No offence but she is a trained physicist so she too is an 'actual scientist' by the very definition of the term. And she's completely right about the neglect of economic reasoning. The arguments against blowing 40 billion bucks on an accelerator that will likely not surface anything new is valid. Physicists gotta accept that opportunity costs are real.
And the 'canary in the coalmine' point in particular in regards to pharmaceuticals is valid too. The research costs for very specialised, small scale drugs has exploded by a magnitude or two depending on who you ask. Other fields are starting to suffer as well.
I would go even further than she does and say it's an almost universal condition of modern research. We see diminishing returns everywhere, and if this is not stopped and we don't manage to drastically increase the efficacy of scientific research we'll effectively flatline at some point.
Almost any material hard metrics you look at like life expectancy, economic growth or whatever you could consider a sign of technological advancement, even tens of billions in investment seem to produce only marginal improvements. We are not living in the golden age of science.
As a knit pick, these metrics are all derivatives of science output, and not science itself. For example, detecting gravity waves does move the needle on any of these metrics, but it is still a great achievement for experimental physics.
All intensive purposes. Get down to brass tax. There's a lot of these that I've uttered or heard and they last a long time because they sound kind of sensible.
It will surely do. Those achievements are not possible without staggering advances in technology that can be later applied in different fields.
The same technology that we first developed for those expensive colliders is now used in MRI and others diagnosis tools that we have for granted today.
The question is, how much better would "MRI and other diagnosis tools" if that money had been spent actively trying to improve them instead of mostly going to detecting gravity waves? That's the question you need to answer to justify spending billions chasing physicists latest "fetish".
"Big physics" proponents always justify wasting (in my opinion) billions in colliders and observers by the unintended benefits that accidentally derive from them but they never mention how much more progress those other ares could make by directly using that money.Instead of spending $40B in the next big collider, what if we were spent developing CRISPR and related technologies? Or on a "moon-shot" for AGI? On developing new tools and techniques to study and understand large scale social systems?
P.S.: I have a BS/MS/PhD in Theoretical Physics
If you want the MRI 2.0, you start with something monstrously different, otherwordly, like gravitational wave detection. There you reach metrological precision, DSP, optics, waveguides, EM shielding, thermal noise compensation, and other incremental advancements that taken together gives you MRI 1.5, and then you can bring in those who make it work into a nice and shiny improved MRI.
The problem with moon-shots (eg. AGI) is that you don't know where to go. With physics at least you sort of do. Higher energy. More sensitivity. Better experiments.
Arguments for "spinoff benefits" from research always seem really weak to me. If you want lighter, imperishable food, invest in food preservation, not a space program that might happen to produce freeze-dried food.
I think, when you take humans into account, you're better off setting interesting and challenging goals, with many useful byproducts.
I still think it's pretty weak though; the inspiration benefit seems unlikely to overcome the lost efficiency, in general. And different people find different problems inspiring; some people can be inspired by practical problems (e.g. "how can we lighten the backpacks of trampers").
The problem with attempting to justify space exploration with spin-off examples like food preservation is that it risks provoking a 'so what?' response. Piling on unimpressive claims does not strengthen one's argument, it dilutes it, and gives the opposition an easy target to dispute.
When Clarke came up with the idea of communications satellites, he, and others, thought he had come up with a before-the-fact justification for space travel, as he expected these relays would need regular maintenance, but another claimed-spinoff-but-not-really, semiconductor electronics, obviated the need.
There is plenty of wasted money in the pharma sector that can be spent and profited from in crispr technologies. I'm not sure why you're taking physics money for that.
The physics funding programs have already moved on from big budget tags in some spaces. ITER will probably be the last big white whale project in fusion. There are a bunch of smaller fusion projects being funded at smaller scales to prove their efforts before going big. The iterative tech model is bleeding over into science funding.
I've always been very skeptical of claims that heavy investment in the space sciences advacnced other technologies, more than if we had just invested that money directly in the other technology. I also see a lot of money wasted in space sciences running experiments on the ISS that aren't really that useful (like crystallography- sure, you can grow nice crystals in space and then bring them back down to earth, but for the money you spent on that, you could have funded 10 PIs, and also crystal structures aren't that useful for advancing science).
Interestingly, if you look at modern science funding, it does basically treat it as a multi-armed bandit and there is a portfolio of project funding that includes both large particle physics experiments and individual investigators.
(Also a BSc in TPhys (& maths), fwiw.)
And you basically followed with it. Basic science is the foundation engineering builds on. I believe 1st semiconductors were a science experiment. Em waves were. Gigantomagnetoresistance was. The internet was an academic curiosity.
It think it's important to blow some of human work on the free thinkers. It moves the popluation forward. Any other comparable scientific and engineering progress I can think was fueled by war.
Imho allocating resources only for acute goals lead to local technological optima. Seemingly puporseless research helps to break out.
I'm pretty sure the transistor [1] was invented specifically to solve a real engineering problem.
[1] I'm taking your use of "semiconductor" to mean transistor because my understanding is semiconductors are a kind of material that was discovered, not invented.
Today number theory is the basis for several important fields of application, including computation theory, modern cryptography, and numerical calculation.
Also in modern times, especially, there is a big problem of discoverability. If the mathematical result you need for some application is buried in a thirty-year-old journal using unfamiliar terminology, what are the chances you'll find it and understand it when you need it? I venture to suggest that much of the time it's easier to re-derive the result than to find it.
Not a chance.
The average cost of an application of permethrin 1% cream is about $20; an application of spinosad costs $270 without insurance.
Ouch!
Most likely there is no way to increase efficacy, because the problems we try to solve become harder and harder as we go. This is why the predictions of singularity are unrealistic, the self improving AI, and constantly increasing number of human researchers will go into merely not flatlining instead of solving everything at once.
Making "smarter" humans (either via sperm/egg/embryo selection, and/or via brain-computer interfaces) would also help a lot.
And it doesn't look like we're anywhere close to "peak brain", after all we do a lot with just 20W and ~1.5 kg of wetware.
Whatever improvements our potential descendants make will surely look like the big-s-singularity to us.
and
> I am a working scientist, which means I have neither the time to keep up nor the audience.
For those that don't know about Sabine, who is criticized in the parent, you can read about her at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabine_Hossenfelder
Short summary... she is a research fellow, theoretical physicist, and of course has a PhD in physics.
I fully expect scientists to disagree with each other. I even enjoy reading about their disagreements. But, to take shots at qualifications (even if in a passive aggressive manner) is rude. The tone of the parent attempts to dismiss her by making us feel she isn't a read scientist while in fact she's talking about her profession.
Sabine has more qualifications than me, but like Michio Kaku and NDT, she now spends most of her time promoting a certain message to the public in a very one-sided way. That's why I called her a popularizer. Like Michio Kaku, she can afford to spend the time on that, and I can't.
So instead you get all this hand-wringing about the process, about how theorists come up with elegant math that isn't testable, yada yada, without at least an honest statement that "It is at least possible that the universe's final secrets will never be amenable to human inquiry."
This is something I've thought about. I'm a physicist, but am now happily working in industry. My job is to solve problems, and for most part I do, but it always seems possible that one fine day, someone will walk into my cubicle with a problem that I just can't solve. I'm always faced with the fact that I can't honestly predict how long the next problem will take. Maybe a day, maybe a week, maybe... forever?
Despite a string of successes, we never know for sure when physics will be hit with a problem that takes a decade, or a century, or even a millennium, to solve. As I understand the history, the ancient Greeks could formulate quadratic equations that they couldn't solve, and it wasn't until something like a millennium later that Al-Khwarizmi cracked it, at least for real roots. Now we teach it to children in middle school.
Finding a testable theory of quantum gravity might be the problem that takes a millennium.
I think that I mostly agree with the theme of your post. An important thing to keep in mind is that physics is inherently an experimental science, so the critique of formulating untestable theories is valid. I have heard that cosmology is particularly bad about this, however I am not in that field...so who knows.
Her factual statements, that every high-energy physics experiment since the 1970s has only confirmed an existing theory (the Standard Model) and that every prediction made by physicists about possible extensions to that existing theory has turned out to be wrong, are correct.
If you think that the underlying cause for these facts is not what she says, what do you think it is?
Well, the snarky answer is that the equivalent of the LHC (America's SSC) was defunded halfway through construction in the 1990s. This set back the field by nearly 20 years. It's rather unfair to say that no progress was made in the 1990s and 2000s if the very instrument that could have done so was defunded.
Anyway, the real answer is that the vast majority of scientific theories ever formulated were completely wrong. Some people say the early 20th century was the golden age of physics. But there were several failed theories of relativitistic gravity proposed in the 1910s, many failed attempts to formulate the quantum theory of fields in the 1920s, and within particle physics, a slew of failed theories of the atomic nucleus and the fine structure constant. None of this appears in textbooks.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Recall that back then the journals were still getting filled with theoretical papers weekly -- the fact that we teach the material that was right to undergraduates in slim textbooks shows that the vast majority was wrong or irrelevant.
Experimental confirmation has always taken a long time, e.g. see the long disputes over the ether that stretched well into the 1940s, 40 years after the proposal of special relativity, complicated by false positives and systematic uncertainties.
Fundamental science is simply hard, and it only looks like it used to be easy because we forgot 99% of the failures. There is a perfectly valid point to be made that it may be getting harder, but it is insufficient to just point to failures to prove it.
Standard Model then implied neutrino mixing would be slight (based on quark mixing). That was also demonstrated to be incorrect.
Standard Model has no good reason to predict that protons are stable, yet so far they apparently are.
There is more to particle physics than Higgs, Horatio.
„I am the only physicist who has at least come up with an idea for what to do.”
Seemed pretty arrogant. But I have no knowledge of her
Still, I don’t think Hossenfelder is a reason to be this salty! Just post links to some other physics blogger that contradicts her and move on. That’s how Lubos is handled and it works ok as far as I can tell (I can’t actually tell very well on account of all the ignoring of Lubos I’m doing).
But maybe, one can dream at least, in the future science will be done with smart models, that can at least verify themselves given some assumptions.
https://www.askamathematician.com/2009/12/q-howwhy-are-quant...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in...
Consciousness is a conceptual problem, not a physical one. It merely goes away once you start asking the right questions.
Consciousness is still an extant and very unexplained phenomenon.
We have not yet mapped out the wiring diagrams of our brains which result in the human experience of consciousness. But that's a technological limitation in brain scanning and simulation. We also haven't yet created AI machines that exhibit what we would call consciousness, but we have good ideas of how to do so and are making progress. In both cases we know there is no need to invoke dualist answers, whether it be souls, ghosts in the machine, or 'qualia.'
https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl
(Also modern dualism is much better than spiritualism! There are some good reasons why people believe it.)
That's news to me. What do you mean? What are those good ideas that we have and that we are making progress towards, that will lead us to conscious machines?
Actually: conscious software. Presumably, if we can get to strong AI from where we are right now, then we already have the hardware and we just need to figure out how to write the software?
A quick Google of the subject will demonstrate it is still an (maybe, the) outstanding subject of philosophy and perhaps ultimately physics.
Check any online encyclopedia, but if you have any respectable references that disagree, I'd be genuinely interested.
Eg:
So in the philosophy of physics and the mind, there are whole departments filled with tenured professors who came of age in their thinking at a time when consciousness was a Hard Problem, and have focused their mental tools on a class of solutions (qualia, observer-triggered wave collapse, etc.) which are irreconcilable with mechanistic physical reality, making the problem even more intractable and mysterious. It'll take another generation or two before the ideas of Dennett, Dawkins, Tegmark, etc. get more widely recognized and consciousness finally goes the way of phlogiston.
For references, I recommend Dennett's "Consciousness Explained", and really anything by Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins--materialistic explanations of consciousness pervade their work. For a compatible (hah!) physical perspective, I suggest Max Tegmark:
Also, I don't really like the way you're describing these professors of philosophy. These people have spent their lives studying this problem and adjacent topics. Sure you may be absolutely convinced that "things that conflict with our understanding of mechanistic physical reality must be untrue," others believe "what almost all people perceive to be true about their internal experience cannot be dismissed when discussing the nature of that experience." I think this topic is much more debatable than you are making it out to be.
A phlogiston is not the correct analogy for grounding consciousness in science. An easier fit would be the software/hardware split you find in computing, where the abstractions and meaning we perceive to be real is a set of built layers of computational or logical abstraction.
I am on the side of not thinking you can scientifically ground consciousness with the understanding we have. I don't think either analogy fits and the argument will forever be pinned in debate between characters that prefer their own worldview.
It's no coincidence that, on the other end of the spectrum, a lot of successful entrepreneurs could barely stay in college long enough to get their bachelor's degree.
I'm not sure if "eagerness to efficiently apply one's skills" is something that can be taught but it could certainly be incentivized.
Please respect those that still think there need not be any base reason for learning about the world
This article is not about doing data analysis in experiment, it's more about how we should choose the theories that guide our choices in experiments in the first place. I disagree with Sabine because I see her as painting an unfair picture of theorists, as if we were all completely unreflective and she was the only one in the world to think seriously about theory selection. Most of her vague suggestions are things that people (sometimes, hundreds of people) have been already doing for decades.
That breaks the cardinal rule of science popularization: don't trash people or take credit for insights without giving a careful, fair picture of everything that is going on, because the scientists affected don't have the right of reply.
I am not going to bother doing a line-by-line rebuttal, because I've already done this for nearly a hundred of her previous articles, in forums across the internet. It just doesn't matter, because tomorrow she will put out another massively popular article with the same oversimplifications and misrepresentations, and it will get 1000 times the views any response I write could. That is what it means to be a public intellectual. I am a working scientist, which means I have neither the time to keep up nor the audience.