Comment by kashyapc
6 days ago
> felt a strong sense of frustration at how modern research in particle physics is producing papers that are all identical to each other and have no true scientific impact
Your comment above makes me think of Sabine Hossenfelder[1]. I'm sure you must've heard of her. I know she's somewhat of a "polarizing" figure. As a former "insider", do you think her core point stands? (Which is, the particle physics field has largely nothing to show for after spending billions of public money. Some particle physicists have even predicted so-called "unparticles", which almost sounds like trolling!)
Yes, I know her and I agree with what she says. I also think many physicists working in the field secretly agree with her but it's a taboo to admit it openly. As an insider I can assure you that currently most analyses in experimental particle physics are a mechanical repetition of previous analyses with a few slight modifications to adapt them to the bigger statistics. It's true that it could simply be an effect due to the experiments lifetime, that have been running for 20 years now and where younger generations are struggling to come up with ideas not yet explored. I can speak less from the perspective of theoretical physics, but it seems obvious to all those in the field that there's a proliferation of papers proposing new particles, new interactions, etc. with no real impact.
I am also a former CERN scientist, and while I agree with the fact that recent papers are more and more a box-checking exercise with low value, I'm concerned on how Hossenfelder misrepresent the causes of that and the situation.
You say yourself that this situation can be simply an effect due to the experiment lifetime, and I also think it's a reasonable hypothesis.
What gives me pause with Hossenfelder is that she jumps to another conclusion, without any good observation for it or without scientific approach. These conclusions seem to be fed by the easy trap of "it's a conspiracy". We know how easy it is for people to give credit to these theses and to totally overlook that some claims are, in practice, totally unrealistic (so we have thousands of new PhD students and postdocs exploring how it works every year, the majority of them leaving the field, and strangely, the very very big majority choose, for absolutely no good reason, to keep hidden the secret they saw).
I agree with some of Hossenfelder's observations, but I find her conclusions often unsubstantiated, overstating elements that are more realistically way rarer than what she described and overlooking plenty of valid hypotheses. The fact that these "great revelations" brings her viewership also fit with a slow crank-ification. The fact that she also released videos on subjects outside of her domain and that these videos contained a lot of approximation also does not give a good image of how reliable is her approach (not that it is a crime to not know something outside of your field of expertise, but it should be something that a good scientist should be fully aware of, and they should simply not do such video in the first place).
I'm not sure if there is a real "taboo" to openly agree with her, I think it is more about the fact that she destroyed herself her own reputation with bad calls and bad conclusions, and people don't really want to tarnish themselves by association.
What's your opinion on Beatriz VIllarroel and her experiments on transient traces in plates?
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Hossenfelder is falling into the same trap most people who make their living off social media do. Lots of money can be made with conspiracies and controversies, much more than with boring facts. This just seems to creep up over time on most of these people. Jordan Peterson fell into the same trap. He used to have pretty interesting insights but then he developed a huge loyal following and over time he felt like he knew the truth about pretty much everything. And the followers were happily cheering him on.
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I see; thanks for expanding on it so honestly.
Not a physicist, but isn’t the issue here that these are experiments? Failure to find a potential particle at a predicted energy shouldn’t be seen as ‘nothing to show’ or a failure. I presume it tells us something really valuable- if perhaps disappointing
I know what you mean. I was recently at lunch at a (non-physics) tech conference and an ex-physicist (now a systems developer) sitting next to me responded the same.
I think (physicists in the room, please correct me if I'm making assumptions here) this is a classic "falsification" trap. Just because you can propose a hypothesis / prediction that is "falsiable" doesn't make it a worthwhile one to pursue. "Hypotheses" are dime a dozen. The art and wisdom is in choosing what to pursue.
> Just because you can propose a hypothesis / prediction that is "falsiable" doesn't make it a worthwhile one to pursue. "Hypotheses" are dime a dozen.
I think there is two things: 1. indeed all falsifiable hypothesis are not worth pursuing (for example, the hypothesis of the existence of a teapot in a 1 km2 area on the surface of Mars is technically falsifiable, you can scan and scan the region for it. But it is a poor usage of time and money) 2. some falsifiable hypothesis are really useful, but when the conclusion is "nope", then it looks like we wasted time and money while in fact we did not (and I think it's what the previous comment is saying).
For the LHC, I think it is very very hard to pretend it was a waste of money. Scanning this energy region was a very good move. It was the obvious next low hanging apple. What else could physicists have done that would have been as informative than that for the same amount of money? Sure, we did not find much (well, we found the Higgs boson, which is a huge discovery in itself), so it is "emotionally" disappointing, and "marketingly" bad luck (the public can think it was useless). But the progress of our understanding of how things work increased a lot thanks to it: before it, we just had no idea what was in this region. We had plenty of hypotheses, with no clue which one was better than the other. Now, we still have a lot of hypothesis, but we crossed-out a huge lot of them.
> The art and wisdom is in choosing what to pursue.
Exactly. On this point, I think the choice made with the LHC is hard to beat. What else could have been done instead that will bring the final word on as much unresolved hypotheses? The question is less clear with the future collider, but if it does not win the best position, it will certainly be in the top ones. So I don't think it is fair to say that people who want to build it are misguided, they still have very good arguments.
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