Wow, I love this. What a thoughtful, empathetic project. This passage really stuck out to me--
"A typical problem is that, in the absence of equations, they project literal meanings onto words such as ‘grains’ of space-time or particles ‘popping’ in and out of existence. Science writers should be more careful to point out when we are using metaphors. My clients read way too much into pictures, measuring every angle, scrutinising every colour, counting every dash. Illustrators should be more careful to point out what is relevant information and what is artistic freedom. But the most important lesson I’ve learned is that journalists are so successful at making physics seem not so complicated that many readers come away with the impression that they can easily do it themselves. How can we blame them for not knowing what it takes if we never tell them?"
Of course, this writing often isn't for the layperson, it's for an audience who can tell the difference between diagram, artistic license, and metaphor, but even so, it's good to think about, especially when communicating science to the general public.
"I still get the occasional joke from colleagues about my ‘crackpot consultant business’, but I’ve stopped thinking of our clients that way. They are driven by the same desire to understand nature and make a contribution to science as we are. They just weren’t lucky enough to get the required education early in life, and now they have a hard time figuring out where to even begin."
In some sense, labeling somebody a "crackpot" assigns a sort of malicious wrongness to them. It is interesting to see somebody who's dealt with a significant subset of these people and discovered more actual, honest misunderstanding than we (or at least I) would have expected.
For a while I held onto this archaic 1950 textbook on geology, solely because the introductory chapter included something like "the now thoroughly discredited crackpot theory of plate tectonics, which we will not consider here."
When I was a kid I read a book published in the 1980s called Yes We Have No Neutrons. It covered various episodes in pseudoscience like N-rays, cold fusion, and Freudian psychology. But there was also a chapter on neural networks that did not age very well at all.
The phrase "neural network" is itself a kind of pseudoscience, in being neither neural nor a network -- but an essentially pseudoscientific description of an algorithm better called "ensembled regression" or something of that kind.
NNs do not model the brain, and have basically nothing to do with it. I'd imagine rereading that chapter would be a good idea.
I'm an academic working at the edge between biological neural networks in neuroscience, and artificial neural networks in machine learning. It is true that NNs don't model the brain, but it is not true that they have nothing to do with it. There is a whole fascinating field that compares the two and discusses their commonalities and differences.
But above all, "pseudoscience" is something different and is certainly not the right word to describe this issue of terminology.
> But above all, "pseudoscience" is something different and is certainly not the right word to describe this issue of terminology.
The definition of pseudoscience is "a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method."
Arguably the idea that neural networks reproduce how brains work is pseudoscience.
In the very least, it's a deeply misguided marketing blurb. It's now considered a metaphor, just like the ones driving some corners of the artificial intelligence field.
Pseudoscience is an issue of method, not of wrongly held beliefs. Before Einstein, Newton's law of gravitation was believed to be correct. It was not, but it wasn't "pseudoscience", because it was falsifiable and the theory was correct up to a certain error value. "Wrong" and "pseudoscience" are not synonymous.
Moreover, you're dismissing an entire extremely active research field, which tries to understand up to which point artificial and biological NNs are or aren't similar. It's the field, for example, of Turing laureate Yoshua Bengio.
Neural networks CAN reproduce how the brain work (if you're doing computational neuroscience, in which case what you call NNs is something different, and it's an issue of terminology). Even simple binary NNs were originally born to understand the cognitive functions of the brain (McCulloch and Pitts, 1943). The field later diverged (with the advent of backprop), but still today they have a lot in common even inadvertently, for example the representations they learn in navigational tasks (Banino et al. Nature 2018) or in the visual cortex vs. CNNs for computer vision.
This is a terminological question which has nothing to do with whether a textbook in the 80s was right or not in calling neural networks a crockpot theory.
The terminology is now fixed and anyone who has more than a passing acquaintance with these things knows that neural networks have almost nothing to do with biological neurons.
It's a 1997, I've just skim read the chapeter -- and it seems entirely correct. Its views here are consistent with my own, NN is just a name for a technique -- baring little relation to the claims made about it in a hysterical press.
Strings, fibers, ropes, and threads do not model textiles. Trees have basically nothing to do with botany but we find their names acceptable. We're programmers, metaphors are our bread and butter.
Ensemble methods have basically nothing to do with neural networks. The output of a NN is not some kind of "average" or "best pick" taken from the outputs of individual neurons. Rather, there are multiple layers each of which performs a kind of generalized multivariate regression on the outputs of the previous layer, and the parameterization for the whole hierarchy of layers is fitted as a whole. Very different.
NNs with dropout are, trivially, an ensembling. And I think it's not so hard to show NNs, by default, meet a criterion like it -- namely that if we have something like batch normalization between the layers, so they are something PMF-like, then each is taking an expectation.
either way, the technique has absolutely nothing to do with the biological cells we call neurones -- as much as decision tress have to do with forests.
It is metaphorical mumbojumbo taken up by a credulous press and repeated in research grant proposals by the present generation of young jobbing PhDs soon to be out of a job.
The whole structure is, as it has ever been, is on the verge of a winter brought about by this shysterism. Self-driving cars, due in 2016, are likewise "just around the corner".
> [A]NNs do not model the brain, and have basically nothing to do with it.
ANNs don't yet model the structure of the brain but it seems plausible that they could do in the future as the result of some "convergent evolution".
ANNs have a fair model of individual neurons. Artificial and biological neurons do roughly the same thing when evaluated, but they are connected and trained very differently.
For me it's too much of a coincidence that the two most generally intelligent systems (ANNs and BNNs) are both "linear networks of activation functions".
We have not managed to build general intelligence from any other formalism, and neither has nature.
Viewing ANNs as a poor model of BNNs may be looking at the question backwards. You could say that BNNs are trying desperately hard to model the pure mathematics of ANNs within the confines of biochemistry. The fact that a biological neuron is not exactly a ReLU may say more about the limitations of biology rather than the limitations of ReLUs.
> For me it's too much of a coincidence that the two most generally intelligent systems (ANNs and BNNs) are both "linear networks of activation functions".
I am unconvinced that "linear network" appropriately defines BNNs. Can you clarify this?
> Artificial and biological neurons do roughly the same thing when evaluated
They most certainly do not. The idea that biological neurons are a kind of programmable on/off switch is completely wrong. There is plenty of computation happening inside a single neuron.
The fact that we once thought only the interconnect of neurons is important, and not the individual neurons themselves, is actually pretty strange. We know full well that every single cell is capable of computation, as it must react to its internal and external environment to be able to function. Neurons are more specialized for computation than other cells, and of course the biological neural network is a still a huge part of animal intelligence, but the simple model where we ignored what was going in inside each neuron should have been seen as extremely unlikely to be the full picture from the start.
You're confused if you think residual neural net motifs don't underlie how human brains reason about analogies, and if you think they don't control vision processing categorization.
Neural networks model the brain via convergent evolution. I don't have a link for this offhand, but I remember seeing several studies that discovered that if you train ANNs on at least some of the same data sources that the developing brain trains on, they develop the same sorts of structures and match to the same features.
That's fun. I had the converse experience when I discovered and read an old pop science article that discussed the light ether as if it were established fact. I was quite young and it was several years until I learned in high school physics class that this was complete bunk.
And it's not until further studying that you learn about the Anderson-Higgs effect in superconductors--how a gravity wave burst is generated every time a type 2 superconductor becomes superconducting.
Light-ether is real. It's [very oversimplifying] the EM pressure from maintaining every EMF-free zone (the insides of particles superconductors), plus pressure of all the cosmic background radiation.
Do you have a picture of the book? Can you post a picture of the passage and cover? That would be fascinating to see! (I believe you fwiw, not doing the whole "pics or it didn't happen" :) )
I think the title included "Geomorphology" but I can't seem to find the exact instance. To be fair to geologists of that era, there wasn't a ton of evidence for plate tectonics at the time other than the matchup between continental boundaries. The mid-ocean spreading discoveries of a decade later kind of sealed the deal.
This theory of crackpot theories is popular with the crackpots, and I suspect it's a good signal of them. Some people do win the lottery, but your lottery ticket is still worthless.
I'm not sure that "crackpot" implies malice. To me, it implies a totally wrong starting point. You can't build astronomy on a foundation of astrology. Using Babylonian base-60 mathematics won't help you create a unified field theory. The guy who showed me some random velocity that he had picked, and taken c^2 divided by that velocity, had not shown that faster-than-light travel was possible.
It's like cargo-cult physics. They (try to) do all the things, but the starting point is wrong, so it can't work.
So showing them "where to even begin" is in fact the solution... if they'll listen.
This is where I find the line easier to draw. Starting from a wrong premise and reaching a wrong conclusion (even if reached rationally and logically) does not, itself, make a crackpot. The crackpot is the one who won't listen to the counterarguments. And when they do listen, they just shift the goalposts instead of actually adjusting their basis to better fit reality.
A looser, less perfect, but more easily applicable and economical heuristic that I have is:
- Is my (layperson) interlocutor mostly contrarian and skeptical of others? Then there is very little chance that trying to point them in the right direction will be productive. Being a reasonable contrarian requires a very high level of expertise.
- Is my interlocutor mostly curious and skeptical of their own understanding? Then my friend, this person is a rare golden perl, and I will spare no effort or patience, because in almost every case these people are the ones who haven’t lost the capacity to learn.
This is admittedly a pedantic nitpicky comment, but humans did build astronomy on a foundation of astrology. Much like alchemy and the legit techniques used during that phase of exploration later got subsumed into chemistry.
I guess most people haven't read any of Newton's writing on alchemy. What's fascinating is that he's clearly mapping metaphors to experiences, in much the same way he did when writing Principia.
The difference is that in P. the metaphors and mappings create consistent experiences for everyone and can be manipulated symbolically using math.
That's a huge change, which is why science is everywhere and hardly anyone attempts alchemy today. But under the hood science is still a machine made of metaphors which are partial mappings of experience.
I don't think anyone believes all the different metaphors physics uses mesh together neatly, so at least some of them must be misleading. Improving the coverage is almost the definition of physics.
But it's also possible the consistent symbolic metaphor approach is limited in ways we don't yet know, and at some point it will reach its limits and have to be replaced with something else.
I really enjoyed Gleick’s biography of Newton, which spends a lot of time on both his math and physics work that panned out, and his alchemical work that didn’t.
Newton is the father of modern physics to us because we have perspective that he lacked. At the time he was working—in the moment—it wasn’t yet clear how the universe worked.
> Newton is the father of modern physics to us because we have perspective that he lacked. At the time he was working—in the moment—it wasn’t yet clear how the universe worked.
His trial and error gave that perspective as a result. Somebody had to waste time on alchemy to then succeed in physics, the time spent on alchemy was not a waste.
Alchemy sired Chemistry and Medicine, not Physics. Physics comes from the natural philosophers pondering ballistics and not the people hoping to make gold out of lead.
Anyway, Newtons contribution with Principia was to collect facts known in his time and put them into one unified mathematical framework, he didn't actually discover any of "his" laws (as predicted by Stigler's law).
Newton is forever remembered as [one of] the granddaddy[ies] of physical sciences.
Alchemy, from any initiated source seems to be a series of rituals designed around the refining of the self into its full potential, rather than a material goal of becoming wealthy by being able to produce gold. That is, it's metaphorical.
I haven't read anything by Newton on his alchemy, but if I were to take my rudimentary understanding of mystical thought and read it against Newton's example—I would think he were quite successful having produced such novel mathematical and scientific breakthroughs—whether he was aware of that or not.
If there was gold to be found in a human experience and work, I'd say he produced endless amounts of it...
> Keynes underlined the last sentence of this passage, which could easily substitute for his own assessment of Newton's use of experimentation in ‘Newton, the Man’, that ‘His experiments were always, I suspect, a means, not of discovery, but always of verifying what he knew already’.13 Keynes repeatedly referenced Newton's ‘intuition’, calling it ‘pre-eminently extraordinary’, almost to the point of relying on mathematical proof and experiment only as a matter of social convention, rather than as a means of revealing some insight that had not already occurred to him. The mathematical proofs in Principia were alleged to be ‘dressed up afterwards—they were not the instrument of discovery.’
The purely metaphorical interpretation of alchemy is popular in some circles, but alchemy has a clear experimental basis. Newton did some pretty wild alchemical experiments. Metals are weird.
Attempting to transmute a metal in the material was a ritual act coinciding with the "Great Work". That tandem practice is built into the philosophy of performing the act. That is, to the "mundane" it was just chemical experimentation, but to the initiates of the magical (or other enlightenment) orders was a dual act reflecting one of their core intuitions (paraphrased): "as above, so below" or what is external to the mind is reflective of what is internal. In other words, irreducible to one or the other (mental or physical act).https://news.ycombinator.com/news
I'm teasing at proposing, after Keynes, that maybe his alchemy worked, and he just didn't understand how.
But there's no salvaging the storybook version of Newton here. Newton was many things, but the innocent, curious monkey sitting under an apple tree he was not. (well, he was—at least insofar as we all are, anyway)
I would also recommend Gleick’s book. The best part for me was the extensive quotations from Newton’s correspondence. You really get a sense of his personality from these, and how different he was from basically everyone he corresponded with.
Assuming a unified field theory is possible, it is surely equally correct in any numerical base; calculations in base 60 will give you the same results as calculations in base 2, base 10, base ½(1 + √5), base 2i, or any other base.
If I understand the parent correctly, he's referring to the specific idea that base 60 math leads directly to the "right" answer, that solves the unsolved problems. I don't remember who was promulgating that idea, but the response you made (a) is correct, and (b) was rejected by the "crackpot" as not understanding the idea.
Although mostly horrified / entertained watching a flat-earther documentary a while back with my teenage son .. I was also kind of impressed at one point when the flat earthers did a measurement with a laser over some kilometers to 'prove' the flatness of their landscape.
Needless to say the experimental results differed slightly from their theory. But what struck me is, they were actually doing science .. which is wonderful. I remembered thinking if only our local schools would do a little bit of science, or math for that matter..
The unfortunate truth is that humans derive status from belittling others. Being highly educated is apparently no defense against this common weakness.
To be fair, it might not be about the desire to belittle or to derive status. I can understand the frustration of those who are educated in a demanding field that also happens to attract people proposing uneducated and usually unsound theories. The wildest of theories -- especially the wildest of them -- would often take a lot of work to untangle and make sense of to the point where it's even possible to discuss and think about them critically. The vast, vast majority of those kinds of theories are wrong yet they take a lot of work to disprove. That probably has little to offer to the expert other than perhaps exercise in the Socratic method with an uncooperative partner.
I'm not in the academia myself but I can totally see how the nth time someone offers their "insights" into something they almost certainly don't understand could make you think of them as crackpots.
I mean, one has to wonder how many real physicists are chasing crackpot theories in exactly the same sense. The drive that results in self-delusion is probably the same mentally/emotionally.
Also it isn’t just physicists on the receiving end. As a software engineer I get people wanting me to help them with their “crackpot” business ideas (although they sometimes don’t want to tell me their secret, and I heartily encourage them not to!). I have seen an acquaintance explore a crackpot electrical mechanism for perpetual energy. Mathematicians surely get their fair share of crackpots too!
I mean, physicists are notorious for chasing crackpot theories in other fields for the exact same reason - they assume their background is sufficient to understand the current progress of a field, when it's not.
Yet Physicists sometimes hit the jackpot too: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
A theoretical computer science analog to the physics crackpots might be semi-knowledgeable people who purport to prove P vs. NP one way or the other or solve some other open mathematical question or disprove a known existing result. Quantum computing probably attracts some as well but that's a bit of an overlap with physics.
Theoretical CS is of course niche enough that it probably doesn't attract mainstream people from outside of the field, so I suppose the field has its own crackpots. I suspect mathematics would be similar except somewhat more mainstream.
Of course some day someone will probably come along and actually prove something about those open questions but claims of proofs are much more common than actual proofs.
As for crackpot things within the academia itself, computer science also has areas such as AGI that are so hard to get actual scientific results from that it might be easy to deem it as just handwaving rather than actual research. Trying to build general AI with automated reasoning and knowledge bases back in the early days may not have been exactly a crackpot idea -- if anything, it was overly optimistic about hard logic -- but it certainly wasn't realistically going to succeed either, at least in hindsight.
Personally I think most of these problems could be easily resolved if we were taught the basics of how to manage emotions and ego in school. Unfortunately, that essential need is still controlled by certain institutional wills that I in turn label crackpot. - Not that I should be throwing stones, living in a house of glass...
Still haunted by interactions ten years ago with someone who claimed to have invented an impossibly efficient garbage collector supported by revolutionary data structures.
You would think this would be empirically verifiable but I nor others could make heads or tails of his argument.
When I saw the guy also had a theory of unified physics, I gave up.
Still don't know, he might have been onto something.
String theory is crackpot AF. It's not based on Occam's razor or empirical observation, just on the fact that if you accept a few really giant unfounded assumptions, then you end up with some neat math.
We'd be better off with a theory of everything designed by a neural network, at least people wouldn't belabor under the mistaken assumption that "theory of everything" actually corresponds to anything real.
Occam's razor is a very useful guiding principle, but it still is a philosophical principle, not a requirement for a theory to be scientific. Observation of course is, and in fact string theory (potentially) is consistent with observed phenomena. Its main problem is that it is too difficult, if possible at all, to determine if it actually is, and in which form. Actually the same Sabine Hossenfelder wrote a book about that as you probably know
Anyway, a string theorist on the faculty doesn't cost any more than a mathematician. For the others you are continually having to pay for LHCs, nanokelvin freezers, and optical tables.
That's exactly the problem - instead of trying to produce new theories, people keep researching string theory, in massive numbers (relatively to the size of the field of theoretical foundations of physics, of course).
Also, there are a few other interesting avenues to explore - coming up with a relativistic version of de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave mechanics (or as close as possible to get, given Bell's inequalities), for example.
It's hard to imagine how you could test any alternative, either.
If the string people were putting all their effort into coming up with a testable prediction, we might be better off. But they are mostly trying to show their untestable thing is better than the next one over, instead.
Further, there's the other half of the psychological stew: them as regard education in general and the attempt to untangle and think critically about wild theories as at best a waste of time and at worst a personal attack. I personally don't think of anyone as a "crackpot" unless they've demonstrated that they are impervious to the basic knowledge they need: "One or two seemed miffed that I didn’t immediately exclaim: ‘Genius!’,..."
I would like to avoid to paint in detail the ugly picture behind the issue I'm talking about, since that feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. - You are obviously right to assume the best about people but it is also prudent to remain vigilant whenever there is hierarchy and competition for resources.
I don't have a solution... I do have a problem in that this drive-by dismissal of mine is getting attention when what I was excited about in another comment goes ignored. =\
> I do have a problem in that this drive-by dismissal of mine is getting attention when what I was excited about in another comment goes ignored. =\
Isn't that explained by the GP's point? Some things are much easier to engage with than others, regardless of whether it's for or against. Your statement above is two sentences, and while it undoubtedly accurately describes some occurrences, it also likely doesn't describe others. Without statements to clarify how absolutely you intend it to apply, people are free to make their own assumptions and if that assumption casts your statement as absolutist, it's easy to refute.
Communication can be hard, asynchronous communication even more so.
Sometimes I wonder if our school teachers' demand to read their minds was justified, and how we can sometimes immediately be aware of context in a way that machine learning consistently fails at.
The article touches on this in how the author quickly deduces who is one of them and who is not. Perhaps therein lies the entire issue at hand.
> The unfortunate truth is that humans derive status from belittling others.
It's not a truth any more than 'humans murder others when they're angry'. Sometimes humans belittle others and sometimes they gain status from it. Sometimes they lose status, and I suspect they almost always lose a little self-respect and feel more intensely the shame that was so strong, they just tried to project it onto someone else.
> Being highly educated is apparently no defense against this common weakness.
I think it depends on the fields of study. If you study humanity, you may understand this behavior. If you study quarks, I agree it is little defense.
That's true, but also there exists a population that's unfortunately been misinformed by Quantum Pseudoscience Grifters. Physics (and medicine) seem to suffer particularly from this sort of thing. Enough misinformed people asking for real engagement will eventually wear even a patient person down (of course the ire should be more accurately targeted toward the grifters, not their victims).
I mean -- as a programmer, my significant other thinks that my presence soothes the Machine Spirits and makes the computer magically cooperate. Imagine if this was a superstition! The random requests for IT support would be really annoying.
> ...misinformed by Quantum Pseudoscience Grifters. Physics (and medicine) seem to suffer particularly from this sort of thing.
Quiet a few of the misinformed are HN commenters.
Generally, the pattern appears to be "Foo is complex. Conspiracy theorist asserts there is a conspiracy making Foo complex. We cannot trust the mainstream experts because they are lying. Gishgallop with endless bad faith questions which take an enormous amount of time to answer properly but ultimately do not convince the question asker".
The general takeaway, for me at least, is that even the most intelligent person can be sucked into crackpot conspiracy. The problem is "I'm an expert in this field, this means I'm smarter than most" and then thinking that intelligence in one area grants you insights into others.
The worst part is conspiracies like to hide under the motto of "I'm just being a good skeptic". However, a good skeptic needs to actually dig deeper than just surface level assertions. A good skeptic needs to look into the counter claims to their conspiracy. What are the sources? Do the actually point to data or are they just naked assertions? Do the sources reference only other conspiracy websites? Do they have references? If this claim is actually true, why is it rejected by the mainstream? Who is actually benefiting from hiding the truth?
> my significant other thinks that my presence soothes the Machine Spirits and makes the computer magically cooperate
I love this. Also hilarious.
In my experience, also true in certain cases.
You observe something that is being done a way you would not do it. There is no reason to suspect this is the source of the problem, but you do it the way you think it should be done. Lo and behold, the process works and the problem is gone. In retrospect you can see why, maybe the filename ':/%20' was bad luck, or whatever. Looking at the process, though, it's hard to claim success was achieved by a rational scientific process...
It's hard to understand what this is aimed at. The original article is rather sweet, and you're replying to a comment that's saying that "crackpots" are mostly just normal people who've misunderstood something. I don't see any belittling going on here
Harlan writes about the story: “Think of someone you know, even someone you love, trapped into a corrupt or self-destructive or anti-social behavior pattern by an inability to get around the roadblock of erroneous thinking. [snip] Polly wouldn’t permit such an evil to exist-as an unconscious understanding of the massmind of the general Analog readership, which is at core and primarily engineers, technicians, scientists, men of the drawing board and the spanner. [snip] [I wrote the story] to see if I could gig the Analog readers of thirty-and-more years’ good standing, who would have coronary arrest at seeing Ellison in the hallowed pages of their favorite magazine. You can imagine my joy when I saw the issue on the newsstands, with my name on the front cover with Isaac Asimov’s, knowing that Analog’s faithful would be gagging, and knowing the little jibe I had waiting for them inside”…
I always get the feeling when I read either Harlan Ellison or Philip K Dick that they're giggling to themselves at some knowledge that they have, that no-one else has. They both play with form, straddle the line between puerile and innovative, and seemingly come up with original ideas with a wave of their hands.
They're both definitely in my favourite author list, of any genre.
> In some sense, labeling somebody a "crackpot" assigns a sort of malicious wrongness to them.
The naive enthusiasm, self directed exploration, and passion many of these crackpots have are winning traits in many pursuits. Just a bit of poor luck they picked an especially high wall to scale with theoretical physics.
It's closer to "none of them are good at math, and aren't trying to learn".
It's why they rage at people not taking them seriously - if anyone tries to show something mathematically they can't understand it, don't want to admit it, and either wander off or ignore it and go back to the extensive prose.
The difference between a real crackpot and someone trying to understand something difficult is that the former is usually genuinely mentally disturbed while the latter is still in Dunning-Kruger territory.
Usenet science boards used to have various "personalities" who were clearly ill. They would post variations on the same word salad over and over, invariably claiming that Einstein was wrong about something or other, while they were right, which made them super-geniuses.
I understand high-profile physicists particularly tend to attract these people, so dealing with them must be a challenge, and there must be a temptation to skip over anyone who looks like they fall into that group even if they're just asking questions.
There was - possibly still is - a crossover group typically made of electrical/electronic engineers who knew just enough traditional EM theory to be dangerous, but not enough to know what they didn't know about GR and QM. For some reason they were also obsessed with trying to prove that relativity was wrong - perhaps because GR is so weird it's almost offensively strange to people who want to live in an un-weird universe.
These characters still exist on Reddit and elsewhere. They typically also stick to trying to disprove SR, because it barely requires more than high school math. No one ever tries to disprove the foundations of condensed matter physics.
Doesn't condensed matter physics heavily feature harmonic analysis? It's a pity -- if math weren't so damn difficult, we could point all the "crystal resonance" crowd in a productive, fascinating direction.
>No one ever tries to disprove the foundations of condensed matter physics.
My contribution to this severely under-served department:
"It can't possibly be correct to use relativistic field theory to write effective fields for excitations of a wave medium when the whole idea of SR was that there wasn't a medium."
That's not the "whole idea" of SR. What he said in his 1905 paper was,
"The introduction of a “luminiferous ether” will prove to be /superfluous/ inasmuch as the view here to be developed will not require an “absolutely stationary space” provided with special properties, nor assign a velocity-vector to a point of the empty space in which electromagnetic processes take place."
In 1920, after developing GR, his views were considerably more nuanced, as expressed in his 1920 lecture at the Leyden University, "Ether and the Theory of Relativity":
"Recapitulating, we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether. According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense. But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable media, as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it."
Einstein, Albert. Sidelights on Relativity . Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition. (0.99$ on Amazon)
That lecture, by the way, is a superb example of presenting the frontier of 1920 physics - before Schrodinger, Dirac, and modern field theory - without using any mathematical notation whatsoever.
I believe (although it isn't my field) that Semiconductor physics is considered to be ultimately grounded in condensed matter physics, right? So we could look at the ridiculous idea that transistors could just keep getting tinier and tinier as a bit of a crackpot idea. Turns out these physicists managed to "yes, and..." their way into controlling, what, most of the economy?
Anecdotally, Engineers seem to want to prove relativity wrong as it places unfortunate limits on the kinds of things that could be built. No one is flash gordoning around space anytime soon.
On the other hand it also gave us marvelous energy sources such as nuclear power. However this connection is often missed amongst lay observers.
This is a very complex topic. however - even if we ignore the civil application of nuclear technologies for radiation therapy, nuclear energy, x-rays etc. Nuclear weaponry has been successful in preventing further destructive wars on the scale of WW2.
I don't believe anybody would have expected the western allies and the Warsaw pact countries not to go to war with each other had nuclear weapons not existed.
> Nuclear weaponry has been successful in preventing further destructive wars on the scale of WW2.
This will unfortunately remain true only until a nuclear war does break out. After such a moment, the few that survive may say "if only nuclear weapons weren't invented, we could have had another WW2 instead of this disaster".
The other arguments about nuclear physics that you make are much more convincing as an unmitigated good.
I understand high-profile physicists particularly tend to attract these people, so dealing with them must be a challenge, and there must be a temptation to skip over anyone who looks like they fall into that group even if they're just asking questions.
I think this is why many profs have a secretary to screen this stuff out
Ironically, that's not what Dunning-Kruger claimed, and the Dunning-Kruger research itself has been largely discredited. A better term might be the "Dunning-Kruger Effect effect" for how these accusations are slung around.
I don't think that article says what you think it says.
The D-K effect is: "The Dunning-Kruger effect is defined as the tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability." That is exactly what the parent described, and is an empirically identified behavior. The criticisms are aimed mostly at the "meta-cognitive" and bias-based explanations for the behavior.
I think my favourite bit of Dunning-Kruger is that it's failure to account for regression towards the mean and the better-than-average effect are kind of an existence proof of a "Dunning-Kruger Effect". ;-)
“Science popularizers often use real-world metaphors to bring specialized knowledge to the public. This was not the case with Feynman. When he delivered that famous quote during a conference at Cornell University in 1964, he was trying to convince his listeners not to try to understand his explanation ‘in terms of something familiar.’ Instead, he announced that he would simply describe how nature works, inviting those present to ‘relax and enjoy it.’”.
"There was - possibly still is - a crossover group typically made of electrical/electronic engineers who knew just enough traditional EM theory to be dangerous, but not enough to know what they didn't know about GR and QM."
The same can be said for physicists and mathematicians who know just enough EE. As a practicing EE who specializes in RF and antennas, I've had to debunk many crackpot antenna and circuits, who developers are looking for funding. The nice thing about RF is hunks of dielectric and conductor are pretty easy to fabricate or simulate, but they don't even try to prove their ideas.
Most impressive: "One of them might even publish a paper soon. Not a proposal for a theory of everything, mind you, but a new way to look at a known effect. A first step on a long journey." Hossenfelder must have the patience of Job and a deep teaching vocation.
If you are ever even around physics or math at all, you will see the crackpot letters. I was a little surprised engineers are largely unaware of the phenomenon and are shocked, for example, that anyone seriously tries to make perpetual motion machines at all.
Here's a couple links about the mathematical equivalent:
The mathematical physicist John Baez proposed a “crackpot index”[1] [snip]
Mathematician Chris Caldwell was inspired by Baez’s list and devised a mathematical version. Some (lightly edited) examples from Caldwell’s list are
1 point for each word in all capital letters;
5 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous, logically inconsistent, or widely known to be false;
10 points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction;
10 points for not knowing (or not using) standard mathematical notation;
10 points for expressing fear that your ideas will be stolen;
10 points for each new term you invent or use without properly defining it;
10 points for stating that your ideas are of great financial, theoretical, or spiritual value;
10 points for beginning the description of your work by saying how long you have been working on it;
10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to established experts;
10 points for citing an impressive-sounding, but irrelevant, result;
20 points for naming something after yourself;
30 points for not knowing how or where to submit their major discovery for publication;
30 points for confusing examples or heuristics with mathematical proof;
40 points for claiming to have a “proof” of an important result but not knowing what established mathematicians have done on the problem.
Some points in that list are deeply rooted in human psychology. I will comment on some of them I have hit in the past:
> 10 points for not knowing (or not using) standard mathematical notation;
I personally hate non-standard notation so I switch to the standard when I know about it, but at first, when moving out of well known waters you may be using non-standard notation.
> 10 points for expressing fear that your ideas will be stolen;
Ha ha, I don't express fear, but who is not afraid a little?
> 10 points for stating that your ideas are of great financial, theoretical, or spiritual value;
A lot of papers I have read starts with this actually, not to mention PhD or MSc thesis.
> 10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to established experts;
Most papers boast about how they beat the baseline that everyone uses. I do it myself although I try to be honest about the circumstances when this happens and when it's better the alternative.
> 30 points for not knowing how or where to submit their major discovery for publication;
Sometimes it happens
> 40 points for claiming to have a “proof” of an important result but not knowing what established mathematicians have done on the problem.
It has happened lot of times, since the beginning of time that some people rediscover previous results, sometimes famous people on famous and important results. To put an example the FFT, but there are a lot of them. And besides, who likes to read others people code?
I think the difference between a crackpot and other people is not accepting the mistake. It's curious it happens so much to engineers. I'm an engineer myself and if I learnt something during my studies is how little I actually know. I usually say that one thing STEM education gives you is the certainty that most of your ideas are wrong.
When I was in Physics this dude from off campus stapled up all these posters that said the inverse square law was rubbish and to come to a conference room in the library on a certain day.
There were like 10+ physicists and 10+ grad students in this meeting, they respectful when they smoked this time crystal guy, but of course he just used it as an example of the cabal keeping the truth down.
Remember when google offered that “ideas to save the planet” contest? I used to wade through those.
They fell into a couple easy categories. Perpetual motion machines, casual ideas that are obviously impractical, fundamentally failing to understand the subject area. Not a single one of them seemed new or useful.
Then again Nicola Tesla had some strange ideas. Turns out half of them were brilliant and the other half still seem weird. Efforts to demarcate crackpot and real might be approaching the problem from the wrong direction.
I like the author’s strategy of helping people gain the knowledge to understand what they’re trying to talk about. Teslas ideas about motion and flow as it pertains to physical health were weird but that doesn’t mean he was unable to learn about biology, had he spent time learning about it, maybe he’d have brought his ideas back to reality and contributed something interesting.
We should celebrate people for their curiosity, encourage them to gain the knowledge that has already been discovered and help them express their ideas in ways that others can relate to.
"What to do when the trisector comes" is very interesting and illuminating and worth reading.
In addition, I believe the article demonstrates that in these cases, the facts people are discussing and debating are only part of the picture: there is an emotional undercurrent to what they are saying.
Dr. Carl Rogers would likely argue that facts would only change their minds if they felt properly heard / seen / understood.
For example:
> One summer I went to visit three trisectors... My first trisector was... enormously pleased to see me and couldn't stop talking. He was bursting with energy and couldn't keep still... We talked about his trisection and I tried (I was younger then, and not as wise) to show him the error of his ways. He seemed to be listening to what I was saying, but none of it was making any impression.
I'm not saying "feed the trolls," only that there is more going on than meets the eye.
Someone came once to our department and I got tasked with talking to him. He had a big paper with "gravity=levity" and a bunch of marine diagrams, and claimed he could get free energy from sinking (partially hollow) things to the bottom of the ocean and then taking advantage of their buoyancy to drive something on the way back up. Rather than launch into conservation of energy or expound on gravitational potential, I objected "Err, doesn't it take energy to turn them around?" He answered, "Not more than I am getting out of it." I slunk away and left him to his devices.
This was such a common problem in my undergrad. I'd say over half of all incoming majors had at least some form of miss-understanding of what physics was and how it really worked coming off of pop sci. Even those who stick it out through Grad School and post docs often lament that they toiled away always believing that the grandiose visions of research presented in pop sci would eventually come true for them.
While pop-sci has been radically successful at making physics concepts appear accessible, it has woefully failed at making actual physics accessible. It's no wonder that Americans increasingly view science as either the tony stark like practice of wizards - or as a ceremonious endeavor practiced by those whose beliefs are no more testable than a TV pundits.
For me pop sci documentaries were quite a motivation to study Physics though. But yeah, after having studied it I have zero interest in pop sci anymore. It's unfortunately not really explaining things but more show casing things. But what I also learned while reading text books, listening and reading lectures: often the most concise explanations are very close to every day language. (In the lines of https://www.motionmountain.net/9lines.html which was recently also posted on HN) Would be great if such things could be included more into pop sci. Maybe in a way that at least the common notations are put in. That doesn't enable you to do meaningful calculations but at least it would be way closer to relevant literature. Unfortunately there's also quite a barrier to university literature in terms of pricing and some stuff is just not published on the Internet. E.g. lecture notes are only sporadically available but tend to be more readable than most books. FWIW Feynman's lectures on Physics really stand out here
I bet the bad science writing sells much better-- readers enjoy the Feeling of Knowing. You're not going to get much of that feeling from an honest article on a complex subject.
"If we just do better, they'll come around". Nah. Sometimes we're just starting too far apart, or frankly the person is not smart enough or has some mental difference that makes the requisite study too hard. We should try -- these are excuses that can be used to give up on people too soon, but ... you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it think.
The median person who can drive, pay taxes, be a loving partner, and parent is just ... disappointingly not smart if you've been surrounded by brainiacs for most of your life. Some very bright people have other personality quirks that make it hard for them to integrate new ideas outside their comfort zone.
You don't have to be particularly smart to do professional mathematics or physics. However, you do need to either come from money or be content with a monkish life. Both of those are "multiple post-docs" fields -- you're basically living hand-to-mouth until your mid 30s (which for most means not having kids).
There are some folks who are incredibly motivated and also fundamentally incapable. But for most people, the biggest "issue" is that there are multiple lucrative and lower-stress exit ramps.
Having done both, I’d say that the primary difference is motivation. Humans learn things to do things. People who learn on their own often have some ultimate goal they are trying to achieve- even if it is I’ll defined.
Learning higher maths and physics is not intrinsically more difficult, but it is hard for most to maintain focus on a topic with only vague applications to anything and leads for most to financial ruin.
Software skills are more common merely by virtue of how applicable they are.
I have also done both and I'm pretty certain higher maths is harder. Its not just motivation. Most people are frightened of leetcode style interviews, which require just an undergraduate level understanding of algorithms. There's plenty of motivation to learn it but most people can't. Higher maths or physics requires way more intellectual horsepower than that.
Maybe the math, but not necessarily the physics. It's a matter of specialization and perseverance. Think of all the thousands of physicists keeping CERN running. These people are smart, know a lot, and have worked a lot of problems, but I'm not sure they're a cut above engineers and/or software devs who have the same depth of experience.
The physicists don't "keep it running ". They have engineers and technicians and so on for that. They come up with models ,design experiments and analyze results of extremely complex phenomena. Almost all of them also have a PhD, they are a lot smarter than your average software team. Okay if you compare them to say people working on compilers at Google , it might be similar, but not to your average team
Consider that there is also an extreme selection bias for who studies higher physics in terms of motivation to study physics vs. desire/need for money.
Given that the income delta between a researcher at CERN and a professional software engineer at Google is >10x I'd be skeptical that this selection always translates to intelligence. Anecdotally, many PhD Physicists transfer into software for monetary reasons and do not come across as intrinsically smarter than the average engineer of equivalent experience.
Lot of science is deeply idiosyncratic and could really use a major overhaul in areas we can be confident we kinda know what we're talking about; for much improved teachability. Currently it's patched together with incremental development hacks/legacy crud that could really use some spring cleaning. Of course paying due respect to Chesterton fences etc.
I would start with most terms named after their inventors/discoverers, trying to give them meaningful names.
> Even those who stick it out through Grad School and post docs often lament that they toiled away always believing that the grandiose visions of research presented in pop sci would eventually come true for them.
> [...]
> We need to do better at Science writing.
Rather: we need to get better at not believing what advertising tells people.
While there is always room for better, is this even a problem that is solvable?
To a certain extent, fundamental background knowledge, in particular mathematical, is needed. So to present something to a general audience will necessarily involve a simplified model of some kind. This can be a bad analogy, but even a "good models" are flawed at the edges and seem likely to be the simpler the model becomes in relation to a more complex topic.
I think this is a problem in a lot of areas where you invent new concepts for which we don’t have words yet. Happens a lot in tech and also in science. If you use a metaphor that people can relate to there is a high chance they will latch on to the metaphor and push it into areas where it doesn’t work anymore. I saw that a lot when “cloud computing” came up. I once described one of our systems as “basically a flash drive” which made sense in the context of the FDA regulation we were discussing but a few months later a director was outraged “but you said it’s a flash drive” in a totally different context where the metaphor didn’t make sense.
Also saw it around COVID vaccines. I talked to several people who claimed calling it “vaccine” is fraudulent because in their minds a vaccine protects you 100% from the disease and if it only avoids hospitalization or severe cases it’s not a vaccine.
I wonder how much of this relates to public perception of hacking and internet security as well. Many methods and procedures are written about with a romantic air.
This is really interesting, I'll be forwarding to my science writer friends for opinions.
Potentially interesting to some: we get the same phenomenon right here on HN regularly! To someone an advanced understanding of music theory (including western harmony, tuning systems, acoustics, psychoacoustics, doing a graduate degree, etc) HN is a regular source of armchair music theorists putting forth their own musical grand unified theories of everything without understanding the foundations. I guess, much like the field the author works in, the nature of it is that a strong understanding of a small piece leads one to easily believe there is this neat and tidy system of well behaving patterns when the reality is vastly more complex. I'd say once a week or so I see posts on HN that are the musical equivalents. I used to answer with pointers to what one might want to learn or suggests books, but really, I have no idea what the right response to that sort of thing is. It's way, way more complicated than one would think coming from a tangentially related field. Perhaps similarly, the popular music theory writing out there creates the same effect.
Oh believe me, every thread here about physics is exactly like this. 90% of the comments are the most ridiculous crackpot nonsense from people who clearly learned physics by watching startrek. There are usually a few surprisingly knowledgeable comments too, but you usually have to look at the bottom of the thread.
I used to have quite a lot of blind faith on HN comments regarding subjects I don’t know well, but after sharing the occasional link to friends who are established scientists in the field it ends up being mostly nonsensical :(
Just last week there was somebody insisting cell phones work by (I swear I am not making this up!) measuring heat with an analog to digital converter attached directly to the antenna.
And assuring us that, on the basis of his deep understanding, 5G is known to be perfectly safe. :)
That is only natural, you learn programming by stating something you think might be true, then you get told you are wrong by an expert (ie the compiler returns an error), and then you adjust your statement and try again until it works. Almost everybody learns programming that way, it is the most efficient.
So when people make stupid remarks here, view them as their "hello world" programs.
The most successful physicists of today do know (at least a part of) physics in depth.
On the other hand, for musical theory, the most successful (and rich) musicians today only know a fraction of music theory. Or none at all
For as much as we can discuss about it, most of it is constructed. A lot of musical theory goes over rules and structures and archaic nomenclature for every little thing (fml) and what not, for, on the more advanced levels say "oh sure, you can break this rule if you want". Ok thanks, I guess I'll just save my time and play what sounds good, thanks
Music theory, at an advanced level, is no more about rules than physics is. It's descriptive, not prescriptive. It's about why, acoustically and psycho-acoustically, certain practices result in the sounds they do and why we perceive sounds the way we do.
What rich or successful musicians do has as much to do with music theory as what rich race car drivers do has to do with physics - the car is the result of generations of the study of physics, but the driver only needs to know how they bits they interact with work.
The fact that the vast majority of players have no idea how the intervals of 12th root of two to the 4th power, or 5/4, became a Major 3rd (ET and JT respectively) is irrelevant to a discussion of theory. I could teach a semester long course on how we arrived at our current notes on the piano keyboard, but lots of A-list piano players don't know any of that. A physicist is the equivalent of a music theorist, not of a musician, as music theory is largely applied physics and geometry applied towards acoustics.
I mean, HN is plagued by people with outlandish theories about pharmaceuticals, nutrition, economics, climatology, artificial intelligence, economics, sociology, history, ethics, and microbiology.
But you’re right, the music theory cranks are the worst.
> the nature of it is that a strong understanding of a small piece leads one to easily believe there is this neat and tidy system of well behaving patterns when the reality is vastly more complex.
The complexity is what keeps this industry interesting. Those people who are getting those little flashes of clarity, only to be crushed at the wheel of complexity, well, I have to admit I was and sometimes still am one of them.
It's funny (fascinating actually!) because it reads just like your typical highly opinionated software engineering blog post, only applied to music. Yet most of it, particularly the first three points, has no basis in reality. (E.g. point 3 - any music theorist will tell you there is a VERY valid reason for choosing a double-sharp over a natural in particular contexts.)
To me, that mostly reads like a UX report. This person admits he has no musical education, and just wants to play - the issue seems to be that reading a score maybe shouldn’t require a degree in musical theory, the same way that using a piece of software doesn’t require a CS degree.
As another amateur musician, I was nodding at most of these points. I fully believe it’s all very complex and double sharps exist for some reason, but how much of that do you really need the reader to understand?
It is like a UX report, and the author has every right to make one! But I'm afraid that if this were a pull request into the western-music-notation repository then I would find it hard to resist closing it quickly.
Yes, it is true that using a piece of software shouldn't require a CS degree. But you still expect the source code to follow "CS principles". Similarly, you expect scores to follow "music theory principles". Now, it takes time and effort to understand these principles, just like with CS. However, whereas almost everybody understands that the subject of computer science is vast and is not to be underestimated, the same doesn't seem to be the case for music theory. And I can sort of understand why - computer science is math (1 + 1 = 2), but music theory is just hand-wavy rules made up by dead people, no? Well, yes, but that does not make it any less "true". Music theory as a tradition is very real, and you can't expect people to take your music-theory "PEPs" seriously unless you have been deeply embedded in that tradition.
Of course, this is not me knocking the author in any way. Sometimes the best innovations come to those with fresh eyes. But I just hope to convey the idea that music theory (or maybe more accurate to say "music tradition") is not something to be easily dismissed and, just like in computer science, a good solution requires a good understanding of the problem.
The problem is you don't want to make the score harder to read for someone who does know some theory. Say you're in G# minor, then F double sharp is going to be pretty common. If you notate that as G natural, it will confuse me. Raised 7th degree in a minor key is easy to understand. Flat first degree is...well, I can only assume we've entirely changed keys. And this is going to happen automatically in my mind, but figuring out it was supposed to be a raised 7th but was notated wrong will not be automatic and therefore slow things down.
The only really solid rule I've seen stated for accidentals is that you want to use sharps when you're going up (as in, playing a rising sequence of notes) and flats when you're going down.[1] There are also many, many people out there who will tell you that you use sharps when the key signature has sharps and flats when the key signature has flats, which (1) is really easy to implement, but also (2) makes no sense.
Anyway, my first guess for a double sharp would be that you're e.g. notating an F# which is itself sharp for whatever reason, and you can't just notate it as a G because Gs are also sharped. (As will be true in any key signature with three or more sharps.) Then the reason for marking F𝄪 rather than G♮ is exactly the same as the reason you'd mark F# rather than G♭ in a key that didn't sharp either note. And even from a pure usability perspective, if you're in a key with three sharps and you're doing a lot of alternating between F𝄪 and G#, it's kind of nice having the two notes at the positions of F and G so that you can give them the appropriate accidentals once per measure instead of every time you play either note, the way you'd need to do if they were both on a G.
The first half of the vibraphone part looks like you're mainly doing downward variations, so I wrote it with flats. But the second half obviously suggests that it wants F#s rather than G♭s, and it felt really weird to use F# sometimes and G♭ other times.
Since I know virtually no music theory, my approach was to ask people for help on the internet. I found someone who had majored in music theory and his response was "hmm, interesting", followed by asking a bunch of his friends. Consensus eventually worked out as something like "Hmm, interesting! Could go either way, but maybe F# is a little better than G♭. Whatever you choose, be consistent."
It was all fairly unsatisfying and I'd be interested in other comments on how the accidentals in the piece should be marked. Following the general theme of "F# looks a little better, but be consistent" I interpreted every accidental anywhere in the piece as a departure upward rather than downward. :/
[1] I've also seen sharps used while going down, but it was pretty obvious what was going on there - the music had changed keys, but the score hadn't changed key signatures. Those sharps just reflected the new key rather than being departures from it.
Your engraving looks good to me - the only change I'd make is measures 7 and 8, changing the C# to a Db. Basically, that harmony there is V - i (G major to C minor, a.k.a. perfect cadence), but with a tritone substitution of the V. So what would normally be the bass is replaced by a note a tritone away. Normal bass = G, so a tritone away would be C#/Db, i.e. I# or IIb. But I# -> i is not a resolution whereas IIb -> i is. This is because, generally speaking, you can't resolve a note to another note if they have the same note name. So C# -> C doesn't resolve, but Db -> C does.
Similarly, regarding the F#/Gb question in the vibraphone part, F# is better than Gb because you are resolving UP to G, so you want to use a different note name. The only questionable part is measures 11-12...I won't go into detail but I would say it can go either F# or Gb - both are perfectly fine ("depends on the person" kind of thing!)
The rule "you want to use sharps when you're going up and flats when you're going down" is maybe only really true for chromatic scales, and even then it's tenuous. In general, you pick accidentals based on the key or harmony that you're in.
Unfortunately music theory commentary does not translate well into English at all, so apologies if this comes across as gobbledygook. And make no mistake, I don't think in these terms when playing/composing music. It's more like a deep intuition you get after a while.
I beat you to it, but your writing is much better than mine, and you are more comfortable with the ideas than me! It's good that between the two of us we hit both of the "depends on the person" options.
So, I might just be way off, but even in measure 7 I'd use a D flat instead of C sharp. It feels like a diatonic run in the violin with the D flat borrowed from the key of F minor to me (which is only one flat away from the key you're already in). I know the "rule" about using sharps going up and all, but that really just feels like a diatonic run to me.
The B natural (raised 7th in C minor) helps keep you grounded by pulling very hard back to C minor. Also, the B natural is the raised 4th of F minor, and raised 4th is being used a lot when you're on the tonic as well which helps keep the feel. Very much double harmonic minor in feel all taken together.
Your actual question... Honestly I don't know and feel the same as others you've asked. I guess the violin in measure 12 feels like it's hitting a flat 5, so personally I'd choose G flat throughout that section for consistency. But I dunno, it's kind of a toss up to me.
Even without a music theorist telling you that point 3 is wrong, it just makes the music harder to read. Of course, the reason is what the theorist would give, but it highlights that he isn't really reading music. He's reading notes. He hasn't learned what those notes mean in context. It's like he's learned how to sound out written words in a foreign language but doesn't actually know what any of the words mean.
There was an article the other day where someone was saying something like "people who listen to more dissonant music, like heavy metal, may not be as good at hearing nuances in less dissonant music like classical."
That sentence right there is just jam packed with bullshit and misunderstanding.
There's really only one mistake, he's misusing the word dissonant. It's certainly true that being deeply into one style of music makes you pay less attention to the things that don't vary much in "your" music but does vary in "their" music, making "your" music seem more varied and "their" music sound all the same.
Right, thats where I tried to meet them in the middle, but they were talking about discreet frequencies. Like listening to classical boosted the ability to recognize harmonics better.
hmm, hard to summon one, but mostly about stuff spanning probability/machine learning and tuning systems/harmony. Lots of very naive statistical inferences with conclusions that seem supported by the data - because they don't understand the data. Like "we found out X because of our analysis of the intervals/chords/whatever they are counting" in these pieces. Where the numerical prevalence really doesn't mean anything similar to what they are positing it means. Tuning and systems and harmony are a) freaking complicated b) almost neat, but so, so not neat on closer examination. :-)
> Science writers should be more careful to point out when we are using metaphors.
I think she should replace "science writers" with physicists. In my experience, it's when physicists give overflowing and superfluous explanations of things that cause the most trouble, because they are viewed as authorities. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, Brian Greene, PBS Space Time, and many others. It's interesting, because I once read an interview with Brian Green, and the question was: what career would you have chosen if you weren't a physicist? His answer was both surprising and unsurprising: a Baptist preacher. One should note that he actually has the speaking style of one.
It brings up an interesting point in that physics at the highest level sounds almost like what ill-informed amateurs produce. I have degrees in mathematics and some understanding of physics, but I've watched a few lectures of Ed Witten before, and he might as well be just making it all up. I know, it can all be backed out such that it all follows from known mathematics and physics, but one does have to marvel at the similarity, and I think this is what so-called cranks get emboldened by. It makes it worse when physicists use words like "believe".
I think physicists have done a poor job explaining that what they do is model building. The models are not reality. What reality is currently lies in the realm of philosophy. The models physicists build are simply our best descriptions based on what we observe (string theory aside). The article gets at this a bit with mentioning metaphors, but it still doesn't drive home the point because she's referring to metaphors of metaphors (i.e., metaphors for the physical models). Once you understanding that physics is about building models that describes what we observe in physical reality, it lowers the barrier of "authority". In that, in some sense, the entire point of physics is often to find out how we're wrong just as much as it is to clarify where we're right. I think many don't understand that when "is" is used in physics, it really means "is modeled by" (or something to that effect).
All of science is model building, or will advance to it (from counting leaves to biochemical models of photosynthesis). When we say we have an understanding of some phenomenon, it means that we have a model that correlates with observations (simplified).
It's a failure of an education system that leaves its citizens with no conception of what science is, or how 'progress' is made.
That's become very clear with regards to Dr. Fauci and the CDC. They can explain all they want about the current state of understanding (modeling) when they are called out by the public as charlatans when the insight and thus guidelines change.
I am flabbergasted at the attacks on scientists explaining current understanding, until I realize that the people attacking very rarely comprehend the process. This isn't a slap at people attacking scientists, it's very much an indictment of our educational and scicomm system, that we say "here is a fully functional adult, who doesn't have the slightest clue as to how this stuff actually works, and we are totally fine with it." As well as experts saying "insert random domain specific jargon here" for said individuals to consume.
I've (PhD in physics) taken long (6-8hour) car rides with my Sensei (2 years of college) to tournaments. On the way, we talk about science, and I put in consumable, non-jargon terms, things like the big bang, quantum physics, steller lifecycles, etc. I'm not an expert in some of these, and out of practice in others, but being able to explain to an intelligent and curious person is feature IMO for scientists.
One should not be mysterious, or assume mantles of superiority. We all put pants on, one leg at a time. Being able to explain the joy of discovery in an approachable way is a skill. One I'd love to see in graduate schools.
My own anecdote on the crackpot bits ... I'd started at SGI in 1995 ABD. I was writing, and it was going slowly. My manager knew I was a physics type, and he forwarded me an email he'd received from someone on a new theory of relativity.
Don't ask me why someone would email SGI (a workstation company) about this. I don't know.
He asked me to look it over. This is like 4 weeks into the job (my first full time professional job post grad school). I thought this was an assignment worth doing. So I reviewed their paper. I caught a bunch of sign and other related errors they made, and wrote up a summary. He asked me to interact with them. So I sent it back to the people.
I got all sorts of weirdness coming back from them. It was a conspiracy to keep their breakthrough out of the public mind. "No", I said, "it was a set of mathematical errors." I pointed out that if they fixed them, they would get normal special relativity. They didn't want to. And complained to my manager.
Re: CDC guidance, we also have the basic cultural problem in the US that for a significant amount of the population, ever publicly changing your mind about any topic is seen as a sign of moral weakness, or even by default perceived as a lie.
> ever publicly changing your mind about any topic
That's pure gloss. It isn't simply "changing your mind," it's changing the social and economic reality of 330,000,000 people. If you fuck up that messaging (science is absolute!) or fuck up plans (flatten the curve! -> eradicate covid! -> lol nvm its endemic now) you and all who support you deserve criticism.
Echoing my point on messaging, the director of the CDC says: “I have frequently said ‘we’re going to lead with the science’…I think public heard that as ‘science is foolproof. Science is black and white. Science is immediate and we get the answer and then we make the decision based on the answer'... and the truth is science is gray".
The point stands: It's a failure of an education system that leaves its citizens with no conception of what science is, or how 'progress' is made.
Also, it's hard to make the case that communication, plans, and COVID going endemic are the CDC's fault, when simultaneously the president's communicated "plan" is 'it'll just disappear' or 'just drink bleach'.
Also easy to make this case, when the director of the CDC also makes it for me.
See the parent comment again.
3. > COVID going endemic
I'm not claiming this is the CDC's fault.
> when simultaneously the president's communicated "plan" is 'it'll just disappear' or 'just drink bleach'
Yes, the CDC's plan differed from the President's plan. Does that fact have any bearing on whether we can criticize the CDC's communication and plan? Cannot both warrant criticism?
You complain that the CDC should have had better communication when it's not their job to re-educate a whole population in 2 weeks about what science is, which is clearly a failure of the education system. Whatever mea culpa that CDC person is going through in that particular interview does not change the facts.
You complain about the CDC to fuck up plans (flatten the curve! -> eradicate covid! -> lol nvm its endemic now)", when that was outside of their power, being sabotaged by that mass murderer clown in the white house.
You are not complaining about what their plan was, just about how it failed, which is clearly outside of what they can affect.
Try to stick to one opinion.
If you want some information about things to criticize about what their plan was, Michael Lewis' 'The Premonition' is a whole book about that shit show. Their biggest problem was that they were not an agency built to actually fight a pandemic, but tried to study it first. However, none of these bad plans even matter when the executive has other ideas.
The problem with the US is not that it is too religious, but the flavour of religiousness in the US leads to those things.
Other than the Anglos most of Europe was pretty much pious some 50/6o years ago and it was never a problem as it is in the US.
The trouble with the CDC is that they talk as though they're pure, disinterested scientists following the evidence, but often it seems they're actually making decisions for political reasons, and then fudging the science so they can claim it supports their decisions.
Their toolbox for fudging the science includes dismissing (or, better, completely ignoring) inconvenient studies; praising weak studies that support their position, and acting like the studies' flaws don't exist; and failing to apply obvious logical reasoning. Some of these could be interpreted as incompetence, which in some cases it probably is; other times it becomes blatant enough that incompetence seems implausible.
Here's one example, when, around the time of Omicron, the CDC changed their post-infection isolation guidelines from 10 days to 5 days. The CDC's announcement literally said "The change is motivated by science demonstrating that the majority of SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurs early in the course of illness, generally in the 1-2 days prior to onset of symptoms and the 2-3 days after". However, as a (CDC-favorable) Washington Post article said, "New CDC guidelines were spurred by worries omicron surge could lead to breakdown in essential services: Health officials worried that mass infections could result in tens of thousands of Americans unable to work"; "The guidance by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “was based on the anticipation of a large number of cases might impact societal function,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in an interview with The Post."
I mean, bullshit. This is most definitely not motivated primarily by science demonstrating a distribution of transmission. If it was, the guidelines would have changed when they learned about this, rather than exactly when the guidelines otherwise needed to change. [...]
So in the interest of making sure people could do [essential services], we’re shortening the period to five days. Understandable? Definitely. I can’t argue with it. I’m all for ‘following the economics.’ [...] But every time you say you are ‘following the science’ when you’re transparently not doing that on any level, you’re burning your credibility and the commons that much more. It needs to stop.
They were worried about the quarantine and isolation requirements taking large numbers out of work, not that the mass infections would be acute or disabling.
> I think she should replace "science writers" with physicists.
The two are not mutually exclusive. What you're describing is physicists being science writers (or talkers, if they are doing videos or PBS specials). And yes, they are just as sloppy when they do it as non-physicists.
> I think physicists have done a poor job explaining that what they do is model building. The models are not reality.
I agree. I think this is one of the key sources of confusion for non-physicists trying to learn about physics.
> The two are not mutually exclusive. What you're describing is physicists being science writers
That is of course true, but I was trying to point out that it's a much more dangerous situation when writers, presenters, etc. are scientists themselves (whether active or perceived as active), because it allows people to say "well, that's how the experts talk". It's somewhat expected of popular science writers who are not active scientists to speak in a loose way. I do agree that popular science writers need to tighten up their publications, but scientists need to be especially careful when they write for the so-called laymen.
I'll take this as a moment to again push my favorite science writing ever, and that's the Scientific American Library book series. It's some of the best written scientific literature for the interested amateur out there, that I know of, written by experts in the fields in very honest (to the source material) ways.
Heck, as a physicist let me clue you in: most physicists simply use single words or short phrases to describe a whole vague bunch of related concepts. What the hell is “entanglement”. Oh my if physicists from two different subfields would try to unpack each others conception they would spend a whole day arguing like those old theologians about the nature of the Holy Ghost. Another is the interchangeable usage of “Lie groups” and “Lie algebra.” It helps, I guess, to realize that these words are actually labels for certain heuristics or sequences of mathematical operations. They work more or less when everyone is taught to use the same techniques but a farce when squeezed for puns.. not looking forward to the emergence of “hair loss” in both professional and journalistic black hole discourse— and yes, another religious term, “emergence”. Bastards.
> most physicists simply use single words or short phrases to describe a whole vague bunch of related concepts. What the hell is “entanglement”.
Actually, "entanglement" has a precise meaning in QM (a state that cannot be expressed as a product of states of subsystems). It's just that that precise meaning won't make any sense to someone who hasn't already learned a fair bit of QM, so when asked to define the term by lay people, physicists have to wave their hands.
To quote:
“The crux of the problem lies in an assumption about the structure of entanglement across the event horizon, namely, that the Hilbert space factorizes. While valid in quantum mechanics, this fails drastically in quantum field theory”
https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.01149
> not looking forward to the emergence of "hair loss" in ... professional ... black hole discourse
That horse bolted from the barn so long ago that the door has rotted away.
The process of black hole "hair loss" has been in the jargon with "balding" for decades. Google scholar will find you baldness/bald/balding with respect to black holes in publications from the 1970s, and I would be far from surprised to find that Werner Israel has the first published use of the exact words "hair loss" in the mid 1960s in a paper on electrovacuum spacetimes.
Hair loss is an important feature of the dynamical spacetime around a black hole, and takes place on timescales of approximately the light-crossing time of the event horizon diameter. Can balding encode the difference between one (classical) shell of test matter of mass M dropped into a black hole versus two shells of 1/2 M each? Good question! Can balding encode quantum numbers? Also good question! These are questions which go back to the early 1970s: https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.5.243...
(Hair loss continues to an area of current active research. A random recent paper: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12... preprint <https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.14620v1>, "... In vacuum non-zero ∇ × (αB) is quickly radiated away or swallowed by the BH (α is the lapse). However, when plasma is present nonzero ∇ × (αB) drives currents which slows down the balding process.")
Emergence seems far from religious, at least as far as I understand the context of your complaint. If you can derive theory B from theory A, B emerges from A. If, for the same theories, you cannot derive A from B, then A is the more fundamental. That's all that's meant, at least in the basement foundations of theoretical physics, in the weak field limit of quantum gravity theories, and likely most places where one must deal in effective theories. I'm sure you know this, as a physicist. I can't speak to how the term might or might not be used in theology.
I do take your point though that physicists from different areas of physics, and of course mathematicians, might not use a jargon word in the same way. Emergence might be one of those, for all I know.
Emergence is widely used to describe the behaviour of complex systems that you would have a hard time to guess from first principles. One simple example would be convection cells. (Note how "hard time to guess" is quite subjective as criteria go.)
Yea, “religious” in the context of physics means, for me at least, more like “metaphysical” (with a nod to Brian Green & a caveat that nowhere near a professional unnatural philosopher am I). Should I say metatheoretical? As you both reveal, we have already here from 2 fields of physics each an equally promising definite sounding but potentially hairy (even divergent) description of ”emergence”. One seemingly about logic and the other about ..computational complexity(?)
Thanks for the hair loss tip! Have been glancing thru the recent lit (admittedly thanks to the quantacoverage)—- it was all “no-hair” and no “hair-loss”. Seems like the term “hair loss” went out of fashion before i was born?
Might be not so divergent if this emergence of new theories is in any way "surprising".
Potentially related : the concept of "surprisal", and how entropy is a superfluous concept - since it's just the lack of information that an observer has about a system.
I think physicists are "careful enough" with their communications to the general public and amongst themselves. At the end of the day, they got work to do after all.
The weird thing about physics is that it attracts a lot of strange fellows that want to grapple with these ideas much like the OP is working with. As far as I know, no other field attracts such folks, and no, people who cargo-cult Kubernetes into their small company workflow for resume bullet-points are NOT the same kind of person as someone who would waltz into a general relativity colloquium, from the street, sporting no degree whatsoever (it happens).
There's whole categories of outsiders, some call them cranks, who get involved with physics. John Baez even has a purity test of sorts for this (the crackpot index): https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
> ...general public doesn't understand physics and makes little use of it.
There's plenty of general science interest in the public and a significant fraction is focused on physics. It doesn't matter if folks don't "make use of it" aside from a bit of enlightenment and wonder. Some physicists have developed quite a public persona and have used that to reach out to the public. Others stay focused on communications within their own community-- both are fine.
The particular kind of autodidactic "cranks" Sabine Hossenfelder (too) generously wrote about are, in my opinion, a very different kind of beast than merely curious folks who want to learn stuff.
Hmmm ... all I see is repetition of the claim, 'it doesn't matter'. That's quite an assertion in a place like HN, and in a world where public education is considered important.
Well, not everyone has to be a physicist. It's part of a well-rounded education to learn some basics, of course, to understand the scientific method, and the conservation laws. Some will go farther than that if they're going into STEM, or into physics itself.
Outside of that it's a matter of curiosity and public outreach from physicists... and I guess a small number of cranks.
I think a big problem is that phycisists in particular and scientists in general like to come up with colorful stories that go along with their work, that have little resemblance to their actual work. They end up telling stories that have nothing to do with the science they are supposedly talking about.
For example, "quantum teleportation" has nothing to do with the common meaning of the word "teleportation", but boy do people love talking and writing about it. The popular articles that are written about them don't tell you anything about what they are actually doing, even if you actually know the theory behind it.
i suspect this is largely driven by pressures to publish in high profile journals, which can tend to take interest in flashy sounding introductions and conclusions.
I think physicists have done a poor job explaining that what they do is model building. The models are not reality.
They can be considered approximations of reality. To say they are not reality seems dismissive. Newtonian physics is as close to 'real' as anyone is going to find.
> I have degrees in mathematics and some understanding of physics, but I've watched a few lectures of Ed Witten before, and he might as well be just making it all up. I know, it can all be backed out such that it all follows from known mathematics and physics,
As someone with a degree in mathematical physics, my experience with many string theorists in general (however – and I want to stress this – not with Ed Witten in particular) is that their statements and claims don't all strictly follow from known math and physics. Quite often there are huge logical gaps, implicit assumptions or implicit
redefinitions of commonly used terminology. For instance, when a string theorist says that "We know that quantum theory dictates XY" or that "Any theory of quantum gravity needs to obey XY", then it might very well be that their implicit assumption is that string theory is the right fundamental theory of nature (i.e. that it makes correct predictions) and that they rather mean something like "We know that quantum theory dictates XY if we model the universe as AdS_5 × S⁵" or "Any stringy theory of quantum gravity needs to obey XY".
More generally, my experience has been that a significant number of people doing string theory lack a sufficiently deep mathematical foundation. Theoretical physicists in general are already quite cavalier when it comes to mathematical rigor and in string theory it's even worse because most quantum field theories are not even mathematically well-defined. So everyone grows up learning to ignore mathematical issues and a large number of people then end up thinking they can just "wing" the math and pick up the required mathematical bits and pieces on the go. So they end up using the same terminology as mathematicians while not really understanding it and/or not really being precise with their words nor in their arguments. At least for me this makes it extremely difficult to tell whether someone is (unknowingly) bullshitting or their claims need to be taken seriously.
Physicists probably do do a poor job, but the general public are literally incapable of understand at any level so I don't think they should lose too much sleep over it.
The over use of anthropomorphization and metaphor is an issue but equally they're usually not completely made up.
If you haven't seen the movie, I highly recommend it. It's a bit of a sleeper hit I think, even for Coen brothers fans. It's really quite perfect and nails all the colloquialisms it gets at, which are a plenty. I rewatch it every now and then and just laugh my ass off.
There are some mistakes on the board in the scene where Abelman pounds his head into it but I assure you other grad students in my department and I enjoyed the movie immensely nonetheless.
I almost mentioned that, so it's funny you did. Lol. I noticed when I saw it in the theater that the formula for the variance was written wrong. If I recall correctly, it was zero because it was subtracting the same term twice since either both squares were either inside or outside the brackets instead of the proper formula. I never went back to take a look at the rest of the board. Upon rewatches, my eyes always go back to that same spot.
> One should note that he actually has the speaking style of one.
Indeed, just one quote from his recent opus Until the End of Time..., "the uncertainty principle demonstrated that there are features of the world - like the position and the speed of a particle - that a classical physicist in the mold of Isaac Newton would adamantly claim can be specified with complete certainty but that a quantum physicist realizes are burdened by a quantum fuzziness", says it all.
Briane Greene is very knowledgeable about physics, and brilliant at math, but his main life's work isn't as physicist. His work is embedding physics in mathematical models in a way that is does not generate empirically testable predictions. His string theory work has the same amount of support as real-Universe physics as does a Baptist preacher's sermons.
I used to think the string theorists were a bunch of charlatans. But matching first-principles entropy at the event horizon gives me pause. Even if they are all wrong about anything beyond the Standard Model, they have a sort of encoding of it in its entirety that ought to suggest places to look for interesting phenomena.
Maybe the math is too hard to predict what happens in such places, but they will have done something useful in pointing at them. It's not exactly science, as such, but not everything useful has to be.
(I gather that in the stringy black hole model, there is no actual space inside the horizon, so no need for a singularity. I may have misunderstood.)
> It brings up an interesting point in that physics at the highest level sounds almost like what ill-informed amateurs produce. I have degrees in mathematics and some understanding of physics, but I've watched a few lectures of Ed Witten before, and he might as well be just making it all up.
“I think physicists have done a poor job explaining that what they do is model building. The models are not reality.”
I’m not a physicist although I’ve had training in the subject and I’m inclined to agree with you. It seems to me there are at least three issues here; the first is many physicists just aren’t good at drawing analogies or describing what they’re trying to explain; few, say, have Feynman's talent. The second is they aren’t good at pitching their explanation at the right level (to the recipient’s level of knowledge)—they don’t judge the recipient’s level of knowledge well before they answer. And third is that they’ve a level of impatience when it comes to such explanations—that is they’re out of their comfort zone in that they cannot use their usual jargon as they would do with other physicists who talk at their level. (I've seen comments to the effect that 'that cannot be explained, you just have to believe the math' — then they don't bother to actually provide the equation or its reference because it's a text-based web page (not that dissimilar to the explanation of the eqn in the video.)
However, it’s not fair to single out physicists alone, this problem often occurs when there’s a disparity of understanding between professionals and others.
For example, I’ve experienced the problem here on HN in both directions (that is when I’m replying to a post where I have greater knowledge than the recipient and vice versa). Let’s say we have a physics topic that’s somewhat tricky to explain such as the Aharonov–Bohm effect and I ask a professional physicist who works in the area a general question that to me may be a complex matter but which is a trite one for him/her then the moment he/she gets a whiff of understanding that I’m not at his/her level of understanding—or that I’m not using the proper vernacular then one either doesn't get a reply or alternatively only a short nonchalant one that doesn't answer my question. This isn’t always the case but it often is—in my example the reply may be along the lines 'you’d better get a better understanding of potentials before you tackle that problem.'
In the reverse situation when I’m providing an explanation then I’ll often go to considerable lengths to provide a simple explanation but this is not easy as it takes considerable time (especially so if the reply is comparatively short, succinct AND easy to understand). I don’t often succeed and as a result my comments are often too long, tedious and boring thus few people bother to read them. Essentially, one needs to learn how to best answer questions where there's no really good, simple or obvious analogy and I, like many others, don't claim great expertise in doing so.
This poor communication amongst technical processionals is a serious problem. One only has to take a glance at the scientific and technical literature to see the problem. Frankly, I’ve often seen papers on topics that I’m competent in that I struggle to read as the language is so strained and obtuse, it’s as if the writers are deliberately going out of their way to sound erudite—but in reality what they’ve written is essentially gobbledygook until the paper has been read and reread multiple times over. This should not be necessary.
Moreover, the same problem arises when it comes to math equations. Often there’s an assumption that readers are fully cognizant with the mathematical treatment of the subject and thus writers often leave out intermediate stages that would make the understanding easier or they don’t provide proper explanations and or legends where the symbols are adequately defined, and so on. Again, this smacks of trying to prove how smart they are, but in the end it doesn't do justice to their cause.
It seems to me the only way around this problem is to include some communications training in their courses. Incidentally, I don’t think the ‘math problem’ is quite as bad as Hossenfelder makes out (although it is a problem). Most people who are going to ask physicists questions on advanced topics actually do have a reasonable amount of math training behind them, so physicists need to keep the math simple as is possible and spend a little time leading questioners through the tricky bits.
On the whole I think Sabine Hossenfelder does a truly excellent job at explaining physics (from my experience of watching her on YouTube), especially so given that she’s doing so in her second language English (if my German were as good as her excellent English then I’d be very pleased). If I have any criticism of her talks then it’s that she pitches her topics lower than I’d like, similarly she uses almost no math in her explanations (but then, I can’t complain, she’s primarily not aiming her talks at people like me).
For those popular science communicators that you mentioned, do you feel that they are misinforming their audience by oversimplifying? Or by leaving them with genuinely wrong ideas?
For people who can study physics (such as students) it's confusing and misleading, and harms their efforts to understand the real material. (Source: studied physics in college, and had a hard time dislodging the nonsense metaphors about things like "virtual particles".)
For people who can, it's just fairy tales, so what's the point of instilling a false sense of understanding?
Physics is mathematical models + experimental data. Good physical intiution comes from familiarity bred of working through math problems and observing experiments. Bad intuition comes from metaphors.
"For people who can, it's just fairy tales, so what's the point of instilling a false sense of understanding?"
I think this statement is worth examining a little bit. This statement implies that, unless you are going to develop a working knowledge of the math and become a practicing physicist, then you shouldn't bother reading anything about it.
The 'virtual particle' non-sense (or very limited sense as artefacts of pertubation theory) goes very deep. Ask and 9 out of 10 physicists will tell you there are such thing (otherwise how do you explain Casimir effect), even at a reputable high energy lab the 'reason' for the range of interaction was given by Heisenbergs uncertainty applied to the creation of (massive) interactive virtual particles.
A person willing to spend time, trying to understand nature, rather than wasting countless hours on scrolling pages is very noble, even if one did not get or missed opportunity in earlier years of life.
Who knows who ends up being a role model for a bright kid who otherwise would not have taken interest in physics, science or nature, and then goes on to become next Einstein or Tesla or Edison.
Also, I am deeply impressed by the group who are continuing spread of knowledge, giving better direction to the fellow explores without judgement. I wish more professionals could spend an hour or two a week/ month in such a way.
While that is noble, what isn't is their arrogance and stubborn belief in their own correctness -- and sometimes -- that everyone else is a bumbling idiot.
> While that is noble, what isn't is their arrogance and stubborn belief in their own correctness
While a lot of very cutting-edge physics is just mathematical theory without experimental proof, another whole lot of it do have enough experimental proof to be considered correct and complete under the right point of view.
> that everyone else is a bumbling idiot.
But that's exactly the issue :-) ! Well, not really, but how hard can it be? Let's do an example. I'm one of those people who doesn't understand quantum mechanics, so I'll do a search. The first result is a page in Wikipedia, which is heavy with historical fluff but it links to the right places under "Mathematical Formulation". Right in the page it mentions and links to Hilbert spaces, and to all other needed mathematical concepts. If I were to become an armchair quantum physicist, it would take me a few minutes to understand it's all about the math. My next steps would be to buy a $1 paper notebook and a $2 pen, and start my journey. I'm sure that with a little digging, textbooks on quantum mechanics can be found for free. Will it take years for my understanding to advance from point A to point B? Very likely.
There is one thing however that I see causes severe issues over the place: people won't do math. It is not just about quantum-physics, but also stuff as mundane as compound interest or investment risk. The amount of missed opportunities and well-being for the dislike of math is astounding. Maybe, as a society, we should do better in that area.
Without the belief that you are right, why would you spend time pursuing something? If you're right, but nobody you talk to understands what you're saying then who is bumbling?
It's a question of perspective.
I have designed a new fusion reactor. I feel like the design has potential, and nobody seems interested in helping to evaluate it. I know there is a communication gap as well. I get different responses from everyone I talk to, and it's clear from their objections that some are dismissing the idea without understanding it. This leads to me dismissing their objections.
I know what the optics are, but still feel like I have to expend time and effort on this. If I don't do it, nobody else will.
In the end, it will work or not regardless of anyone's opinion.
> Some of them cherish the opportunity to talk to a physicist because one-to-one conversation is simply more efficient than Google. They can shoot up to 20 questions a minute, everything from: ‘How do we know quarks exist?’ to ‘Can atoms contain tiny universes?’ They’re normally young or middle-aged men who want to understand all the nerdy stuff but have no time to lose.
Some years ago when I wanted to quickly expand my knowledge of React, I hired some guy to sit with me for four hours and build something with me. I had 1,000 questions and I felt like I got exceptional value for money by just being able to ask them directly and not have to try and extract these from the docs or out of date articles
Where did you find them? I've had experience working with such people and progressed so fast. At other times it's back to hours on docs and StackOverflow. Would love to find mentors for hire.
I'm probably in the same boat as those people, but in AI. Some of the problems I find interesting are just out of my depth. I don't know exactly what's required and from where to catch up to attempt a particular question in mind.
I think part of the problem is that science is not honest with itself. There is some sense that getting a Ph.D. is an institutionalization process, one that does not really reward non-conservative, long-term, or high probability of failure work. And god forbid if someone wants to revisit "known" ideas and results to help clarify them, apply them, or place them in better context. There is very much an "in" crowd in science, which leaves a lot of people, people who could positively contribute, feeling "out". We have commoditized academic research, at least in the science and engineering fields, which makes things very streamlined and on rails.
I've spent some time in both academic and industrial circles of mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, and physicists. It is a bit astonishing just how people in each one of these groups all sound like each other and distinct from the other groups. There are particular mannerisms and even idiomatic phrases that each group uses. Some simple ones are that physicists like to say "it goes like" and use the word "codes" to refer to code, as in software code. Computer scientists like to say "it better be". There are many others that I've lost track of and should have written down over these years. Yes, in many ways, the little idiomatic phrases make sense, but it at least lends credence to the question that if they all use the same phrases, something very simple and harmless, how else are they "conditioned"?
The book Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives by Jeff Schmidt covers some of this.
It all makes me wonder if someone like John Archibald Wheeler, a personal favorite, could be successful in today's academic climate.
The simple answer is: funding. There is no (public) money to revisit "known" ideas and results to help clarify them, apply them, or place them in better context. And I would not be the one to explain to the public to spend their money on known ideas rather than discover something new and shiny.
Concerning a PhD, I think it's pretty easy to see that that's not the stage in your career where you would want to embark on long-term, high risk research.
Also, I am not surprised that people doing a similar job have a common vocabulary and vernacular. You could say culture. I'd be surprised if carpenters, mechanics, et al. don't have the same thing, with other words and topics, of course.
No conspiracies needed.
Wheeler had significant contributions, had the right pedigree, the right schools. I don't see how he would be at a disadvantage today.
It's not about conspiracy theories. It's about reality. You even explicitly called it out: culture. That's just the way humans work, for better or worse. One of my points, and I think a point of Disciplined Minds, is that scientists are sometimes not honest or self-aware of the culture that they're a part of. Science is not a purely rational endeavor. There's some fashion and belief to it.
> Wheeler had significant contributions, had the right pedigree, the right schools. I don't see how he would be at a disadvantage today.
I didn't mean it as a critique upon Wheeler's potential. He was incredible. But he switched fields and research directions several times during his long and successful career. I'm not sure academics today have that fluidity in their careers (not due to internal forces but rather the external ones).
I don't see why scientists would be less self-aware of their culture than other groups. In particular, that culture has got nothing to do with the things you decry (why is no one looking at old ideas, where, again, the simple problem is money).
As soon as Wheeler would have tenure today, he could switch all day long. I am not talking about Wheeler's potential either, but whether he ticks the boxes to make him likely to succeed today. And he does.
You are looking for a career that wouldn't work today? Freeman Dyson. Getting tenure at Princeton aged 29 without a doctorate, not so likely today.
> I don't see why scientists would be less self-aware of their culture than other groups.
In my opinion, there’s a rationality bias. In that, if one thinks that they are operating rationally, then they think they are somewhat immune to cultural biases and inclinations. If I am not mistaken, this is similar to things Paul Feyerabend discussed. This is also heavily discussed in the book Disciplined Minds I linked above.
> You are looking for a career that wouldn't work today? Freeman Dyson. Getting tenure at Princeton aged 29 without a doctorate, not so likely today.
I absolutely agree. I think it’s beyond not likely. It is basically an impossibility.
Feyerabend may have a point here, but elsewhere on this site I have raised my doubts about his understanding of some physics notions. It is sad to see errors propagated at the same time as good points.
>And I would not be the one to explain to the public to spend their money on known ideas rather than discover something new and shiny.
Speaking of relating scientists to labor workers..
There is a lot of value to be earned by closing the gap between cutting edge, but proven, science and easily understood training documents for contract workers.
I would say most people would not care if we stopped using tax dollars to fund string theory research or finding 'habitable' planets, and a host of other luxury topics. we need to fortify our infrastructure (in every sense of the word) with all the things we have established as 'known ideas' today. it doesnt feel like we are in the golden age anymore where we can afford luxury research. at least not this decade.
imo The only 3 research fields still worth investing tax dollars in is long term energy storage, AI, and GMO. Everything else can kick rocks and start pitching in with more necessary labor or do it on their own time. the reason for those exceptions is that based on what we already know, there is a potential for resolving some unknowns that would result in global disruptions. IE self driving cars have proof of concept, resetting cell age has been done in mice,and the energy crisis demands a need for energy storage research to be exhausted
This standpoint is very specific to the world we live in today. Such luxury research is the reason we are where we are today and we should continue it in the future, but given what we know now - we should be in a heavy transition period towards getting the most out of what we already know. We've reached the part of the brainstorm session where the new topics being introduced arent exactly wrong, but it is borderline annoying and distracting in relation to accomplishing anything and it would be nice if our smartest people would contribute to the project
> we should be in a heavy transition period towards getting the most out of what we already know
That's what a free market is for. Developing technology from what we already know is profitable and self sustaining. I can't think of anything worse than governments directing technology development.
Science is the process of uncovering and understanding things about the world that we don't already know. Who exactly is in a position to know what counts as luxury? By your logic the discovery of the electron 125 years ago was luxury research, and the fact that our civilization is based on electricity and electronics today is irrelevant. General relativity didn't have practical applications for almost a hundred years, now we all rely on it indirectly everyday for GPS.
Paying money to shoot in the dark for miracle theories is a luxury. If you dont have enough food, and you are paying to research how to get more food - it's not luxury research. If you are paying to study string theory instead of importing more food because "you never know what we might learn, maybe world hunger will be solved" then I consider that a luxury. If we disagree on that it's okay and we can move on to other points as that is a fringe point.
No one funded general relativity, they funded Einstein. And the government did not fund Einsteins early theoretical papers AFAIK. To use him as an example is disingenuous. He had already made significant and applicable contributions (which is an understatement). He was definitely funded by a government (as part of a team) to create new technologies which in turn won WWII for that government.
I am not aware of any scientific evidence that government funding is necessary to produce groundbreaking theories. In other words, it's possible that genius happens and self-motivates without prior good-faith funding. I do see historical precedent for huge technological advancement through paying theoretical physicists to stop working on theory and start working on application though.
>I can't think of anything worse than governments directing technology development.
Why? Governments historically have funded an incredible amount of successful bleeding edge technologies. Especially in the defense sector. The atom bomb is one of them.
Part of my point here is that we need to take the effectiveness of what our government is capable of with technology in terms of defense and apply that level of competency to other areas - incentivizing the relevant researchers to be hands-on with application development
Good news, energy storage has plenty of private funding, and mainly just needs to get built out, along with solar to charge it from. For serious bulk long-term storage it would be hard to beat ammonia, except that people will keep trying to buy up your stock to use for other things.
What needs work is economical ways to get carbon out of the air into a form where it will stay. I had thought moving surface water saturated with it down deep was a good idea, but apparently there is more down there than at the surface! So, scattering millions of tons of olivine on beaches and cropland might be the best we can do.
>For serious bulk long-term storage it would be hard to beat ammonia
Is this related to flow batteries? Right now I think pumped storage is winning (where applicable), but I've heard flow batteries are more powerful
>What needs work is economical ways to get carbon out of the air
Isn't it kind of wild that too much carbon is a problem? A core building block for life on earth. I agree though, next decade is important for carbon research as well. Olivine is interesting
The current research is a valid next step in automation which has always shown to have good ROI imo. I dont think it's very "I" but the algorithms have proven very good at outperforming prior heuristics. this enables automation in areas that have unknowns that cannot be explicitly defined as required by prior tooling. the use-cases it settles into are going to be undeniably better for it, but there is a lot of noise right now with people trying to use it for everything
Pumped storage is certainly the easiest thing to deploy right now, anywhere you have hills. There are projects to make pumped hydro work where there are no hills, but there are deep underground cavities, or deep ocean near enough by you can put a tank under. In those, you pump water up from a space or tank below, and let water back into it to discharge. For the latter, you don't even need a long pipe, just a pump/turbine at the bottom of the tank, so it doesn't even need to be very nearby, just near enough to run a transmission line to. (That applies to any pumped hydro, BTW.)
Ammonia means, simply, synthesizing anhydrous ammonia from environmental nitrogen and hydrogen (that electrolysed from water). To get the power back out, you burn it in your gas turbine, or (in future) use fuel cells. The attractions are that excess ammonia may be sold on the open market, so your synthesis equipment sits idle only when you are actually drawing down on your tank; and it doesn't cost anything more than the tankage to bank it indefinitely. If you need more ammonia than you have banked, you just buy it, maybe shipped in from a solar farm in the tropics.
Remarkably, if you have just enough of some more round-trip efficient storage to get you through the night, the round-trip efficiency of the ammonia, hydrogen, liquified nitrogen, or what-have-you doesn't matter very much. Solar panels are so cheap, you can afford to be wasteful.
Carbon is the 4th most abundant substance in the universe. What is wild is that life is good enough at stealing it away from oxygen to have almost scrubbed it out of our atmosphere. (Compare to Venus.)
It will be important to get the carbon back out of the air, and then not turn around and, as everybody seems so eager to do, burn and exhaust it again. A business model where we end up with the carbon sequestered has been hard to come up with.
There was a suggestion to make it into fiber and put that in cement, thereby strengthening concrete so you don't need as much; but the best source for that carbon is cement manufacture itself, which exhausts CO2 at much higher concentration than in the atmosphere. So, it only helps much if you need a lot more carbon for that than you would have exhausted.
>Remarkably, if you have just enough of some more round-trip efficient storage to get you through the night, the round-trip efficiency of the ammonia, hydrogen, liquified nitrogen, or what-have-you doesn't matter very much. Solar panels are so cheap, you can afford to be wasteful.
i wonder if round-trip efficiency really is all that negligible when solar panel development and shipping is no longer subsidized by fossil fuels and must also use the energy-storage tech of choice as the predominant source of energy for anything not directly hooked up to the grid. a 20% RTE efficiency has a 5x impact on required energy to do anything. Are there enough good locations for solar to cover the needs of all long-term storage needs 5x over? Do we have enough raw materials for that many panels? Seems plausible tbh but idk
In any case, isn't ammonia incredibly toxic? whats the work-around there? we assume perfect handling of it by all parties at every level of a globally large scale operation? A gasoline leak is bad enough, but an ammonia pipeline bursting? that seems like a hard sell
Cost for solar panels is still in free fall. Nothing is being subsidized at anything like the amount we pay for oil extraction: every last barrel pumped is paid out for, cash on the barrelhead, hundreds of $billions every year. You pay for a panel exactly one time, and then it delivers for years.
The point about round-trip efficiency being negligible is that you only rarely need to draw down on those easy-to-ship, easy-to-store media. All you need is, say, 2x more panels to use to top them up again. Most of the time, those extra panels are driving synthesis to sell, generating revenue.
Shipping is always cheap. In the future, we can expect the ships to burn ammonia synthesized in the tropics.
Storage costs are falling even faster than for solar panels.
Solar can be co-sited with roofs, where it extends the life of the roof; with parking lots, where it extends the life of the cars; with reservoirs and canals, where it cuts evaporation and biofouling, and also operates cooler, thus 3% more efficiently; and with pasture and farmland, where it increases yield by reducing heat stress, and cuts water demand. So, yes, there is way more room for solar panels than you will ever want.
Solar panels are usually made of silicon, which makes up 28% of the Earth's crust. The mass of solar panels needed per kW is falling even faster than their cost.
Ammonia is toxic. But we already handle literally millions of tons of it every year without incident. It is lighter than air, so if it leaks, it can't blanket a nearby town like, say (just picking at random) methyl isocyanate.
> There is a lot of value to be earned by closing the gap between cutting edge, but proven, science and easily understood training documents for contract workers.
Oh absolutely! But those are two completely different things.
> I would say most people would not care if we stopped using tax dollars to fund string theory research or finding 'habitable' planets, and a host of other luxury topics.
I agree. And then all of those people will be shocked to see $SOMECOUNTRY do crazy stuff in a decade when the US will be reduced to rubble or decline to irrelevance. Something like that almost happened with Goddard vs von Braun during and prior to WWII. Then, the US suddenly faced rocket interceptors, ballistic missiles, and jet fighters. The whole of US research, and in particular the Air Force, was reorganized after that experience.
> This standpoint is very specific to the world we live in today.
No, it's just very specific to your personal opinion. I take it you wouldn't have funded a patent clerk in Switzerland in 190x when he studied what happens when you sit in a train going close to the speed of light. I'm glad someone in the US listened to him, because otherwise it would have been Nazi Germany to build the atomic bomb that came from his insight.
The whole crux of the matter is that we don't know in advance what pays off.
>The whole crux of the matter is that we don't know in advance what pays off.
Yeah we all know that. My post was sensitive to that. You're not wrong, but there is a cost to that.
>I take it you wouldn't have funded a patent clerk in Switzerland in 190x
Please cite sources on Einstein getting funding for his research from the government. I do not believe that happened, at least not while anything was theoretical. His PhD advisor worked for free, and Einstein published multiple significant papers on his own accord.
He was later paid by the government to take his theory and make the most out of it in reality, which is what resulted in the development of the weapons that won the world war.
So before you dismiss what I am saying for being a bit counter to the typical narrative about science funding - please be aware that what you want is what Germany did in that situation. Which was continue to develop theories of new fringe ideas instead of taking the new golden goose egg that was discovered and making something useful out of it right away
"The simple answer is: funding. There is no (public) money to revisit "known" ideas and results to help clarify them, apply them, or place them in better context. And I would not be the one to explain to the public to spend their money on known ideas rather than discover something new and shiny."
Which is a pity. There's a prominent member of my field who does this for causal inference work, and it has been invaluable.
The problem at heart is research pace. Slowing the pace should help. i.e., it should be ok for faculty to produce half the papers they now produce and still retain their hopes on tenure, or whatever grants and glory.
I cannot get creative under pressure. I don't know how anyone can.
There is insurmountable amount of papers produced every year in AI, and everyone's in a rat race for some reason I don't understand. There is no way someone can exist in a department for more than a year without pushing a paper.
At least in AI, the courses students are taught, professors have an understanding are out of touch with the kind of mathematical rigor needed.
I would guess that the rat race in that case is probably driven by the ability of the machine learning industry to pull people from academia. So the rat race is a literal one, with people trying to get hired by Google, Meta, and the like.
In general though, I am with you. I don’t understand why people are in such a hurry all the time these days. I have a personal principle that I move slow to move fast. Moving slow and methodically is almost always faster in the end.
But ... I think with AI, if you have an insight that isn't motivated by math per se, but is motivated by some other problem intuition, you can still attempt to implement it, and the proof is sort of in the pudding.
With physics, even the experts can go on developing theory which (as I understand it) arguably might never be testable, or is only testable after some absurdly expensive new machine is planned and built which might take decades. So an armchair physicist with an idea can have no route to falsifying their idea.
Surely if someone is paying a consultant to weigh in on their ideas they must have some inkling that they're out of their element.
From the article:
> One or two seemed miffed that I didn’t immediately exclaim: ‘Genius!’, but most of my callers realised that they can’t contribute to a field without meeting today’s quality standard. Then again, I hear only from those willing to invest in advancing their education to begin with.
The references should allow you to follow some sort of red thread. They will probably aid in closing the knowledge gap as well. It's probably like in this article (it was a good article btw) though, you need more maths. Either you use university curricula to find out what maths you need as a starting point or you focus on the maths that pops up in the papers and work your way from there.
I can't speak for others, but I find scientific literature is not written general audience to understand, for a variety of reasons such as (a) publisher limitation on number of pages (b) to communicate core message right without distraction (c) to not bore a certain people etc.
Not to mention, depending on the sub-fields, at least in AI, there is quite a bit of noise in papers as they are explaining _their_ viewpoint which might differ from broad consensus or disproven in future.
I find papers are typically written keeping in mind a specific set of people, who are typically in that particular sub-field for some time. In sub-fields like quantum computation, that specific set of people authors have in mind while writing paper are <100, and those are not newbies.
Newbies can quickly get discouraged reading a paper out of the blue. Picking the right papers at the beginning requires exposure to the field.
It's not simple.
I really hope what you said is practical. I tried. Hope it's my fault because the alternative option doesn't exist for me.
This was a super interesting article, it makes me sad though.
As someone who loves studying physics for fun, it's disheartening to hear how hard it is to be really good at it and how people at the highest levels kind of look down on all the people who are not researchers in the field. I mean, I get it, it's a very difficult field and it requires an incredible rigor to contribute to it. It gives me a kind of "what's the point?" feeling though. The best I can ever be is a crackpot.
Hi @Dig1t, PhD in quantum physics here. I think it's important to add some nuance here.
1. The crackpots are trying to "disrupt" or "overhaul" the very foundations of Physics. Finding something beyond general relativity or beyond quantum field theory is unlikely without high brain power combined with a minimum of 10 years of full time study. There's no way around it. It's like wanting to be an opera composer with a few months of guitar lessons.
2. This does not mean that there aren't thousands of fun, relevant and impactful physics problems out there. In all areas of physics. There are thousands of small questions that puzzle the best physicists and which they don't have time for, or haven't gotten the inspiration for, etc. Many of them can be tackled without understanding the whole field. It's not about laying new foundations which need to agree with decades and decades of data and theory. It's about using the tools to push the frontier.
If (2) sound interesting, keep going. If you contact a physicist and say:
- I know this and that math (done all problems in this and that textbook)
- I'm interested in your field
- Are there any accessible open problems that my math could potentially crack open?
Most physicists will likely point you towards interesting problems.
2nd year physics, my first lecture was one of the professors rambling away about quarks and other tiny particles. During that lecture I saw my future life:
1. Highly unlikely best case scenario : Academic treadmill and all that implies, PhD, Postdoc, applying for grants, tenuous employment forevermore etc. The rest of society view me as a crackpot even if my fellow physicists like my ideas. I mean even if you have a Nobel it's not like society in general would value you as much as say Linus.
2. Highly Likely scenario I fail or find something else interesting to do, at some point - all that effort and agony and knowledge of quarks and tiny particles is of very little use in my day to day life.
So, like you, "What's the point?"
I chose option 2. - go do something else. I walked away and never came back. Studying computers was relevant to my daily decisions every day of my life - even if I were to have a career not directly in IT.
3. I help people solve practical problems that require relatively mundane physics and math, plus the ability to bridge multiple disciplines, use things like theory and modeling as tools, and conduct experiments to test hypotheses. At a company that makes measurement equipment.
Some of this stuff is work that most people hate, and are happy to have off their plates.
This is sort of the problem with academia in general, isn't it? And the worst part is that it's a self-reinforcing problem.
Students see the academic path and at some point along the way realize it's not for them. It doesn't pay well, it's really difficult, and you have to constantly engage with an environment that is at best pedantic and at worst bureaucratic and toxic. Yet we still need more professors to actually teach, although the research grants, administrative costs, budget structures may not allow for it.
Then why does a PhD include a vow of celibacy, years of silent seclusion to meditate, and the abandonment of greed and ego in favor of beliefs in a greater power?
>> Sociologists have long tried and failed to draw a line between science and pseudoscience. In physics, though, that ‘demarcation problem’ is a non-problem, solved by the pragmatic observation that we can reliably tell an outsider when we see one.
My issue isn't with the apparent arrogance of the in-club. It's with the certainty she expresses that there isn't any pseudoscience going on inside that club.
I would love to have access to this in general (but maybe not for a physicist specifically) - sometimes I just am having trouble understanding a paper and want someone to walk me through it. Hire a biologist / computer scientist / etc
Check upwork or fiver. There are people offering a wide variety of expertise in a format similar to that outlined in the article. I know someone who hired someone to talk about designing building ventilation systems for two hours — it was relevant to his work, so he basically found a way to hire a consultant for a fraction of the normal price.
Agreed. Personally, I'm interested in circuit board electronics. If people can get a personal trainer for fitness, why not for hobbies/topics of interest?
well, but she's kinda famous, so she can do it, I suppose less famous physicist could still provide similar service for less (like a less prestigious law firm)
When I was at university, all the physicists loved to humblebrag about the “crackpots” that came to them, and how much dumber they were than real physicists. They had a similar but less pronounced snobbish dislike for students from other faculties, like engineering.
The thing is, most of them (with a couple of exceptions) weren’t actually any smarter. They just “knew the language”, exactly as this article says. Sadly, their attitude turned a number of people off physics I think.
The tone of this article is similar. The author kindly took the time to talk to the unwashed masses because he felt sorry for them, or something. But, as he said, he never learnt anything real from them, except how to communicate better with idiots.
I couldn't disagree more about the tone of this article. Is it possible you are projecting your past experience of that snobbish attitude onto this article? To me it seems to be an article about a real, practical attempt to bridge the gap between autodidacts and academics, and is written with empathy and honesty.
Adding to clarify: I agree the snobbish attitude you describe does exist. I just think it’s exactly what this article addresses. He gives an honest report of what it’s like from his perspective, in good humour. And sums it all up with this:
> I still get the occasional joke from colleagues about my ‘crackpot consultant business’, but I’ve stopped thinking of our clients that way. They are driven by the same desire to understand nature and make a contribution to science as we are. They just weren’t lucky enough to get the required education early in life, and now they have a hard time figuring out where to even begin. At the same time, the physicists on my team like to help others understand more about science and appreciate the opportunity to apply their knowledge outside academia. In connecting both sides, everybody wins. And who knows? Maybe we’ll be the first to learn of the new Theory of Everything.
This is awesome! I watched multiple videos by Sabine. She stays on popular level there, pretty much like the journalists she mentions.
I am interested in physics. I am one of those middle aged men. Not that I aspire to suddenly come up with a theory of everything that people who dedicated their life to it could not think of. I am just curious. I have a solid applied mathematical background with all the usual basics like linear algebra, real and complex calculus, functional analysis, information theory, probability, statistics, ODEs and PDEs, but I quickly realized that I would need to fill multiple gaps in my math before understanding modern physics: quarternions, tensors, Lie groups and algebras, differential geometry etc. so I am slowly working through this.
My problem is: it is pretty hard for me to find a good set of books/textbooks that fill the specific gaps in my math knowledge. I even started to work on DAG of areas and associated textbooks myself but any pointers would be appreciated.
I can tell immediately that you have never actually picked up a physics textbook. The main reason is that most physicists only have the most elementary understanding of the mathematics underlying what they are doing. This is for historical reasons because usually the physics came first, then the mathematicians came and cleaned everything up. The result is that every physics textbook teaches you exactly what you need to know and not a thing more.
Most physicists wouldn't understand group theory or lie groups any better than an undergrad having done the first 3 weeks of an algebra course. I'm telling you this because by listening to too much popular physics rather than actually reading a physics textbook you are going well on your way to becoming one of these people from the article.
Anyway, Gerard 't Hooft made a great little website to help people in your situation.
You already should be able to get the basics of quantum physics. Have you tried starting there? (Feynman Vol III is a good place to start.) Or are you more interested in general (or special) relativity? Definitely check out John Baez's TWF's [1].
My advice to college freshmen is to consider universities as a place for meaningful interaction between explorers at different stages.
The "learning" (curriculum) part is just a prerequisite done (mostly) all by yourself (through exercise) at your study desk.
At the campus you show up prepared to be able to engage with the community (of peers, graduates, postgraduates, professors ...) as you climb up the ranks yourself. At its heart it is very much a social endeavor. But ime especially in physics or mathematics this is much less emphasized. Maybe understandably so in order to encourage working on a "simple" problem for weeks on end ("frustration tolerance") and not to cheat by consulting others immediately after a failed attempt without even trying the "deep dive" of carefully going through the reasoning.
>During a decade of education, we physicists learn more than the tools of the trade; we also learn the walk and talk of the community, shared through countless seminars and conferences, meetings, lectures and papers. After exchanging a few sentences, we can tell if you’re one of us. You can’t fake our community slang any more than you can fake a local accent in a foreign country.
My clients know so little about current research in physics, they aren’t even aware they’re in a foreign country.
This also reminds me of the life of Alexander Grothendieck who after a decade of brilliant work ("Golden Age" in his 30's to 40's) in which he stayed in touch with the mathematical community through unsurmountable correspondence and singlehanendly spread a lot of remarkable seeds which later blossomed wonderfully in the field --- one day vehemently and visibly protested the military-industrial complex in France (because of his traumatic WWII experience), was left alone by his intimidated fellow academics (who were fearful to simply cut off a tremendous amount of funding resources) and then simply stopped engaging with the community all together and never in his later life found a way to come back in (despite his brilliant "track record") but instead grew more and more sour and frustrated becoming isolated, in the end even suffering from (mild) paranoid delusions while only a handful of people/acolytes kept him in touch with the outside world.
Re Grothendieck, I'd recommend the book When We Cease to Understand the World, which somewhat romantically tells his story alongside Schwarzschild, Schrodinger, and Heisenberg. It's put me in quite the spirit!
"As long as you have funding, quantum gravity is basic research at its finest. If not, it’s pretty much useless knowledge."
Hm. That bears thinking about.
pseudomathematical priestly class
Would that be string theory, which doesn't seem to lead to any falsifiable experiments? Smolin is very critical of string theory for that reason. It's apparently mathematically plausible but doesn't seem to lead anywhere.
"Science is prediction, not explanation" - Fred Hoyle
> "Science is prediction, not explanation." - Fred Hoyle
I don't know about string theory, but this is totally wrong. Exploiting a simple correlation gives you the ability to predict to a certain extent, but that's not science, that's numerology. I couldn't find the source of the quote, but I looked up the guy and found what I expected. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle#Other_controversies:
Hoyle also supported the following controversial hypotheses and speculations:
The correlation of flu epidemics with the sunspot cycle, with epidemics occurring at the minimum of the cycle. The idea was that flu contagion was scattered in the interstellar medium and reached Earth only when the solar wind had minimum power.
Black holes would be different if string theory is right. There would be no singularity, for instance, and no interior. String theory black holes (which are called fuzzballs) would emit slightly different gravitational waves when they merge. We should have sensitive enough gravitation wave detecters in the not too distant future to check this.
There was a PBS Space Time episode on fuzzballs last November [1].
I feel that when the words 'shut up and calculate' were uttered, physics flew off into la-la land, and that without a backing of natural philosophy science became an engineering discipline at best and a cargo cult at worst. - It is a non sequitur to go from lack of understanding to saying there is nothing to understand. It would have been more honest to declare that Newton was correct in studying the occult, and that truth is yet to be revealed to our humbled minds.
So, "priests" because they don't know about the spirit of inquiry that gave rise to natural philosophy; this sublime tradition that they have misunderstood.
“Shut up and calculate” is to physics what “premature optimization” and “security through obscurity” are to computer science. Meaning that the people who know the actual contexts in which these phrases arose are simply weary of explaining their meanings to people who imagine that they understand them, and have long since given up.
Smolin himself has basic (like high school, early college) mistakes in his published books. Maybe it's the editor screwing it up but combining that with Distler saying how he didn't put the effort in to understand certain stuff in grad school and it looks bleak for him.
I'm curious why the author's clients tend to fit my demographic: "Many of them are retired or near retirement, typically with a background in engineering or a related industry. All of them are men."
I'm a male engineer in my 40s, and I've recently developed an interest in trying to understand quantum mechanics. I wonder if people like me, seeing the arc of our lives curving closer to its end, develop a natural curiosity about How It All Works/What It All Means.
I'm a female engineer in my early 30s and I'm very interested in this stuff, to offer a counter-example.
I'd be interested in paying a physicist to explain the Scharnhorst effect (predicted travel of photons very slightly faster than c between Casimir plates), and the implications for whether c is a core constant. I can't find much written about this - some papers were published about it in creditable journals iirc, it just hasn't gotten much attention for whatever reason.
Something about Hossenfelder rubs me the wrong way though.
> Many of them are retired or near retirement, typically with a background in engineering or a related industry
I have heard there is such a thing referred to as "the retiree's patent" -- presumably not fantastically market-worthy, but motivated in part by desire to make a difference or leave a mark.
$150/hour is pretty cheap for a lawyer these days. But even still, a lawyer has a bachelors and a law degree, while this gets 20 minutes talking to someone with a PhD--and in this case, someone with a lot of experience both doing physics and communicating it. The lawyerly equivalent to Sabine Hossenfelder would a partner at a major law firm, whose hourly rate is likely around $1,000.
Even if she's now farming it out postgraduates in physics, it still seems like a fair price to me.
> I now have a small team of consultants on the ‘talk to a physicist’ service. None of us makes great money, and I don’t think we ever will because the market is too small. But broken down to dollars or euros per hour, I’ve had many freelance writing jobs that paid worse.
It's fascinating that this is so well known among physicists but to those of us outside, we are totally unaware that these people exist and that email addresses get deluged.
It seems to be a logical trap: physics is interesting enough to attract amateurs but complex enough that no amateur can hope to contribute.
Which makes me think the reason biology or sociology doesn't have crackpots (or maybe they do... Ive never heard of it though) is either that they just are not interesting to the retired engineer, or they dont take as many years of intense study.
Every sufficiently non-obscure field has crackpots. Most only see ones in their own field, but if you end up as a volunteer handling the wikipedia email queues, you'll see them across all fields.
Some fields have more crackpots and more persistent ones, I think it's an open question if that's due to to the field itself or how it's presented in the media.
I'm confident that if there are frequent high profile articles on the field that talk about "unsolved problems" or "fundamental limits" that this acts like crackpot catnip.
> Which makes me think the reason biology or sociology doesn't have crackpots ...either that they just are not interesting to the retired engineer, or they dont take as many years of intense study.
An alternative, cynical interpretation is that crackpots are indistinguishable from the ordinary output of some fields.
Biology has attracted what you might call crackpots (particularly in the area of human evolution and evolution in general) of all persuasions, some of whom were quite successful in their local arenas (Lysenko in the Soviet Union controlled the direction of biological research for several decades, much to the detriment of Soviet agriculture for example).
Another one I encountered personally was the group of academics who got behind the "AIDS is an autoimmune disorder, not a viral infection" theory. It was a bit uncomfortable talking to them about it, they really had a kind of evangelical / persecuted visionary complex. These were people with advanced degrees and even a university professor (in chemistry, not biology) was involved. A similar small group of academics in paleontology continue to deny that an asteroid impact had anything to do with the extinction of the dinosaurs, despite vast evidence supporting that conclusion.
A common factor seems to be that such people are susceptible to ideological fixation. They get ideas in their heads that they aren't willing to question, and promoting them becomes more of an article of faith rather than something that can be addressed by scientific methods.
Non-math fields have more subjectiveness, for one. Second, much higher barrier to entry. Someone can investigate something, read some relevant literature, and become an amateur historian, but the barriers to being competent at math and physics are way higher.
One of the top people in retrovirology turned out to be a crank when AIDS was elucidated, and he couldn't see it. Peter Duesberg (duesberg.com). Also, HPV doesn't cause cancer, after all? He has got Kary Mullis, 1993 Nobel/chem for the polymerase chain reaction, on his side, anyway.
Geology used to be full of cranks. Not just anti-tectonicists, but anti-catastrophists who could not abide bolide strikes. There are still many who can't accept a strike 13kya; they have fallen back on demanding a crater, knowing not all bolides leave one.
A really great geology book, BTW, is "Reading the Rocks", by Marcia Bjornerud.
I'm surprised abiogenesis hasn't attracted more crackpots. there's no embarrassing dinosaur bones to deny or antibiotic resistance to explain away. lots of hints left in virions, archaea and ribozymes, but still a tremendous amount of complexity in LUCA to explain. I guess there's panspermia, but that just kicks the can down the road, and asteroids are a viable explanation for at least e.g. sourcing amino acids.
maybe because nothing's established enough yet to be dogma, and the field isn't practically important other than just being neat.
The article comments on the site are thick with the autodidacts with an intuition that the author describes. They all seem to have missed a primary point made in the essay - if you can't describe it with math you have nothing.
Are you sure? Can you describe, visually using the famous gravity well example, the central massive object rotating on an axis with a small object in a stable (non-inspiralling over the course of thousands or more revolutions) polar (or indeed any arbitrary nonequatorial) orbit about it?
One might compare your visualization with results from Gravity Probe B, which had an orbital inclination of 90.007 degrees, or Juno, which continues to have have this fun polar orbit (90.000 degree inclination) around Jupiter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_(spacecraft)#/media/File:... (animated). Jupiter's mass and angular momentum ("J") parameters are, relevantly, greater than Earth's; additionally, GPB's was nearly circular, while Juno's is very highly elliptical.
I'm also curious about how you visualize -- using the gravity well example -- an extremely elliptical orbit even with J=0 and orbital inclination=0 -- one that alllllmost grazes the surface of the central object at closest, and at farthest is light-seconds away in effectively flat spacetime.
I'm not saying it can't be done, or even that you cannot do it. I just think it's hard -- I can't do it, or perhaps won't do it because I think it's easier to reach for an approximate solution of the Einstein Field Equations (and if one takes the mass of the small body to some unignorably higher level, through effective one-body methods). Others might reach for gravitoelectromagnetism. Others have some other favoured post-Newtonian or numerical method. Solve first, then grind out some useful visualization. But if you can successfully visualize first and extract a solution from that, with any sort of generality, then I'm honestly interested.
I have never found it comfortable to imagine gravity as a rubber sheet with a weight on it, where Earth's gravity is making the 'model' work by pulling the weight and stretching the sheet. Trying to turn that into a 3D Sun with a planet orbiting it when there is no 'down' separate to the system, trying to imagine gravitational lensing when there is no way to imagine a NASCAR style banked corner in a stretched void, trying to imagine why a black hole can be so dense that light cannot get away.
Imagine a rubber sheet and light as a toy car climbing up the well, it's easy to imagine the well becoming so steep that the car wheels cannot grip it, or the car motor cannot lift the weight of the car. Try imagining light heading directly 'out' from a black hole, space is compressed so much that ... what? Light loses its grip on spacetime? Spacetime is not just stretched but is being pulled inwards like a conveyor belt at 3e8 meters/second so light is at an effective standstill? (yet all frames of reference see light moving away from them at the speed of light).
It doesn't fit a rubber sheet for anything, really, even the basic planet orbiting the gravity well has no easy imagining in 3D. It's somehow ... Earth taking the path of least action? a straight line in curved spacetime?
The rubber sheet runs into problems when you try to introduce high inclination orbits, or non-inspiralling (or at least very very slowly inspiralling) nearly circular orbits. It also doesn't do well when the mass-to-mass ratios of the objects on the sheet are small. It also doesn't do well when you want the masses to spin. (How many of the large bodies in our solar system have nearly zero spin angular momentum? And the difference between perihelion and aphelion for Venus and Neptune are small, and there doesn't seem to be any danger of them inspiralling sunwards in the next several thousand of their respective solar orbits.)
It was never a productive metaphor, in any way, but it let people with no mathematics feel like they had a sense of things. If you want to reason correctly, it is a trap.
As a computer scientist, I've only encountered this once. My grad school advisor pointed the guy to me, who insisted on having phone conversations. He was interested in compiler technology; I suggested the Dragon Book, EOPL, and a few other of the usual suspects. He said, "Oh, that's all academic nonsense."
I don't think I ever properly thanked Mohammed for that...
That's the first time I heard about someone rejecting the theoretical basis of compilers on a conspiratorial basis, are you sure that person was rejecting your suggestions out of literally disbelieving in the theory, and not, for example, doing it from the "this 10-line regex is better than any fancy parsing technique out there" angle?
It just seems weird to me for somebody to know what a "compiler" is yet refuse to believe the fundamentals. Compilers are pretty niche, there is no glory or mainstream pop science around them.
I have a PhD in physics and one of Nobel prize laureates in theoretical physics made the following observation in my presence (I will leave him anonymous for obvious reasons): "All crackpots with zero knowledge of physics that have ever emailed me are men. It shows that there's more to the STEM gender gap than discrimination".
I don't understand the point. couldn't it just mean that men are more likely to be crackpots? or that women are more likely to read up before confidently asserting they know the answer?
fwiw I'm a woman who's interested in physics, though I haven't contributed any crackpot ideas.
Edit: disregard this comment, see reply for context
I find it odd that this is not acknowledged or linked from the article. Perhaps this is a signal that Aeon is ashamed of YouTube or perhaps they do not want to share traffic to another platform??
>"As long as you have funding, quantum gravity is basic research at its finest. If not, it’s pretty much useless knowledge"
the issue of the public seeing basic research as useless has always bothered me.
and I'm not sure if basic research is truly useless because of its innate nature or if basic researchers themselves make it look useless on purpose because they like it to be secluded from "real life" or maybe it's too exhausting to try to explain to people while it's still ongoing.
reading Rutherford's own notes and biography was truly enlightening and refreshing, there is more to physics than the purely theoretical part.he didn't think he was too good to work with his hands.
Engineering physics / applied physics / medical physics are all interesting interdisciplinary fields where you can see physics come to life.
Notably none of these use quantum gravity, and none will for a while. I'd really really like us to collectively figure out where the hell spacetime comes from, and I definitely think it's worth the money, but let's not pretend that if theoretical quantum physicists would just roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty there'd be lots of practical applications.
I have to admit I occasionally have crackpot physics ideas floating around in my head and I actually have seen that Dr Hossenfelder has this service and thought of contacting her. But my tech job took too much time to even clarify my thoughts. (I had probably 5 undergrad physics/astronomy courses.) How many of us have these thoughts I wonder? It's a fun way to pass the time. Recently I thought that rather than thinking of these ideas as physics I should look at them as science fiction and write an amusing story.
Same here. The crackpot side of me is trying to create intelligent tools to augment my own intelligence, so that I can get smart/fast/wise enough to understand / predict / control enough biology so I don't die of something boring before having a good long time to figure out how to get to a Neutron star or something. Beginning to realize that biology is more complicated than physics (the models, not the scope).
> And I put up a note on my blog offering physics consultation, including help with theory development: ‘Talk to a physicist. Call me on Skype. $50 per 20 minutes.’
Interesting! A lot of times, this is what I want (as the asker) -- to be able to do quick back-and-forth with someone genuinely knowledgeable to identify where my understanding is right and wrong, and where I need to look next. I'd be interested if there were a general platform where you can hire experts on these terms. (Not interested in physics though.)
I would love a platform like this as well. About 1 hour into an intensive search, I find that I have so many questions that are hard to Google that an expert would easily be able to walk me through. $50 for 20 minutes would be an incredible boon in those situations.
A few years ago I was getting a undergraduate degree in physics and I was dating a girl who had a theory of gravity. I don't totally remember the theory now and I never fully understood it at the time, even though she tried to explain it to me. The few times we talked about it, I tried to argue against her theory rather than just listening.
This article reminded me of that experience—especially the description of vague images. I think I could have used some advice from this guy, or at least some empathy.
I've encountered people with a cult interest in quaternions. To anyone who does 3D graphics, they're just a convenience. But they can be visualized as a point on the surface of a 4D hypersphere, and there are generalizations to higher dimensions and to representations where you can express "rotate 720 degrees". For some, that way lies madness.
Nice to see. I know myself well enough to know that, despite working my way through the physics modules of brilliant.org [0], despite the A-levels in maths and further maths, despite watching and listening to a lot of popsci, I fail any professional scientist’s shibboleth tests.
[0] actually all of brilliant.org, but the rest of the learning paths aren’t important to this context
The ones that would allow me to ask questions and get responses like I’m a fresher at university rather than like I mistook Star Trek for a documentary.
I absolutely understand not having time for the later — I don’t have time for politicians and pundits who mistake fiction for fact in computer science — but it does mean I can’t use Physics Stack Exchange to learn stuff by asking questions because my questions are, essentially, too dumb.
I like the idea of this consultant work, but I also find the idea that people are incapable of learning a new field because they missed out on lessons earlier in life outrageous and simply incorrect (I don't think the author was intentionally disrespectful here, they've just always been in a community where their life is on rails). Precociousness is one type of intelligence, and early schooling is valuable, but people can always learn, even at the highest level. It is unfortunate that most of our higher education/research programs for science are structured in such a way that entry into those programs is difficult for people that are older and need to maintain a good income. Really we'd need alternate program structures like those for many master's degrees, or more advanced online courses.
Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal is a great resource if you are looking for a little more than pop-sci.
I think the problem science communicators have is that the English speaking tradition divorced itself from natural philosophy so long ago that it seems intractable to build a bridge back to intuition and meaning from algebraic structures and faculty blessings. Fortunately luminaries such as for example Stephen Wolfram and Eric Weinstein are pulling ears, so the entrenched narrative of the nature of reality is no longer the exclusive purview of the pseudomathematical priestly class. :o)
I warmly recommend listening to Curt's Salvatore Pais interview, as you will quickly dismiss certain doubts about the intent behind certain patents.
I don't share the conviction of many in these comments that "is", and "is modeled by" are clearly different concepts, or that distinction is the source of hubris or ignorance about science.
Moreover, I don't see any of the science communicator bad guys being mentioned in the comments saying "remember everyone, you DON'T have to understand math to practice high level theoretical physics." I don't think its on those communicators to explain this to people.
People are allowed to have interests in stuff that they don't have a practitioners knowledge of, which is good because I'm sure that you have interests and opinions in fields that you don't practice or never studied as well.
When she writes about needing a lot of mathematics, what specifically does she mean and how many thousands of hours of problem solving and proof writing practice are we talking about for a person of average aptitude?
I can't speak to a doctoral level of knowledge, it's probably not really formalized and will differ on your specialization. But just for my bachelor's degree I took the following courses: Calculus 1, Calculus 2, Vector Calculus, Elementary Linear Algebra, Differential Equations, Linear Algebra.
Those are just the courses specifically in the mathematics department. You also cover mathematics within the physics courses themselves of course. Especially in quantum mechanics and E&M. You also might be required to take more math depending on the structure of your degree program, I did a focus in chemistry as well so took more chemistry and less math than other students.
I also can't say how many hours I spent on this. But the overwhelming amount of my homework time, every night, was spent writing proofs and solving mathematical equations. To a lay person physics work probably looks no different than mathematics. It was all math all the time :) Sometimes I would have a homework assignment that was only a few "problems" that would take me a dozen hours to solve. As for aptitude, I was probably in the middle amongst other physics students, but that group overall was above average already.
Oddly, most programming seems to lack good models at intermediate levels of complexity. (In physics, those levels are called things like "chemistry" or "cellular biology"). Relational databases have a rigorous model; but what about OOP? What is it? It feels like some sort of weird, misbehaved algebra. I've been doing it a long time, but properly characterizing it escapes me. I'd pay $50 if I thought someone had the answer, but I suspect they don't. (Or if they do, it's more of an opinion).
Yes, on OOP, once I got into a big battle: We had developed an OOP repository (cache, scoreboard, etc.), then along came CMIS/CMIP, and I was asked to modify our repository to handle CMIS/CMIP.
So, off I went, got copies of as many of the CMIS/CMIP documents as I could, read and studied, learned about the registration hierarchy, etc. Finally I concluded the CMIS/CMIP OOP was just for data definitions and was not programming at all. E.g., a CMIS/CMIP object could not do even 1 + 2 = 3, if-then-else, read, write, do while, etc. So, just for storing CMIS/CMIP data, and data is all it was about, the repository we had was already up to the task.
So, CMIS/CMIP was OOP only in the sense of inheriting definitions of data. So could define an object for a computer, i.e., list all the data were going to keep on a computer, and then inherit (borrow, copy) from that definition to define a laptop computer.
on the other hand, you can (sorta) go from lambda calculus up through all the sugar of a nice Lisp. or start with types and evolve dependent types and get all the way to ZFC and theorem proving. there's ways of reasoning about imperative code mathematically too, though I know less about them.
OOP itself is more of a style, imo. you can boil it down into the things above if you want to think of it as such. I'm just not sure there's much there mathematically.
Well, to be fair, current theory for vacuum energy is 120 orders of magnitude off from observed values from what I've read (IANAPhysicist). That's a lot of runway for crackpot physics.
My favourite is the language used to describe the moons orbit around the earth. I've had a great conversation about how it works if a rod extends through the earths core to the moon (libration aside) and how it differs from other rotations we describe.
Personally, I think it may be wrong to call this "rotating" when it is an orbit with a fixed face presented to the frame of reference in question.
Massive chops to anyone prepared to deal with loonies like me, and worse!
What a cool project! As a law professor, I get a bunch of crank letters all the time too, but it's typically from people who want legal representation to defend themselves against an imagined conspiracy (often involving the CIA, China/Russia/etc., any of the usual paranoia-suspect churches, etc.). Sadly, setting up a "pay me to talk about it" service would in that case would really not help matters.
Reminds me of one of my lecturers saying he stopped responding, after a few years of teaching, to people who had built a perpetual motion machine.
Also makes me glad I moved into IT, though the bug never leaves you, for anyone in a similar position this is a wonderful book on general rel, and requires very little maths - "Visual Differential Geometry and Forms: A Mathematical Drama in Five Acts"
One source of crackpots is people who encountered "postmodernist" ideas telling them that science is sexist/racist/whatever, and who then make the jump to thinking that anyone can contribute scientific theories without having to understand the canon, because the canon is part of the sexist/racist institution.
Conversely, Einstein started as a patents clerk. He had his idea for general relativity when he read about a worker falling off his ladder. Then, with the help of a friend, he spent the next three years learning the mathematical techniques that would help him formalize his idea.
I wonder if the author could understand why no one on this board has done the same thing for people who have an idea for "an app," and, hey, they just need you to "program" it all for a 10% cut.
Well, he didn't write Facebook, but Dan Abramov only took a semester of college and is now one of Facebook's most well known engineers, due to creating Redux.
Sorry, didn’t mean to sound bitter. No offense really, bad wording, please take excuse.
My point being that lack of profound/scientific knowledge cannot be just bypassed in any area.
And while trying to skip education many end in childish pursuit of difficult or impossible goals.
The author of the article states that physics can only be learned the hard way, and from my experience he’s right.
The same is true for informatics and its application in software def. and I know so many ppl that can right code, but are absolutely illiterate about asymptotic analysis, discreet math, and relational algebra. Missing these all they miss the real picture and very often try to invent half-baked solutions to already known problems.
Regarding the social benefit - it can be gained or not depending on how good one is with social work.
I doubt that Mark didn’t apply what he learned in the university. Even though I also used to think it’s bollocks since I already knew x86 assembly, C, basic graph theory and some Perl when I got into university. I nearly dropped out.
But in reality classes I had to take about Functional programming, Design of FSM, Logical Peogramming, data mining and software requirements analysis helped me form a much better understanding. Also some of the people I met there really helped me be on track with where things are going.
So you cannot just skip this with few videos and tutorial. It is childish to think so, as it is childish to think you can invent the next general theory of everything while you don’t even have a clue what the precious theory was about.
People like to tell the story of how Einstein was not good with math… we’ll, he had a PhD from Zurich, so he must’ve been good about something to gain it. Or the story of Apple’s Steve Jobs who dropped out of university. But then he actually attended classes and Wozniak took an university degree.
I've seen a lot of self-taught doctor/pharmacists, touting the latest "antioxidant", "radical scavenging", homeopathy, hormesis... For all kind of diseases, developping their own regimen based on their experience of n=2 or 3. This has exploded with COVID. Even some friends that were presenting themselves as science-driven were taking ivermectin when they got infected and came up with all kind of justifications for it.
>Sociologists have long tried and failed to draw a line between science and pseudoscience. In physics, though, that ‘demarcation problem’ is a non-problem, solved by the pragmatic observation that we can reliably tell an outsider when we see one. During a decade of education, we physicists learn more than the tools of the trade; we also learn the walk and talk of the community, shared through countless seminars and conferences, meetings, lectures and papers. After exchanging a few sentences, we can tell if you’re one of us. You can’t fake our community slang any more than you can fake a local accent in a foreign country
I wanted so badly to find this to be sarcasm or a bit of a joke.
I hope it is there, I hope I missed it.
If not the arrogance and hubris is monumental.
Worthy of some oldschool strictly hieraracal priesthood.
We have nice roboes, leather bound books and speak many languages.
You will never understand.
You cannot understand.
Your thinking is of no interest or importance.
We shall speak the truth and ye shall listen and obey.
The earth is flat.
It has always been flat.
It shall always remain flat
All else is hersay and yes blasphemy.
We have spoken.
Historically, good ideas have often come from somewhere outside the
high priesthood, and for that sin are usually ridiclued and ostracized,
sometimes punished in hideaous ways.
Now historiclaly yes it happens.
But history does not record the 1000000 gazillion times the idea was idiotic.
We get a biased view of it when we think about pioneers.
Yet it does happen.
I know a lot of smart people.
I know a couple that I wold rate as geniuses.
All of them know far more than me in one or more diciplines.
(which is not difficult I may add)
I know a few things and a couple of specific things well.
They have all suffered my pedestrian inquiries into their realm,
and in general done so politely and I have learned so much from them
"dumbing it down" for me.
A few times I approach a topic from such an odd angle that the discourse
turns quite interesitng for both parties.
Cross pollination is a real and fascinating thing.
A few times I have been on the other end of it.
A dear friend who is a neurosurgon, which I still call brain surgery,
She is in my opinion a genius and was in the periphery of a Nobel prize.
She has called me at odd hours of the night when some technical IT disasters
has occured and she needs it to work.
If I can I try to diagnose it and talk her trought it.
(Or I have to go over there)
For her these weird spells and nonsense text strings I have her type
have no meaning to her and its all quite mysterious.
She is happy when it works again.
Just as her «victims» as I like to call them “patients” are happy to have
their brainbox doing its thing better
Given that I am “neurodivergent” she is usually fascinated with the highly inaccurate theories I have as to how our brains work just because they are at times different.
Sometimes she will prompt me for them.
We will have lunch and she will tell me about an upcoming case and describe
symptoms to me, curious as to what (an idiot) would come up with.
One thing my smart friends have in common is the ability to decompose and
leave much of the nomenclature out of it.
The specific model of abstractions and metaphors that allow people within the know
to communicate vastly faster and more accurate with each other is not a hard requirement.
to explain how something works.
This reminds me a story about my mom. She was a beautiful person, gave me and my brother all she could. She also believed in all kind of pseudo-science. Talking with her I think I gained a deeper understanding of why pseudo scientific things were alluring to her.
I remember one day as I was visiting her. She brightened up, like someone who just remembered that they know a cool new story, and told me that scientist has discovered that some people have their sixth (or sevent?) chakra open! I could not act enthusiastically over this. Tried to explain to her politely that based on what I know about the world that does not sound like the kind of thing a real scientist would or could do. She accused me of having a closed mind, and we left the topic. Better be on friendly terms than having a disagreement ruin the mood.
A few months later I was visiting with my then girlfriend. She was a medical student and my mom politely inquired what kind of doctor she wanted to be. The girlfriend told her that she is interested in specialising in endocrinology. My mom got really upset that we were using complicated words instead of talking plainly. We realised that she might not know the term, so we explained that an endocrinologist measures hormone levels, diagnoses and cures disorders of the hormone system, etc. Once explained thus, she declared that she never would have thought that hormones can be measured.
That was a really surprising to me, because I have clear memories of my mom having an operative understanding about hormones. My grandad had diabetes, and she helped him with stuff related to that. One of her friends had some hormonal disorder and she referred to it as such.
What i realised, that i understood hormones on a deeper level than her. Not the way a doctor would, but like I did know that they are molecules which signal cells in our bodies to do or not do specific things. I understood that molecules are just atoms clumped together. And I understood that atoms are just the lego bricks everything around us is built out of. I don't know how exactly one would measure the level of some hormone in ones blood, but I did understand that they are just chemicals, so through complicated analytical means they can be measured.
And then I realised that if someone doesn't know these things about hormones, then when she reads a pop-science article talking about this or that hormone, then reads a different article talking about chakras they both sound the exact same kind of gobbledok. They sound both mystical and somehow connected to health. One might hear a story about how someone gained weight after their hormones went out of whack, or one might hear a story how someone cured their depression after they unblocked their heart chakra. If you don't know better, how would you know that one is bulsh*t and the other is a measurable, real thing.
In fact here is the thing, the chakras are simpler, easier and nicer. You can see a nice drawing of them! They make sense. Hormones? I know a lot about chemistry, and more than what I would like to know about hormones secreted by the pancreas and even I can't keep all of them straight. There are many of them. They have complicated scientific names. They act in all kind of bizarro complicated ways. Too much is bad, too little is bad. Some are easier to measure analytically, some are harder. Chakras are so much simpler: they can be blocked or open, they have colours, they are associated with organs you have heard of. Simple! Also ... not real in the same sense hormones are.
So I guess now I understand how it was hard for my mom to navigate the boundary of science and pseudo-science.
You mentioned that the amateur physicists don't know enough math. Well, some of us amateur physicists have concluded that the academic physicists don't know enough math.
E.g., when I was trying to be a ugrad physics major, the prof in the E&M course tried to prove the divergence theorem. His proof was, in one word, junk. Sadly as a ungrad math major, the math department didn't prove it either. By now, sure, I've gone through fairly careful treatments including the Jacobian, ..., exterior algebra of differential forms (texts by Fleming, Rudin, Apostol, ...). Even some of those treatments are a bit fishy in places and incomplete: Physicists keep using old versions of differentials, and the math books got rid of those 50+ years ago; clean ups are not too difficult but need to be done by either physics or math.
The Riemann integral over the whole real line is fishy (smells like old fish). The improper integral approach of integrating from -a to a and then taking the limit as a goes to infinity is also fishy. There is a good clean up -- the Lebesgue theory.
Back to the divergence theorem, physics wants to have a 2 dimensional measure they write as dA and a three dimensional measure they write as dV, but there is a gap in their argument: They are necessarily working with what measure theory calls product measure and in particular Fubini's theorem, and there needs to be some orthogonality that is not made clear, in either math or physics.
I'm tired of screaming myself to a sore throat over the claims that the wave functions of quantum mechanics form a Hilbert space. Hilbert space is a math idea, and in math departments we know quite well what a Hilbert space is, a complete inner product space. The "complete" part is in the sense of Cauchy, that every Cauchy convergent sequence converges. Well, the wave functions fail that completeness assumption.
You mentioned that you can tell backgrounds just from use of language: Right, so can math people! So, when an MIT physics guy teaches quantum mechanics and says that "the wave functions are differentiable and also continuous" we know his background is in physics, not math -- EVERY differentiable function is continuous.
It goes on this way: Net, to us math people, it is the physics people who are short on the math.
Then beyond the math, some of us amateurs have some other issues with physics:
Physics in quantum mechanics keeps talking about superposition and linearity. Us math people know in fine detail just what linearity is -- it's central to linear algebra, Banach space, Hilbert space, integration, differentiation, and more. I have to question if the physics people have a clear understanding of linearity. Then there is superposition -- tough even to make a mathematically credible guess just what physics means by superposition.
The last time I was reading from Feynman's Lectures on Physics I recall, before I wanted to get my money back, that he claimed that a particle of unknown position had probability distribution uniform over all of space. WRONG! It's a trivial argument, maybe even at the middle school level, to show that no such distribution can exist.
Then setting aside the math and going for something like actual physics, a particle goes through a beam splitter such as the one in the Mach-Zehnder interferometer. On one path from the beam splitter there is a detector. We send in one particle. The beam splitter yields the wave function in two physically separated parts on two very different paths; we believe this from our experience with the full Mach-Zehnder interferometer.
This trial we get a signal from the detector. Okay, but what happens to the other part of the wave function? The quantum mechanics lectures and texts don't say.
Professor Hossenfelder, some of us amateur physics people are actually math people (e.g., with a Ph.D. degree from a world famous research university and have published peer-reviewed original research in math with theorems and proofs) and look at physics people as very short on math and also sometimes even their physics. Uh, for $50 an hour, I will tutor you in linearity, Lebesgue theory, Hilbert space, and probability theory (based on sigma algebras).
> Back to the divergence theorem, physics wants to have a 2 dimensional measure they write as dA and a three dimensional measure they write as dV, but there is a gap in their argument: They are necessarily working with what measure theory calls product measure and in particular Fubini's theorem, and there needs to be some orthogonality that is not made clear, in either math or physics.
Those are differential forms, defined explicitly in terms of submanifolds of euclidean space. Turning them into measures on the corresponding manifolds requires picking an arbitrary "unit speed" parameterization (or equivalent data) to absorb the equally arbitrary (from the intrinsic perspective) choice of embedding.
Sticking with differential forms and letting smoothness assumptions handle all the measure-theoretic difficulties for you is the principled choice and also the easy choice, so it should come as no surprise when physicists choose it.
> Physics in quantum mechanics keeps talking about superposition and linearity. Us math people know in fine detail just what linearity is -- it's central to linear algebra, Banach space, Hilbert space, integration, differentiation, and more. I have to question if the physics people have a clear understanding of linearity. Then there is superposition -- tough even to make a mathematically credible guess just what physics means by superposition.
obeys the superposition principle = has dynamics given by a linear operator. Or sometimes a bounded linear operator, continuous linear operator, etc. depending on context. Physics is no different from math in this respect.
> I'm tired of screaming myself to a sore throat over the claims that the wave functions of quantum mechanics form a Hilbert space. Hilbert space is a math idea, and in math departments we know quite well what a Hilbert space is, a complete inner product space. The "complete" part is in the sense of Cauchy, that every Cauchy convergent sequence converges. Well, the wave functions fail that completeness assumption.
State spaces in finite dimensional QM are projective Hilbert spaces, in a perfectly literal sense, with all the completeness properties you expect. You're right that intro QM mischaracterizes it though: the position (wlog momentum) "basis" is actually defined with respect to a rigged Hilbert space structure Psi \subset H \subset Psi^*. This is also the appropriate approach for the infinite dimensional case ... and a completely inappropriate approach for teaching freshmen.
> The last time I was reading from Feynman's Lectures on Physics I recall, before I wanted to get my money back, that he claimed that a particle of unknown position had probability distribution uniform over all of space. WRONG! It's a trivial argument, maybe even at the middle school level, to show that no such distribution can exist.
Again, he's teaching freshmen: don't confuse lies-to-children with genuine misunderstanding. Physicists are well aware that plane waves are not actual states.
Yup. You gave the modern treatment. What I wrote was:
> Physicists keep using old versions of differentials, and the math books got rid of those 50+ years ago; clean ups are not too difficult but need to be done by either physics or math.
So, I was talking about the "old" stuff. That is relevant because a LOT of the physics literature elementary enough to be in courses in universities just asks the student to accept that dA is a "little unit of area" and dV is "a little unit of volume" and that that is enough to define an integral. The people who write such physics are rarely or never actually thinking the modern treatment of differential forms, tangent spaces, etc. So, often a physics student is stuck with the old versions of dA and dV and with a prof who doesn't know the modern treatment either. So, that is an example of my theme: The physics people are not so good at the math.
Start with at least a good course in calculus. Then, for the divergence theorem, in one dimension that is essentially just the fundamental theorem of calculus on a closed interval on the real line. Then with multiple integrals can get a proof on any box, rectangular parallelepeped with edges parallel to the three orthogonal coordinate axes. If draw a picture and use the Jacobian for change of variable, can get a somewhat more general proof.
That's enough for most courses in E&M, Maxwell's equations, and fluid flow.
Apostol does Jordan curves, and that's a bit much; it's a strange physics course that needs Jordan curves.
The last edition of Rudin, Principles of Mathematical Analysis is a good source. With some good lectures to explain to the students just what is going on with compact sets, Rudin does not have to be too difficult or severe.
Fleming in Functions of Several Variables does both the Lebesgue integral and exterior algebra -- at times it has been taught to ugrads.
For the Lebesgue theory, I prefer either of Rudin, Real and Complex Analysis (just the first, real, half) and Royden, Real Analysis to Fleming. The Lebesgue integral does not have to be more difficult to teach or learn than the Riemann integral -- maybe the Lebesgue approach is easier than the Riemann approach where usually dig into compact sets.
Here is the fishy part of improper integrals: Rudin's Principles discusses conditionally convergent series. Then it's just an exercise that a rearrangement can be made to converge to negative infinity, positive infinity, or anything between. Well, can generalize this to improper integrals: Partition the real line into intervals of length 1, (0, 1], (1, 2], .... Then start with a function defined from a conditionally convergent infinite series, say, each interval with integral the same as one of the terms of the series. Then in the limit in the improper integral, integrate over the intervals in whatever order want, not necessarily from -a to a and, thus, converge to anything might want. So, the value of an improper integral depends all on just what order in which add up the pieces -- so that's not a very good definition and stands to resist proofs of good properties.
The Lebesgue theory gets around this issue. First, that theory just takes the given function and takes it apart into the positive part and the negative part. Second, it is easy, then, to define the integral of each part separately. If both parts have integral with absolute value infinity, then the integral of the function is not defined because it would require subtracting infinity from infinity which is not defined, even in the extended real number system. And that approach right away rules out the conditionally convergent issue. Otherwise the Lebesgue integral is defined. It also has good convergence properties, e.g., can prove a good version of Leibniz's rule.
In grad school, the department suggested Courant and Hilbert. So, I got a copy: The content didn't seem to have much to do with the math I was studying or the physics I was interested in (I lost my copy in a move).
For the Feynman Lectures, yes, I like most of it. I didn't like his treatment of the bra-ket notation, but then I don't like that notation anyway. The whole Lectures are available in PDF at
https://feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/
The move also cost me my copy of Feynman's Lectures.
There is something, maybe, US STEM field students should understand: In the US, there was The Bomb, the atomic bomb. That made a lot of people in Congress awake and afraid, and they decided that the US research universities should be the world leaders in research in the STEM fields. So, Congress appropriated a lot of money (NSF, NIH, DARPA, etc.) for US research universities and STEM field researchers. The universities like the money, e.g., commonly take 60% for "overhead" and, thus, fund the theater group, the string quartet, the English department, the art department, the new fountain in the quadrangle, the limo for the president, etc. But the STEM field profs and students also get funded. Since the members of Congress tend to be old, they also like funding medical research. For something like the Webb telescope, who's to say, that might lead to some fantastic discovery crucial for US national security (it's happened before).
Well, the Congress is smart enough to want some evaluation, grades, measures, of the work funded. In simple terms, the evaluation is to count prizes and papers in peer-reviewed journals.
Net, the big bucks say that the emphasis is on the research. It's not on the teaching. It's not on
writing books that clean up rough edges in old research. E.g., no one questions the basic correctness of Maxwell's equations, Schrödinger's equation, the divergence theorem, and polishing that material will NOT get published in the best peer-reviewed journals and is NOT the results desired from the funding. If some student wants to polish the material, the library is just off the quadrangle, and they can go for it -- or now just use the Internet.
But the emphasis is on the research. What Congress is paying for is the research that might be crucial for US national security (or medical research that might make them live another 10 years). What's wanted is the research, to be the best in the world in research, and polishing and teaching are not much of a part of that.
Actually, Congress has zero curiosity about the research and couldn't care less about the research. All Congress wants is to have the US the world leader in anything that might yield another surprise for US national security such as The Bomb. If there were no competition from Russia, China, etc., the US Congress would cut back the research funding to pennies or less.
This is what I kept trying to explain to the freshmen and sophomores I used to tutor. The physics is easy once you learn the conservations: energy flows and transforms, can you see where it goes and add it up?
The math is hard.
Same deal in calculus. Conceptually very easy, you can determine the total by adding up the amount in the slices. Calculus is easy, algebra is hard.
For anyone out there beginning their journey reading this, there is nothing I would recommend more than this: do the work; chew the pencil; become very good at algebra.
I once derived the equation in the Mark's handbook for sizing a drive shaft from first principles for a project, not knowing I could have just looked it up. I can't even imagine being able to do it now. This is what I miss, 30 years post B.S.M.E. as a programmer. I can't do the math any more, because I can't remember the algebra.
It's been 7 years for me and I'm certain I would fail a test in anything past Calc 1 now. I can still remember derivatives, limits, and basic integrals but anything past that would be a wash without going over a textbook first.
Ironically I actually did really well in multivariable calculus in college. I had tremendous trouble focusing on anything I didn't find interesting, but once I recognized that all the computer graphics papers I was reading at the time were all based in multivariable calculus and differential equations I was hooked.
I share this experience. It seems advanced math skills are hard to "mothball" properly. Either you keep using them day-to-day, or you'll will lose them real fast.
Physics is actually still pretty hard without the maths: if you imagine you have a new phenomena (e.g. a whole bunch of seemingly bizarre "elementary" particles a la hadrons before quarks) characterising them in a way that they can be modelled let alone modelling them is very hard.
I agree, but I think we're talking about slightly different things. I was more referring to the judicious division and encapsulation of concepts that we already understand very well.
More science education than science the philosophical pursuit. Which was more the concern of the folks I was tutoring.
The challenge of physics is that the relationship between concept and math reverses as the further you go.
Early on, studying Newtons laws, the concepts are way easier than the math for most people. Inertia, parabolas, friction, angles.. we can see it and use it every day.
But the current state of knowledge is that we can reliably use math to calculate phenomena that seem to have no analog in the familiar concepts that govern our everyday experience. The math of dark matter is fairly straightforward but the concept is so weird that tons of people reject it out of hand (as seen in the comments whenever it comes up on HN).
#/media/File:Animation_of_Juno_trajectory_around_Jupiter.gif){kind=link}
"A typical problem is that, in the absence of equations, they project literal meanings onto words such as ‘grains’ of space-time or particles ‘popping’ in and out of existence. Science writers should be more careful to point out when we are using metaphors. My clients read way too much into pictures, measuring every angle, scrutinising every colour, counting every dash. Illustrators should be more careful to point out what is relevant information and what is artistic freedom. But the most important lesson I’ve learned is that journalists are so successful at making physics seem not so complicated that many readers come away with the impression that they can easily do it themselves. How can we blame them for not knowing what it takes if we never tell them?"
Of course, this writing often isn't for the layperson, it's for an audience who can tell the difference between diagram, artistic license, and metaphor, but even so, it's good to think about, especially when communicating science to the general public.