Also, it is a massive weakness of the theory that it can be used to predict such varied values. This is a big part of why it is not exactly a scientific theory: it is not really falsifiable, since you can tweak it to predict any value you want. If we had the kind of particle accelerators needed to test high-energy supersymmetry, and if it failed again, it could be adjusted to predict higher-energy supersymmetry, and since the number line extends towards infinity, this would never stop.
I treat her like Jordan Peterson. Obviously smart, but also obviously bitter and if/when they have a valid point I’m sure someone else has said it in a less grating manner.
Plenty of her points aren't without merit but she's frequently disengenious and doesn't give the full argument for what she criticises.
An example is her criticism on "decoherence solves the measurement issue" where she explains the average of multiple particles doesn't tell you what happens to just one of the particles involved. She's not wrong in the example she gives but decoherence actually can be applied to a single particle. Compare with PBS space time, they present both sides and offer an opinion as their opinion not fact.
I recently watched a lecture on issues in particle physics. Naturalness was mentioned due to a need to ensure the theory gave sensible answers, to ensure it was renormalizable, that's far more reasonable to how Sabine presents it.
The same goes for this stuff about tests of string theory. As far as I can tell, string theory is perfectly good physics whether or not it is experimentally testable. That is, there is a viewpoint called "naive Popperianism" that if something isn't experimentally testable then it it isn't science, but from what I can tell, that viewpoint is not truly decisive (thus "naive"), and its proponents don't have the authority that they wish they did. As a comparable situation, there is not much dispute that general relativity (GR) is perfectly good physics except at the center of a black hole, where it predicts a singularity which people consider non-physical. Particularly, GR makes predictions about the interior of black holes (points inside the event horizon) that are considered perfectly good except at the center. But, since there is no way to observe the inside of a black hole, those predictions of GR are also not verifiable. So I'm not bothered by unverifiability. Theory is good if it has explanatory or interpretive power, not just testable predictive power.
She's not wrong about any of the empirical content of physics (so far as we know), but neither are the people she criticizes. It's a philosophical conflict. Most physicists are at least weakly inclined towards scientific realism, whereas Hossenfelder is a radical instrumentalist - and doesn't seem to think any other view is even worth engaging with.
Maybe been you mean Jordan Peterson the year 1 edition where he was still talking about personal responsibility.
He makes frequent reference to judaeo-christian archetypes, which seems to me to grossly overstate the relevance of the belief systems.
The fundamental archetypes represented in the human mind are far older than any current form of religion, to the extent that there's overlap then either the archetypes have been co-opted, or have been overlaid with a culturally mediated avatars.
I don't think that you ever find him framing those underlying structures in a way that does not tie back to Christ.
It is hardly possible to overstate the relevance of those archetypes and beliefs. Nothing else has been more widespread on earth for as long to have anywhere close to the same influence on humanity.
And to the extent that those beliefs are actually archetypal, they are not fundamentally judaeo-christian but predate and have been co-opted by those religions.
(Where Buddhism is similar, it's because "religion" as a concept had to be made legible to Westerners when they showed up so they wouldn't colonize you so hard, and they did this by putting Western philosophy in it.)
My take on that it is a perspective based subset of actuality; in the case of the mother (as opposed) to the wife, 'she' is measured from the perspective of the child, she has her nurturing capabilities but not those of reproduction.
Reproduction is outside of the child's need to understand, and is not a property of the mother as it is seen from the child's perspective.
Bare in mind that the archetype is always perceived by the child, the husband will see something else.
These restrictions are based on perspective and need, and are reflective only of a limited subset of reality.
Christianity has taken that childish abstraction, and declared it to be an actual thing, that actually existed.
It doesn't take much consideration to understand that virgins don't give birth to sons (and if they ever give birth to daughters, they'll be genetic clones of the mother).
Reworded: Where Buddhism is similar, it's because Westerners showed up and were going to colonize anyone who didn't have something called a "religion", so they had to turn it into a recognizable "religion", which they did by copying a bunch of Western philosophy. (And inventing meditation classes.)
Peterson does not argue data - he suggests analogies and then holds those analogies as iron-clad transitive relationships to argue his preconceived position.
- Max Planck
I think it’s a human thing and every generation has to deal with the fanatics or believers or whatever you want to call it of their time.
We’re in a time where a great number of people are extremely religious without having any idea they are. The people that live by what their screen tells them. If you didn’t see some of this in the last three years that there is religion without it being labeled as such, I don’t know I’ll be able to reach you now.
It’s human nature for older people to be more conservative. Transcends time and culture.
Though I'm not sure what that has to do with the notion that bad ideas only die when the people who hold them die.
Doubt and questioning are a part of science but this "religion" meme about string theory et al is silly. If you're really upset that somebody is pursuing something is a blind alley, go ahead and do some physics that shows results, otherwise I really wish people would tone the unhelpful criticisms down.
I don’t see the problem with physicists working on or even promoting string theory.
During the hype phase of string theory, every major university wanted to get in on the game, and devoted large amounts of funding towards hiring researchers with a background in string theory. If you weren't one of those people, you were at a severe disadvantage, and might not get hired at all.
String theory hovered up tons of cash in university budgets, and majorly fucked over a lot of careers. The result of all this money has been no actual scientifically proven results despite decades of research.
Even today, we don't really have anything much better than string theory.
> String theory hovered up tons of cash in university budgets, and majorly fucked over a lot of careers.
This is pretty misleading. An argument could be made - though I'm not necessarily endorsing it - that string theory has crowded out other quantum gravity research programs in the last few decades. But quantum gravity is a small and poorly funded subfield: we're talking about no more than a few hundred people total in the US, fighting over one medium-sized experiment worth of grant money. None of it makes any difference to the overwhelming majority of physicists.
I don't think string theorists are being unreasonable by not having changed their minds yet, given that no evidence has come out one way or the other.
I don't think we can extrapolate from "string theorists didn't update when presented with no evidence" to "string theorists won't update when presented with evidence".
It can make no predictions, it is not falsifiable, it meets none of the constraints that allow something to be science.
Speaking of nomenclature, this is not a good characterization of what philosophy is, if your intention is to reduce philosophy to what you seem to have in mind for “philosophical speculation”. Metaphysical theory thoroughly supported by argument (hylomorphic dualism, theory of act and potency) is actually stronger than mere empirical science. Empirically testable predictions do not transcend reasoned argument as observation is interpreted though the body of propositions of prior theory and enters into scientific argument as argument.
This is a big if. For now they've just shown that once again something in the string theory landscape could look like something in real life.
Given that the definition of a theory is an hypothesis that can be tested for falsehood, it isn't a theory by definition. It is a hypothesis.. but presumably "string hypothesis" doesn't sound as nice.
Not really. All this paper is really saying is that they have found solutions in classical theories of gravity with extra dimensions that, in four dimensions, can look like standard black holes. So even observing effects predicted by these models would not be evidence for string theory. It would at best be evidence for possible extra dimensions of spacetime at the classical level.
Also, the paper only compares its models with the standard Schwarzschild black hole. But first, most black holes are spinning so the comparison should be with Kerr, not Schwarzschild; and second, as the paper notes early on, there are many other proposed models of compact objects that can look similar to standard black holes. Any given set of observations would have to be tested against all proposed models, not just this one.
Have any been detected that are not spinning?
Can't we just pick as a reference the black hole, and say that the everything else is spinning, just as well?
Now what does it mean for a black hole, which we assume to be a singularity occupying no space at all, to be spinning? We don’t know. That’s one of the gaps in our theory. But as the collapsed remnants of an object that was spinning, they should have done residual angular momentum.
Not necessarily. The three definitions for a "spinning" black hole that I gave upthread do not require the presence of any accelerated frames or observers.
> what does it mean for a black hole, which we assume to be a singularity occupying no space at all
This is not correct. A black hole is a finite region of spacetime enclosed by an event horizon. The singularity is inside the hole but is not all of the hole.
> to be spinning? We don’t know.
Yes, we do. We have known since the 1960s that the Kerr solution to the Einstein Field Equation describes a spinning black hole, and all of the geometric properties of that solution have been known for almost as long as that.
> That’s one of the gaps in our theory.
No, it's not. See above.
> as the collapsed remnants of an object that was spinning, they should have done residual angular momentum.
This is correct, but it does not imply or support your other claims.
An object can spin relative to itself. Particles away from the center are constantly accelerating. Gravity or physical connection are the forces that prevent these particles from flying away.
Thinking about it, I am not even sure an object can spin relative to another object. Orbit sure, but not spin.
This is a reasonable description of spin for an ordinary object, but it can't be used for a black hole, because a black hole is a vacuum solution; it has no "particles". See my other post upthread for better ways to view spin for a black hole.
> I am not even sure an object can spin relative to another object. Orbit sure, but not spin.
The usual definition of "spin" makes use of the object's center of mass frame, yes. Orbital angular momentum is thus separated out.
Note, though, that strictly speaking, in relativity there is no invariant way to make this split. It works very well as an approximation for most objects (like planets and stars), but there are complications when one tries to apply it to things like black holes. That's one reason why physicists prefer other ways of defining "spinning" for black holes that don't involve any split between orbital and spin angular momentum.
There are several equivalent ways of stating it:
(1) The hole's spacetime geometry is axisymmetric but not spherically symmetric;
(2) The hole has a Killing vector field that is timelike at infinity but is not hypersurface orthogonal;
(3) The hole has nonzero angular momentum as viewed in the asymptotically flat region at infinity.
> Can't we just pick as a reference the black hole, and say that the everything else is spinning, just as well?
No. All three of the above conditions are invariant and only depend on the spacetime geometry; they are unaffected by any choice of coordinates or the motion of any outside observers.
Its presumed lack of falsifiability has been one of its drawbacks and has been the source of some of the controversy around it.
Finding a potential test that could be conducted with telescopes instead of high energy particle accelerators would be a big moment in modern physics.