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The contrarian physics podcast subculture

timothynguyen.org

201–210 of 269 posts

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#201

I have written previously about Sabine. I think it's fascinating to follow her trajectory. Initially I quite liked her show and my impression was that it gave valuable insights and critique of some branches of modern theoretical physics. At some point I noticed that her shows were starting to significantly diverge from her area of expertise and she was weighing in on much broader topics, something in her early shows…

My observation is that anybody who engages a lot on social media is at a very high risk of losing their mind over time. They get caught up in these weird bubbles of constant controversy and group think bubbles . I have seen this with friends but also with more famous people. For content creators there is a lot of economic incentive. Real science is kind of boring and mundane while controversy is exciting and sells.

Social media is like a parasite for the brain that slowly drives a person insane. Posting or only consuming.

In some sense, whenever I see someone with psychotic views (in any political, ideological, social / etc direction), it’s not even “their fault” — their mind was simply melted by technology.

Touch grass.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that does not in itself prove that the people peddling alternatives aren't even worse. I understand this line of thinking but I don't feel that it's particularly relevant. It seems to be born out of a point of view that physics theories are a binary. We either fully support them with everything we have or we completely denigrate them to the point of demonizing anyone who shows any interest in them. Surely this…

I used to be in charge of technical measures for controlling crackpot submissions at arXiv because we were trying to get a very ornery physicist from not getting us in trouble sending nastygrams to HBCUs and such. The endorsement system was my work. 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 t…

> [crackpots] were concentrated in certain areas that really would have been overrun with them

Let me guess: theoretical particle physics, relativity, gravity, and magnetism?

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It was a clock that was powered by daily changes in barometric pressure. That sounds awesome, but it also sounds like it's conflating two things: (1) the physically impossible perpetual motion of popular understanding, e.g. machine that operates at 100% energy efficiency in perpetuity from an initial one-time energy input and (2) a machine with automatic passive energy draw from ambient sources, but with the usual i…

> (1) the physically impossible perpetual motion of popular understanding, e.g. machine that operates at 100% energy efficiency in perpetuity from an initial one-time energy input That's easy to make. If you spin up a wheel in the vacuum of space, it's going to keep spinning forever. If doing it in space is not allowed, then you have to allow machines that take advantage of terrestrial conditions such as drawing ener…

>If you spin up a wheel in the vacuum of space, it's going to keep spinning forever.

Even interstellar space is not 100% vaccuum. So it will slow from the occasional contact with matter. No doubt it would take a very long time, though.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#205

Tim Nguyen has put an extraordinary effort into finding the truth in this entire long exchange, and it's been mostly thankless. His appearance on Decoding the Gurus was a highlight of the show's early seasons. https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/special-epis... Perhaps you would agree with Weinstein and Hossenfelder that physics today is broken. But that does not in itself prove that the people peddling a…

There's always a grain of truth or some shared understanding to every grift. You can see it play out in how people sell you alternative diets or alternative therapies. "Processed foods are bad. Here, eat this thing that's been boiled until it is relieved of all nutrition." "Preservatives are bad, here eat this vegetable that's been heavily salted." Beware of people who seem to be on the same page with you, especially…

>especially when they're selling you their own idea.

That is the heart of every con, isn't it? Tell people what they want to hear.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there wasn’t a difference in categories at the time — yet, at the time, perpetual motion was still treated as impossible.

If the category didn't exist at the time, the example shouldn't have been volunteered as an example that fits our present day understanding of perpetual motion as understood by the U.S. patent office in the 20th century.

The patent office doesn't serve the patenting of physical theories (which would be a horrible thing), but if it did, its easy to imagine Einsteins theories regarding relativity to have been summarily rejected: surely charged particles at rest in a gravitational field don't radiate energy, yet by the Equivalence principle it seems that radiation is nonetheless predicted by relativity:

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

I believe that which is often referred to as the stagnation of physics is in a large part due to this instant-rejection in the modern physics community. There's plenty of "single point mutation" theories (think hypothesize particles with negative masses, hypothesize underlying elements below the standard model so that reactions once again obey the chemical conservation numbers,...) which individually are easy to lampoon, and are henceforth ignored (i.e. for negative masses simulations show they can pair up and accelerate indefinitely, or for a beyond-the-standard-model atomistic theory one can easily refer to the spectrum of hydrogen or positronium, and highlight that a single photon can excite it to a higher state, and then emit 2 lower energy photons).

What if our current interpretations form a very successful local optimum? I.e. suppose we can provably rule out each crooked idea if its the only modification in a theory, then we might be collectively conclude to rule them out in general, as they fail so embarassingly, but perhaps simultaneous consideration of 2 crooked ideas can make the inconsistencies disappear.

Imagine voting as a group of physicists on the most interesting crooked ideas, gathering the top 10, and then exhaustively going through the 2^10=1024 combinations, where bit K decides if crooked idea K is "enabled" a specific one of the 1024 candidates.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#207

It seems like this thread has become a referendum on Sabine - who along with Lex is the more popular of the podcasters mentioned But I think that’s a pity and we need to acknowledge the great value they all these podcasts bring instead of just complaining about audience capture and various biases of one - we’re all human - if Einstein or Newton had or was on a podcast we’d be criticizing it just the same IMHO. Human…

Sorry, it's one thing to interview cranks like Chris Langan and Eric Weinstein, bad enough as that is. It's quite another to promote them as brave champions of suppressed truths.

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#209

I waded through some of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m7LnLgvMnM Carroll comes across as very reasonable. Weinstein comes across _very_ badly. The only positive thing I can think to say about him, is that he kept the equally awful Peirs Morgan quiet for a while.

I highly recommend watching this debate (I use the term very loosely here) between Weinstein and Sean Carroll - and particularly this exchange about 37 minutes in: https://youtu.be/5m7LnLgvMnM?&t=2269

Carroll basically reads off two sections from Weinstein's paper [1] and points out that the reason the physics community isn't paying attention to it is because it's not a serious paper worthy of most working physicists' time. In fact, Weinstein even goes out of his way to actively discourage rigorous consideration of his paper:

On the first page:

> The Author is not a physicist and is no longer an active academician, but is an Entertainer and host of The Portal podcast. This work of entertainment is a draft of work in progress which is the property of the author and thus may not be built upon, renamed, or profited from without express permission of the author.

And again on the "Notes on the present draft document" section:

> As such this document is an attempt to begin recovering a rather more complete theory which is at this point only partially remembered and stiched together from old computer files, notebooks, recordings and the like dating back as far as 1983-4 when the author began the present line of investigation. This is the first time the author has attempted to assemble the major components of the story and has discovered in the process how much variation there has been across matters of notation, convention, and methodology. Every effort has been made to standardize notation but what you are reading is stitched together from entirely heterogeneous sources and inaccuracies and discrepancies are regularly encountered as well as missing components when old work is located.

> The author notes many academicians find this unprofessional and therefore irritating. This is quite literally unprofessional as the author is not employed within the profession and has not worked professionally on such material since the fall of 1994. If you find this disagreeable, please feel free to take your professional assumptions elsewhere. This document comes from a context totally different from the world of grants, citations, research metrics, lectures, awards and positions. In fact, the author claims that if there is any merit to be found here, it is unlikely that it could be worked out in such a context due to the author’s direct experience of the political economy of modern academic research. This work stands apart from that context and does so proudly, intentionally, and without apology.

And then upon having these sections from his own paper read out loud to him, Weinstein says "how dare you" and basically flies off the handle resorting to personal attacks on Carroll. It's absolutely wild. I am not qualified to assess Geometric Unity or theories of everything, but it is clear from this exchange that Weinstein is a grifter with delusions of grandeur and a persecution complex.

[1] https://saismaran.org/geometricunity.pdf

Re: The contrarian physics podcast subculture

#210
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other motivations besides money for cranks. In the case of Weinstein, I think his motivation has been getting attention and grievances he has with other people and institutions. I think it's OK to recognize grifting for attention as grifting. Having been a longtime employee of Peter Theil in some finance job, I expect he has f-u money by now and can thus attempt whatever he desires. I don't know what the en…

The motivation of getting attention about the problems he believes exists in institutions (eg lack of heterodox thinking) doesn't seem like a grift to me (how broad does that definition get to be before it's just "they're doing stuff I don't like"). It seems more like he wants heterodox thinking to be able to flourish within the academics and is fighting for that, nothing grift-y about that. > obscurantist Nothing he…

>Nothing he says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading

Have you listened to the Piers Morgan interview with Weinstein and Sean Carroll? In it, Weinstein appears to be using as many obscure terms as possible, in an attempt to appear clever.

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