Wall Street Journal Decries 'The Rise of Conspiracy Physics' (msn.com) 202
"The internet is full of people claiming to uncover conspiracies in politics and business..." reports the Wall Street Journal.
"Now an unlikely new villain has been added to the list: theoretical physicists," they write, saygin resentment of scientific authority figures "is the major attraction of what might be called 'conspiracy physics'." In recent years, a group of YouTubers and podcasters have attracted millions of viewers by proclaiming that physics is in crisis. The field, they argue, has discovered little of importance in the last 50 years, because it is dominated by groupthink and silences anyone who dares to dissent from mainstream ideas, like string theory... Most fringe theories are too arcane for listeners to understand, but anyone can grasp the idea that academic physics is just one more corrupt and self-serving establishment... In this corner of the internet, the scientist Scott Aaronson has written, "Anyone perceived as the 'mainstream establishment' faces a near-insurmountable burden of proof, while anyone perceived as 'renegade' wins by default if they identify any hole whatsoever in mainstream understanding...
As with other kinds of authorities, there are reasonable criticisms to be made of academic physics. By some metrics, scientific productivity has slowed since the 1970s. String theory has not fulfilled physicists' early dreams that it would become the ultimate explanation of all forces and matter in our universe. The Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, has delivered fewer breakthroughs than scientists expected when it turned on in 2010. But even reasonable points become hard to recognize when expressed in the ways YouTube incentivizes. Conspiracy physics videos with titles like "They Just Keep Lying" are full of sour sarcasm, outraged facial expressions and spooky music...
Leonard Susskind, director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, says physicists need to be both more sober and more forceful when addressing the public. The limits of string theory should be acknowledged, he says, but the idea that progress has slowed isn't right. In the last few decades, he and other physicists have figured out how to make progress on the vast project of integrating general relativity and quantum mechanics, the century-old pillars of physics, into a single explanation of the universe.
The bitter attacks on leading physicists get a succinct summary in the article from Chris Williamson, a "Love Island" contestant turned podcast host. "This is like 'The Kardashians' for physicists — I love it."
"Now an unlikely new villain has been added to the list: theoretical physicists," they write, saygin resentment of scientific authority figures "is the major attraction of what might be called 'conspiracy physics'." In recent years, a group of YouTubers and podcasters have attracted millions of viewers by proclaiming that physics is in crisis. The field, they argue, has discovered little of importance in the last 50 years, because it is dominated by groupthink and silences anyone who dares to dissent from mainstream ideas, like string theory... Most fringe theories are too arcane for listeners to understand, but anyone can grasp the idea that academic physics is just one more corrupt and self-serving establishment... In this corner of the internet, the scientist Scott Aaronson has written, "Anyone perceived as the 'mainstream establishment' faces a near-insurmountable burden of proof, while anyone perceived as 'renegade' wins by default if they identify any hole whatsoever in mainstream understanding...
As with other kinds of authorities, there are reasonable criticisms to be made of academic physics. By some metrics, scientific productivity has slowed since the 1970s. String theory has not fulfilled physicists' early dreams that it would become the ultimate explanation of all forces and matter in our universe. The Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, has delivered fewer breakthroughs than scientists expected when it turned on in 2010. But even reasonable points become hard to recognize when expressed in the ways YouTube incentivizes. Conspiracy physics videos with titles like "They Just Keep Lying" are full of sour sarcasm, outraged facial expressions and spooky music...
Leonard Susskind, director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, says physicists need to be both more sober and more forceful when addressing the public. The limits of string theory should be acknowledged, he says, but the idea that progress has slowed isn't right. In the last few decades, he and other physicists have figured out how to make progress on the vast project of integrating general relativity and quantum mechanics, the century-old pillars of physics, into a single explanation of the universe.
The bitter attacks on leading physicists get a succinct summary in the article from Chris Williamson, a "Love Island" contestant turned podcast host. "This is like 'The Kardashians' for physicists — I love it."
People Hate Science (Score:5, Interesting)
Despite doubling their expected livespan, making it so they'll never have to worry about starving to death, and infact making life an endless feast, giving them the ability to do and enjoy things not even the greatest emperors of the world could dream of 400 years ago, giving them objects that would have been considered magic, preforming all the greatest feats and wonders of humanity in their lifetime, from walking on the moon, to taking photos of pluto, to measuring gravitational waves - people really hate scientists, science, academia and everything adjacent to it.
Why? My only guess is that people are stupid jerks and aren't capable of appreciating science becaue they're mostly just sad, stunted apes.
Re:People Hate Science (Score:5, Interesting)
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
Isaac Asimov
Newsweek editorial 1980
Re: (Score:2)
I think these days it's just that a lot of people have decided that they don't like reality, so they will substitute their own, in which they are the winners and what they want to be true is true. The famous "alternative facts" is an example.
Re: (Score:3)
Conservatives do it too, in exact reverse, blaming everything bad 2021-2024 on the government in power, but now insisting that everything bad happening today is obviously not the government's fault.
The economy steers slowly. People have hard time understanding how something can happen and the effects don't happen for 2-3 years. Most of what happened from 2021-2024 was a continuation of the effects of COVID policies set in motion in 2020. A lot of the rest was the pandemic itself. All the tariff business in 2025 might take less than 2-3 years to make a mess just because of the scale. But it will be blamed on whatever shift in power happens at the midterm elections if we make it that far before see
Re: People Hate Science (Score:2)
Despite doubling their expected livespan,
It hasn't. Most of us still live to 80-ish or so, as we did millenia ago. The only difference for the others of us, who would've died by the first heart attack in our 60s, that some of us still can be saved today. And infant death isn't as widespread.
making it so they'll never have to worry about starving to death,
There's still people that starve to death. And many more, in particular the US, go to bed hungry on most days of the week deapite.working full time.
and infact making life an endless feast,
Not for most of us. We need a credit score.just
Re: (Score:2)
FYI, I stopped reading after that.
Re: (Score:2)
All you're pointing out is that what we currently experience in life isn't perfect. That doesn't at all change the fact that science has brought a quality of life to hundreds of millions of people that couldn't even have been conceived of once upon a time.
Most of the problems you highlight are problems of resource distribution and are genuinely solvable today with the proper will. They are not the fault of any scientific advancements and if anything we're closer to solving these problems today then we were
Re: (Score:2)
Re:People Hate Science (Score:5, Insightful)
But yes, much of The Science today is spent telling us that past The Science was a bad idea (e.g. 'climate change' now telling us we shouldn't have figured out how to use oil or uranium as fuel rather than wood and should have continued living in caves).
That is some wild hyperbole, my man. The big deal with climate change is emitting less CO2. Nuclear power (uranium) is great for this—it emits no CO2 other than that used for mining, building the plants, etc. Burning oil emits a lot of CO2. Burning wood emits CO2 unless it is done sustainably.
No one is saying we should all live in caves. There aren't that many caves.
Re: (Score:2)
But Uranium is limited. At the current rate, the known mineable resources are spent within the next 35 years.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Re: (Score:3)
But Uranium is limited. At the current rate, the known mineable resources are spent within the next 35 years.
That's rubbish. Current known world reserves of uranium are 8 million tons [wikipedia.org] and the current annual production rate was just over 48,332 tons [wikipedia.org] in 2021. This gives us over 150 years of reserves at current usage rates.
However, we already have the capability to make that last about 100 times longer using fast breeder reactors that convert the non-fissionable U-238 into fissionable Plutonium-239. This has been done in the past, e.g. Dounreay in Scotland, but was too successful - it created more plutonium than
Re: People Hate Science (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:People Hate Science (Score:5, Insightful)
Every new imposition on personal freedom is justified by The Science
Please provide specific examples.
Impositions on our freedoms these days seem to come by way of executive order. The justifications vary, but they don't tend to use science.
Re:People Hate Science (Score:5, Insightful)
Politicians made people "follow the science" during COVID - masks, inject un-trialed vaccines into your body, stay inside, Many more .
Masks and social distancing are effective public health interventions to prevent the spread of an airborne virus. The vaccines were tested and are yet another effective public health intervention to prevent the spread of a virus...
I guess you did help me understand where someone making the claim "Every new imposition on personal freedom is justified by The Science" might be coming from. Do you have any other examples?
Re:People Hate Science (Score:5, Interesting)
Please humor me. If another global pandemic like COVID occurs again, what should we do and why? What is your alternative to scientifically based publich health interventions?
Re:People Hate Science (Score:5, Funny)
Ivermection and bleach injections. We'd have very few cases once we stop testing.
You walked right into that one...
Re: (Score:3)
Let her rip, and may the strongest and luckiest survive. And also richest, because as the black plague proved in Europe, the rich have the capability to do social distancing from society.
Re: (Score:3)
I know you're asking an anti-science user about what they would want. That said, even the left-wing scientists didn't act optimally.
One thing we could have done is be more morally flexible about challenge trials. See https://www.1daysooner.org/ [1daysooner.org] for a missed opportunity.
If the MRNA vaccines had come 6 months sooner there might have been a chance to preempt a lot of the COVID mutations that made vaccines less effective. It was physically (but not politically) possible to have a timeline that fast.
My take i
Re: (Score:3)
One thing we could have done is be more morally flexible about challenge trials. See https://www.1daysooner.org/ [1daysooner.org] for a missed opportunity.
If the MRNA vaccines had come 6 months sooner there might have been a chance to preempt a lot of the COVID mutations that made vaccines less effective. It was physically (but not politically) possible to have a timeline that fast.
We could have done it by keeping the lockdowns going longer and doing more to protect people with immune deficiency from getting it, too. Those mutations are accelerated by more transmissions, and are massively accelerated by people who don't ever fully get over the illness. If we had stayed in a lockdown state and figured out ways to deal with it, COVID would be gone, because those mutations would not have happened in the number of transmission generations that we would have had in the absence of people
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Huh. Didn't think I would see a pro-infant mortality post today. Truly conservatives just want to go back to the middle ages.
Re:People Hate Science (Score:5, Insightful)
The Science is the religion of the Left,
You have it backwards: attacks on science is the religion of the Right. This is part of the general attack on intellectuals from the right; they perceive any scholar endeavour as snobbery, and colleges and universities as breeding grounds for liberal thinking.
Re:People Hate Science (Score:5, Insightful)
Well,welcome to one side then. I have no idea if you are far right or far left, but once people start talking about "biological reality" and "trans ideology", you can be 100% sure they aren't actually talking about biological reality, they are trying to coerce biology into a rather simplistic, ideological worldview.
Nothing in biology is simple, absolutely nothing.
I can point to a dead rat, a rock and you and it's obvious which is alive, which is dead and which was never alive. And yet no one's figured out a good definition of life that isn't full of holes.
I can point to you, me and a starfish. It's obvious we are the same species and a starfish isn't. And yet it's impossible to cleanly define precisely what a species is (for more formal reasons).
And gender. Well for 99% of people it's pretty obvious what gender they are. And yet again, no one can actually come up with a foolproof definition that doesn't simply pretend rare cases don't exist. Ignoring biology isn't biological reality, it's blinkered ideology.
Also, there is no "trans ideology" any more than there is "cis ideology". Most trans people, like most people of any description want to be able to live their lives in peace.
Re:People Hate Science (Score:4, Insightful)
Gender dysphoria is a well known condition that is considered irreversible by every first world psychiatric organization in the world. In other words, it's part of who these people are. To pretend otherwise is to be indulging in ignorance and bigotry as opposed to current science.
There is also no "trans ideology", that's just a right wing buzzword used so folks like you can pretend this is a social issue and that they aren't just indulging in common bigotry.
And I'm sure they did until a bunch of screeching arseholes decided it was their next cause de jour.
So then knock it off as the only screeching arseholes I see making these people's lives miserable are ignorant twats like yourself.
Re:People Hate Science (Score:5, Insightful)
Gotcha. Thanks for serving as an example of the ignorant using their own biases in place of current science as you are clearly incapable of refuting the fact that there isn't a first world psychiatric organization that backs you on this but don't seem to care.
Biology doesn't give a shit about what you believe, if you've got a dick and XY chromosomes you're male and putting on a dress and talking in a high pitched voice doesn't change that.
Nice strawman, of course no one with any expertise on this is saying anything contrary to biological realities as you make out. What is being said is that since this is just who these people are, is irreversible, and doesn't hurt anyone these people should be treated in accordance with their perceived gender so as to allow them to at least attempt to live the life their brains are hard wired to rather than cruelly forcing them into a lifestyle they are unsuited for.
It doesn't hurt you or anyone else allowing these people to happily live their lives along the lines that their brains are hard wired to. Somehow you still feel a driving need to treat them poorly though.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, inconvenient facts are strawmen now are they. Says a lot about your so called argument.
Of course I showed you how your reasoning was faulty and I don't see you addressing that so...
BS. There are many women who don't want a man in a dress in their changing rooms or in their sports. And yes, their feelings are more important than the trannys in this instance.
There are women who would be opposed to being in a dressing room with a black person. Should their wants be entertained by society?
We've had trans people using the locker rooms and bathrooms of the gender they ID as for a number of years now in blue state America. Hasn't been a problem.
Hard wired my arse. A lot of these guys took 40+ years to have their "revelation" in the meantime marrying a woman and having kids. More like a mid life crisis due to testosterone levels going down..
Right, we didn't see a whole bunch of gay people come out of the closet when it became generally socially acceptable to be gay and
Re: (Score:2)
No, you're posting AC so you can post anti scientific crap without facing repercussions.
Gender dysphoria has never been found to be reversable. There is no psychiatric help that would change these people and that's straight from every major psychiatric organization in the first world.
Re:People Hate Science (Score:4, Insightful)
Save the know-nothing BS for your sociology class pal as you've clearly never been near a science class.
Oh right I'm talking to an idealogue, not a scientist. Figures. I know I will not and cannot ever convince you because this is not about logic, facts or reason. Nonetheless...
Male and female are not only physically different in humans but genetically different
Say, 99.9% of the time, sure. But we both know full well you cannot come up with a foolproof definition of male and female that fits all the data. 99.9% isn't good enough. We both know that any definition you try and make, I will be able to poke holes in and find counterexamples to in the medical literature.
So why keep up the pretense?
And I'm sure they did until a bunch of screeching arseholes decided it was their next cause de jour.
Indeed and they and I do wish you'd shut up about it and let them go back to living their lives in peace.
Re: People Hate Science (Score:4)
"The far left and far right as as bad as each other."
Sure, the people who want you to eat and have health care are as bad as the people who want to marry your 14 year old, you fucking idiot.
Re: (Score:2)
Do you have a comprehension problem with simple english ? Which bit of the "far" in far left confused you cupcake?
Re:People Hate Science (Score:5, Insightful)
What if "the left" don't have a religion like that? What if it's a projection, not just an aid to understanding?
What if the idea that they need to have that kind of belief system is genuinely part of a fundamental misunderstanding about how people who aren't religious see the world, not just a translation of terms...?
There is some serious cognitive dissonance in your perspective, and your attempt to shield yourself with claims about your education come across as... defensive. You don't seem like you're looking for a way out of your confusion, but instead want other people to join you in it. If that gets a lot of reactions that seem like they're accusing you of operating in bad faith and trying to dictate peoples' perspectives to them then that might be why...
Re:People Hate Science (Score:5, Informative)
The Science is the religion of the Left, even though 50% of peer-reviewed papers can't be reproduced.
Nice strawman here. If Science is religion to you, you are doing it wrong. If you want eternal truths, Science is not the way to go. Yes, 50% of all scientific papers are non-reproducable. And this is a problem exactly why? Someone makes an observation, tries to enumerate the ways he got to that observation, and then publishes it. Someone else tries to reproduce the observation, and sometimes, it works, sometime it does not. How do you know you got a real observation and not a fluke, if you don't reproduce it? And what would the point of reproducing it if we knew the result beforehand?
What you want to be a weakness is actually the strength of Science. We learn from mistakes, and for that to work, we have to produce mistakes. We err up.
I guess the main problem you have with Science is that it is not a good negotiation partner. Carbon dioxide happens to absorb electromagnetic waves at 4.26 micrometers and at 15 micrometers, and there is nothing you can do about it. It makes no sense to blame Carbon dioxide to be a supporter of the Left. It makes no sense to offer billions of dollars to prove otherwise. All you can do is look at the consequences and find out what this means for you.
Consumerism and travel turned out to be a pale substitute for living in a real community.
It is still a better substitute compared to live alone as an hermit for most people. And people indulging themselves in consumerism and travel live longer and healthier than most hermits. And then there is the question, what a "real community" actually means, and you will notice that as soon as your community grows beyond a certain size, the differences about the nature of "real community" become insurmountable, and the once real community breaks up and becomes no longer real. And you will notice that any community which seems to work seamlessly for a generation, and maybe a second generation fizzles out in the third, something we know since at least we have written records. It has nothing to do with Science, or the Left, or whatever strawman you want to blame it on. It seems a part of human nature.
Re: People Hate Science (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe your woke liberal carbon dioxide absorbs at those frequencies, but that says nothing about the absorption frequencies of god-fearing patriotic carbon dioxide as paraphrased in the bible.
Re:People Hate Science (Score:4, Interesting)
And it is the antithesis of the right. No to vaccines, no to clean energy, etc. The reason is that the right has learned to grift off their own shtick to fellow right wingnuts; they are getting paid to act stupid.
As a brief insight into their mindset, la Presidenta has been sending his Maggots notes on how the U.S. has alien technology that will cure their ills. I'm not making this up, but he is. It is a fever dream of the Q-Anon crew and his Maggots will believe anything while he screws them out of their money.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
He's featured on more than a few grifter lists. You should ask some scientists whether they consider him to be good at his old job, you'll get some interesting opinions that aren't too different to what you're saying here... most of them wouldn't pay him any attention or think of him as someone who was active in science education, most think of him as a relic at best.
There are a few other people who no longer have jobs in science or who have been discredited who continue to use the term 'scientist' to claim
Like to see each area publish its top 25 list (Score:5, Interesting)
So that the general public can see, side by side, what each major research area has contributed in the last 25 years.
A top 25 list with the benefits of each research discovery in terms of how it makes the daily life/health of citizens better.
It can be followed by a relative amount of money spent on research, think tanks, construction projects for each area.
Each area's researchers can rank and rate their own area.
Point being (Score:2)
The point being that the way research is discussed is that each research area has largely a siloed discussion and media coverage.
This could be physics to chemistry silos or newborn baby diseases to middle-aged women silos.
A simple question of did one research area contribute more than another research area?
Or did a $1 billion spent on specialized research facilities for research area contribute more than $1 billion spent on research in another area.
We want science research to result in improvements to avera
Re: (Score:3)
Why?
How would you determine the weight of some minor piece of math or physics that ended up being the final part of a technology? What about all the other parts that are legacy, or that already had uses... do they count in this new context?
Every time someone tries this, we quickly learn they imagine that there's some kind of videogame-esque pipeline that just fills a bar to 100% and then a usable technology pops out the other end. It just doesn't work in any way that would make this kind of value based revi
Re:Like to see each area publish its top 25 list (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how the Fourier Transform (1822) would have ranked 25 years afterwards. Its real practical use probably had to wait for at least Maxwell's Equations (1861) and likely a fair amount of time later. And for really practical applications probably a lot longer - I would bet it had to wait for radio to be widely used.
The problem with science is that it is really difficult to place a value on research. Some is obviously worthless, some extraordinarily valuable (e.g. the transistor - but even that took more than 25 years to really show its worth). Something like astrophysics will probably be always shown to be worth $0. There isn't often much practical use for astrophysics (some technology gets created to enable it which might have practical use elsewhere). But in the end, people are really curious about what's out there - there is value in knowing even if there isn't a direct application of the science.
Re: (Score:2)
Related article in arstech... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Then again, some people might remark how it's curious that two ostensibly independent journalistic sources just happen to be presenting the same spin on the same thing at the same time? Funny, that.
Formerly it would have been people like journalists and the left deeply suspicious of the narratives flowing from authority but now I guess it just depends on your politics.
Re: (Score:3)
Physics versus Next Generation Physics (Score:2, Funny)
I think, based on the recent testimony from first hand whistleblowers, and the 700 first hand whistleblowers in The Disclosure Project from Steven Greer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2hk8Qp8dd0), there is the typical physics you learn in school, versus the next generation physics you learn when you work at Lockheed Martin Skunkworks where they have been making their own gravitic propulsion systems since at least 1954 after they reverse engineered downed alien space craft in the 1930's.... So, to say the
Re: (Score:3)
They can barely hold the government together, you're telling me they have alien tech? Get real.
Where's flying cars and faster than light travel? (Score:2)
Figure out how to do anti-gravity and faster than light travel, then physics will become cool again. Rest of the stuff is stupid. Or at least figure out minor shit like 10x cheaper energy generation, 10x better energy density batteries, and super conductors.
Re: (Score:2)
"saygin"? (Score:2)
Is that Carl Saygin?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That guy was way more than the "billions and billions" character PBS made him seem to be.
Really? I thought that was enough; as far as I'm concerned Cosmos put Sagan up there with David Attenborough.
Who Cares? (Score:2)
This is pure clickbait. The simple truth is a bunch of people podcasting about advance physics theories has zero importance. Knowledgeable people will ignore them and for the rest of us it makes no difference whether we are misinformed or not.
Perhaps what should concern us is the exaggerated importance attached to having an audience.That having a lot of clicks makes something important by definition.
Re: (Score:3)
If you like being taxed to support bullshit artists, why not donate a little extra all on your own?
Re: (Score:2)
Your faux-concern is so touching -- and fake, as you well know.
I'm glad you at least recognize you treat people as stereotypes instead of pondering what they say and responding as if you had actually read and understood what they say. You may eventually cease to be a stereotype yourself some day.
Too much of Quantum/Modern Phsics is unprovable BS (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Simple but provocative (Score:2)
The low hanging fruit has been found. I know that sounds simplistic, but the big stuff which was predicted/suggested 50+ years ago is now being corroborated/refuted. Whether gavitational waves or the Higgs boson, it took how many decades for us to fully develop the idea and then come up with a way to test for it? One of the big things being looked at now is neutrinos. How long has it taken from the time they were conceived for us to design ways to find them let alone study them?
There will always be cons
Re: (Score:2)
Right. The standard model is so comprehensive and successful that it's very, very difficult to make further progress. They're working on it...
Peter thiel wants to fundamentally break (Score:2)
Of course you won't be going directly to Thiel you will be going to one of his media apparatuses but it's the same thing basically. He gets to control your access to knowledge and information so he gets the control what you do.
These are tech Bros that made all thei
HyperNormalization-Technofedualism-Necropolitics (Score:2)
20 year delay to youtube. (Score:2)
About 20 years ago Lee Smolin published "The Trouble with Physics" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Physics) and Peter Woit published "Not even Wrong" where they described the core problem with String theory as people attached to the community to the general public of interest (i guess mostly scientists).
Since then, things have shifted a little bit, and the mindset is
changing. That does not mean that everything is peacy already - people who got their professorships 20 years ago may be heads o
Sabine Hossenfelder used to have a point (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the days when she just blogged I was a huge fan, because she is a brilliant theoretical physicist and her frustrations with String theory were well founded.
Unfortunately, YouTube warped her. IMHO she completely jumped the gun when she extrapolated from her experience in theoretical physics to all of science. She now claims all of science is failing and this is extremely disingenuous and dangerous rhetoric.
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/arti... [mcgill.ca]
Re: (Score:2)
Back in the days when she just blogged I was a huge fan, because she is a brilliant theoretical physicist and her frustrations with String theory were well founded.
Unfortunately, YouTube warped her. IMHO she completely jumped the gun when she extrapolated from her experience in theoretical physics to all of science. She now claims all of science is failing and this is extremely disingenuous and dangerous rhetoric.
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/arti... [mcgill.ca]
Thanks for sharing that article. +1 informative.
Re: (Score:2)
And to make a small update, Jarry's article (from April) says:
Shomet wrong with text :o (Score:2)
Actual physicist in pharma (Score:2)
I think there's good $ to be made (Score:3)
...in 'oppositional' & confrontational clickbait anti-authoritarianism and anti-credentialism.
I ALSO THINK that there's good $ to be made in lumping everyone with a complaint about establishment groupthink in with the flat-earth nutters. Today, it just depends on which way your politics leans, really.
Have we forgotten? ...we just came out of the dark years of COVID where we're now discovering that large segments of our supposedly independent media engines were working completely at the behest of the government.
Likewise, during this same span of years we had what were generally believed to be science-driven organizations like the American Medical Society INSISTING (as they do still today) that trans-women are women because they think they are.
Don't say something astonishingly, obviously stupid and then be shocked that people start to wonder if these experts aren't just normal, politically- and socially-biased people leveraging their credentials into a position of "you can't doubt anything I say". I believe it was MST3k that said "you know you can just buy a lab coat, right?"
In a science-forward world where we have become habituated to extraordinary scientific discoveries on a regular basis EVEN STILL normal people are entitled to deploy their bullshit detectors, no matter what the "authorities" try to shovel at us as fact.
This whole argument is very internet circa 2025.
There are absolutely issues of stagnation and sclerosis in physics. Sabine Hossenfelder is one of the highly-educated credentialed insiders who has been open about her opinion on the groupthink wanking going.
And she has recently been purged from one of her professional associations for (as it seems from the outside) daring to publicize her criticisms. This isn't alarmism.
She's not some high school dropout complaining on youtube about people not taking creationism "seriously". There are such people, and they should rightly be dismissed, but to attempt to whitewash the entire controversy as "a bunch of crazies" is equally illegitimate.
Re:Part of the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
TFA isn't very good about describing the problem in detail. I watched Sabine Hossenfelder's ( https://www.youtube.com/@Sabin... [youtube.com] ) for a while over the past 2 years and her critique is very "inside baseball". She's a bona fide physicist herself and she's not critiquing established physics, she's complaining that THEORETICAL physics stalled out about 50 years ago and that professional theoretical physicists (which basically is ALL in academia and government jobs) are just publishing about hypothetical mathematical constructs that are not testable; sometimes not even in theory.
Where i take some issue with her is that it's easy to see how anti-science people would also latch on to her statement without really understanding the nuance of what she's actually saying. She claims that's not her problem, but... imo it's unescapable that that's some or maybe most of who her audience is.... in ADDITION to actual scientists who agree.
Her particular take on German snark is also a bit much for me for day after day.
But overall... she almost certainly more right than wrong.
Also i watched a bit of that Professor Dave guy... and omg... he's an obnoxious neckbeard debunker guy. Angrily/joyously dunking on flat earthers, anti-vaxers, climate change skeptics, etc. he's not WRONG, usually, but he's on the angrier side of Hitchens / Dawkins and not half as eloquent.
So really Sabine is talking about and to like the top 10% or 1% of science involved/interested people and Dave is pointing and laughing at the other end of the science scale.
Re: (Score:2)
I hadn't watched her videos for a few months and this one from two weeks ago is quite a good review of what she's on about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
which ... tbh is not much different than what her 2017 book "Lost in Math" was about
this is a review from around its release https://www.math.columbia.edu/... [columbia.edu]
i remember being quite against her POV originally, but after many examples ... i'm mostly won over that there's a lot of wasted brainpower in the space.
Re: (Score:2)
I hadn't watched her videos for a few months and this one from two weeks ago is quite a good review of what she's on about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I don't know what happened with my post but that was the link I wanted to include, thanks.
Mod parent up, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
It does feel like we should be farther along
I think we got spoiled during the 20th century. Theoretical Physics made enormous advances up through the 1970s, explaining one major phenomenon after another and advancing to a unified theory (except for that pesky force called gravity). Then it "stalled" with fewer headline-making advances (this doesn't mean that lots of lesser advances don't happen - and we still have lots of confirmation/refinement of existing theories).
I am vastly simplifying what follows - a huge amount of work led up to these formula
Re: (Score:2)
> there's nothing anyone can do about the pace of physics.
If we can determine what kind of papers we want and what kind of we don't, we could deny rewards from the papers which we don't want and direct more money to scientists who produce what we want. I think Sabine tries to make a point that we currently reward people when they write "bad" papers.
Re: (Score:3)
I would add that the academic community writ large is suffering from self-imposed wounds around the 'publish or perish' model of the past. The 'Sciences' both physical and social need to get their house in order. Not because they are inherently wrong, or not useful, etc, but because the world has changed and they have not.
IMHO they need to revisit peer-review...not throw it out, but double down. Make the peer review process more legitimate, involve more people as a regular part of their academic jobs.
Re: (Score:2)
I think that the "publish or perish" model is not so much created by scientists, but imposed upon them. In large part this is because most science funding comes from the government and governments (and other funders) like to be able to demonstrate that they are "getting their money's worth". How do you measure science output? Quality is difficult to judge, especially as science has become more specialized. Over time, this evolved more and more to be the counting of the number of papers published. Novelty is
Re: (Score:2)
Sabine Hossenfelder is a bit like politicians these days: constantly swearing and not behaving civilized. It's not good for the debate.
Re: (Score:2)
Another part of the problem: people's attention span has diminished significantly. Communicating complex ideas requires time and attention. Text is probably the best way of communicating this (though video can also help communicate some things well). People "don't have time" to delve into the topics and understand (this isn't true, people have just as much time as they did 50 years ago, they just choose to use it differently).
TV started this - dividing things up into at most 5-10 minute segments divided by
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Medical Science has been pretty corrupted (Score:5, Informative)
> I recall a Dutch research team which found that baking powder could be helpful for treating certain types of cancer. They abandoned the research because they could not find any way to patent backing powder anymore.
Maybe there were also other reasons they abandoned it, I don't know when that was but I found a lot of recent studies on sodium bicarbonate, here are a few from 2024 and one from 2023:
Sodium bicarbonate potentiates the antitumor effects of Olaparib in ovarian cancer via cGMP/PKG-mediated ROS scavenging and M1 macrophage transformation - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov]
Sodium bicarbonate nanoparticles modulate the tumor pH and enhance the cellular uptake of doxorubicin - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a... [nih.gov]
Tumor alkalization therapy: misconception or good therapeutics perspective? - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a... [nih.gov]
Sodium Bicarbonate Nanoparticles for Amplified Cancer Immunotherapy by Inducing Pyroptosis and Regulating Lactic Acid Metabolism - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.co... [wiley.com]
Re: (Score:3)
This is part of the problem. Your links are all to interesting pre-clinical work in petrie dishes or injecting mice. You can't just eat baking soda and cure your cancer. You also can't just inject it. Doing either of those things in the quanity required to affect a tumor would overwhelm your body's homeostasis and you'd die too.
If you actually read those papers, the more advanced ones (i.e. in living mice instead of cell cultures) are looking at ways to deliver sodium bicarbonate or other agents to the tumo
Re: (Score:3)
Fenbendazole is a broad-spectrum de-wormer that is used to treat many of the intestinal parasites that affect pet animals.
According to much literature it is also a broad-spectrum cancer cure, so claims this article backed up with a long list of scientific papers. [rifttv.com]
Is it safe for humans? Seems to be as a variation of it, Mebendazole, is already widely used for intestinal parasites in humans and some cancer patients have already tried it with success.
Big Pharma, and industrialists as a whole, are the ones who a
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that Big Pharma shouldn't be the primary funders of medical research. Big Pharma needs to exist (we need large-scale manufacturing of medicines) - and they can play a role in applied research. But most research needs to be done by not-for-profit funders (primarily government). The big problem in the current system is that Big Pharma is getting the best of both worlds - government funded research that they make into private and patented medicines - corrupting the whole system (and likely leadi
Re: (Score:3)
We shouldn't expect major corporations to sponsor research they can't make any money from, that would be behaviour completely antithetical to their nature. This is what government research money is for.
Of course here in the US we've lost a lot of that recently, we'll see how that's gone for us in a couple decades. I don't expect anything positive.
Re: (Score:3)
I don't. I give far more credence to what Sabine Hossenfelder (one of the people shouting "bullshit") has to say [youtube.com] about the issue. To her credit, she doesn't go crying to reddit when people publicly disagree with her.
tl;dw - far too much time and effort is spent studying mathematical models that are intellectually satisfying but have no physical basis in reality. This is good for securing grant money but doesn't expand our knowledge of the Universe in any meaningful way. It's somewhat telling that string the
Re: (Score:2)
She worked on quantum gravity for fucks sake. Have you ever seen a description of quantum gravity that didn't count as theoretical?
Pfff. The magnitude of the mathwank projection of quantum gravity is even slightly larger than that of string theory[1]. It's just that being so easy to point out the reasonable shortcomings of string theory distracts from Mme SH's underlying message of "their mathwank is crowding out grant money from my mathwank."
Don't get me wrong, I think the GP's "mathwank" label is ... tricky. Theoretical Math is a Good Thing. Theoretical Physicists trying to come up with Mathematical models for things are also a Good
Re: (Score:3)
> Should anyone really care?
Their opinion pieces are purchased by the MIC, so maybe.
They must be afraid somebody is sniffing around in "their" physics.
We've had government physicists say plainly that MIC R&D has fundamental breakthroughs in topological physics that the public is not privy to.
JWST is discarding "established" cosmological physics theories by the week. This should be celebrated by scientists!
I recently listened to a retired Lockheed guy talking about light propagation theory and in tha
Re: (Score:2)
Should anyone really care?
That's what I don't get. Are there any of these theoretical physicists throwing around conspiracy theories? Or this is "bruhaha" about what a bunch of people on Youtube think? Isn't the real story that some supposedly sane people care what a bunch of non-experts are saying about the experts. Or more like how a few journalists need to find a story to boost their careers, so this is the best they can do?
Re: (Score:2)
You holding out for Fox News?
Re: (Score:2)
Should anyone really care?
Whether you like the Wall Street Journal or not, doesn't mean it isn't relevant. Powerful people read it and it probably influences their decisions.
Today's US government's policy making is heavily influenced by social media - and so the article is reporting upon something that might be directly relevant to support for the sciences. If you care about the sciences, you probably ought to care about what information might influence policy makers - and at least prepare for it to be used. (I don't like this fact,
Re: (Score:3)
It's on YouTube as well. She makes a good point and has been consistent about it too.
There is an end to physics somewhere. Sorting out quantum gravity and those screwy neutrinos is about all that is left and neither of those are going to put dinner on the table. If a billionaire wants to keep looking for a warp drive that's fine, but with his or her money.
Look at chemistry for another example, probably the easiest one to see. Are there any holes in the periodic table? No. Very determined researchers with mo
Re: (Score:2)
yes and
the amount of very obvious bad faith agents with their own completely unrelated motivations is... unsurprising but... I wonder if they really buy into their own ideas that science is just a series of decisions, or at least is just one of the entries in the global popularity contest.
Some of the folks in the comments today have been... trying to get themselves dogpiled to prove they're victims.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Explain where I have confused climate and weather. You didn't, and you won't, because you can't. You make arguments with nothing to back them up because you don't know what you are talking about, and because you don't want to risk anyone rebutting your claims.
That's also why you didn't rebut a single one of my claims. You don't believe your own claims. You are just another climate alarmist yelling at the clouds and wearing an onion on your belt.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't believe that you honestly subscribe to the bizarre logical fallacies you claim to believe in.
Re: (Score:2)
Again: rebut my assertions and claims, or you are a fraud. If all you do is skirt the issue and claim to be right and I am wrong, without any evidence but the sound of your keyboard, you are a fraud.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Cattle in Greenland is historical fact. I learned it in grade school and a simple google finds all the confirmation you need.
The 97% fallacy is also easy to verify.
You lie again.
Re: (Score:2)
If it's settled, why do they need trillions more dollars to study it?
To refine the models. To improve the error bars in the predictions. To try and work out how to help the billions of stupid humans adapt to the changing climate.
Re: (Score:2)
They claim they can predict the global temperature in 75 years within a tenth of a degree. How much more accuracy do they need?
Answer: they don't, unless their models are so inaccurate that the claims of knowing the temperature 75 years from now are false.
They lie.