For a defense of the 'unicorns in unexplored forests', that was pretty much the approach that led to the discovery of most of the standard model.
Plus, given dark matter and dark energy, we know something must be out there, even if its not unicorns, there's something.
Because science is paradigmatic, this is the problem. We do not know something else must be out there because we have no direct evidence of either Dark Matter nor Dark Energy, which, btw, have absolutely nothing to do with one another. We might just not yet have the intuition to understand what is causing our perception of the need for these labels.
I, for one, am absolutely convinced Dark Matter is absolute bunk and will be widely accepted to not exist eventually within the next 50 years. The initial reason for Dark Matter's existence, to explain rotational velocities of spiral galaxies we assume spiral galaxies appear to have more invisible matter, has been explained by the fact that the initial observation was of a galaxy in isolation, and the assumption that it was an isolated inertial frame without considering the cluster of galaxies around it, which perfectly explain spiral galaxy rotational velocities without any need for Dark Matter. But because science is paradigmatic and even in the Space Age the correct information is taking decades to disseminate, many if not most are still are convinced Dark Matter is needed even though no one knows what it is. It's nothing, really, it's a phantom, imagination gone haywire. Also, as other unexplained developments occurred, these too got lumped into Dark Matter, which galaxy clusters can not explain. So the problem becomes the shame of not just saying, "we don't know... we don't understand this," and labelling it something to fake it like we do understand it. This is a flaw of modern science, or at least of cosmology,i.e. the unwillingness to accept that we don't (yet) know the precise reasons for what is observed.
"What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics?"
Do you want to do a 20 year long study on a particle collider built specifically for you right after finishing your PhD? Well, sorry, you have to build your reputation so that society sees that you are not one of those people who “are making shit up or at least being overly optimistic”.
so the argurment now is, for how much longer is it reasonable to be roaming difficult terrains in the hope that we might have a repeat miracle? Its practically impossible to answer. "All Unicorns have been discovered" has been a scientist's cry as far back as Laplace.
edit: her complaint is that once funding sources realize that 'particle physicists shill ridiculous ideas for research grants', all of the money dries up and won't return for at least a generation or two. That's an existential threat to the field. That sounds like a legitimate complaint to me. Unfortunately she's also shining a spotlight on the thing she's worried about other people noticing.
Is that a lot? On what basis could we decide?(1) I am not saying it isn't, I am just saying it is a rather subjective call which sort of looks at the prior pace of discoveries and extrapolates a judgement.
(1) it took more than that from the first gravitational wave detector to an actual discovery
Einstein didn't predict gravitational waves as a standalone theory. Gravitational waves are a prediction of General Relativity. General Relativity was shown to be plausible based on data already at hand and data they could collect.
Gravity waves and lensing and frame dragging all confirm what we already suspected to be true. Which is good and bad news because they increase the corroborating evidence for an existing theory, and they take out huge chunks of opportunity for some other theory to explain the same phenomenon but introduce new loopholes or consequences that let us do new things like build Foundation power supplies (nuclear reactors the size of gumballs) or FTL travel or explain why galaxies move 'wrong'.
The Higgs Boson was found in 2012 by the LHC and was predicted by the standard model.
IANAPhysicist so correct me if I'm wrong but the last time we found something predicted [1] by the Standard Model was the Higgs Boson in 2012. Before that it was the Tau neutrino and the quark-gluon plasma in 2000, the top quark in 1995, and then (the discovery I think you're referring to) the W and Z bosons in 1983
[1] we mean experimental confirmation, right?
For instance special relativity explains gravitational lensing and predicted that frame dragging would also be discovered, but also explained other problems. The theories that make a physicist's day seem to tie the past to the present and the present to the future:
This happened, we don't know why. Here's a theory that explains those measurements. Here's a prediction we can test now/with a billion dollars that will corroborate my theory, and here are some new consequences of the theory that require <future tech> to be sure that this is 'true' instead of an accident of math. Like atomic clocks or giant particle accelerators.
You mean general relativity
1950s, 1950, 1970s, particle physics was a fast-moving field, theory and experiment moved hand in hand. Guided by the intuition of what is mathematically elegant, you propose an extension of current theories, and soon someone in experimental physics with particle colliders publishes results that confirm your theory. Or the other way round: Experimental physicists publish new collider results, and theorists rush in to explain them with new theories.
But you had to be fast, and greedy (in a good way). If you didn't work out and publish the new mathematical expansion of current theories, someone else surely did.
It was also a good time to be a scientist in academia: Population was growing (15% per decade in USA, 10% per decade in Europe), economy was growing, and graduates from a previous (smaller) generation found jobs and careers in the expanding university system, to teach the next (larger) generation of students.
The standard model was competed in the 1970s. Theoretical particle physics was a well-oiled, battle tested fast spinning machine. Ready to continue the mad gold rush of past 30 years. Follow your intuition of mathematical elegance, propose new theories, wait for experiments to confirm them.
But experiments stopped finding traces of new particles. The standard model of particle physics was complete, and apparently all its particles were already discovered. Well, you had to wait a bit longer for: Top quark 1995, tau neutrino 2000, Higgs boson 2012.
The fast machine of theoretical physics kept rotating and spinning out mathematical structures and theories. But experiments were no longer confirming, or even guiding, the development of theory. The mode of work that had worked beautifully up to mid-1970s didn't work anymore. Supersymmetry made predictions, but all turned out to be wrong. String theory was such a complicated mathematical construction, that we don't even know if it makes predictions (in the Popperian sense) at all.
So yes, we can blame particle physics. What first worked for 30 years, hasn't been working anymore for 40 years. You should try something different.
We know that we are far from having figured out all fundamental physics: All the "dark" stuff in cosmology points to the pieces of the puzzle not fitting well together, if at all.
The question is what sort of local experiments can help lift that next weil of ignorance and if we are collectively capable to imagine them and pursue them.
The issue with local physics is that it is what it is (as Feynman who triggered this thread might say) and what is accessible to us to explore does not match to perfection the socioeconomic convulsions of homo sapiens.
The high energy accelerator physics paradigm (which is but one of the possible local physics windows) may have been exhausted for our current cirumstances but I would bet not in general. The pattern of all physical systems we know is that if you keep pushing them they keep revealing new behavior. We may have hit an energy gap that requires too many resources to cross. But maybe the only resource missing is imagination. Who is to tell?
What is my conclusion? I would agree the success patterns of the past will not repeat on a cookie cutter basis. And theoretical physics is certainly gyrating uncontollably in the absence of experimental anchors. This only raises the bar for people to do a better job at connecting the dots.
Hossenfelder critzises physics. That is a good thing to do, regardless of whether she is always right about it.
Being smart, you can learn from her even if she is not. At the very least about how to present better.
A telltale sign of a crank is attacking career scientists, which is her brand. What insight is she offering? Destroying is easy, creating is hard. Lies spread faster than truth. In general she is a force of confusion rather than enlightenment. It's too bad because she seems capable, if only she'd follow through rather than chase headlines.
For a while she was offering an honest look at a field going nowhere, and suggestions as to how they might better spend time and money.
Now I think she's just profiting from her new popularity by doing a not so good science/tech show.
And if not career scientists, who exactly do you think should be making a living... Doing research?
Undergrads? The admins? The timecube guy? Nobody?
There's a lot of problems with science as it's done today, but that snipe is a banal, tribalistic take that is all-too-common.
For me, a "career scientist" is someone that publishes papers solely to hold a position at an org / institute / uni / etc (yes, yes, everyone needs food on the table... not the point here. One can still have integrity). The career scientist couldn't care less about being right, only about how many citations he's gonna get and whether anyone's going to discover any flaws in his paper.
That doesn't change the fact that the most common non-monetary goal of academics is in fact pretty well aligned with behaviors such as: publishing very frequently/flag planting, farming citations on old publications, exaggerating work in presentations and media press releases, etc. Not all of these behaviors are inherently bad but they easily can be and too often are taken to an extreme.
Said goal is of course intellectual credit, or from a more cynical lense pure ego stroking. And it is indeed a rampant non-monetary incentive in academia.
Anyway, I don't see the problem with someone who has recently pursued a PhD or beyond in academic science ripping on "career scientists". This is the sort of (mostly) informed criticism that science should welcome. Though some are overly negative, they usually still have relevant insights into problems in their field, and it is silly to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
That is markedly different from someone that frequently criticizes scientists from the outside while lacking any actual insight into the relevant technical complications, especially if that person is casting a wide net in what they criticize.
The goal of a lot of modern scientific criticism is to further the conversation amongst those presently in the field, and help those adjacent to the field make more informed decisions - including prospective/very early career trainees, potential interdisciplinary collaborators, and anyone that has a role in directing possibly relevant funding opportunities. If criticisms get co-opted by other individuals for irrelevant goals that is unfortunate but it does not make the criticism invalid.
It's also somewhat difficult in the social media age to avoid commentary that gains steam in the scientific community from reaching broader public exposure, which indeed opens it to misinterpretation. But the alternative of walled off information a la the old school journal publication system is obviously problematic for other reasons.
That is a long winded way of saying that I think some amount of harsh publicly viewable criticism is sorely needed by a number of scientific fields right now, including my own (very much not physics). The fact that criticisms which from what I can gather where initially internally directed eventually gained such external exposure tells me that the message resonated with many scientists, even if just earlier career ones. Whether this person has started to profiteer on their cynicism is tangential to the validity of the original core message IMO.
Someone hasn't heard of ticket quotas before have they? Or the pharmaceutical companies that were effectively buying off doctors for years by expensive trips based on their ability to prescribe the drugs they were selling. We've had to add regulations to these above two 'fields' to prevent exactly this from happening, and in many places it still does.
What you are describing is philosophically, definitively, not science. The career scientist is a scientist who is committed to the scientific method. The career crank is committed to selling the notion that they have all the answers. That could be a citation chaser or a youtube contrarian.
yeah, she should've known better than to attack a protected class
Shouldn't particle physicists have more expectations of what they expect to find rather than we want to find X and we are going to search the entire energy frontier to find it. The problem is that the energy frontier is limitless so the ROI could be extremely poor unless we had a good idea of what we expect
AKA the full employment theorem of particle physics…
I think if we push the energy frontier one more time, there's no real reason to expect us to find anything -- but there's also no reason for us not to find anything.
Something is there causing those phenomena. People have a theory that it may be unicorns, so they are out looking for unicorns. Those are supposed to be hard to find, and people are still searching on the hardest possible places that can hold them. It may also not be unicorns, on what case nobody has any idea what it may be. Some people are trying to make such theories, but none got a good one yet.
On this level of detail, there is nothing wrong at all with any party of the above. All of the problems are with finer details.
That is part of the argument. Those dollars could go other places than these giant particle accelerators that haven't shown anything much since the Higgs Boson, and no theories are more than guessing that we will.
To make your analogy close to physics -- imagine you found a unicorn horn and can tell from the biological makeup that it is indeed a horn grown from some sort of horse-like mammal. If you searched 99.9999% of the earth for animals that might have grown that horn and found nothing then the best thing to do would be to continue looking within that 0.00001%.
We can't figure out what comes after the standard model of particle physics. But we know it's wrong. e.g. we know black holes exist and something has to happen within them. But we don't have a theory that can predict what that is. e.g. we found a unicorn horn. So we have to desperately search for it.
Hossenfelder is right that it's shitty to have to keep pushing the energy boundaries in which we hope we'll see some interesting behavior. But there's literally nothing else to do. We've searched 99.99999% of earth and there's no unicorn. Do we start denying the existence of the unicorn horn that we're holding?
Can't say I agree with that one. I think we're capping out on the physics that Einstein and ilk laid out for us to explore. This is an ideal time in the next 20-40 years for a new revolutionary genius to figure out the next big thing.
I'm not going to make any sci-fi prognostications but I have a feeling like there's a new threshold to cross coming up, one of those unknown unknowns that we'll suddenly figure out thanks to a flash of insight by the right person being in the right place at the right time kind of things.
Yes, you really should go and look back at that horn and thoroughly recheck if it really is what it seemed like to people several decades ago.
It's fascinating that someone can make a career out of a phenomenon not being observed.
Establishing a solid negative result that rules out hypotheses is worthwhile if unglamorous.
Citing an upper bound on the half-life is all that can be credibly reported. It's how you put an error bar on something that's non-negative but consistent with zero.
The life sciences equivalent would be a study of unicorn sightings. None so far, but they could be put there so please fund my research!
Whether to fund difficult research, when it's reasonable to give up, and when it escapes beyond reasonable definitions of science, are separate questions. Physics is wrestling with these questions in a number of areas, such as the search for an empirically testable theory that reconciles quantum mechanics and gravity.
The life sciences have no equivalent. Precision measurement is not their bag, which is OK. Physics is the first to arrive at such a roadblock. Maybe the search for proofs of some famous math conjectures is an analogy to draw guidance from.
In India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Indian_One_Horned_Rhino.j...
I think at some point we (physicists) are just going to have to realize we're at the point where the models we have maybe should be taken for what they are (incomplete), and re-examine the data and construct new hypotheses to design experiments for. I'm certainly not the physicist to do that (I haven't been practicing for almost 15 years now, and even when I was I was not the Einstein caliber physicist to do it), but there will be someone or a group who do that. I hope soon, as I'd like to see it!
Took until Kepler and the idea that orbits were mostly elliptical for people to throw out epicycles altogether.
Basically she said you are supposed to change your theory based upon results that don't match the theory, and what they have been doing for decades is looking at gaps in the results, and imagining particle theories that don't alter the expected results in the currently explored energy levels, just in the unexplored ones. Then when people get funding to look into these frontiers/gaps, and find that everything looks the same, they adjust their theories to push them out into the gaps.
That's not Science, she emphatically states.
For myself it sounds like saying, "well you don't know Unicorns don't exist because we haven't looked everywhere, what if they're in <unexplored forests in the Congo>?" Then the Congo gets explored and they say, "well maybe they're in Antarctica".