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.

  • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • TerminalEncounter [she/her]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      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.

      • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        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.