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

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

#61

Post by touisteur »

gertop wrote: post #36
tansey wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

If your soul can bounce back, finding ways your previous research might help, or combine with the breakthrough (or not !) can help. I've used many previous formal/analytic SOTA algorithms and methods for dataset tagging automation, or as feedback for RL, or to speed-up post-training.

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

#62

Post by qsera »

pmontra wrote: post #53
qsera wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a bit sick of this narrative. That science can make mistakes is in no shape or form, one of its strengths. It is a weakness of the process. The lipstick putting can be exposed by simply asking if you would not prefer a version of the scientific method that is never wrong.

Mathematicians proof theorems so they are always correct. Physicists don't have that privilege.

>Physicists don't have that privilege.

Then don't claim it as a strength!

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

#63

Post by Dylan16807 »

wuliwong wrote: post #27
colechristensen wrote: post #12

I really dislike the writing style of being so "friendly" for people who don't know anything about the space that you obscure what the topic of the article is at all. It's a third of the way through the article when "g-2", the problem at hand, is mentioned. Information that should have been shared in the title took a third of the article to figure out.

You dislike that people write for audiences other than yourself.

Writing for an unfamiliar audience doesn't mean you should hide the name of the problem until after a huge pile of setup.

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

#64

Post by cyberax »

ordu wrote: post #49

Hmm... The Reality changed itself when guys in Siberia changed the sensor? Some years ago I was playing with the idea that the Reality might invent new laws when people look for them, and doesn't bother with laws when no one observes them. It would be in the style of Copenhagen interpretation, though even with regard to it, the idea seems too weird to be true. But now we have an experimental evidence. In any case it…

> Some years ago I was playing with the idea that the Reality might invent new laws when people look for them, and doesn't bother with laws when no one observes them

There are several books from Greg Egan with this idea in mind: Permutation City and Distress. The latter one is exactly about this idea.

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

#65

Post by scarlehoff »

gertop wrote: post #36
tansey wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Three/four years of (honest) work is usually worth to publish. The result might not be high impact (and thus end up in a lower tier journal, sadly) but knowing what didn't work is also a valid output.

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

#66

Post by fc417fc802 »

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…

> 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.

Indeed that is highly implausible. I daresay that anyone stating otherwise fundamentally lacks an understanding of the sort of people that are attracted to and work in the sciences. Paradigm shifts are a form of progress and progress is the raison d'etre.

Note that one or two outliers do not contradict a larger trend. Also that the examples given so far, in addition to being highly unusual, follow from social phenomena downstream of the new results rather than being a direct personal reaction to them.

That said, as noted by others that isn't what's going on in the book being discussed. So the plausibility of that plot point needs to be judged on its own merit as an entirely separate sort of thing.

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

#67

Post by exmadscientist »

qsera wrote: post #62
pmontra wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mathematicians proof theorems so they are always correct. Physicists don't have that privilege.

>Physicists don't have that privilege. Then don't claim it as a strength!

Celebrating the mistakes is, as you're saying, perhaps a bit too far. But mistakes will happen, it's just the nature of the world. That makes developing a robust error correction mentality something that genuinely is worth celebrating.

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

#68

Post by whatsThisBtn4 »

9 years of philosophy and I'm over platonic realism and reading contemporary philosophy of science.

The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions. Everyone knows about the copernican revolution. But when it first happened, the old models(earth at the center of the solar system) were more accurate at predicting where the plenets would be.

Scientists pragmatically spend their time doing best fits. (Typically)

But then the paradigm shifts and we are closer to reality than the current local minimum/maximum.

Before reading philosophy of science, I was into m theory and string theory. Now I'm nearly sure it's bunk that might be replaced in our lifetime.

I thank scientists, but I do not envy them.

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

#69

Post by worldthruword »

cyberax wrote: post #64
ordu wrote: post #49

Hmm... The Reality changed itself when guys in Siberia changed the sensor? Some years ago I was playing with the idea that the Reality might invent new laws when people look for them, and doesn't bother with laws when no one observes them. It would be in the style of Copenhagen interpretation, though even with regard to it, the idea seems too weird to be true. But now we have an experimental evidence. In any case it…

> Some years ago I was playing with the idea that the Reality might invent new laws when people look for them, and doesn't bother with laws when no one observes them There are several books from Greg Egan with this idea in mind: Permutation City and Distress. The latter one is exactly about this idea.

Distress sounds like "Distributed Solipsism".

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

#70

Post by applfanboysbgon »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #66
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Indeed that is highly implausible. I daresay that anyone stating otherwise fundamentally lacks an understanding of the sort of people that are attracted to and work in the sciences. Paradigm shifts are a form of progress and progress is the raison d'etre. Note…

> Note that one or two outliers do not contradict a larger trend.

The listed cases are not outliers in the scientific community. The individuals were outliers, but the scientific community, in a mode of behaviour that was not outlier-ish, shunned them. This tendency of scientists is well-established: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

At the end of the day, humans are largely egotistical, self-centred creatures, and scientists are no exception. When you say that scientists believe that progress is their raison d'etre, you may not be incorrect, but their belief in progress is grounded in a self-centred way. Perhaps the ideal is "progress for humanity", but the reality is more like "progress for my career" or "progress for my worldview", in which case results challenging everything you hold as a foundation are a threat to you, being regressive rather than progressive in matters important to one's ego. People really, really don't like being told they're wrong. Even scientists.

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