I can't help but wonder if she is just speaking uncomfortable truths about things a lot of the hn audience like, where nobody can really come up with a counter per se but there is still a negative gut reaction of i-don't-like-people-challenging-my-world-view so the criticism comes out as, i dont mind your view i just hate the way you say it.
But I still have a negative reaction to the way she (and others in other fields) does it.
Because whether it's true or not, it doesn't tend to get results in changing how things are done.
But at the same time, several comments on this post are talking about how they think her diatribes will have an undue influence on funding decisions, so i doubt that accounts for all the negativity.
The reason people trust science is because it listens to skeptics and critics and refutes their arguments. Of course some people are cranks that cannot be reasoned with, but this person clearly does not fall into the category.
Sweeping disenting voices under the rug is how people lose faith in institutions in the long term.
At least from what i read - she's basically saying that there is such a derth of new data and plausible ways to get it in the near/medium term, that theoretical particle physicists have basically been creating abstract theories which while may or may not be true, are increasingly detached from the emperical world. To the point where they are no longer predictive theories and there are so many free parameters that you can post-hoc fit it to any data you might collect. Hence the real world applicability is akin to speculating how many angels could fit on a pin head.
Now this may or may not be true. I don't have the background to know. But this is not a science argument, it is a philosophical argument. Fundamentally its asking are theoretical particle physicists engaging in science or are they engaging in some combination of math and metaphysics. Is arxiv really the place to have such philosophical debates?
> There are many theories in theoretical physics where it is very difficult or impossible to come up with experiments to prove or disprove them, e.g. Everett’s Many-Worlds Interpretation or the String Theory. One might call these sorts of theories metaphysical, fine, but it doesn’t make them into disproven pseudoscience or religions.
Like i'm really not sure how you can argue that religion and metaphysics are distinct. The main difference is just how much cultural baggage is attached.
Ultimately after reading that article (and having not watched the video it is responding to) my conclusion is not that Sabine misunderstands the simulation theory (she may or may not, but nothing there convinced me she did) but that the author of the article misunderstands what the word "science" means. Like the term "pseudoscience" may be unfair, as that has specific connotations, but its clearly a metaphysical theory not a scientific theory.
If anything, the simulation hypothesis seems to be an attempt to partially shed light on those traditional metaphysical questions. I would say the hypothesis is not tangential but directly bears on metaphysics.
So the claim that there is no substantiation is false. You just didn't bother to find out.
I would point out that lots of other important scientific fields have been in this situation before. Maybe there’s an interesting argument to the overfunding (but then again, developing theories is also pretty important!). But mostly it just feels like she’s made the point and while it’s an important point, getting a clear picture of the scientific results is more valuable than this particular opinion. (But I stress, it is her platform to do with as she wants.)
I think you mean this: “Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray”
https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Math-Beauty-Physics-Astray/dp/04...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1KFTPqc0nQ
I still find the tone off putting, reminds me of the fox and the grapes fable, not sure if it's known to most cultures.
Nevertheless, I'll watch the video and reexamine my opinion.
I still found her point valid and interesting and not at all noise. My takeaway is more that new physics might well be out of our energetic grasps until we build some much larger accelerators. Little idea how to convince society of the worth of that expense. Maybe if it can produce useful substances for industrial use. I’d love more knowledge on expansions to the periodic table, for example.
That's one of Aesop's fables. I believe it's widely known, at least in all western cultures. The fox can't reach the grapes he desires, so he concludes the grapes were sour and he didn't want them anyway.
Einstein passed away in 1955. Quarks were theorized in 1964 and experimentally confirmed in 1968. Quarks are necessary to explain how a neutron can become a proton, how an atom with more than one proton can possibly be stable, what pions and kaons from cosmic ray impacts even are, and many other everyday things.
Less has happened since Feynman passed; I would say it was Feynman dying and glam metal taking over the music scene that finally made the world realize technology had gone too far. Indeed, grunge was the next wave.
Really? Pretty much every article in this field is some click bait title similar to "did this recent discovery break science?" and is quite tiresome. But a more accurate title like "Results from new experiment are so far out of norm for prior understanding that much more scrutiny is needed" doesn't gain attraction.
“I left the field because it's a paper production machine that adds no value to society” without substantiation is simply a frustration ridden meme.