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Comment by PaulHoule

2 days ago

The real root of brokenness in physics is not bad ideas or a lack of good ideas but it is that experiments are nowhere near being able to answer the big questions. Ok, we will probably get some insight into the neutrino mass from KATRIN but we are in the dark when it comes to dark matter, proton decay (predicted by all GUTs including string theory), etc.

In the absence of real data there is all sorts of groupthink and nepotism [1] but it is really beside the point. People are fighting for a prize which isn’t there. As an insider-outsider myself I have had a huge amount of contact with (invariably male) paranoid delusional people who think they’ve discovered something great in physics or math [2], it’s really a mental illness.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9755046/ is the master scandal of academia

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Westley_Newman stole away a really good lab tech from the EE department at my undergrad school

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PaulHoule

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griffzhowl  1 day ago

From your ref [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9755046/

> we show that faculty are up to 25 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D.

That seems high, but I can't contextualize it based only on these results. What would the figures be for doctors, blacksmiths, farmers, computer programmers, etc.? I guess you're likely to find disproportionate numbers of children who followed in their parents' footsteps in any profession. It's likely not something special to academia.

In any case, there are plenty of other factors that contribute beyond nepotism: early guidance and encouragement, support and understanding of career choices, parental expectations or pressures, genetics, and so on.

> Moreover, this rate nearly doubles at prestigious universities and is stable across the past 50 years.

Ok, this is a bit more suggestive, but it's also plausible to me that the factors I mentioned above are amplified for children of parents working at prestigious universities.

> Our results suggest that the professoriate is, and has remained, accessible disproportionately to the socioeconomically privileged, which is likely to deeply shape their scholarship and their reproduction.

This seemed a bit of a non sequitur to me. The results show that children of academic parents go into academia more than others, not that "socioeconomic privilege" predisposes to going into academia. For example, are the children of billionaires (or millionaires) more likely to go into academia than the children of humble academics at non-prestigious universities? I doubt it.

(I only read the abstract so please let me know if these points are addressed in the article)

jurking_hoff  2 days ago

> but was rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office on grounds of being a perpetual motion machine

The implication that being a “perpetual motion machine” is a specific reason for patent denial is kinda funny.

  • dr_dshiv  2 days ago

    Dutch alchemist Cornelis Drebbel got a patent in 1598 for the design of a perpetual motion machine. It was a clock that was powered by daily changes in barometric pressure. In the early 1900s, he was largely scrubbed from the history books because everyone knows that perpetual motion is impossible.

    The clock worked, of course. There are still paintings of it — based on those, rolex made a functional replica.

    But if you've never heard about Drebbel, perpetual motion is the reason. That wasn't his only invention, of course. He also invented:

    * The first cybernetic system (a thermostat; a self-governing oven for incubating eggs)

    * The first air conditioning system

    * The first functional submarine

    * Magic lanterns, telescopes (including the one used by Galileo), microscopes, camera obscuras, and pump drainage systems (credited for draining cambridge and oxford)

    He was also a beautiful artist — he made engravings of topless women teaching men science and math (the seven liberal arts). Actually, maybe that's why he was erased? IDK. But he was definitely a free thinker and 100% legit. Look him up.

    • glenstein  2 days ago

      >It was a clock that was powered by daily changes in barometric pressure.

      That sounds awesome, but it also sounds like it's conflating two things: (1) the physically impossible perpetual motion of popular understanding, e.g. machine that operates at 100% energy efficiency in perpetuity from an initial one-time energy input and (2) a machine with automatic passive energy draw from ambient sources, but with the usual inefficiencies familiar to physics and engineering.

      Sounds like Drebbel did (2). Which, don't get me wrong, absolutely rocks. But I certainly wouldn't want to use (2) to advertise a moral that even laws of thermodynamics were just yet another fiction from untrustworthy institutions, which seems like the upshot you were landing on.

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