In the book they get different results on all tests they run, consistency is gone, that is something else.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#38

Post by ASalazarMX » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 6:06 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #4

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #2

That's the best part about science.

I remember reading the Three Body Problem, and thinking to myself: this is implausible. If scientists started getting weird results, they'd be thrilled , not suicidal!

Specially because only particle physics suddenly became inconsistent. I can see scientists fruitlessly obsessing with finding why the universe was toying with them, but suicide? OK, they were also seeing intent with individualized hallucinations, and computer interference, but IIRC those messages asked them to to stop particle physics, not to off themselves. They could change fields and live on.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#39

Post by ASalazarMX » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 6:10 PM UTC

dguest wrote: post #26

black6 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were getting inconsistent results, not just weird ones. However I agree that suicide probably wouldn't be where they would end up.

I seem to remember something about the scientist being distraught because physics didn't make sense, not because she was having trouble getting clean data. That also stuck with me as weird: there are any number of places you could sabotage a precision physics experiment by injecting tiny amounts of noise, which would drive the scientists to think they were bad scientists. Instead they thought science was broken. As s…

> I've known plenty of scientists with psychological problems but it's never coming from their data.

I want to read a spinoff of the Three-Body Problem with this premise.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#40

Post by glenstein » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 6:11 PM UTC

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #22

glenstein wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are definitely unfortunate examples and I can see how those environments pushed them to their limits. But if we're talking large-scale systematic thinking about what kind of data would be necessary to show that there's such a thing as a typical, characteristic civilization scale negative reaction to scientific revolutions, these don't demonstrate that this is the usual case. Obviously they're important in their…

The point being made is about the general reaction to weird results. The original supposition was that it would be implausible for scientists at large to have an adverse reaction to results that defied their current worldview. Given that we have seen this play out, there is in fact nothing implausible about it at all. The specifics (proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging scientific experiments by altering the outcome…

>Given that we have seen this play out

We saw two examples, definitely unfortunate for what they were but well short of a built in civilization level reaction to scientific progress writ large. I don't think there's a single by and large way that people react to scientific revolutions, negative or otherwise. Feels like it depends on a combination of how it impacts most powerful stakeholders, things about culture, and things about the zeitgeist of a particular moment.

>we don't need an actual instance of scientists committing suicide to suggest that it's plausible, because we don't have an actual instance of proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging results

Right, the specifics of the science fiction don't matter here. And plausibility counts for something though it's a dramatically lower threshold. And the person above who is appealing to scientific revolutions writ large seem to be attempting a general level inference to human reaction to scientific revolutions, which is a huge inference to make on the back of a pair of one-off examples.

Possibility counts for something, but I would say it only goes as far as explaining contingencies of particular circumstances and doesn't explain trends, and what happens within the fiction of the book is a trend, and it's explained by a sabotage campaign rather than by an appeal to the stresses of day-to-day science.