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.
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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.
Sounds like the impatience of youth.
The longing for each and everyone’s 5 minutes of fame, well Sabine Hossenfelder you’ve had your now clear the stage… next!
First one learns how to pass the driving test; after that, one learns to drive.
So it is with gaining a Ph.d. in Theoretical Physics; or so it would seem?
The entire fundamentals of Physics as a subject are seriously broken and need work. But no one is interested, and if you attempt to publish a paper which is against the “group belief” then you are banned, loose your job, and very effectively silenced.
Lets look at the basis of “climate change”, the latest name to cover up the fact there is no process happening which can be described. Greenhouse gas? Well as there is no such thing as the greenhouse effect, we are already in cloud cuckoo land. The experiments have been done, proved there is no effect, but they ignore all this and invent something which can be used to confuse everyone. Radiation thermodynamics is understood fairly well, except in the case of black body radiation, but that does not stop certain persons making claims which do not match experimental science. Then there is this magic 2% or 1.5% or whatever. Blame wild fires on a change of less than 1 degree in average global temperature? Good idea, but devoid of science. Remove all the positive feedback from models? Bad idea, then they say that the climate is stable and our funding will stop. It is always about money, particularly in the UN.
The dynamics of the scientific world are a lot different from what most people think. Nobody likes a revolutionary. When half of someone’s career is built on string theory, pitching it in the trash is a hard thing to do. If that happens, what are they an expert in? Nothing. String theory has many years of non-progress to go before students decide to focus on something else, and the current crop of scientists die out.
I am really old school. I believe the ether exist and is involved with each part of reality. I see particle physics as a chase for unstable balls of ether. The only stable one is a proton. Electrons are actually a charge void. Now with this understanding the great minds dealing with electricity and magnetism launched us into the modern age. I think science took a wrong turn around 1920 and has pretty much dead ended ever since. I see all modern devices resting on the work of the great minds at the turn of the century. I do not think great advancements in science will occur until we reexamine our roots.
Let the stoning begin.
Please propose an experiment.
Actually the experiments have been done it is the interpretation that needs to be changed. When science views experiments through the lens of a paradigm the conclusions match the paradigm. Let us take the Michelson Morley experiment. Everyone assumed that the ether would instill a drift in the speed of light. That is because they did not understand the ether or light. There are two parts to light, the electrostatic part and the magnetic part. The electrostatic part if alone in the ether travels at infinite speed. So drift can not be attached to the electrostatic part of light. Now the magnetic part is linked to normal space and is the part that slows down light because it is actually propagating through normal space. The propagation is also why the speed slows when it goes through more dense material. It also accounts to why light speeds back up when it leaves a dense material. So the experiment was actually measuring the propagation of light in normal space. The ether did not come into play.
“The electrostatic part if alone in the ether travels at infinite speed.”
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No it does not. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light.
So goes the paradigm. The whole of science is swimming in group think. Some more than others. It is not my job or desire to change science. If the current paradigm makes you happy then I am happy for you. I happen to agree with a different paradigm. It is the future paradigm of science. Let science develop for a few million years. I suspect the understanding of future scientist will agree with me. Now one could feel that science has everything correct and no advancements will be made in a few million years. But I think history is on my side when I say that science will be vastly different in understanding in a few million years.
The underlying spaces used in fundamental physics, space time, phase spaces, twistor space whichever are built on spaces that are differentiable so calculus can be utilised in the mathematical formulation. If the fundamentals are not built on differentiable spaces then progress will stop at some point until another mathematical paradigm can be found. A bit like water behaves according to Navier-Stokes equations until one gets down to the molecular level where it is actually particles tumbling about.
Particle physics is a joke these days. She’s correct. So is Astronomy.
One example of how idiots can be seen as geniuses is Prof Brian Cox and his AGW defence on Australian TV.
He acted like a complete fool, make nonsensical arguments. How is someone so ignorant and moronic meant to further the field, well he did nothing for PP, and he ran away to become an entertainer, much like de Grasse Tyson who also flopped in Astronomy and ran away too from the field because the work was too hard
The book I mentioned above about today’s “liberals” and yesterday’s eugenics promoters is:
“Liberal Fascism”
Jonah Goldberg
Doubleday
2007
A highlight line is:
“It is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion.”
And the line I like to use is Murray Gell-Mann’s definition of a totalitarian system:
That which is not compulsory is prohibited.
Dr Sabine, it’s worse than you think. Universities have been ruined beyond redemption by social justice/industrial democracy/equality of outcomes/affirmative action mumbo jumbo from the neomarxsbrothers. They decimated standards and threw the doors open wide. They even had to create a few dozen faculties for witless scholars (notably gender issue ones that didnt admit men, although that may have been because they worried no men would apply (remember the “Feminine Glaciology” paper that got published because no one had the guts to turn it down?).
Yeah, but we are talking physics here! Sorry, even it has been watered down. Up to the first quarter of 20th Century, an individual so motivated could read the entire body of scientific, humanities and Belles Lettres literature. Since, although most of the science had already been discovered, “scholarly lit” mushroomed to 10s of millions of largely worthless verbiage. The fabled infinite number of chimps with an infinite number of typewriters sort of thing (we aren’t talking about the marvels of engineering here).
Most climate scientists claim to be “physicists”. When
97% Cook did his analysis, the only thing that struck me about it was that he had 12,000 (!) papers published in a decade to consult. 1200 a year. 24 papers a week. 3 papers per workday for ten years!! A colossal waste of money, resources and time that will have to be dumped after the game is up.
We can apparently just hang on to Tyndall’s and Arhenius’s 19th century few days of thought with one linear formula that hasn’t seen any refinement, despite a few hundred billion spent by the numberless minnions with numberless keyboards.
I managed to get booted from a Physics forum somewhere over a decade ago for having the audacity to question the speed of light. Empirically, the Michelson-Morley experiments were just over a century and a half ago. To say this is the absolute speed of light is analogous to sticking a thermometer out the window at any random second in the last millenia and claiming this is the temperature for all time. A couple years ago I noticed an Italian physicist was raising the same question. I wish him luck with his endeavors.
The assumption of the constant speed of light was one of the most fruitful in modern physics. So far there are no observations or experiments contradicting it. Of course, you can engage in just any speculation – and I wish you luck. Booting you from a forum seems uncalled for, unless you posted many thousands words.
Albert A. Michelson did his experiment.
Came away miffed:
Need a more accurate interferometer,
Back to the drawing board; can’t get the drift.
No one has mentioned the Atlas Shrugged, John Galt syndrome. I know I made that choice years ago.
In other words science appears to resemble every other part of our current culture. This is surprising how?
What positive, new and original hypothesis is Sabine Hossenfelder herself proposing? Aside from endlessly denigrating the research of others?
It’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. Go on, Sabine – now is your chance to refute all those sexist and misogynistic assumptions about gender and scientific discovery. Be the next Lynn Margulies!
Six words, one concept that explains _loads_ of what seemingly baffles so-called nuclear science: Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics.
As far as physics ‘breakthroughs’ go – what happened about the ‘faster-than-light’ particles detected from the LHC a couple of years ago? And, thinking of the LHC, have they got any further with the Higgs boson? I haven’t read anything in the MSM about EITHER of those discoveries.
That turned out to be a bad connector in a detector.
https://motls.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-number-of-anti-physics-articles-is.html
I go to Lubos Motl when info on the state of physics is needed.
“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.”
Actually, you’ll have trouble getting your grant proposal approved because this is a stupid question. _Perturbative_ string theory assumes a fixed background, but this is no more surprising than that the perturbative Standard Model assumes a fixed vacuum, despite the fact that the vacuum in the SM is degenerate (aka The Higgs mechanism). This is how perturbation theory works; you assume a starting point and consider the dynamics of small deviations about this starting point. Works for masses and springs, works for experimentally verified particle physics models, and there’s no reason in principle why it can’t work for string theory.
I have no dog in this fight; I don’t know if string theory is a good description of reality at the fundamental level, but to say that the background dependence of typical perturbative formulations is some serious deficiency is just wrong.
This article in The Atlantic was mentioned above. It’s worth repeating and reading.
“Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck”
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminishing-returns-science/575665/
The first figure there says it all:
Brief History of The Decline of Science.
1. Scientists were amateurs, some with royal patrons.
2. Scientists worked for universities, in effect their patrons
3. WWII happened and scientists invented many things, from radar to atomic bombs to nuclear power.
4. Science became cool. Scientists became superstars and the money started poring in.
5. The baby boom happened and the economy was good.
6. Baby boomers grew up and went to university and created a degree explosion.
7. Universities changed, the baby boomers changed the universities, the courses, the degrees.
8. Physics PhDs started driving taxis.
It’s safe to assume that the proportion of genius in the population did not change, which means that the scientist population was diluted with more of the lesser gifted sort. Just a guess.
Something important was left out — Computers. They were invented earlier, but at about the time of #5, they became very important. They changed everything. Before, thinking was necessary. After, modelling was dominant.
For those who want more background on #3 and #4, these books are good:
“The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi, Father of the Nuclear Age”
https://www.amazon.com/Last-Man-Who-Knew-Everything/dp/0465072925
“The Making of the Atomic Bomb”
https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/1451677618/
http://www.fraleytech.com/binding-energy/
Apply Occam’s Razor.
Things you probably think aren’t true.
Mass, charge, magnetic moment, spin, energy, isospin and angular momentum are due to one: spin.
There are equal numbers of particles and antiparticles.
There are antiprotons in nuclei.
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 –>
… about naturalness and multiverses -and- shifting their predictions …
“Any change will reduce the paper output, and they don’t want this” — that’s a good one!
less papers, more insights!
“why is most string theory based on the assumption that space and time are immutable?“
Because: in a muted space and time we would never know space and time were muted.
With every new mutation we were mutet TOO, thinking we were borne that way. Into that mutet universe.
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Maybe there’s a lot of mutable universes. They spring into existence and get lost likely fast – no duration, they’re mutable = unstable, mortal.
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But that’s a good example:
who believes in travel-faster-than-the-speed-of-light will never want to hear about a boring plain flat universe.
and who believes in man made CAGW will never want to hear about plain meteorological basics.
With every new mutation we were mutet TOO, thinking we were borne that way. Into that mutet universe.
Because: if we were THE ONLY OBJECTS UNALTERED TO FIT INTO THAT ALTERED UNIVERSE
our shear existence would abandon that altered universe.