I have some concerns about the dark matter point but I think she is more or less right and I think it sucks to be competing for funding with work that's not well-directed.
Of course, she thinks spending on other work is not well directed, but others think spending it on her work is not well directed. While I think that maybe we just fund all (because really, it's not that much money -- for her group, we probably talk about a couple of shot-down balloon kind of money [Sidewinder is >300k], for several years worth of research), we do not live in that world.
I want to note, though, that this "controversy", is very important for her book sales. I am not convinced that these books actually bring the field forward.
Maybe address one or two of her actual points and try to refute them?
No, because the vested interests have blinders on because they're invested in current paradigms. They could get stuck trying to find a local optimum rather than the global optimum we actually want. External objective assessments are sometimes needed, and Sabine is making a good case that particle physicists need a wake up call to get out of their rut. She won't convince the currently entrenched interests, but hopefully she's convincing graduate students that will start gaining influence over the next decade.
The argument she lays out in this video is exactly such an assessment. She is an external agent because she's not working in particle physics. Plenty of other physicists are in the same position and can impartially evaluate the state of particle physics and where funding for basic science research should go.
What are the objective reasons to justify the expense of yet larger particle accelerators at this point? It's literally just for the hell of it, all the low hanging fruit has long since been plucked. There are no theoretical reasons to expect to find anything. Empirically, we haven't found anything surprising in numerous previous accelerators. The Higgs was expected and justified the LHC. If the Higgs had not been found, then there would have been a decent argument for a larger accelerator, but that's not the world we live in.
The colossal funds that would go towards a larger accelerator could fund literally thousands of scientific experiments that aren't suffering from diminishing returns. We'd be better off funneling that money towards wakefield accelerators, for instance.
Additionally: The relative attribution of funds is decided by funding agencies, by reviewing the individual fields and asking for input from these fields, using panels that span fields. The finer contribution in the field then depends on experts in the field.
It's also not true that money is fungible in that way. Especially for bigger projects like this, without such a project, the money just wouldn't be there.
And if you don't trust the in-field experts to distribute the money, why do you believe that out-field experts, who directly would profit from the diverted funding (if the money would be a zero sum game), are neutral?
I'm aware. She hasn't worked in HEP in quite some time as she's been focusing on cosmology and quantum foundations.
> A condensed matter physicist cannot evaluate the field, the same way as a particle physicist cannot evaluate the field of CM.
They absolutely can evaluate whether a field lacks any prospects or real problems to solve.
> It's also not true that money is fungible in that way. Especially for bigger projects like this, without such a project, the money just wouldn't be there.
The money just drying up is frankly better than wasting it on a fruitless endeavour, which just discredits research as a whole.
> And if you don't trust the in-field experts to distribute the money, why do you believe that out-field experts, who directly would profit from the diverted funding (if the money would be a zero sum game), are neutral?
There are many ways to approach this, use your imagination and consider how science could be funded freed from its current shackles. A certain percentage of funds can be earmarked for particle physics, but that doesn't mean a new collider should get most of it. You can separate the decision of how much funding a sub field gets from how much of that funding goes to specific projects in that sub field, and each decision could be made by different sets of people, as but one example.
This is an outstanding non-reply! Is this how you actually think reasoning works, or are just getting replies from ChatGPT?
Seems to know her shit and doesn’t seem to hate it.
Dr Becky is a fantastic science communicator that is clearly very passionate and optimistic about her field
One of the take aways I've got from what I've seen of academia (whether this applies to Sabine or not) is that you'd be surprised how disconnected a senior academic is from the current state of their field. Not that they're ignorant of the latest findings (though, again, you'd be surprised how little time they have actually read papers unless they have to), but they're often not doing actual research at all, not reading the latest papers as widely as a good postdoc would be, and see the field through older often outdated (though sometimes still valuable) lenses, and can be very distracted by their other responsibilities. A young excited researcher is genuinely looking out for the future of their field, and, IMO, I think you can see that Dr Becky
Of course if you follow this to its logical conclusion you eventually hit "become a scientist, work with the material, form your own opinion", but well, a little bit more aggregation and summary would be of service to me.
I guess what Hossenfelder offers me is content above the quality bar of most science journalism, on that spectrum.
The one that comes to mind is when talking about fusion she said the output energy of the reaction * efficiency must be > input energy which seems perfectly logical. Except the input energy doesn’t all disappear much of it ends up in the plasma which in a steady state is then converted at some efficiency to electricity again. This is why Q is considered independently of the total power used by the facility which goes on to invalidate much of the rest of the video.
I don’t know if that was intentional oversimplification or a mistake on her part, but it makes me question the accuracy of her videos on other topics.
But the bigger issue is that all she's saying is that there is a problem (which everyone in the field knows) but doesn't offer any solution.
Note for example the bit about how there are many possible choices for what thing to test next, but only a finite amount of resources to do the tests which makes how one chooses what to try next a very important factor.
What modification does she propose to ensure it is done better? None! She just says "do it better", possibly thinking that is helpful advice?
So in summary these days Hossenfelder is being _exactly_ as helpful as the college that rolls in to your office, and, while filming for tiktok, glances at your screen and tells you to fix that stubborn segfault you have been struggling to debug for the last three hours.
The solution is to stop pretending there's a problem to solve when there isn't. That's literally what she's saying.
The obvious corollary is, "work on real problems instead of pseudo problems and stop trying to take funding away from people working on real problems".
It seems perfectly obvious that we've passed the point of diminishing returns and it's time to focus on other things until we have a compelling reason to revisit this.
Who decides about the money?
I would give every scientist a yearly budget to distribute to Research Organisations / Research Projects. Let's try democracy instead of oligarchy (and maybe ending up in populism or anarchy).
Your claim that this advantage exists is based on an assumption that you've accurately evaluated the likelihood that the people who were rejected would not have been able to do the research. I don't think you have reliable data to draw such a conclusion. As such, I don't accept this claim to advantage.
However, I do agree that some plausibility metric relating the funding requested to the difficulty of the proposed research would be valuable to weed out overly ambitious projects. Moonshot programs can then rely on the lottery.
Coincidentally just came across this thread which discusses exactly how much of a fiction this is:
https://twitter.com/ThomasVanRiet2/status/162540854754145894...
You don't provide any information for evaluation, all we know is that you think you heard it too often. And why make a disparaging comment about her on top of that, without any substance added?
I would not have added a comment if I didn't find it disturbing how much attention your mean comment gets. Another person even saying they cannot "stand her" - of course also without anything of substance added. I hate adding my own comment along this mean-spirited, substance-free and OT thread, but I don't want to say nothing either.
If you dislike the topic, just don't click. Easy. Or, provide some real meat for the discussion, not an expression of personal dislike, especially not of the person, unless they actually did something despicable worthy of such dislike.
I think they're complaining about Sabine making another video where she repeats the same unsubstantiated complaints. And they were disappointed because they are interested in novel critique of particle physics, and were let down.
What a weird comment. They're not substantiated at all, the whole video is literally substantiating her position, and does it quite well IMO.
In what way? Her line of reasoning was easy to follow and she gave some specific examples. Given the length and medium I felt it was substantial, certainly enough for a rebuttal. What's missing?
That funding could go towards thousands of research proposals that aren't suffering from diminishing returns.
This is simply not true, as a quick perusal of any proposal for a future collider will show: they all start with motivational statements, not with "it is a truth universally acknowledged we need another" as you claim.
What you are thinking of is ballistic missile defence, now that's a self-serving boondoggle.
They are pseudo motivations "justified" by appeals to pseudo problems. They are pseudo problems for exactly the reasons Hossenfelder discusses in this video and in her book.
Glad you asked. The Higgs boson was just the thing I needed for my new Tesla and, thanks to LHC, I now always carry a spare in the trunk. But in all honesty it's slightly off-center and I am hoping that a new larger accelerator will provide a particle that precisely fills the bill.
I concur with your last point.
This happens to anyone who goes into a highly specialized, close-knit academic field; has a private disagreement with their field; and subsequently goes public.