Interesting analysis from my favorite severe no nonsense physics youtuber gal (who also used to randomly post vids of her doing cover songs to peoples' general confusion lol).
Good bit at the end speculating on the material economic basis for this (useless) way of doing science. People make careers on this fluff that amounts to nothing.
But I believe the biggest contributor to this trend is a misunderstanding of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, which, to make a long story short, demands that a good scientific idea has to be falsifiable.
lmao of course the guy who "debunked marxism" has also infected other areas of academia with his brainworms
Karl Popper: "weird how this straw man is so flammable! it must be because of my genius"
Popper: Everything didn't turn out exactly as Marx thought it would. He isn't literally nostradamus. Europe did not lead a global revolution. Marxism finished! Unexpected changes in material conditions are impossible. What do you mean you can have two different possible outcomes from the same starting point?
Popper I think. Anticommunists think they're doing real brain genius philosophy(tm) instead of just asinine sophistry when they cite him (by which I mean a 60 second video they watched on youtube) in lieu of reading literally any communist literature.
It's particularly annoying since Popper's epistemology comes accross as deeply lacking even compared to Logical Empiricism.
Hexbear go 30 days without anprim threads over physics research challenge (impossible!)
actual research is just like elon musk bazingabrains or something
She's also a currently working physicist and once worked in particle physicis. This is more of an appeal to spend money better, not stop spending it at all and regressing.
i think the point she's making is that these highly speculative particle inventings are not comparable to the higgs boson or whatever that were theorized as necessary rather than "well it could".
that said, anprims should have better things to go after than physics research just like [shitty sectarian group] should go yell at chuds instead of comrades.
Sure it'd be great if that money went towards counting rare beetles or figuring out what's going on underground, but if governments stopped funding particle accelerators, that money would just go towards more bank bailouts and bombs. Take the particle accelerators.
Also if we established global communism tomorrow, there'd still be particle accelerators, because there's enough people who want to work on particle physics and particle accelerators.
if governments stopped funding particle accelerators, that money would just go towards more bank bailouts and bombs
One could argue that the pursuit of sub-atomic particles is simply the legacy of the Manhattan Project. Its just another Pentagon project in search of a new hypothetical super-weapon that's long since exceeded its point of utility.
I don't think it is necessarily bad that we continue to fund particle physics. The nature of Blue Sky research has always been "We don't know what we're going to get until we find it". But I agree that none of this shit is really "science driven" and never has been. Particle Accelerators are simply a positive externality of a terrible system and not something we can really "take" or "leave" any more than we can shape any other national policy.
Also if we established global communism tomorrow, there’d still be particle accelerators, because there’s enough people who want to work on particle physics and particle accelerators.
Global Communism Tomorrow would truly be a foreign country. I can only imagine a world totally unyoked from the plow of capitalism and free to pursue utopian projects. Maybe we'd still have a vestigal program for the die-hards. Maybe we'd be building a series of tubes around the sun in pursuit of that next-smallest particle. Maybe we'd be scratching this off as overly ambitious and focusing more R&D on biology or chemistry. Maybe we'd scrap all the colliders for soccer stadiums, because that was determined to be a better way to spend our time. My money is on something from The Mystery Box that I haven't even considered.
But I think modern particle research would likely see a significant overhaul simply because all the current proponents and benefactors of particle research would be gone.
I think the prevalence of :so-true: "bazinga science" among public consciousness also helped created this trend. Let's face it, the majority of the public thinks that the sole purpose of science is to discover and invent things that is useful for human exploitation, in a way thinking that science works like in Civilization games where you insert "cold fusion" into a slot and all the scientistcians fills up the progress bar until a you get a "research finished" pop up.
These research into particles is so well funded and well-publicized because the public and capitalist investors thinks that eventually the science guys will come across into some super particle that can be exploited into something "useful" (read: profitable).
edit: the first paragraph where the writer talks about how ridiculous zoology would be if they use particle physics' standard underline this. Noone is funding or publicizing research into arctic 12-legged purple spiders because even if it does exist capitalism have no use for such thing, while some bullshit particles are showered with grants and publicity because some of them might have potential for commercialization, whatever it is.
there's a hypothesized "island of stability" where elements in the atomic number 130s or something start being able to exist long enough to matter but that idea is kinda old and i don't know enough about this shit to speculate.
but even if we never find anything like that i say take the bllions of dollars for war away before you go after the particle accelerator nerds.
Yeah but that's just another likely example of people hearing about something in a popular science article and overblowing its usefulness for human exploitation. We know there's an island of stability, creating and studying those elements will surely improve our scientific models, but we don't know how long these elements would last. They will more likely have "long" half lives of milliseconds rather than applicable half lives of years. And even if it's the latter, manufacturing enough is a whole other nightmare. It'd be easier to make 100x as much plutonium!
I don't agree with that. First off, I'm not at all convinced that the people providing the money have any sort of understanding about what the researchers are working on, and I think that's the biggest difference between a new particle and a 12-legged purple spider - anyone can understand what a 12-legged purple spider is and can imagine what it's implications might be, but for hypothetical new physics things, it's a lot more confusing. Researchers meanwhile may have incentives to exaggerate, obfuscate, and mislead to get more funding. If there's an exciting new thing going around, there's money in hyping it up, but often not much money in shooting it down.
New particles are a million steps away from being profitable or commercialized. I can't imagine an individual capitalist investing in a project like that, on something they don't understand and which may or may not even be possible, which might, potentially, hold some completely unknown and unpredictable use, and actually expecting a return on their investment. It seems more likely that any such investment is a passion project, or about the prestige rather than the immediate usefulness or marketability of the discovery.
Let’s face it, the majority of the public thinks that the sole purpose of science is to discover and invent things that is useful for human exploitation, in a way thinking that science works like in Civilization games where you insert “cold fusion” into a slot and all the scientistcians fills up the progress bar until a you get a “research finished” pop up.
Now the game designer in me is wondering what a more realistic (but still fun) research system in a game would look like.
Semi-random precursor concept events that unlock the ability to do focused engineering projects to actually apply those, but which will gradually happen eventually and which propagate rapidly once they become public knowledge. Pair it with a development of industrial capital thing, where you need the material capacity to actually do something with it too. That's probably the most concession to reality you can make while talking about a game genre where you're basically playing as an immortal alien spirit that can unilaterally shape entire civilizations and cultures to focus their efforts where you want.
So something like basic metallurgy would go something like: pottery "factory" spawns event about copper ore in glaze (AFAIK the actual theory about where people figured out basic metallurgy from to start with) yielding hard, sharp material or w/e, the player can focus artisans on building a prototype forge to make more crude copper, and from there it becomes more sophisticated with use until copper foundries become a normal thing that you can just have built, etc.
You fund random scientific research and get random results and whether or not they're useful is determined by what you do with the results?
Since the 1980s, physicists have invented an entire particle zoo, whose inhabitants carry names like preons, sfermions, dyons, magnetic monopoles, simps, wimps, wimpzillas
Does the existence of a simp particle pre-suppose the existence of an E-girl particle?
I would like $8 billion to find out.
You'd think so, but SIMPs only interact with themselves, and have no effect on electromagnetic charged particles, regardless if they're Top or Bottom.
So an E girl particle would ignore them entirely.
I wonder how that got past the filter. I thought the word "simp" was banned.
Well, it also serves as a training ground for quantitatively minded people to gain the marketable skills and ideological disposition needed to sustain the weapons development, finance, and surveillance industries. Most of the students who work on these projects won't become professors but there's a sizeable contingent who will become data scientists at marketing firms
Jesus. Look, I can accept that because we haven't found the necessary violations with the currently accessible energy scales that you could make the argument that the money is better spent on other research rather than making the SuperDuper Superconducting Super Collider to make the experiments at this point. But we know that we can't bridge General relativity, QFT, and Cosmology with currently existing theories. And so we need extra mechanism (which in the language used for layman explanations means new particles) or some much more dramatic rewriting of High Energy Physics. This is just :bait: for other physicists because we know that there are advances and new theories (likely involving new particles), but the only argument in good faith, other than funding priorities with other fields of study, is for a cosmology guided exploration, which has been a fixture of the field of saying "well Black Holes, Quasars, Stars, etc. provide more extreme environments than our colliders, so observing them would be better than waiting for the next two generations of colliders." The good faith argument is to argue for more focus on other violations, cosmological/Astrophysical observations, etc. that could be tested with these theories than just saying "well when we have PeV scale collider then we might be able to test my theory".
Also, we are searching for particles we don't really believe exist thing, isn't so much that the field that lost its way, but as I said, we know our current theories can't be the end of it, but the only thing we got after decades of searching for these particles are only after much failures and modifications the only one that fits within current frameworks, the Higgs Boson. So, after years of searching for where our models come up empty and not finding it, most people aren't delusional enough to say "well I am different, the particle I am searching for is going to be the one that exists in the way the previous 50 didn't".
i think her best point is the one about ambulance chasing or the other one about how these particles are being mathed-up just because rather than to solve any problems like the higgs or some of the other ones.
i wouldn't really look to theoretical physics grants for where to scrape up money, we could just give fewer weapons to nazis and come up with the cash for all the social programs we want and still have plenty for speculative physics.
Well, as I was saying, this is one of those trade offs of this needing a resolution, while the attempts are becoming more extreme, to where I would say other directions of funding could be seriously argued, since previous methods of trying to solve these contradictions fail, it is only the most arrogant that would say that "I have pierced the vale and seen the solution where the previous more compelling and simple explanations failed." It is kind of the opposite of ambulance chasing, you know there is a solution needing to be found, but the need to push on this front necessitates picking specific theories.
The theoretical physics grants aren't what is being directly argued. It is more of the lack and legitimate question-ability of the experimental side that is saying to theoretical physicists to back down and that their work is not worthwhile, because you need to have the ability to test theories for them to contribute to science.
because we know that there are advances and new theories
We do know this?
Yeah, on extremely small scales we get weird results, General Relativity isn't really compatible with current quantum mechanics, and we would need new particles, at least if not modifications, to handle inflation and components of Big Bang cosmology.
Edit: I forgot to mention Dark Matter and Dark Energy would likely require two new particles, if not a more fundamental change in our understanding of these theories.
She has a blog post for common retorts to her criticism of modern theoretical particle physics, and a list of problems that would probably yield fruitful results rather than what she dubbed "pseudo problems" of the last 50 years that have yielded nothing but very ephemeral headlines in science mags.
She has a list of problems that would probably yield better results and a better understanding of nature, for example quantum gravity (which she admits may not have a quantizing solution), even the measurement problem which is usually relegated to philosophy could lead to better results.
I'm going to comment again to drop a new hot take on this. The power of the quantum revolution that got us to this point was a series of dialectical observations about certain experiments that led us not strictly just to quantum mechanics but also this particle zoo. I think at a certain point with less social cohesion and less relevant unexplained material observations to guide dialectical reasoning, you get the situation Sabine describes where one moiety of physicists exists to churn out new descriptions of particles that don't exist and an almost fully separate moiety dedicated to proving that those particles don't exist. They ran out of science to do basically. Until humanity gets its shit together enough to actually observe some shit we can't fully explain in detail and get some people free to think about it dialectically, don't expect to see any advances in fundamental physics. String theory is a very similar and related crock of shit as well. Literally unprovable, untestable, and has yet to produce an actual model that describes the mess of particles in our universe.
She has a few problems that would be more dialectically based that modern physicists aren't focusing on: finding a good theory on quantum gravity and finding a material basis for a solution to the measurement problem (rather than relegating it to idealists in philosophy) and so on. Yeah, capitalism and lib idealism has definitely infected physics which is why it can't advance lol.
I would go so far as to argue that quantum gravity can't be dialectically approached yet due to a relative lack of any empirical clues as to what the behavior would look like. That's one of the primary sins of string theory, and an issue in general. Measurement problem maybe though. But yeah, the idealism is staggering.
it blows my mind that these physicists can sit there and grind on it, knowing that either they're too underfunded to see anything or too outside of any good ideas. like, i am literally incapable of working under those conditions, it's so meaningless.
They have to do whatever the business class wants, same as everyone else. Science is fucked under capitalism and the best you're going to get is expensive toys and overpriced insulin. Science itself is not a force for bad, capitalist 'science' is.
doesn't this qualify as basic research
which is literally always based
Well duh. They have to have make-work, though! Otherwise the future would be poverty and unemployment for these people.
And yet these very same people are vehemently against make-work for the lower classes. They must do something useful! We need our back rubs, our dicks sucked, our code written! They can't just take our money without being productive! That's a crime against neoliberalism.
