[Elrac]

Underneath the eloquent prose and the many helpful examples and showcases, this is an anti-science hit piece.

How dare theoretical physicists develop ideas about the world around us that can't be quickly and obviously supported by real-world observations? It's apparent that science is in a crisis! We might as well just throw up our hands and place our faith in homeopathy and creationism, which are no better.

Sorry, Mr. Baggott, that's a shitty argument for a target audience of stupid people.

A counter-argument could be built on science stories like Ignatz Semmelweis' ideas about hand-washing before surgery. Semmelweis suspected that _something_ was transferred from cadavers to birthing mothers via the hands of unwashed surgeons, but he had no idea what that something was, and could certainly not provide empirical proof. He was later vindicated by the work of Pasteur and Koch. Too late for poor Dr. Semmelweis, who died in a nuthouse, but today hand washing is an essential practice in modern medicine.

Mr. Baggott is telling us that science talks about things that are obviously real, like bacteria, but also things that may or may not be, such as multiverses. He's trying to convince us that because multiverses aren't obviously real, science shouldn't be talking or even thinking about them. He's implying that science is dishonest because it claims that multiverses are real. Actually, he's the one who's being dishonest, not science.

Especially in fields where it's not feasible to stick the subject matter into a test tube, hypothesis and speculation are valid tools of science. Hypotheses are proposed with the expectation that science will later refute or substantiate them. Contrary to what Mr. Baggott brings across, this is part of science's process, a process that has proven wildly successful and valuable in the past.

Most scientists are honest; and if asked by someone interested in more than a catchy headline, they'll gladly tell you which theories are solidly supported by a wealth of evidence, which are just ideas being thrown at the wall, and which are in between. People who fail to understand this are poorly informed; people who intentionally paper over the differences are dishonest. Please, let's ignore and shame that kind of people.

[skrebbel]

> this is an anti-science hit piece.

You're needlessly painting the world black and white. Very few people are against science.

This is not a hit piece. It's just a piece that you disagree with. That's fine, and I think your comment would be a lot stronger if it was formulated as such.

EDIT: removed lots of needless snark.

[pron]

Here's an actual theoretical physicist, though, saying pretty much the same thing as the article not two weeks ago: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-crisis-in-phys... :

> Instead of examining the way that they propose hypotheses and revising their methods, theoretical physicists have developed a habit of putting forward entirely baseless speculations. Over and over again I have heard them justifying their mindless production of mathematical fiction as “healthy speculation” – entirely ignoring that this type of speculation has demonstrably not worked for decades and continues to not work. There is nothing healthy about this. It’s sick science. And, embarrassingly enough, that’s plain to see for everyone who does not work in the field.

> This behavior is based on the hopelessly naïve, not to mention ill-informed, belief that science always progresses somehow, and that sooner or later certainly someone will stumble over something interesting. But even if that happened – even if someone found a piece of the puzzle – at this point we wouldn’t notice, because today any drop of genuine theoretical progress would drown in an ocean of “healthy speculation”.

> And so, what we have here in the foundation of physics is a plain failure of the scientific method. All these wrong predictions should have taught physicists that just because they can write down equations for something does not mean this math is a scientifically promising hypothesis. String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There’s math for it, alright. Pretty math, even. But that doesn’t mean this math describes reality.

[lidHanteyk]

And it's just as stupid-sounding when it comes from somebody who has training and skills. Stupider-sounding, even.

It's not like theoretical physicists have a perfect track record. Prior to modern thermodynamics, there were so many failed attempts to explain heat. Remember caloric? Phlogiston? The ultraviolet catastrophe? There have been periods of time where physics advances rapidly, and periods of time where there are long stalls and no good ideas.

Additionally, it's pretty common for a theoretical idea to turn out to be extremely practical, just in a way that wasn't obvious at first. In the past 300 years, we've gone from complex numbers being "imaginary" to being standard components of quantum mechanics. While people of Cardano's time might say that square roots of real numbers aren't real, we today understand that QM requires complex amplitudes instead of classical probabilities.

It's easy to point to where people can find interesting stuff to study. Einstein's work stemmed from noting that existing models of physics did not completely predict the solar system's behavior. Similarly, when we look at what these string theorists are aiming at, they turn out to have very reasonable idiosyncratic observations that they are trying to explain. They're examining the vacuum catastrophe, they're examining the Big Bang, they're examining quantum electronics. These are the places where our theories aren't able to explain every observation coherently; these are where we need new explanations.

[pron]

I'm not sure we've read the same text. Hossenfelder explicitly acknowledges all that -- in fact, she makes the exact point you are -- and yet says that physicists today do not practice the theoretical methodology that led to success in the past.

[lidHanteyk]

In the past, how did we figure out Mercury's orbit? We looked for Vulcan for half a century before Einstein figured out that our maths needed another term. Was the search for Vulcan founded on "entirely baseless speculation", in Sabine's words? No, there was a strong expectation that, since other planets had been found this way, particularly Neptune, only a few decades prior!

By analogy, the string theorists did present some falsifiable guesses, not based purely on speculation, but based on generalizations of mathematical patterns which were first observed in the beginnings of QM. They guessed at supersymmetries, and we've falsified most of the low-energy (easy) possibilities. This is fine; this is science as normal. And the string theorists have reacted to an inability to design new experiments by parameterizing the swampland.

Sabine doesn't seem to care that, during this same time period, we've seen weakening of more classical symmetries too! Remember charge-parity symmetry? These days we're down to CPT, and neutrinos are even weirder than we thought, and we can't explain all of this yet, but the maths needs to become more and more flexible to model these interesting observations.

To quote Sabine from her comment section:

> This lack of careful math is basically where the idea comes from that supersymmetry solves some problem. It has never been cleanly formulated just what the supposed problem is. Instead you get this community narrative that keeps people thinking there must be something to it. And such a shared belief is basically impossible to correct once you have sufficiently many people on it.

The only problem that supersymmetry solves is the problem of experimentalists wanting to be able to falsify/verify string theory. That's it. That's the only reason that it's interesting. And we failed to verify or falsify so far. This isn't bad, but people seem to think that it's bad.

The main gripe that I have with these rants of Sabine's is that, at this point, if we're so direly "lost in maths", then what non-mathematical alternative is she putting forward? How are we going to escape? I feel like there's not really any substance to that part of her argument, just a vague suggestion that somehow we'd better find somebody with the new and ground-breaking thought experiments who can lead physics out of a dark and demented era. It reeks, even if the odor isn't offensive.

To recall the thread-starter that got you worked up:

> How dare theoretical physicists develop ideas about the world around us that can't be quickly and obviously supported by real-world observations?

How dare we guess that microscopic organisms might exist before we can see them? How dare we guess that a planet might be out there before we can see it? How dare we guess that a subatomic particle might exist before we can measure it? How dare we presume symmetries before we can test their breaking points? How dare people put dark matter, dark energy, cosmological constants, or any other grandiosely-indirect hypothetical universal information into their tiny little parochial experiments done here on Earth!?

At some point, this line of thinking breaks down into absurd skepticism of any sort of mathematical modelling. Okay, fine; so, instead of maths, what shall we use?

[pron]

I am having a hard time following this, because you're not engaging with the point Hossenfelder makes, but with one she doesn't. In fact, you're trying to rebut her by agreeing with her.

She's not against mathematical modeling and hypothesizing -- quite the opposite. She's in favor of mathematical modeling of the kind that has worked so far -- as you acknowledge -- and from which physicists have strayed, at least according to her. She is for hypothesizing microorganisms and that is why she's against current hypotheses. She's against the latter because the former is works, and the latter is different.

Her point, as I understand it, is as follows. Theory and experimentation have worked hand in hand when there was a certain balance between them. But the cost, and therefore the nature of experimentation has changed, and, as a result, if theory wants to work as it has in the past, it must change as well in order to maintain this mutually-beneficial balance. In particular, she's talking about recognizing more or less promising hypotheses based on this balance. But even if she doesn't offer what you see as a solution, the lack of a solution does not imply the lack of a problem, and recognizing the problem is usually a good first step.

Pointing out that theory has worked in the past is agreeing with her, not disagreeing with her. If you actually disagree with her, are you saying that the nature of experimentation has not changed and therefore theory should not change? Are you saying that theory has already changed to maintain the balance? Or are you saying that the balance is not important? Because in order to disagree with her -- which I think is what you're trying to do -- you need to argue one of these.

And by the way, the existence of microorganisms was experimentally verified, and in many experiments, well before -- or separately from -- direct observation. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease)

[lidHanteyk]

I don't buy the bullshit that there's some sort of good math vs. bad math in physics, or that there's some necessary balance between theory and experiment. It all sounds like an attempt to forget that mathematics is harder than any hard science.

I'm saying that we have no reason to expect that we are somehow doing science any more wrongly than we used to do science. This is why I find the "Lost in Maths" critique so empty: It wants to discard all of what has worked, for no reason other than discomfort with what people are doing based on what has worked, and offers no compelling replacement bedrock.

[thanatropism]

The orthodoxy says that "science is the scientific method", but I think we need to decouple core science as a humanitarian enterprise from the academic adventure.

We should be able to deeply criticize science to its very core without losing a rhetoric that defends vaccines and so on.