Why Sabine Hossenfelder lost faith in science

February 14, 2023 3:06 PM

Why do particle physicists constantly make wrong predictions?
posted by dmh (23 comments total)

Good Problems in the Foundations of Physics
posted by jeffburdges at 3:55 PM on February 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

This is a delightfully scathingly dry roast in a field about which I have zero practical knowledge.
posted by cortex at 3:58 PM on February 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

Sabine Hossenfelder is my favorite iconoclast in the physics community right now. Most of the ones that get traction are cranks who have an axe to grind about their pet unpopular hypotheses, but her "pet unpopular hypothesis" is basically that the Standard Model isn't in as much trouble as the particle-zoo folks want people to believe, and I'm here for it.
posted by tclark at 4:07 PM on February 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

She may be a scientist, but she is also very much a YouTuber at this point so she frames things to get clicks and drive engagement. I’m not suggesting that she’s insincere, or even wrong (I’m not qualified to judge), but she does have incentives to orient her argument from a contrarian point of view.

You can see this from her opening suggestion that the state of particle physics is something that can be judged by contadictory headlines in The Guardian, or “something so boring you don’t even finish reading the headline.” Possibly engaging but not really indicative of the condition of current scientific debate.

I also worry about physicist contrarians who stray from their fiield of expertise: “Genetic Selection is Happening Already. Here's How it Works”, “Fake News, Echo Chambers & Polarization: How Bad Is Social Media?”, “How Much Can You Trust Calorie Labels?”, “The End of Masculinity Has Been Somewhat Exaggerated”, and so on.

She’s amusing and I have enjoyed several of her videos, but I’d want some more corroboration from somewhere else to trust her cranky iconoclasm as being anything other than entertainment.
posted by Quinbus Flestrin at 4:32 PM on February 14, 2023 [22 favorites]

Previously.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 4:34 PM on February 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

The Monopole Problem
That’s the question why we haven’t seen magnetic monopoles. It is quite plausibly solved by them not existing.
posted by sixswitch at 4:46 PM on February 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

She’s amusing and I have enjoyed several of her videos, but I’d want some more corroboration from somewhere else to trust her cranky iconoclasm as being anything other than entertainment.

At least with regards to the huge proliferation of new-particle theories that perennially need just one more, bigger generation of particle colliders to uncover, she's been beating that drum since long before she had a youtube channel.

I don't object quite so strenuously to the new colliders per se, but I believe she definitely has a point that particle physics has been hamstrung by the seductive possibilities of ever more abstract and ever higher-energy hypotheses. There's definitely a bit of a "god particle of the gaps" tendency to loudly proclaim a whole new physics is just beyond the current collider generation's capability, especially in the last decade or so.
posted by tclark at 4:51 PM on February 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

At least with regards to the huge proliferation of new-particle theories that perennially need just one more, bigger generation of particle colliders to uncover, she's been beating that drum since long before she had a youtube channel.

It's hard not to suspect that a lot of influential people are erring on the side of "lots more funding for lots bigger scientific apparatus' above anything else", which is not coincidentally something that the institutions of academia in which they find themselves reward generously.
posted by mhoye at 5:25 PM on February 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

Been following Hossenfelder for some time now, and I don't think it is fair to describe her as a contrarian, which implies a reflexive positioning, lacking a considered case.

An outspoken skeptic, certainly, and yes she is a performer and does the YT/social media thing well, and there is always risk of slipping into the isolated-contrarian-shouting-at-establishment-clouds trap to feed the algorithms, especially in matters on which one is not a genuine expert.

OTOH, there is a clarity and robustness to her arguments and critiques that I find refreshing, and if ever there is a place to publicly and unapologetically behead sacred cows it is in science.

See her video explaining why the whole delayed choice in quantum experiments thing is just wrong, or the problems with the recent revival of claims about cold fusion. She is also happy to admit error on her part, like with how the greenhouse effect actually works.

How well her act holds up longer term remains to be seen. But so far she is good value, IMHO.
posted by Pouteria at 5:55 PM on February 14, 2023 [7 favorites]

I was also very specific to describe her as an iconoclast rather than a contrarian because while her objections may be against the single dominant social/cultural paradigm in particle physics, they're not unthinkingly reflexive, and not without merit.
posted by tclark at 6:27 PM on February 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

We mathematicians have non-experimental methods for identifying interesting problems, which eventually become important somewhere. We've "more applied" fields like physics or computation, in which abstract mathematical remain relevant, but also impose some more near-term physical judgement criteria too. We've far too many people who ignore the physical or experimentalist criteria for assessing research, hence Hossenfelder's critique.

In cryptography, it's typically the protocols people do bone headed stupid shit for theory reasons, while the primitives people more often recognize and adapt to real concerns faster. As a classical example, protocol papers almost never contain cofactors, which causes broken implementations galore. We've exceptions of course, but even the zoo of broken post-quantum schemes comes largely from primitives being done by theoreticians, with rainbow being a particularly hilarious example.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:59 AM on February 15, 2023

I found "The Cause of the Problem" section from 10-13min very effective for this layperson to understand her arguments. They seem compelling. If anyone has a link to a rebuttal I'd love to see that, too. Thanks for the post, dmh.
posted by mediareport at 4:44 AM on February 15, 2023

Looks like there are some good links to counter-arguments in the previous thread from September.
posted by mediareport at 5:04 AM on February 15, 2023

I watched the first 0:59 of TFV and decided to bail. When you look at the bleeding edge of something for a while, you should expect exactly what she's complaining about, namely that there are lots of blind alleys that get followed and then backed out of, lot of wrong trees that get barked at, etc. Of her litany of complaints the only thing that's really current is dark matter, which yes that's a huge embarrassment to physics. But not something to lose faith in science over.

I mean, maybe eventually she gets to ask "where are the testable hypotheses from string theory," but it didn't seem hopeful.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:20 AM on February 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

I find the title misleading - Dr. Hossenfelder has not "lost faith in science" - many of her arguments are that some of particle "theories" can not be judged by the scientific method, in that they are not falsifiable. She is not the only physicist to be pointing this out - see, for example "Not Even Wrong", a book that takes on string theory.
posted by Johnny Quaternion at 8:22 AM on February 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

If I am a new grad student I would veer to cosmology. At least there, there is actual data that needs explaining. I am hopeful that JWST and the Roman telescopes will provide an impetus to Physics departments to emphasize cosmology in preference to particle physics. Especially now with all this multiverse theories and other such non-falsifiable avenues that are propping up.
posted by indianbadger1 at 10:29 AM on February 15, 2023

suddenly I'm nostalgic for the ninety-seventies
posted by gkr at 10:56 AM on February 15, 2023

I've just watched 15 of her videos, and subscribed to her podcast. Its like "Healthcare Triage" but more physics/env.

V. interesting. We disagree over some issues (nuke waste, population) but she does a great job in a 20min vid.

a lifetime ago, i was a chemist, though thr quantum mechanics was just treated as a subset of pchem. We also dont use most of the standard model particles/forces.

Is she right about particle physics? Maybe. Its certainly a plausible argument. Definately worth the time to consumer her content.
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 1:26 AM on February 16, 2023

Her criticism of the phenomenology hypothesis mill seems healthy to me, but yes, at least a hypothetical new particle that solves some problem with our understanding of the actual world is connected to science. Peter Woit’s criticism of string theory (as I understand it) seems even worse: there is no well defined theory on which to base predictions, outside of some artificial toy models that manifestly do not describe the real world, and whole careers are built on things like exploring the consequences of unproven conjectures about these models that may not even be mathematically well defined within these models, never mind mathematically true, or connected to the real world.
posted by mubba at 2:55 AM on February 16, 2023

Part of her appeal is her very dry humour. Here she is explaining the concept of free energy. She doesn't depart from her usual tone one bit when delivering the line, "That it’s “free” doesn’t mean it insists on taking guns on a trip to the mall."
posted by clawsoon at 9:26 AM on February 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's awesome Hossenfelder highlighted Tom Murphy's observation (previously), and often does other climate topics, but not sure why she even mentioned carbon capture, and really planetary AC does not sound remotely viable, given all the constraints like growing food. We'll simply need to use energy when the sun shines and use less energy overall, aka have less GDP.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:58 PM on February 25, 2023

We'll simply need to use energy when the sun shines and use less energy overall, aka have less GDP.

One of the challenges with her dry humour is that it's sometimes hard to figure out what she's being sarcastic about and what she's presenting as the actual answer to the problem. In this case, for example, she gives the actual answer - your answer, and Tom Murphy's answer, and every reasonable person's answer - in the middle of a joke around 20:10 of the video.
posted by clawsoon at 3:29 PM on February 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Why Billionaires are Obsessed With Blocking Out the Sun
"Among the world’s ultra-rich, plans to swat back the sun’s rays like they’re capital gains taxes .. have seemingly been all the rage."
posted by jeffburdges at 11:14 PM on February 27, 2023