The contrarian physics podcast subculture

Weinstein had that opportunity with Lex Fridman and instead is avoiding it. This is not he behavior of someone with a serious scientific position.

Weinstein has never alleged any kind of issue you’re suggesting, so I don’t think we need to invent any issues for him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_experiment

But the Higgs Boson might be the last prediction in fundamental physics to be verified in the lifetime of the predictor. Neutrino oscillations sure weren’t.

Society needs people to teach introductory physics classes to a wide range of undergrad students and upper level classes to a few specialists and that is what determines the size of the job market. You don’t really need physics PhDs to do that (I did a lot of that work in the first two years of my PhD program)

The physics community manages to organize things such that a few people can work on fundamental physics on the side but their numbers are basically determined by demand for teaching with is unrelated to the situation in research.

One strange thing though is that there is some market for books for laymen like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Brief_History_of_Time

and it’s been clear for a while those people aren’t really satisfied. They think Bell’s inequality and ‘interpretations of quantum mechanics’ are more interesting than physicists do, there is no more Babe Ruth style showmanship [1] and from an outsider’s point of view there’s a feeling that since GUTs and inflation and String theory there are just a lot of bad smells —- insiders are right to discount some of these complaints but in a lot of ways inflation and string theory have neither had a story that completely made sense nor anything that rules them out so they lumber on in an unsatisfying way so in the 2000s we started to see insider-outsider figures like Peter Woit (who I strongly endorse) and Hossenfelder (who’s been too corrupted by being a YouTube star)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babe_Ruth%27s_called_shot

"she is essentially equating Weinstein's theory to all other theoretical physics"

Sure, it is an extrapolation to say "all other".

But this sentence still has the point of showing how unfair and unscientific is the basis of Hossenfelder's arguments. Even if you don't know String Theory, you should stop and think "ok, but how can she pretend that conclusion is valid" (in my previous comment, I provided 3 elements she overlooked: the fact that BU and String Theory may not be the same level of bullshit-ness, the fact that having 2 different theories receiving a different treatment can be explained by other reasons that a bias for the insider, the fact that she has no access to the rate of criticism of BU-like theories that come from the inside).

Even if you don't know String Theory, you should ask "did she even consider that maybe there are differences in the level of bullshit-ness that make some people criticize GU and not String Theory".

Two things we noticed were: (1) there weren’t really that many crackpot submissions but they were concentrated in certain areas that really would have been overrun with them. Crackpots don’t ever seem to find out that there is a big mystery in how cuprate semiconductors superconduct or what determines how proteins fold or even that there is such a thing as condensed-matter physics (e.g. most of it!) (2) Crackpots almost always work alone, contrasted to real physicists who work with other physicists which was the basis for the endorsement system. We’d ask a crackpot “who else is working on this?” And always get the answer “no one.”

From having done that work but also having an interest in the phenomenon, being too well read of a person to make it in academia, and personally meeting more than my share of lunatics, that it is really a psychiatric phenomenon really a subtype of paranoia

https://www.verywellhealth.com/paranoia-5113652

particularly involving grandiosity but sometimes litigiousness. It boggles my mind that Weinstein threatened a lawsuit over criticism of his ideas, something I’ve never heard of a real scientist doing —- I mean, scientific truth is outside the jurisdiction of the courts. I met

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Westley_Newman

and did not get to put his motor on my bench but I did set up some equipment on my bench that showed that the equipment he was demoing his motor on could give inaccurate readings and he had this crazy story of sueing the patent office and using his right-wing connections with churches and the Reagan administration to bully NIST into testing his motor.