Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, impaired methodology and groupthink is retarding the discovery of new physics.
The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal
Nothing is moving in the foundations of physics. One experiment after the other is returning null results: No new particles, no new dimensions, no new symmetries. Sure, there are some anomalies in the data here and there, and maybe one of them will turn out to be real news. But experimentalists are just poking in the dark. They have no clue where new physics may be to find. And their colleagues in theory development are of no help.
Some have called it a crisis. But I don’t think “crisis” describes the current situation well: Crisis is so optimistic. It raises the impression that theorists realized the error of their ways, that change is on the way, that they are waking up now and will abandon their flawed methodology. But I see no awakening. The self-reflection in the community is zero, zilch, nada, nichts, null. They just keep doing what they’ve been doing for 40 years, blathering about naturalness and multiversesand shifting their “predictions,” once again, to the next larger particle collider.
…
I don’t take this advice out of nowhere. If you look at the history of physics, it was working on the hard mathematical problems that led to breakthroughs. If you look at the sociology of science, bad incentives create substantial inefficiencies. If you look at the psychology of science, no one likes change.
Developing new methodologies is harder than inventing new particles in the dozens, which is why they don’t like to hear my conclusions. Any change will reduce the paper output, and they don’t want this. It’s not institutional pressure that creates this resistance, it’s that scientists themselves don’t want to move their butts.
How long can they go on with this, you ask? How long can they keep on spinning theory-tales?
I am afraid there is nothing that can stop them. They review each other’s papers. They review each other’s grant proposals. And they constantly tell each other that what they are doing is good science. Why should they stop? For them, all is going well. They hold conferences, they publish papers, they discuss their great new ideas. From the inside, it looks like business as usual, just that nothing comes out of it.
This is not a problem that will go away by itself.
Read more: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-present-phase-of-stagnation-in.html
The author, Sabine Hossenfelder, is a researcher fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and author of the book “Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.”
This isn’t the first time WUWT have seen this claim, renowned Theoretical Physicist Lee Smolin made similar claims in his book “The Trouble With Physics”.
The suggestion of a tremendous, pointless waste of effort, producing academic papers and good careers but very little advance, seems somehow familiar.
As Willis pointed out in his post The Picasso Problem, for decades there has been no real advance in climate science. Fundamental problems, answers to basic questions such as “how much does the world warm if you add CO2” are no closer to resolution today than they were in the 1980s.
Why is climate science stagnating? One thing we have seen over the years, in Climate Science nobody ever loses. As long as your estimated climate sensitivity is above 1.5C and not too much higher than 4.5C, your estimate will be accepted by the community as reasonable. If your sensitivity estimate is less than 1.5C, you’re a denier. If you make a truly ridiculous claim, such as predicting an ice free Arctic in the next couple of years, you might attract a pithy comment from Gavin Schmidt. But overall everyone’s career is safe, providing you churn out lots of papers which conform to the community view of what your results should be. There is no sense of urgency, no sense of concern, that the field of climate science is not advancing.
Similarly in Physics, according to Lee Smolin and now to Sabine Hossenfelder, your career is fine as long as your research proposal falls within the parameters of what everyone else thinks it should be.
If you want to ask uncomfortable questions like “Since the observable Universe is relativistic, why is most string theory based on the assumption that space and time are immutable?“, you may have trouble getting your grant proposal approved, because your grant proposal will be reviewed by scientists who built their careers writing papers based on flawed assumptions which you want to question.
The point is the malaise we have seen in the mainstream climate community is not limited to climate science, it is far more widespread. From rampant scientific fraud in the medical community, to stagnation in the climate science and physics communities, career scientists appear to be prioritising safety and job security ahead of progress. And nobody seems to have a solution for how to fix this problem.
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My professor Dr. Leventhal (Imperial college) often use to say something like ‘science is advanced by individual endeavours of human mind’
Here’s how Sabine Hossenfelder describes the process.
So, it’s pretty much an individual endeavor of the human mind.
Further to the above, committees, and grant proposals are poison to scientific progress.
Hossenfelder’s blog is http://backreaction.blogspot.com . She pulls no punches. I highly recommend it.
“it’s pretty much an individual endeavor of the human mind”
Except increasingly in some fields, like particle physics, the “tools” have become so complex and large that many scientists (sometimes scores) are involved in the same experiment. They can’t all walk around and think. Most are attending to nuts and bolts.
Pretty much all physicists are brilliant people. Unfortunately the problema they seek to solve have very little to do with any normal human experience , and they are presented out of the infinity of the mathematically possible. Physics was pretty stuck before Einstein came along. The individuals who can push the science into a new era are not only brilliant, they are not bound by the orthodoxy. History shows us they are very rare.
And they are sceptics!
“The suggestion of a tremendous, pointless waste of effort, producing academic papers and good careers but very little advance, seems somehow familiar.”
The situation that today’s “research” universities are in is very, very similar to the position that the great Monasteries of Europe found themselves in after governments became stabilized and the printing press was developed. They had great wealth and a great following, but no true purpose anymore except to provide a comfortable living for their adherents, which was easy to do because of the immense wealth they had accumulated. (Before Henry VIII dissolved them, estimates are that the monasteries owned and controlled 1/4 – 1/3 of all of the productive farmland in the British Isles, and the rest of Europe was similar)
I now think we are in the same situation today, and some vast social upheaval and reshaping of society is going to be required before any of this becomes rational. Sadly, every time that period of history has come round it always brings with it a lot of violence, and a lot of death. That’s where this is headed now. I used to have hope for the future – i have none now. Maybe I do for the different future, but rivers of blood will run first, just like they have before.
Sad but true.
If / when the global warming narrative is exposed as an exploitative scam of the elites, after thousands have died needlessly of fuel poverty, universities and academics will provide soft targets for rage of the masses.
There is too much specialisation, so nobody can see the larger picture. And too many highly educated people, instead of clever people. My ex-dragon was highly educated, but would still put the plastic kettle on the gas cooker…..
R
Sabine Hossenfelder is about the most loopy unscientific person you could ever meet, that anyone would call her a theoretical physicist is an insult to the term. She is your normal run of the garden mill quack, pure and simple.
Hello Lumo!
Well, theoretical Physics isn’t scientific. It isn’t empiricism based on experiment, so by it’s very nature it cannot be science, nor can it prove anything or increase the knowledge base… So the people in Theoretical fields do tend to be “Loopy” and imaginative…. But that doesn’t make them, or their ideas about something, invalid… Only experiment can do that LdB…. and it is pretty much what she is talking about.
Your word salad is missing an argument.
Zero substance, all ad hominem. Dummer esel
A paraphrase of Dr. Max Plank’s famous dictum…
“Science advances, one funeral at a time.”
Who’s funeral we’re waiting for? Not Hossenfelder’s, she’s not the authority slowing down stuff.
Not that I want names, I just wanted to point out it is more the grant system that keeps new approaches not coming. See Peter Shor’s comment in the blog.
Indeed, but when politics mixes with science only “wanted” results are rampant.
Or maybe this is a part of the problem (Tony Rothman/Physicist, excerpt, entire article is worth a read):
“Nevertheless, as a physicist travels along his (in this case) career, the hairline cracks in the edifice become more apparent, as does the dirt swept under the rug, the fudges and the wholesale swindles, with the disconcerting result that the totality occasionally appears more like Bruegel’s Tower of Babel as dreamt by a modern slumlord, a ramshackle structure of compartmentalized models soldered together into a skewed heap of explanations as the whole jury-rigged monstrosity tumbles skyward.
It would be surprising if the strange world of subatomic and quantum physics did not lead the field in mysteries, conceptual ambiguities and paradoxes, and it does not disappoint. The standard model of particle physics, for instance (the one containing all the quarks and gluons), has no fewer than 19 adjustable parameters, about 60 years after Enrico Fermi exclaimed, “With four parameters I can fit an elephant!” Suffice to say, “beauty” is a term not frequently applied to the standard model.”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275701468_The_Man_Behind_the_Curtain
Did Thomas Kuhn address any of this in his “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”?
Yes. He said scientists will keep following the old paradigm even though observational evidence contradicts it.
He has no answer as to how to breakout if the wrong path has been selected.
It is important to be able to recognize when the parrot is dead.
John Horgan in his book “the end of science” created the term ‘ironic’ science to describe science work that has no basis in reality.
Ironic science looks like science and can go on forever, but will never converge on the truth as it concerns theoretical entities that have no basis in reality.
The point is it time to relook at the entire cosmological problem as it is a fact that there are more and more anomalies concerning every aspect of the standard components due to multi spectrum data at all redshifts.
The Frenk Principle:
“If the Cold Dark Matter Model does not agree with observations, there must be physical processes, no matter how bizarre or unlikely, that can explain the discrepancy.”
The Strong Frenk Principle: (2 versions)
1: “The physical processes must be the most bizarre and unlikely…”
2: “If we are incapable of finding any physical processes to explain the discrepancy between CDM models and observations, then observations are wrong.”
– George Efstathiou
https://www.astro.umd.edu/~ssm/mond/DMOct05.pdf
Karl Popper also chimed in about dogma and tradition in science. Science advances when it is questioned, not when it is defended. In essence the ‘real’ scientists are the ones who challenge the accepted, the ‘loopy’ ones.
Sabine Hossenfelder and Eric are both pointing out that physics and climate science are stuck in their paradigms. When we hear CAGW supported because 97% of scientists think in a certain way, we see a group of people who are hide bound in their paradigm. Likwise, when physicists have difficulty publishing a paper which would shift the paradigm of the majority of physicists, it is strong evidence that physics is stuck in a paradigm. Ms. Hossenfelder sees the physics side of this more clearly than I do, thus I would not argue a contrary position. However, climate science is stuck in the mode of supporting the paradigm primarily because there are billions of dollars distributed to scientists who support the paradigm and little available to those of us who question it.
It isn’t so much that 97% of climate scientists think a certain way. It’s more that 99.7% of grants are for papers that come up with certain conclusions. Naturally if you pay people to think a certain way, you will get a lot of applications pointing out how firmly people think your way. The same is true in the other sciences. Who would give a grant for a scientist that wants to study a radical new way of doing physics? No, the grants are all for small increments on existing theories.
The only solution is to stop paying for rubbish science. Isaac Asimov once wrote that (not his exact words), “If you keep paying for bad philosophers and not for good plumbers, you will have neither good philosophers, nor good plumbers. Neither your theories, nor pipes, will hold water”.
Another path is to decrease the cost of science. Of course this will not solve the problem, but more independent scientists will have a go. See for example this autosampler that costs $500 and substitutes one that costs $50,000:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322363581_Osmar_the_open-source_microsyringe_autosampler
You can find many other examples here:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/hardwarex/issues
My point was not that 97% of anyone thinks in a certain way, but rather than when a scientific hypothesis is said to be supported by a beauty contrast then we are no longer discussing science.
BH
“Climate Science” may be called a science, but it’s not – it’s a hoax (think: beanie babies & Bitcoins). Treating this hot, steaming mess like a science is like conflating astrology & biology. If you can’t separate a simple hoax and real science, you’ll probably have an even harder time crafting a meaningful “philosophy” that addresses both….
“Climate Science” claims not to make predictions (only “forecasts), has no recognized statement of theory (“CO2 is going to kill us, oceans are rising, and it’s worse than we thought” IS NOT A COJENT STATEMENT OF THEORY); there are no generally recognized mathematical equations that accurately track natural results (computer models are not equations describing physical reality) and produce testable predictoins. We can measure the transit of a planet across a skas millions of light-years away, but we still can’t measure the earth’s temperature (tree rings don’t count).
Smolin observed that since Newton, physics produced great leaps forward (revolution?) roughly every 25 years; Hossenfelder makes somewhat the same point in describing the sheer number of wasted “scientific” man-hours spent writing papers about theories that are (so far at least) 100% wrong. (Ok, I understand investing SOME time in string theory & SUSY, but physics has been betting the ranch on this non-productive stuff for over 30+ years).
Retrospective reviews of highly creative activities (physics, music, poetry…) generally show physicists are most creative before age 35. Today’s 60-70 year-old theoretical physicists have had a hammer-lock on the field since about 1980.
Here’s my hot tip for the physicists. Scrap the multiverse interpretation, scrap the Copenhagen interpretation an investigate the implications of Bohmian Mechanics for the underlying nature of space time.
Once they figure that out, they can admit they have no idea how the Universe started. The Big Bang theory is the equivalent of Newton’s gravity . Merely a description, not an explanation at all and ridiculously deficient.
Writing pop physics books has been a hugely profitable cottage industry for the likes of Green, Smolin, et al. Especially since the popular science mags have falln’ under the junk Climate Change trance.
Actually, computer models are essentially complex sets of equations, that are used to try to describe reality. The problem is, if the output of a computer model does not match reality, rather than abandon it as incorrect, climate scientists argue with the data (aka reality).
Pretty well correct except I would be ok with them “arguing” with the data. They don’t argue so much as torture and disfigure it!
This idea of groupthink in fields other than climate change pops up from time to time here. And every time I just add in that it’s the same for cometary science especially those scientists churning out papers on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, subject of the Rosetta mission. I’ve corrected several of their papers and argued for others to be corrected to no avail. The morphology team is the OSIRIS consortium of 9 universities and research institutions that built the Rosetta cameras. They continually misidentify features at the 100-metre scale (on a km-scale comet) and therefore misinterpret what they see. Their mapping and morphology work is used for understanding the morphological evolution and from there, the composition, pristine nature and its formation 4.5Gyr ago.
I’m certain there will be a mass-retraction scenario in due course…or at least, a demand for one, which will be circumvented with piecemeal corrigenda that are totally ignored. I know this because my existing corrigenda are being ignored in subsequent citations i.e. mistakes are being propagated.
The underlying problem is groupthink. This includes paying an unhealthy deference to precedent (i.e. citing important seminal works on 67P that contradict your results but nevertheless saying your results confirm their findings).
Hi Scute
67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet, showing a lion holding its pray
was made by a pre-human civilization and was dug up in Central Siberia by Russian archaeologists/ 🙂
Scute
This is an interesting phenomenon (citing defective works that confirm current errors). Surely that is the core problem with climate science as a philosophy? It emerges from the
internal review” paradigm.
It is easy to accept that GHG’s will increase the temperature of any atmosphere to which they are added. It is really hard to accept that there could be emergent phenomena that counter-act all that warming, because it goes against the easily accessible and simplistic consequence.
Those who study systems, like systems engineers, are used to the emergence of unpredictable (not just unpredicted) consequences. For example increasing the % of males hired to assemble iPhones from 30% to 50% has brought forth problems that were not anticipated, and which cannot be detected by interviewing every single employee at length in advance. People in groups act different from people as individuals.
No one is surprised by this, over coffee, but when it comes to physical systems there is a groupthink response: if we understand the individual components of the system, then we can predict the operation and outcome. Astrophysicists assume this over and over.
When I worked at IMAX as an assistant to the inventor Bill Shaw back in its earliest days in Galt, Ontario, he told me a story. He was asked in the 60’s to build a device that could stop a memory platter set rotating at 20,000 RPM within 2 turns, max. These were stacks of one ft diameter platters each of which could hold a few hundred KB of data. If they coasted to a stop they were quickly erased by the head. He planned to do this by placing fixed plates very close to each platter and injecting water into the small space between the rotating platter and the fixed plates. Water at that thickness and relative speed is like cold molasses.
So they built it and spun it up and fired the water into the spaces and lo, it really worked well! One Brownie point for the genius engineers. The platters came to a stop in about 1 turn. Cheap, easy, worked to spec.
The emergent phenomenon (visible with 20:20 hindsight) was that the entire welded angle iron guts of the table on which they were working and to which everything was attached tore away from the frame and began spinning together. Oh yeah! Inertia! Stored energy! Dang. They got so involved in their solution they overlooked, in a groupthink manner, something that would emerge from their solution.
This lesson (about coming to a stop quickly) was later applied to the problem that in 1968-9 the IMAX projector worked, but could not run above 13 frames per second. It turned out the inertia of the high speed film landing on the aperture plate was so large it tore the film to pieces. There is a great video online about how this was resolved by the time of the World’s Fair in Osaka, 1970 where it was demonstrated publicly for the first time.
But it is even harder to accept that there are positive feedbacks that will cause it to fry the planet.
So Crispin,
if climate scientists find it hard to believe that emergent effects that might reduce global
warming why do you find it so hard to believe that there might be emergent effects that
amplify it? Is that not another example of groupthink?
Because evidence for emergent effects that decrease the amount of warming are all around us, while evidence for emergent effects that increase the amount of warming have yet to be found anywhere outside computer models which assume they must be present.
Well positive reinforcement in nature always leads to a change in state or in a runaway system. Examples of positive feedbacks are 1)fruit ripening 2)childbirth 3) Blood clotting . All those examples result in a change of state. Since the earth doesnt change state even over billions of years and there hasnt been runaway global warming even when CO 2 levels have been over 15 times higher, positive feedback doesnt exist for the climate system.
Positive feedback in complex chaotic systems causes oscillation, not runaway change.
A natural system that illustrates this clearly is the Cepheid variable star:
https://ptolemy2.wordpress.com/2018/07/22/cepheid-variable-stars-what-light-do-they-shed-on-back-radiation-feedbacks-and-climate-oscillations/
“why do you find it so hard to believe that there might be emergent effects that
amplify it?”
Because, if they existed, we wouldn’t be here to ask the question. Our ancestors would have been wiped out by runaway global warming millions of years ago, when CO2 levels were much higher.
Those who actually know about these things are aware that you don’t get stable results from a system that has positive feedback. That alone is enough to completely discount any ‘global warming’ model that relies on them.
Quite frankly, it’s pathetic that anyone in science takes any of this crap seriously when it’s so easy to disprove. But I guess they won’t have to worry about grants for science when people are sick of the nonsense and demand that governments stop funding it.
“Emergent” is useful because it can not be disproven.
Any stable state should be assumed to be the product of various forcings and feedbacks, both positive and negative. The clear historical evidence for boundaries indicates strongly that both negative and positive feedbacks grow with deviation from a central region of stability. Ergo, such a system has a degree of inherent stability.
A change of forcing is different. The history of Earth indicates that without a doubt we live in such a system.
I don’t actually think the underlying problem is groupthink. I think that that is a symptom. The underlying problem is the publish or perish approach to modern science. These people have performance criteria requiring so many published papers that they can’t actually do good science. Worse, people that write a lot of papers are promoted above people that do good science, simply because they outweigh them in the number of papers written.
I have read a few of these papers (in the management field), and they are largely a complete waste of time. Rubbish methodologies leading to predetermined conclusions.
Hivemind
Is it too presumptuous for a layman to suggest that science is disappearing up its own backside of self congratulation?
It seems to me that science is now held as the new religion. We have abandoned religion of old and the world hails science as the new dawn because a few conundrums, amongst the myriad conundrums the world faces seem to have been solved.
Medicine has taken strides with the gnome, electronics with the microprocessor, warfare with guidance systems, surveillance with satellites, communications with smartphones and all the other breakthroughs humanity has made in the last 50 years or so.
And yet, we are so far away from where we want to be. These milestones are merely man’s first stumbling steps at science. Supercomputers can give us almost more solutions than we have questions, but it seems to me that scientists largely ignore the answers they get and keep asking the questions, no matter how ludicrous simply because answers can be churned out and they have a selection to pick from, one of which seems to answer their question.
And I cite by way of example the recent article on WUWT titled: Could an anti-global warming atmospheric spraying program really work?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/11/24/could-an-anti-global-warming-atmospheric-spraying-program-really-work/
I mean, seriously? With all we don’t know about climate change, which anyone with a functioning couple of brain cells could tell you is much more than we do know, scientists waste time and money on crackpot research to answer a question no sane individual would seriously consider asking.
Indeed, my example isn’t a clever scientific question, it’s one an idiot like me would ask after a lifetime of digesting the MSM garbage I have been exposed to. It’s the type of insane question ill informed drunk men discuss in the pub and wake up the next morning wondering why they are dressed in a clown outfit, in bed with a donkey, wondering who they offended the night before.
Predicating climate issues on the day long existence of the the great crested, slimy, horn toed, natter-jack weevil when a cow fart could wipe out a whole community is just the most insane proposition anyone could conceive, yet we read about it daily. Some major construction project is delayed by years, roads by decades and god forbid someone suggests a tunnel, it now has to wait 50 years whilst said community is allowed to populate the planet. Even then it’s designated the ‘eastern’ western’ ‘northern’ ‘southern ‘ ‘lesser spotted’ ‘long tailed’ ‘long eared’……..variant and every other tunnel in the world is stopped because the darling wee beasties are threatened, despite them carrying some disgusting disease that threatens mankind.
It’s science for the sake of science. Nothing to do with moving forward, and when something like carbon dioxide thermodynamic cycles for nuclear power conversion comes along to actually solve a problem we have (that of reducing size and complexity of nuclear power production) it’s swamped by the noise of idiotic research into things that just don’t matter. (details here: https://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/beacons/breakthroughs/carbon-dioxide-turbines/)
I might be completely wrong, in which case so is 90% of the planet who are laymen like me, and our political and scientific elite are just not listening to us, the people who pay their grossly over inflated salaries.
My father use to sit me on his knee and warn me to be weary of the “silver tongue devils” (blowhards) out there as well as “men in grey suits” (sharks) ,which one are you????
[The mods can reliably assure you that no grey suites were worn out in the pursuit of the silver-tongued HotScot. (T’was plaidly not flannel either!) .mod]
If I lived in a Grey suite I would paint it. Toot suite!
Science related to the Human diet has also stagnated for decades, since the McGovern Committee in 1977, that demonized fat and praised carbohydrates. This, in my opinion, has lead to the premature deaths of probably millions.
But science always corrects itself, eventually. A few “skeptics” begin to see contrary results, and in the case of diet, see real improvements in people’s health by not following the consensus. Papers start to be published; a trickle at first, then it snowballs. The same thing will eventually happen in Physics and climate science. Eventually.
I guess I missed the memo on that one…..
Start with the premise; everything you believe you know is a lie. Start from there and re-evaluate from scratch everything you want to know. It clears the cobwebs 🙂
seriously?
How long would it take you or anyone to rederive from scratch a mobile phone? It is way
beyond the capacity of any single person. You would have to study general relativity to understand the GPS chip, quantum mechanics to understand semiconductors, material physics to work out the gorilla glass, computer science to understand the programming etc. etc. You have to take the vast majority of modern science on trust to even begin to think about doing research.
Percy Jackson
That being the case, it should be easy for the scientific community that developed the mobile phone to demonstrate by empirical means, that CO2 causes the planet to warm.
Yet there has not ever been a credible, successful field study completed which shows it.
Why is that?
We don’t take it on trust. We take it on results.
Relativity works. Quantum mechanics works. Material physics works. They all allow us to make predictions that prove true in the real world.
‘Climate science’ does no such thing. It’s Fake Science that produces Fake Results.
You want to re-work the entire world’s economy, spend trillions of dollars on unproven energy schemes, and when asked for data your only response is “trust me”.
And you wonder why nobody takes you seriously.
Mark W
“You want to re-work the entire world’s economy, spend trillions of dollars on unproven energy schemes, and when asked for data your only response is “trust me”.
And you wonder why nobody takes you seriously.”
The problem is that lots of people do take that kind of thinking seriously.
The world is full of Chicken Littles who want to think it is all coming to an end and it’s all our fault. No different than ancient civilizations thinking everything that goes wrong is caused by gods that are mad at us and if we only sacrifice a few souls to them everything will be good.
Eventually, may be, but that may take thousands of years.
I just read Ms Hossenfelder’s blog and I have read Smolin’s book long ago. When I was young I felt that I don’t understand particle physics and theoretical physics. Studies did not help a lot. Still perplexed – as were the other students. Fine mathematics but what has it to do with reality.
If “climate science” as practiced today becomes enshrined in policy, research on climate will come to a complete halt. All contrary data will be destroyed. Game over.
Sometimes the good research has already been done, but was forgotten or suppressed. I had to “relearn” economics after coming across Ludwig von Mises. Finally all the things that had bothered me about the modern orthodoxy were cleared up, like scales falling from my eyes.
Particle physics suffers from diminishing returns. The description of experiments to test new theories all too often begins with “once we maneuver the two black holes close enough…”.
“Once we build a particle collider the circumference of Earth, …”
Oh for crying out loud…just make up something….like it’s always done
I’m retired and haven’t published in 12 or 13 years. But this sure doesn’t sound like any physicists that I ever collaborated with. They would have sold their eyeteeth for a major discovery, maybe their left arm, if the discovery was big enough. Discoveries continue apace — but since they are by definition in early days, their consequences are unclear: gravity waves, an accelerating unit universe, rotation curves of the galaxies. Sounds like Ms. Hossenfelder needs to quit complaining about others and go to work. Their won’t be a lot of low hanging fruit until someone (e.g., Ms. Hossenfelder) breaks a truly hard problem. Go to work!
Lee Smolin said something similar in his book “The Trouble With Physics”.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/10/12/the-trouble-with-physics-another-branch-of-science-captured-by-groupthink/
I like Lee, he once answered a question I sent; I asked him whether the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the universe might be an artefact caused by time dilation from our vantage point due to the higher density of the early universe – looking back in time to the primordial universe is kindof like looking down the mouth of a black hole.
He said no, the time dilation has already been accounted for.
Second that. Probably because he’s a bit of a maverick. Way out somewhere on the perimeter!
Jim is right and you have added another name in lee Smolin who yes is like her, a quack. To say that either of them represents mainstream physics is a bit like saying the Pope represents Muslims. In any field there are those who did enough to get a degree but failed to actually understand anything.
The funny part with grouping these two crazies together which none of this forum would understand is they actually are at opposite ends of the crazy spectrum and agree on nothing. I believe it started when “Aunt Bee” as she likes to be known reviewed a Lee Smolin book.
Another interesting connection is one of the better physicists around who the CAGW crowd hates in Lubos Motl actually considers and call both crackpots.
Having all these names linked who are in there own 3 way feud is actually quite funny 🙂
That’s what they said about Einstein. And Darwin. And Copernicus. I’ll pick the wackos for my team. At least they have original ideas.
Mozart-1
Saltieri- no score
Where would we be without the first wacko who thought he could tame fire?
The core point both Smolin and Sabine made is theoretical physics is failing to advance.
It might be that they just need a bigger particle accelerator or something, but I think its also reasonable to give a hearing to suggestions like Smolin’s, that the method theorists use to handle relativity is failing them, or Sabine’s suggestion that physicists are wasting their effort on non problems.
My guess is they don’t need a bigger particle accelerator, but that they need a bigger magnet.
A really, really big magnet to find some new physics observations.
Big, non linear particle accelerators need big magnets. Except for finding the real estate and funding that may be the biggest problem.
“The core point both Smolin and Sabine made is theoretical physics is failing to advance.”
It’s all relative. They could debate that point, but that does not make them right in anything else. Physics long ago left the realm of common sense, and those that do not understand the new ways long for the old ways, even the newest generations. Nevertheless, physics did advance, amazingly well. Now that the “easy” results have been picked, it is harder to move further. Everything experimental requires more money and bigger teams, and everything theoretical requires more math and more genius. What we get is more science by speculation and more calls for diversity and equality. And quacks. When few can understand the real science, quacks prosper.
Some haven’t accepted quantum theories yet. It’s no surprise that string theories are hated.
Jim,
See my comment below @ur momisugly 1:48.
Go to Luboš Motl (the Reference Frame ) and search on the names in this post.
Seriously don’t unless you like a good dose of toxic, Lubos does not like either let us just leave it at that.
Motl has the problem that he sees no error in what he does, and he’s seriously toxic in writing style. It is a shame that he makes himself so poisonous reading. He’s also a russophile, which makes me feel really bad; after what Soviet Union did to whole East Europe, it is rather difficult to understand why nationalist like Motl is so pro Putin’s Russia.
Motl grew up under communism. It’s not difficult to understand his stands, he explains them well. He is only “poisonous” to those who disagree. He certainly is not Politically Correct — but that does not make him wrong.
Go back and look at his writings when trouble first started in the Ukraine.
Really he just doesn’t agree with or follow the normal science etiquette in politely pointing out you are wrong he uses a sledgehammer. He has been wrong on a few occasions but his strength is he can break most problems down to mathematics, where others can not. For grads with theories he is you worst nightmare and your best test of your pet theory 🙂
I think you got it all wrong and I also think Lubos Motl is very misguided in here. But it is not rare that great minds don’t agree on things, and only history will tell who was right on what.
I value Hossenfelder as a thinker, and Motl as a string theorist, but not the other way around. Motl in horrible in philosophical questions he trods on.
*is* horrible in
However I think that Motl is correct that, unfortunately, a lot of protest and dissent against mainstream science including in the blogosphere, is not pure search for truth but is poisoned by envy of intelligence which turns into a form of general anti-intellectualism. Call it an intellectual penis envy. This often causes bloggers to turn on each other as well as lash out at the establishment. The ego must die in the search for truth.
The history has bolted, Lubos has contributed some fine papers on physics, correct countless errors on physics pages on wikipedia and to this day participates on advanced physics forums but can be a complete ar$e. Sabine does indeed have some interesting takes on philosophical questions and is probably a good mother and wife. That is pretty much how it will be recorded in history.
Dark energy, dark matter, multiverse, string theory. It’s all a work of fiction, paid for by taxpayers.
It’s all a work of philosophy, which may be fantasy, faith, science, or unknowable. At this time, with near-observation and deduction, these ideas seem to intersect with, in the best case, faith, or, in the worst case, unknowable (e.g. theories of origin based on myth, assertion/assumption, and inference). They are also post-normal models of “consistent with”, which passes for science outside of the near-frame, observable, reproducible, and deduced. People want to believe, something, and political congruence is the mark of modern civilization.
I have no qualifications to give me any hope at all of understanding these concepts. I guess I do react a bit against the idea of dark energy, strings, and branes, perhaps for no better reason than they seem so alien to my thought processes. But doesn’t the confirmation of the Higgs, and the detection of gravity waves, represent some progress at least?
ps – always liked the Multiverse idea. Seems quite logical to me, and the only thing I ever heard that could make some sense of quantum weirdness.
I partly disagree. Dark matter is an answer to inconvenient observation of rotation of galaxies. It is posited to bring observations in accord with laws of gravity. No one has ever observed it directly. If you believe in it, you are limited only by your fantasy. Theorists believe that it is composed of particles, just like visible matter.
Dark energy is more theoretical, posited to explain an observed(?) acceleration of the expansion of the Universe. This observation is more indirect and has much larger error margins. I am old enough to remember the time when oldest Earth rocks were older than the Universe. The discrepancy was resolved by a discovery of two classes of Cepheids, variable stars which were used to measure the Universe -and suddenly the Universe was 15 billion years old, not 4 billion.
String theory is a brave attempt to create a Theory of Everything. Unfortunately, it requires many dimensions beyond the three (plus time) we are used to. There are almost infinitely many ways to account for these additional dimensions, and each of them comes with its own set of not yet observed particles. It might well be the Theory of Everything, but right now it is a Theory of Anything.
Multiverse – I prefer not to know anything about it.
As von Neumann is reported to have said, “With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.” String theory seemingly has an infinitude of parameters (e.g. in how the extra dimensions are all curled up) which just seems crazy. I’ve only ever dipped my little toe into the ocean of string theory, but I sure hope it turns out to be nonsense. It just seems too arbitrary and complex to be a good candidate for TOE.
“and suddenly the Universe was 15 billion years old, not 4 billion.”
At least this time the Astronomers’ did not do a Lord Kelvin and try to constrain Geology to the results of a physical model of planetary cooling with the flawed assumption of a totally solid earth.
Maybe it’s just the professional courtesy of one observational science to another, or perhaps we are slowly beginning to discard the hubris that so clogs up the “Settled Science” TM that is ruled by models which do not agree with data.
We should go back to traditional ideals of free research of free men. A patent clerk with good theoretical background has a better position than a junior scientist teaching at an university if professors judging his/her papers prefer to the ideals instead of giving deep state style favors to each other.
Scientific peer review favors conjectures over validation. Students (below PhD) should just critically repeat existing papers. We should replace scientific journals with research pages of the universities (and other’s). These publish research for public review that others can do. Criticism given to others should be highly appreciated when researcher progresses in his/her career.
Master’s papers? No one would read them. They are largely sycophantic and boring. It is at that level that the paradigms are enforced.
Agree that no one reads Master’s papers. Why are they written? Could they do something more useful?
Of course they’re sycophantic. That’s how you pass. On the other hand, it is possible to tweak the professor’s nose if you are willing to take a risk. I did and he didn’t dare fail me. On the other hand, he did give me the lowest mark he could get away with.
Sycophantic and boring? Geez, Crispin, I find that a Master’s thesis or two are the first things I read when I want to get up to speed with the current “state of the art” of some long rusty gateway of knowledge. But I’m talking Engineering, not Physics….
Engineering is progressing. It ‘s results get tested.
We need to expand near-frame observation and deduction, and leave logical domain conflation and inference behind. Perhaps a venture beyond the fringe of our solar system, to confirm or reject the fidelity of signals received from without.
i dont understand this obsession with CO2; explain glaciation. Demonstrating how different the glacial earth is from present would stop the CO2 business cold.
Traditional ideals of free research of free men didn’t work out too well for Halton ARP when he carefully pointed to examples of discordant redshifts. Even his Nobel didn’t save him from being denied telescope time and calculatedly insulted by his peers.
I’m still dubious whether his ideas have been given a fair evaluation, especially since if he is correct we will need to bin rather a lot of cosmology.
When I was studying physics back in the late ’60’s and early ’70’s it was referred to as cookbook physics. At my small liberal arts uni they were doing x-ray crystallography. Most of the PHD holders had their degrees in this subject area and all they did was pick a different crystal to analyze every couple years. Write it up for the journals and they were all set for the next grant requests.
“Any change will reduce the paper output, and they don’t want this.”
That is when you get money for producing ‘quantity’. Quantity in quotations, quantity in accepted (!) articles in scientific magazines, quantity in ‘being in the news’ etc.
In the old Sovjet Plan Economy glass factories were paid for the number of tons of glass windows they were producing. It was the most easy only to produce thick windows. But the market asked thinner windows as well. So the system was changed and the factories became paid for the number of square meters of windows they produced. Wanting lower costs for raw materials, the factories than decided to produce only (!) thin windows……
You get what you ask. If you pay for quantity, you will never get (the needed) quality.
It’s the inevitable result of governments funding ‘science’ with taxpayers’ money. Eisenhower warned about it many years ago.
Government science funding needs to be slashed, it not eliminated. Companies will pay for science that’s actually useful, and the Fake Science will simply disappear.
Good review by Eric Worrall. When I graduated in 1962, I thought there were far to may particles to remember then.
But Worrall shifted over to ask the question “Why is climate science stagnating?”
Because governments are putting huge amounts of money into funding anything that enhances its power and revenues. So the world is again suffering “government science”. One previous example was that the Solar System rotated around the Vatican, using the then precise center of the universe,
Another, of course, was the murderous concept and application of “Lysenkoism”, from the 1920s to 1964.
However over the last decade, Svensmark and his team as well as work by Shaviv have made great strides with the cosmic ray-magnetic field variation-real climate change variation.
Especially, the part when authorities in Europe tried to prevent Svensmark from using the accelerator to confirm his theory in the lab.
Another bogus concept has been the notion that a committee can “manage” a national economy. First there is no such thing as a discrete national economy. The original tout behind the formation of the Federal Reserve System was that it could prevent the financial setbacks that preceded recessions. There has been 18 recessions since the Fed opened its doors in January 1914.
This has been an incredible display of audacity.
But it is minor compared to the audacity behind the ambition to “manage” the temperature of the nearest planet.
Whew!
I appreciate the analogy between physics and climate science. Much of it, as we know from the “peer” review system in climate publications, Climate Gate, and the like, that there is an “old boys network” which tends to suppress the work of those not part of the network. “Old boys” I use in the sense of past pupils of English Public Schools. Think “alumni”.
However there is much that sounds like “sour grapes” from Sabine Hossenfelder. Theoretical physics must be a difficult discipline. Not many have really made it to the top. So, is she referring to only theoretical physics, or is she referring to the whole scope of physics? If the latter then she could not be more wrong. Think in terms of the advances in particle physics (LHC, FermiLab, and the like), results from the Hubble and other space telescopes, and recent advances in the application of quantum physics (entanglement and computation, for example).
Practical physics is very expensive and will always win the lion’s share of funds available to the whole discipline. Is this, for her, the difficulty? If so, why? It seems to me Stephen Hawking managed to gain support for the directions he wished to take. On the other hand, practical physicists, such as Rutherford, always managed to find support to build the instrumentation they could not otherwise obtain.
The big difference between physics and climate science is, however, what the vast amounts of money are being spent for. I would guess that many of us appreciate why the LHC cost many billions and the proposed Chinese accelerator many times more. Not many of us appreciate the similar amount of money spent on chasing the proverbial climate rainbow.
There is a close analogy between particle physics and climate science, but a crucial difference. In the former the bulk of theorists work on confirming the “standard model”, but the hope is to find some phenomenon that doesn’t fit. In contrast the bulk of climate scientists work on confirming the “CO2 hypothesis”, but woe betide anyone who dares to mention any phenomenon that doesn’t fit.
Particle physics is thus still a healthy science, but climate science is now largely theology.
“The non-falsifiable hypotheses works this way, ‘whatever happens is consistent
with my hypothesis.'” – Dr. John R. Christy, https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/users/john.christy/christy/ChristyJR_Written_EP_110308.pdf
The big money is inventing epi-cycles that explain how CO2 is responsible for everything.
I have an example about this present culture that physical science does not allow any new and radical ideas. In Finland is my country man Tuomo Suntola who has a remarkable career in developing new physical methods and innovations. His first R&D work was a development a thin film humidity sensor Humicap for Vaisala Oy. It has been a market leader in meteorological humidity measurements since its introduction in 1979.
His second development work was the development of ALD (Atomic Layer Deposition ) method for manufacturing semiconductors. This technology is used to manufacture ultra-thin material layers for a variety of devices such as computers, smartphones, microprocessores and memory devices enabling high performance in small size.
On May 22, 2018 Tuomo Suntola won Finland’s take on the Nobel science prizes. The 74-year-old was awarded the Millennium Technology Prize worth one million euros ($1.18 million).
What is more, he has developed a new theory called the Dynamic Universe (DU) theory. It is a holistic description of the observable physical reality. DU relies on absolute time and distance as coordinate quatitities essential for human comprehension and shows relativity in terms of local energy unit.
According to my understanding this theory challenges Einstein’s relativity theory. According to Suntola, he could not get this paper published in any respected journal. So, he wrote a book about his theory and used his own money to get it published.
Dr. Antero Ollila
How does the DU theory account for the time differences experienced by earth satellites?
The author of this article claims that GPS coordinates would be skewed by miles in just one day were it not for time dilation corrections: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/einsteins-genius-changed-sciences-perception-gravity
Ptolemy’s model of the solar system persisted for 1400 years until Copernicus showed that a system placing the sun at the center of the known universe was much simpler. Kepler defined the laws that explain elliptic planetary motion upon which Newton based his laws of motion and gravity. See https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/OrbitsHistory
Read youself. Downloadable from here.
https://www.physicsfoundations.org/1_5_dynamic-universe.html
Unless his theory does a better job of explaining all of the things that are explained by relativity, then it should be ignored.
So he claims. The theory is old skool, and awkward, but Suntola is not so crackpot as rather old crank.
I haven’t studied the theory, but it is clear that Suntola”s original style including numerous mentions of Einstein doesn’t help making friends with contemporary cosmologists.
I can’t decide if there resides some wisdom or just a misguided amateur with some grandieuse thinking. He wrote about the speed of light and contradicted with himself in a jiffy, by manner that suggested he’s not the best philosopher.
Btw is awful more aweward than awesome?
“Similarly in Physics, according to Lee Smolin and now to Sabine Hossenfelder, your career is fine as long as your research proposal falls within the parameters of what everyone else thinks it should be.”
Chasing ghosts (e.g. dark energy) in modern physics is becoming subject of jokes. After another unsuccessful attempt to detect dark matter I read the following: in old, good days physicists were explaining to us their findings and how Universe works. Noways they are explaining only why they cannot find anything (dark matter, dark energy, multiverse etc.). And even in that they’re not particular convincing.
Similar in Physics, according to Lee Smolin and now to Sabine Hossenfelder, your career is fine as long as your research proposal falls within the parameters of what everyone else thinks it should be.
You see the same in Solar Science. Just think of [sometimes ugly] negative reactions to the revision of the Sunspot Number Series.
Leif,
You can rationally explain and defend the “why” of all the corrections to past numbers. The solar physics field is healthy because arguments and disagreements can be discussed in the literature and conference presentations.
– No one can defend the revisions that Tom Karl made to NCEI ocean temperature data set when he used the ship intake data to correct the more accurate buoy data, and then use the smaller uncertainty from the buoy data on the entire adjusted data set. So they suppress the dissent getting into publications.
– No one can defend the methods used by Mann to create his hocket stick paleo-reconstructions that McKitrick and McIntyre exposed. So they suppress the dissent getting into publications.
– No one can defend the climate modeling community validating their outputs by comparing them to other model outputs and not to observation. Those who try to are given pejorative labels to minimize them.
Climate Science is diseased and dying as a result.
You can rationally explain and defend the “why” of all the corrections to past numbers.
In spite of this, the revision is often vehemently dismissed by people on both sides of the debate…
Even here on WUWT.
Einstein’s GR theory was vehemently dismissed by many of his peers and senior physicists. Some of it was ugly anti-semitism. Some of it was jealousy. And some of it was just anti-science stubbornness from scientists unable to accept variable time.
But he held the day. And few, outside of science historians, remember his detractors’ names.
To this day, good physicists are trying to find exceptions to his Equivalence Principle that underpins GR to point to something beyond GR. My suspicion is that will never succeed until we can examine the experiment from the outside. The observation that c never varies regardless of reference frame should be the big clue.
Even dear Einstein was sufficiently overwhelmed by the grouptink of Solvay 1927 that he did not stand up for the young deBroglie who closed his books for decades afterwards. J.S.Bell’s Speakable and Unspeakable in QM is an insider’s view into this.
Born spent decades harassing Einstein who never submitted.
And the very revealing insight on Bohr using “complimentarity” with a gnomish smirk meaning “contradictoriness” – shows what physics is infested with.
No Leif, there problem is in the physics any good student can easily shown what they believe is wrong and in some cases “not even wrong”. It is the way with actual science no-one cares what you think, or who you are they care what you can prove to be true.
I amm of the opinion that most such “Knowledge”is sheer fiction.
A good example i is the Big Bang thheory. No one assks where doess all the energy come from which would be required to expand a tiny ball, the condenssed Universe, to the giant size universe of today. Think energy and the whole concept of the Big Bang is nonsense.
I am far more inclined to accept Fred Hoyles and the Induan scientists theory of “Steady State”
MJE
Agreed, if scientists keep repeating the same words about current trend theories of:
Big Bang,
Global Cooling/Warming – Change,
Black Holes,
etc., etc..
They solidify their pet theories and nothing changes, as fixation slows progress.
It’ll be a boring world when we know everything, which of course can’t happen, as no one has touched on Abiogenesis and how Mind evolved from Matter – ‘What’s the Matter with Mind’ 😀
Stanley Miller demonstrated abiogenesis over 60 years ago. It’s not difficult to repeat his experiments and make many different amino acids that are found naturally.
I find that the more we discover, the more wonderful the world and the universe is. Shame that the UNFCCC seem to want to end the spirit of discovery and pronounce their version of climatology as complete and irrefutable. The surface has barely been scratched, but they’ve got the answer we’ve paid for, and will continue to pay for if they get their way.
Michael, it is nice to see a question what was happening before the beginning of time 🙂
Groupthink affects every avenue of human endeavour. Groupthink is the triumph of money over truth. In Climate science, corruption affects our finances. in medical research, corruption affects our health, in Physics, not so much.
Crisis in science paradigms occurs when there are repeated, independent observations of a physical phenomenon that conflicts with or cannot fit into consensus theory.
Examples:
– Once telescopes came along, the independent observations of the Jovian moons clearly orbiting Jupiter put Earth-centric Ptolemaic celestial models in crisis 400 years ago.
– The observation that antibiotics could cure gastric ulcers put the medical consensus on ulcers as caused by stress and too much acid production by the stomach into crisis.
The list is rather long.
Particle physics is not in crisis because every observation so far demonstrates the current Standard Model works very well. Cosmology is not in crisis (yet) because every actual observation so far supports General Relativity.
The problem here that Sabine Hossenfelder highlights is that experimentalists can find no evidence to constrain so many different theories (that is to eliminate them), so they proliferate.
The problem is they are finding no observational evidence from the LHC for things like the many different variations on Cold Dark Matter (CDM) theory envisions weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) to explain the rotation speed and formation of galaxies. But without WIMPs, galaxies like our own cannot be explained.
And without Dark Energy, the apparent accelerating expansion of the universe (from 2 independent observations of type 1A Supernovae) cannot be explained.
And without Inflation at the Big Bang, the universe we see in both the vast clusters of galaxies early after that beginning and the Cosmic Microwave background (CMB) cannot be explained.
From the few observed Gravitational Waves, the LIGO/Virgo consortium of physicists have found (so far) no observational evidence for the existence of small, curled up extra dimensions predicted from String Theory, as these small, curled up dimensions should be permeable to gravity. So from String Theory, extra dimensions thus should bleed-off GW energy as the gravitational wave propagates the hundreds of millions of parsecs of intergalactic space to reach Earth’s detectors. Thus extra-dimensions would result in GWs that arrive at Earth’s detectors with less energy, as calculated from the binary blackhole inspiral “chirp” frequency spectrum. So far, there is no evidence of extra-dimension GW energy bleed-off and thus no evidence of extra-dimensions.
All of these things makes the Theoretical Physicists uncomfortable because theories are proliferating with experimentalists unable to constrain them. At this point, it is not just a matter of building a bigger collider, but completely new kinds of basic experimental set-ups.
This is all very different from the coming crisis in Climate Science, which is predictably coming. The adjustments to the surface temperature data sets can only go so far in a cooling planet that has seen many up and downs in the current interglacial. And the coming crisis in Climate Science won’t be because no one knows where to go with theory. The crisis will happen because the decades of outright dishonesty will come crashing down on the RentSeekers.
I take exception to your assessment that cosmology is not in crisis because everything is consistent with General Relativity. Cosmology is still addicted to epicycles; the latest being dark energy. Dark energy can be made to disappear by means of one very modest change to General Relativity that only allows gravity to be regarded as a real field rather than being merely a manifestation of spacetime geometry. Further, the cosmological redshift data can be encompassed nicely with only one free parameter and no dark energy. Partially separating gravity from General Relativity should also permit the development of a quantum field theory of gravity. It is amazing that no young theorists seem to be actively pursuing this at present. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.07809.pdf
The last sentence of your Abstract says CDM is still required for Yilmaz to be a consistent theory. CDM as WIMPs is possibly in crisis depending on your viewpoint. Light Bosons (< 5x proton rest mass) may be a possibility. And note I did put in the weasel word "yet". And despite intense efforts, the search is still empty on CDM. At this point, galactic unicorns or pixie dust theory works too.
Without CDM, today's cosmology cannot explain why galaxies exist at all. Yet here we are.
Yes.
He pointed out that people stayed with groupthink (which he called ‘normal’ science) and suppressed any disturbing finding until the pressure became too great and the groupthink broke down in a paradigm shift.
The only thing he got wrong was thinking that this referred to Science. It actually is the way ALL human thought works…