string theory lied to us and now science communication is hard
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- Опубликовано: 28 май 2024
- String theory lied to us and now science communication is hard.
This is just my opinion man. String theory is not bad. String theory is fine and interesting. String theory was communicated.....you could say poorly or could say deceptively.
The game is Binding of Isaac Rebirth. I wish I had saved the seed so I could post it here. 
Наука
What I learned from this video:
#1: The true test of a science communicator is how well they can communicate complicated topics to the general public while playing a video game.
#2: The true test of a gamer is how well they can play a video game while communicating complicated science to the general public.
He's called a RUclipsr. It really doesn't take a genius to explain the basics of any science.. what you don't realize is all the gaps he's missing because your not educated enough to know.
I'm reading The Biggest Ideas in the Universe by Sean Carroll and it's awesome.
His idea was that while solving equations is the domain of professional mathematicians and physicists, being able to understand what an equation is telling you rather than relying on imperfect metaphors _is_ something most people are capable of. So he wrote a series of books dedicated to helping people understand the reality of modern physics rather than popsci metaphors.
Within the first few pages of the book it's clarified in no uncertain terms that energy is NOT stuff, it's a mathematical construct we use to represent the way forces are converted, and the misunderstanding mostly comes from a misunderstanding of what _mass_ is when we say that mass and energy are convertable (it's not matter). That was _hugely_ validating because it's something I see seemingly smart people get wrong all the time, to the point where I was starting to think _I_ had something wrong and was missing something huge.
@@maxwellblackwell5045you sound insane right now
@@99loolill that's a comment copying bot.
@@frankmckenneth9254 WHY though
"I know she worked very hard on it, it had some very nice pictures in it." Is the single most devastating sentence one could use to review a physics adjacent book, I laughed out loud
I love nice pictures.
@@poppers7317 who doesn't
Angela is such a badass. My new favorite science communicator on the internet. She's unapologetically her and some times that means she is savage as fuck and I'm just like oh damn she went there!
I love the font...
She just murdered that woman in broad daylight.
Now Michio Kaku talks about aliens eating Planck Energy for breakfast, and still gets introduced as a legitimate scientist by the new anchor. It’s really easy to spot an honest physicist, they drive a Honda and say “I don’t know” a lot.
Science is the process we follow to find true knowledge we all learn this at school....how to construct, run and publish the results of an experiment, you do that then you are a scientist there are no other rules.
@@backgammonbaconyeah for real, no one said every scientist has to have the same opinion lmao, the gatekeeping in science is kinda insane
yes! Even if you propose a thousand hypotheses, and test them fairly, and they all come out to be incorrect you are still a scientist if you followed the formula of
Propose falsifiable hypothesis
Test it to attempt to falsify it
Publish result
When is that last time Michio did any of that? How much of that did he do when he DID do it decades ago? He is a clown, not a scientist - he has contradicted himself NUMEROUS times in interviews. He is, at best, a former scientists who is now a joke.
🎯
Man, as someone who dropped out of college and can barely do algebra , this felt like the college conversation I never had with that one friend I’d force to teach me on that subject I don’t understand. So casual and yet well spoken and all while playing video games too. All that’s missing is some Tostitos pizza rolls
Tostitos makes pizza rolls?
i have literally no idea what they make other than pizza rolls how did you not know this lol @@jameslove-vani797
@@jameslove-vani797we all know he meant tostinos’
That sounds kind of like when the smart pot addict friend in the movie "Road Trip" tutors the main character for his philosophy final by relating it to WWE.
@@Kitzooni Totinos
It's like Carl Sagan said: yeah, they laughed at the visionaries, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Bozo the Clown was immensely skilled and talented at his profession. These guys were just delusional.
@@aadd2935 I condensed it a bit. The full quote goes: “But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
@@DannyBeans and what's missing in his argument is, stactically, the Bozo the Clowns were in a massive majority
If only we had laughed at the likes of Sagan.
@@noosphericaltarzanfor promoting healthy skepticism?
This reminds me of the recent "proof" of the ABC Conjecture in maths. Shinichi Mochizuki published a huge, incredibly dense series of papers which he claims proves this long standing conjecture, most mathematicians who try to understand give up because of how dense it is, Fields medallist Peter Scholz spends some time trying and finds what he believes in a hole in the proof, Mochizuki responds with something very close to "nuhuh, you're dumb, there's no gap". We've now reached a stage where most mathematicians have given up trying to understand it, most either believe it contains at least one significant error, or if it's right Mochizuki's not done his job of actually communicating his ideas well enough, but there's a small group of true believers who insist the proof's right and they understand it (though they can't manage to explain it to the rest of the mathematical community).
This sounds great going to read up on this.
Second this. It's really a bizzare situation. I rememember several serious attempts to get to the bottom of Mochizuki's ideas, like a workshop at Oxford and even before Scholze's paper several attempts by mathematicians. It doesn't help that Mochiuzuki refused to travel (before the pandemic) at times and he got hos PhD in Princeton under Faltings, the fields medalist.
@@acollierastro Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong blog has several good posts about it if you're interested (which is rather fitting given the subject of this video).
@@primzahler8377 honestly a sad situation, from what I gather Mochizuki was a well respected mathematician for many years before this strange turn into seeming crankery.
@@dayvancowboi9135 I think so too. My impression is also that he was well respected although working a lot on his own and I think his work was mostly known in Japan, except some of his papers from the 90s and early 2000s. But I could be wromg
Left screen: String theory as an example of miscommunication of science
Right screen: Binding of Isaac speedrun
I wish my homeboys hyped me up the way string theorists hyped up String Theory for decades.
Everyone, keep an eye on this man. Big things coming in a decade!!
I can finally sleep peacefully knowing the string theorists are only a decade from a huge breakthrough
Same for biologist gonna make real Mammoth from their DNA
You'll be sleeping for more than 10 years...
They never said *which* decade they are away from.
@@pingukutepro you are mixing up science and engineering. Mammoth cloning is not something that is supposed to prove anything, it is a (dubiously) practical application of existing, well established, science.
@@gg829 not really because there are still enormous gaps in understanding gene-gene interplay.
Thank you for picking up the mantle where Northernlion left off for going on huge tangents while still being able to win a game of Isaac 🙏
Thank you for making me giggle a little
many people are saying this
isek is dead
CEREAL
She's like 10000% better at science than NL too. I'm so glad I stumbled upon this channel!😆
@@AileTheAlien Biology major btw
i wish you would do this more you would be just the most insane twitch streamer. hot physics takes and isaac gameplay has an audience you could never believe
She was made for the segment of Northernlion's audience who's into pop science
@@sandenson so the entire audience then
@@nullsol6274 Probably lol
Full credit to Lee Smolin and Peter Voit, for shouting out loudly that the String Theory emperor had no clothes.
this video is like when you're a kid and can't buy books so you just read what the school library has and never know how 99% of series end, then 15 years later you watch a summary of the entire series on youtube and go, whoa, that's not what I expected but at least I finally know what happens
I've always felt like String Theory was a bunch of imaginative nonsense.
I feel the same way about entanglement and the interpretation that observing one particle induces a change in the other -- is it magic or did we make a subtle but fundamental mistake in the experiment and the statistics?
I felt the same about Dark Matter -- why can't this missing matter be baryonic? I now think that WIMPs are probably a real thing but I don't recall why MACHOs was dismissed -- space is big and maybe there's a huge amount of rogue planetoids in interstellar space.
Although I haven't done that myself that still sounds very relatable.
This comment might be the most hyper-relatable simile I have ever read
ahh poor buddy. where did the bad string theory touch you
Too bad that half of what she said isn't true. So you're still better off reading the history of string theory on your own.
What I'm learning about this is that not only is the "public" is ten years behind the physics departments but that popular culture is ten years behind the public.
Dark matter girlies know whats up though
sam in the wild 🤯🤯🤯
popular culture is still in the Schroedinger's cat era
@@SaltNBattery What are you even talking about, did a lab make a policy that you can't call black employees slurs or something ?
@@SaltNBattery lmao, how are you or someone like you on every comment section I ever see? You are doing the same thing as the string theory people, and you are defending the string theory like people in all fields and you dont get it. What you just did was hyper political, not logical. I have seen that defense for every laughable, uneducated and unsupportable take getting called out.
What are we really talking about hear is your shot at medicine about masks and covid? maybe im wrong and its about systemic problems in for profit healthcare systems, is it?
Are your other social sciences complaints about things like critical race theory or trans issues, things political media has gotten on board with a tiny minority of college faculty lying about? I see all the buzz words and distortions and no issues you actually want to talk about because like string theory your bs will get blown to smithereens and you just dont like it. So test it, what are we talking about? Jordan Peterson?
discovered this from the "Best video essays of 2023" list published by BFI and this one might be my favorite of all of them, amazing work!
Source?
This video took me back to when I was at uni! I was at my boyfriends 21st birthday in 2012, shortly after the discovery of the Higgs, and I was an undergraduate physics student who was really interested in particle physics. A guy (who did not study physics) at the party cornered me and called me a terrible physicist because I told him I couldn't tell him much about string theory. Obviously as a third year undergraduate interested in experimental particle physics, I was far more interested in the exciting recent discovery!
I also enjoy your choice of game because I was obsessed with playing The Binding of Isaac at uni!
Insulting someone because... oh wow, what a winning pickup strategy.
@@hp67c Negging was big with the "general public" in 2012 even though it was garbage even as a theory and ruined a lot of people's ability to communicate effectively… Now, what does that sound like? 🙂
This is honestly an incredibly unique format I've never seen before, of professionals talking about science while playing video games. Honestly incredible imo
For some reason this helped me. Calmed my mind maybe? Loved it!
I'm hooked. 👍
Cool that people liked it. I'm about one of the few that actually found distracting and a bit annoying.
@@isaquelucas8791 You can just listen to it like a podcast if that's the case!
Yeah, didn't make any sense for the format.
this is what the internet will look like after all the subway surfer tik tok kids get PHDs
and I like it.
Instead of arguing with people who do not understand the math, I can just point them to these videos ! I'm very happy about this.
@@avibhagan These videos make me want to understand physics and actually get past learning the maths XD
@@gloriousblobber9647
You have no idea how difficult it is to explain to people who watched big bang theory, that string theory is a dead end.
I'd guess so.. lol@@avibhagan
I think it's fine, I do think the playing a game while explaining is kind of weird and distracting (which I believe is what you're referring to) but it's not the worst thing in the world.
33:40 it’s like when you’ve watched 4 seasons of Dexter because the first season was amazing and you kept watching hoping to get that feeling again and by the 4th season you realize the show went to shit but you’ll watch the next 2 seasons anyway because you already invested yourself in the show and spent countless hours so might as well see it through
Damn. The Dexter experience is universal huh? I never got passed season 6 😂
@@brock985 I actually just quit ahead and now I know that that was justified
Alternate universe Northernlion:
I never knew I needed a video of a physicist ranting about their field while playing Binding of Isaac. But now I know, and have a whole RUclips channel to catch up on 😊
I think it's not distracting enough 😕
She needs to also be eating pizza 🍕
@@richardhouseplantagenet6004 she didn't lie. She was simply describing the phenomenon of pop science and how it can run away from reality. The outrageous claims in pop science articles, to use a quote from the video "it's not even wrong." She of course knows what the most serious model of string theory is, but this video isn't about taking down string theory, it's about the history and relationship between string theory and popular science.
I cannot imagine the RUclips algorithm ever again getting so perfect of a bullseye on my interests as an hour-long informal monologue about popular science with extremely clean Binding of Isaac gameplay in the background.
I think this video format worked well, you explained the problem, the context, and how we got here in a really understandable way, and your obvious passion for the topic made your frustration very relatable, even as someone that wasn't really all that familiar with string theory's controversial impact. Thank you for making this.
Don't get me wrong I'm sure she was distracted by what she was saying, and the script she was reading, but this was not "extremely clean" gameplay. In the cathedral she literally got lost and went in a circle about 4 times.
@@Anything_Random I don't think there was a script. Maybe a few rough notes -- but eg not enough to include why it was that Pauli got a Nobel Prize
Your stream of consciousness narration is magnificent. And so very appropriate to narrate in a stream of consciousness manner, especially as that narrative strategy was all the rage back when Einstein was doing his thing.
Agree. Hopefully there's been an algo tweak. Does seem to be different recommendations the last few days.
I'm guessing the YT algorithm presented this to me since I watch a Sabine video every 2 weeks or so. I hate the game she was playing so i was just watching and listening to her and didn't get too distracted. I think she did a couple of times.
Does she always play a game when doing videos like this? And are they always as bad as Bind-of-Isac? 🙂
I'm reminded what the late great Sidney Coleman said about string theorists: "They promised us a theory of everything but gave us a theory of anything."
I usually loose my focus after 7 minutes but you managed to keep me into the topic for almost all of the 50 minutes you talked. It made me regain my interest in at least understanding and being informed about some general physics and science knowledge.
I've followed physics casually for ages and I always wondered why string theory went quiet. Thanks for the excellent summary.
@@RockBrentwood
"a bit of 20th century physics that someone dropped into the 21st century".
Like aa long strip of toilet paper stuck on your shoe as you exit the public restroom.
I thought you were Tay Zonday
This is perhaps only true if you restrict attention to only the world of physics. In the world of mathematics, entire subdisciplines have been revitalised or brought into existence from the interaction with string theory. The most well-known instance of such progress is Pereleman's solution to one of the Milennium Prize problems. So, as with many other things in life, string theory may not have served its intended purpose but it has certainly been and will continue to be extremely fruitful for mathematicians.
@@SpaghettiFusillade No offense, but "fruitful for mathematicians" sounds like a euphemism for "incomprehensible to anyone who is not a mathmatician."
In 30 years there is going to be a younger version of this girl blasting her antiquated beliefs...
The fact that she shit on string theory and beat Isaac in one run is absolutely insane to me.
I can't do either one. Am I stupid?
@@spraynardkruger6426practice makes perfect, gotta keep trying 👍
Built different.
"I'm not very good at this game"
> Obliterates a game I've tried to beat 250 times and only succeeded once while explaining theoretical physics over 40 years
Normal isaac easy
I’m a 90’s kid. And when String Theory came up in a TV show we were watching I asked what it was.
The quote from my dad is likely corrupted by time but here’s how I remember it, ‘It’s a theory about how the universe works. But it can’t be all that good if nobody else can understand it well enough not to make it look stupid.’
The "this is jusy my opinion man" is such a good editorial device for the youtube medium. Making it both useful to the viewer for perspective and preventing clips being blatantly misuable. Thank you for a personable video that functions as a example for science communication and a critique of it.
But she then goes on to immediately say everything in the video as if it's all fact. It's just a cop out for a woman that isn't confident in what she's saying because she knows it's mostly clickbait
This format feels like a modern version of early RUclips from the ‘00s where people just vibe and talk. No need for flashy post-edits, no high tech setup, just relevant information and vibes; almost gives me vihart energy. I love it and it only helps add to your message and keep me engaged. More like this plz
Its just like listening to a friend whos passionately talking about something you're interested in. Its a nice vibe!
There's no "@acollierastro in post" commentary: just a brilliant mind holding forth while doing something else compliex.
Darn you beat me to it lol, I too was reminiscing about the good ol' vihart days of youtube and thinking how this channel rlly embraces the '00s vibe. Love me some good, straight up non-stop spitting of facts
Was thinking the same thing.
It's not that people don't always make these videos. It's just that they aren't from popular accounts and or aren't promoted enough over other videos unfortunately.
I love that you made this personal. "They lied to this specific small child (me)"
ruclips.net/video/uCGD9dT12C0/видео.html
She uses the word "lie" very loosely throughout the video. It just comes off as a delusional rant that is ultimately more about the importance of dressing claims up in such a way that they aren't perceived as misleading.
@@godofmath1039 "Intense research over the past decade by physicists and mathematicians around the world has revealed that [superstring theory] *resolves the tension between general relativity and quantum mechanics* " Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe
Is that the statement of a man who "never believed" in string theory?
She's not delusional. She's accurate.
@@mallninja9805 What does that have to do with anything?
Hey, string theorist here. Love the video and the vibes, and you made some good points! One comment regarding Brian Greene's quote around minute 23: when he said that string theory successfully merges general relativity and quantum mechanics, he didn't mean that it describes our universe successfully - just that it's a quantum mechanical theory which also contains general relativity (which is true). I don't think he was lying, or even attempting to be misleading, for what it's worth. In general, my main disagreement with your video is the implication that Brian and his colleagues were lying, or speaking in bad faith. I think they were just being overly (irresponsibly?) optimistic.
I definitely agree that string theorists made a lot of big promises and statements about string theory that didn't pan out. My perspective is that it's an extremely interesting framework, has led to progress in other areas of physics and math, and might one day turn out to be useful for describing our universe. I totally agree when you say that string theory is a mathematical tool - in the same way that, for example, Newton's forces were a mathematical tool, or quantum field theory is a mathematical tool. Until you have a specific formula for a gravitational force, or a specific Lagrangian, you don't really have a theory - it's just a tool. Similarly, string theory is a framework until we figure out if there is an actual compactification of the extra dimensions which leads to what we observe (and makes predictions!).
Regardless of whether it's the correct framework for a theory of everything, strings as fundamental excitations are pretty good for understanding phenomena at the level of effective field theory, or for studying theories which naively look like they have particles. (I have in mind flux tubes, which just go back to the old ideas of Faraday, also large N expansions a la 't Hooft, and lastly applications of AdS/CFT to QCD, which is an active area of research giving fruitful results for real-world physics).
Read my just posted theo.. experiment here,, uhh experiment. Its from that the extra dimensions are that each different field is like their own parallel universes, or string theory membranes, and have own spaces. Which'd explain why magnetic field have a non cubic coordinate coordination. Its up outward and loops back to the south pole. Read comment, and my community post, about the writing on graph paper.
This comment is very important. The implication that people like Ed Witten or Peter Greene are actively deceiving everybody seems harsh. I only remember the outrageous claims coming from science media, not the scientists themselves. If the science media blows stuff out of proportion, it's then the fault of science media - not the scientists.
I'm thinking the issue is more about string theory no longer being fashionable. Just as every tom, dick and harry jumped on the string theory bandwagon when it WAS fashionable, now they are lining up to bash it. Welcome to the RUclips age
I think her discussion is very revealing and interesting, but I agree with you that we have to be careful about "lie". She quickly dismisses a quote from Seinfeld about it's not a lie if you believe it, but that's basically true. String theory exponents seem to have oversold the idea for quite a while, and Angela (especially young Angela) ate it up, and ended up feeling lied to. Maybe "lied to" is too strong and inaccurate. I had an idea that if someone tells you there is a flying saucer in the yard, but you prove there isn't, that: 1) the person knows there isn't, hence lying; 2) the person thinks there really is, hence mistaken, hallucinating, etc.
Brian Greene is a VERY smart physicist. You think someone that smart misjudged string conjecture? Not believable at all. An average person would be irresponsibly optimistic. Brian plain and simple lied in 2005 and still overselling it when he knows the cold hard truth.
I just discovered your channel and it has become one of my favourites already
Me too!
I can't beat that game when I'm hyper focused, how the hell did you beat it while telling an hour long scientific story!? I am thoroughly impressed
I'm guessing it's "because when this is your PHD, this shit is second nature you can explain in your sleep"
Adderall
when you occupy both the monkey mind and the thinking mind, they do not work against each other
She practiced!
To me, this looks like a long-time Isaac player going on auto-pilot to keep her eyes and hands busy while her brain and voice do some work. It's amazing how, once you get a couple hundred hours into the game, a standard run can be pretty much unconscious. Enemy patterns become engrained, and you move automatically to react to them.
Throughout the game, you can she she's not always having the optimal reactions, but her trained instincts are so good that she gets through anyway. Plus, she got solid offense and health generation early on, which lightened the load. The lack of focus saps her health in the later floors, as the stronger enemies require more careful reactions.
TL;DR: with a lot of experience in the game, her autopilot is just that good
I’m grateful for this channel for validating all of my decade-old gripes, except argued by a phd rather than a lowbie bs.
Nothing wrong with a bs in physics!! Just...maybe don't write books comparing physics to crackpots and we will be fine haha.
This! I knew 20 ago when I heard Greene bloviating about string theory that it was pure horseshit, and I am a layman. I can’t believe we’ve wasted decades on this nonsense.
Maybe only shitty ideas need to go on press tours rather than producing results. And then the work that gets results goes unnoticed
Nothing wrong with BS in Physics, given how much of it is there already...
@@acollierastro it's crazy that someone really did that tho, like whoa
Was hesitant to watch this since it was so long and unedited but... this might be my new favorite format? I love it lol. Also watching you redo takes in real time is oddly refreshing? Like it makes the video feel super real. Great vid, thanks for the info! 😁😁
I'm forgetting the channel name but look up "A time travellers guide to visiting medieval europe", it's an hour long video by a historian, is presented in a similarly casual and pleasant manner and frankly if you're here you'll probably like that one too lol
String theory wasn't a competitor to the standard model. It was an attempt to unify forces because of some interesting math that just pops out simply by adding more dimensions. Adding a fifth dimension to general relativity causes Maxwell's equations to appear, for instance. There is no incompatibility between String Theory and structured hadrons or the existence of quarks. The predictions of W and Z particles resulted from the unified electroweak theory and really shouldn't be attributed to an underlying "standard model" as these became additions to the standard model. The standard model is a collection of things that have worked out and has been just as hard to squeeze quantitative predictions from as any other.
So, particle physicist here, this was SO good. I think there are a couple of places were you got things wrong. Like the whole SSC happened in the 90s. But overall really good.
Also the comment about all string theorists getting faculty positions in the 80s explains so much of my lecturers during uni.
Yeah it was excellent. The chronology was a bit off but that didn't detract and anyway I only know that because I'm old. String Theory was still hegemonic until well past 2010.
This is bs...if you want a good explanation about why the USA super collider project failed I recomend watching bobby broccoli vids...bc she just pulled that crap out of her butt.
@@peterdonnelly1074 Maybe old but clearly still rigorous.
She is very well on a narrative that is presentable as representative
PhD phys student here, I enjoyed this too - I remember reading Brian Greene's book back as a teenager. I definitely believed the universe was made of strings back when I was 15. Then I did undergrad, and realized string theory didn't even explain the physical underpinnings of quantum physics, just tacked on the math of canonical quantization sort of as an afterthought (I'm just a layperson when it comes to string theory, but that's my understanding). There are things I like about string theory and would like to learn more about, like AdS-CFT, but I realized a while ago it's more of a conglomeration of math, with a few specialized applications, than a theory of everything.
I've been following walking droplet research for a long time, modern pilot-wave theory stuff, and am studying (basically on my own, as no one has expertise in it where I am) vortex molecules in multi-component Bose-Einstein condensates. I have a lot of faith in this area, built up over time from the things I've learned, to actually explain particle physics and cosmology - the walking droplet system is a pretty good analog of the electron-positron field and certain optical/photon phenomena (see e.g. the 2020 review paper by Bush), and the vortex molecules I'm studying display confinement among other things similarly to quark-based particles (and BECs have many other analogs mostly in cosmology) - but I'm not an experimentalist and I have no idea when these ideas might yield testable predictions. (Maybe pilot-wave theory in general has some, I'd have to check...) My hope is that a clear understanding of particle interactions, dark matter and dark energy will arise from hydrodynamic analog models, which would be pretty good evidence in favour of them. I believe there are connections between MOND and superfluids (like BECs), for instance.
Anyway, I think this video made me understand something, about why science communication feels so all-over-the-place now. Walking droplets were covered for a bit, then they seem to have gone out of fashion, and I see plenty of articles pop up about the multiverse and other random things. Maybe people just want to hear scientific-sounding stuff, but don't really want to believe anything anymore. It's obvious to me how much more sense hydrodynamic analogs make than pseudoscience like multiverse "theory", and I've wondered why walking droplets/etc weren't big news. I thought it was just that the field is still somewhat in its infancy, with its first international conference a few years ago. I thought the idea that the universe is a fluid-based chaotic-dynamical system (with non-Markovian dynamics) was too complicated or boring for some people, and so science communication lost interest. But maybe it's also that people have become skeptical.
"I'm playing as normal don't judge me"- Too late, you've already been judged as having great taste for being into Isaac.
Agreed.
I feel like I learned more about string theory in this video than all the popsci articles I've read on the subject. This put so much into perspective.
Also, kudos on giving this talk while gaming! I love going in-depth about the scientific things I'm passionate about, and I'd love to try incorporating this kind of format in some of my own videos in the future
I think this is the first out of many videos that I will watch from your channel! It's also the first run of Isaac I've ever watched! Very enjoyable an a cool concept for a video.
I’m a sixteen year old girl, and I just adore physics. I’m in AP phys 2 right now and I’m having so much fun. Videos like these and people like you are my biggest inspiration to keep learning and expanding my knowledge; not because I necessarily want to do it professionally, but because I love the subject. Thank you so much for posting this it was so well made and you’re so eloquent. I appreciate the work you’re doing so incredibly much ❤
Yo badass man
same here too!!!
So great! Keep sharpening your mathematics - a fundamental tool of your trade. It will make everything easier for you and unlock your potential.
I often claim that my recent Foundations of Physics paper (published January 23, 2023) can be understood by talented high school physics students. The title is "Ground state quantum vortex proton model."
personal projects will be your biggest source of academia! have fun and keep at it!
I am infinitely impressed that you were able to explain string theory and it's underlying flaws so coherently while also dominating BoIR.
I came here looking for someone to comment on this - I agree she's giving a powerful dissertation and playing a video game at the same time - dang.
lucky run
i really don't know, except the win streak before this game is -212 (1:05).
my theory is she plays better while explaining stuff, or this particular stuff
It was def interesting but she didn’t explain it
Multitasking Chick.
She’s so cool.
@@biggiesmartypants I don't know how BoIR works, but could it be that she was experimenting with different builds, or mods or something? I really don't think she's shit at the game but then miraculously wins while talking about a complex subject lol.
This is really great, and really relatable as someone in CS/robotics *cough* self-driving cars LLMs *coughs*
Out of curiosity, do you think ML will become another string theory? There's lots of funding going on at the moment, and I see a lot of parallels between it and string theory, but I'm a dumbass so idk.
oh wow I just started watching this and I'm already in love with your process. love the subject and the transparency of the one-take not to mention to your sincere (interesting) weirdness. haven't got time to watch but can't wait to watch later.
okay I was randomly recommended this video and never leave RUclips comments but just had to say something because WOW. being in academia myself (grad student in biochemistry/biophysics) I feel like we seriously don't talk enough about how academic politics or like, money, or book deals, play into how we communicate science. you knocked it out of the park. instant subscriber. thank you.
Not exactly the same science, as it's data and behavioral science, but you should look into this one famous lady in the field of behavioral science (I forgot her name) that is under heavy scrutiny right now for falsifying/fabricating data in her studies and research. It's a great current events topic that exemplifies the dangers of sacrifice morality honesty, and ethics for increased chance at fame and getting more accolades.
Wait till we scratch the "covid vaccine" topic in the next 20/30 years
@@OscarASevillaI’m a psychology student. Psychology, not being hard science, is one of those fields where it’s suuuuuper easy to go to pseudoscience-land or plain old letstweakthesenumbersabit-land, and it’s baffling to me how no one took the time to teach us how science is supposed to work and simply started teaching concepts we’re supposed to take at face value. No surprise we’re seen as the dumb inbred cousins of the scientific field (there’s a book I’m reading by Keith Stanovich called How to think straight about psychology that talks about how the whole field is full of bad scientist and really stresses on how it should basically all be neuropsychology - I highly recommend it).
I think we should teach a bit less of scientific facts and a little more of scientific culture, as much in school as in popular science: if a teenager doesn’t know about Krebs cycle (something we spent like a month of in high school, but that might just be Italy’s education system’s love for wasting time on random things lol) but knows what falsification principle is, that’s more good than harm done for me. The fact that it’s not even taught in university though, that’s worrisome.
Sounds like they've been... Stringing us along
Badum-tish
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAH 😎
get out
Now I'd be wishing there were some invisible dimensions I could disappear into.
I think a better name for it is Worm theory, thats what those strings look like to me😊
Your multitasking abilities are next level! I'm impressed! I would love to see anyone else talk science and do something else that demands your attention!
I teach physics at university level and I am very happy you made this video. I fully agree on all points you're making.
I'm so impressed by this. Not that she can explain all of this but that she can put together coherent sentences and play games at the same time. I cannot do this.
Don't worry man, she put in a lot of work, but there are lots of types of minds. Some need distractions, some need hyperfocus. It's not just a matter of skill.
It is quite distracting though
@@will1603 I agree. It's impressive that she's able to do these things simultaneously but they do not complement each other at all
she is probably playing the game to slow her mind down
@@armandoff91 Don't fall for this. Humans are humans. She's able to do this with qualitative phrases. If you add some calculations or equation analisys it falls off.
I really don't like this concept of playing a game while talking "complex" stuff as it's just for show and she portrais the same results on people as she is complaining about, people like you believing "smart people" are way over they capabilities when in reality, the process of understanding is always time consuming and mostly not straightfoward.
"I'm a dark matter guy, but like I'm not anymore, because I'm in industry-- where the cash is"
"Sir, did she just"
"Yea she just" like a 90s mic drop moment lol
Same, but computational condensed matter. For me, it was gallium arsenide which, similar to string theory, was the material of the future. The joke about it is that it always will be the material of the future. Kinda like string theory being the theory of the future. Once they figure out how (if at all) to test it.
@@joelandman3721 *laughing and caughing in arsenic poisoning*
Black Sabbath - MASTER OF REALITY
I don’t get it…
Does that mean that the industry doesn’t put funds into dark matter or is the joke something else?
@@plaguedfrost1753 It's two things. Academia is totally down to study dark matter, but nobody else really cares about it, so for PhDs who study dark matter, it's either get a tenure-track job or live in a box on the side of the road. But if you've got a PhD in a complex topic like studying dark matter, industry will throw gobs of money at you so you can make a better rocket/semiconductor/data farm/computer program. Might be something you don't care a lick about, but honestly, those jobs are way less drama and way more straightforward than holding the hand out for grant money every few months.
ok. i really like the channel. so thanks. i think you might have underestimated the love that the public has, public in your agreed upon usage, for the physics. those of us who got into string theory saw that there wasn't much testable pretty early. Our disappointment with strings is shared. I will speak for everyone. we're not mad, we're disappointed.
Wow, I never realized (or must have glossed over it while reading popular science books) that Supersymmetry was actually first an idea that popped up in String theory and was then applied to the Standard Model but they never found the supersymmetric particles (that part I knew). I learned something and that's great, thank you!
I grew up reading all those Brian Greene & Michio Kaku books as a kid, wanting to become a string theorist, and then got disillusioned with it in undergrad. Ended up going into soft matter theory instead, right now I'm working on a project studying polymer statistical physics; I like to think of it as studying string theory, except my strings actually exist lol
Well, as I recall, many physicists sort of rolled their eyes when string theorists started doing pop sci, but others argued that it was for the best, that they'd capture the imagination of children and encourage more people to study physics. And perhaps there is something to that.
@@mikicerise6250 I agree! Even though they were overly optimistic at best (and downright dishonest at worst) about string theory, their books are still one of the primary factors that really hooked me into physics as a whole. They had a perspective about the natural world that I wasn't really being exposed to anywhere else in my life. So I am grateful to them for that.
@@mikicerise6250 Hindsight is definitely 20/20 here, but the problem with that logic is that you just produce a lot of mathematical physicists who refuse to look into anything else when what we really need more of is "lab scale" experimentalists (so condensed matter and AMO primarily). I'm definitely biased being a chemical physicist here/only knowing a small subset of what actual mathematical physicists work on, but the work I see from there is more or less worthless. A lot of justifying why physically obvious things are true (say, why energy must be bounded from below) and not a lot of finding non obvious things that must be true because of the math (for an old example, say, that the rotational ground state isn't no angular momentum for certain molecules due to the nuclear spin quantum numbers).
Bound magnetic monopoles exist in solids ;-)
You did better than me. Finished The Elegant Universe the summer before 8th grade. I got disillusioned with academia at 13 when I realized that my school district genuinely couldn’t recognize that I wasn’t doing any of the work because I had already taught myself the entire high school curriculum and was bored. Fought them all throughout high school, trying to be let into the classes that were actually appropriate for me. Always got hit with “bUt YuO dOnT dO tHe WoRk” after getting between a 90 and a 100 on every test while sleeping through most of my classes.
After that it just got worse. The further you go in academia the more offended people get by someone who requires no concerted effort to learn and finds modern physics and medicine to be equally as pedestrian as an intro literature course.
Of course being depressed all the time doesn’t really help my productivity. But when the general state of the world and other factors out of your control are the primary thing depressing you, fixing the depression isn’t usually the most cost-effective use of resources
Amazing video! And as a request/suggestion: PLEASE do one on Quantum Physics. Not the field of QP itself because of course this is legitimate field of physics etc but how (bad) science communication/journalism/pop culture have completely turned the public's understanding of QP into a mystical, esoteric magical clowncar (if not an actual circus with elephants and the peanut gallery and all that)
@@Horvath_Gabor "Tantric Quantum Intercourse" is going to be the name of my debut album lmao Thank you, gonna check them out
@@Horvath_Gabor Babe I'm gonna *ANKH* !!! 😩
i hate the marvel universe so much for what they have done to quantum physics...what the everloving fuck is the quantum world why are there aliens ????
A lot of people think that quantum mechanics is garbage because it doesn't correspond to their naive preconceptions of how things should work. If you're studying quantum mechanics at any sort of realistic level that's a threshold that you have to overcome. Most people who study it seriously don't really try to understand it. It's like we've got this set of rules, and we can use it to do calculations, and the calculations give us the right answers. So whatever it is, it works.
@@peterwilson8039I think it’s a type of person thing. To me quantum mechanics makes more sense then traditional mechanics but my background is in pure math so the idea of abstracting photons into waves and calculating off that just… idk, it makes more sense then the abstractions we’ve been doing to this point by counting individual atoms. My brain likes the quantum rules haha
I'm catching up on your great videos so i feel like i should comment to push engagement. Excellent commentary!
(Software) engineer here: Thank you. it's been a decade and a half hearing vague stuff about this (and physics teachers rants about this) and I never understand the conflict or what was at stake. Like, I understood in a really superficial level some core concepts of string theory, and some of the implications if it was proven right, but, I never really understood the "logistics" and almost business-side of this whole debate.
This clarified things in a way that someone who tangentially had to learn semi-advanced calculus and how electromagnetic waves behave but never really using that knowledge on a regular basis, could understand.
As someone who grew up in Fermilab's backyard and first wanted to do physics because of Nova's Elegant Universe, this hit WAY too hard. I got all the way up through undergraduate physics and realized that I had basically been sold a pipe dream. Thankfully my last course ever was a radio astronomy course right before they imaged the black hole, which made that paper so much more intelligible. I got my degree and left physics altogether because I just lost my love for it. And I kinda blame Brian Greene for a lot of it.
Equal if not more blame should also be placed at the feet of Michio Kaku.
I'm in the same boat. switched to art where being a wacko is encouraged. a lot more fun for me!
@@theranchokid yeah, it makes me wonder if the charismatic scientist trope should be a red flag 😅
@@theranchokid He is an out-and-out charlatan who has taken money to lend his voice and supposed expertise to lead the public down a sparkling dead-end. A true $cienti$t.
@@theranchokid
No joke. This is the guy went goofy (a real short trip) over the Higgs Boson and said, "This is the origin of the Big-Bang!!" Physicists the world over were universally, "Just shut up, dude. Enough already." I've typically liked his radio show, Science Fantastic (at least I did when it was on the radio in my area 10-15 years ago). He is (or at least was) very good with talking about conventional well-established science. When he starts talking about new theories and discoveries, he goes off the reservation real easy.
This isn't really a String Theory problem, it's a symptom of popular science media. The publishers know there's a market for people who want to pick up a science book at an airport, as you put it, and it's the same audience buying Popular Science, which for years has been more like Popular Science Fiction. So they have to do two things: (1) find someone with science knowledge who's willing to take time writing books instead of writing papers and experimental setups and grant proposals and (2) find a topic that promises to be revolutionary to the average person. String Theory talks about multiple dimensions, and multiple dimensions has this kind of mystique in the popular psyche. In the west, shows like Doctor Who and Twilight Zone and Star Trek have brought us this idea of multiple dimensions as frontiers of discovery. In Asia, there's an entire genre of popular fiction that involves moving between worlds or dimensions. The popular promise of String Theory wasn't even something that the String Theorists said, and therein was the deception made. They didn't have to lie as much as people heard "big breakthrough in physics" along with "multiple dimensions" and their imaginations spun out a bunch of nonsense fantasies. The publishers knew that this would happen, too, because those promises of a better immediate future are a large part of what sells their stuff. Add in a bunch of frustrated physicists who aren't making headway in their String Theory research, and the publishers can pump out a bunch of books.
If you look at other popular science stuff, there's publications that will gladly talk about how the Higgs Boson discovery will "let us unravel the mysteries of gravity". To a physicist, that means things like figuring out how gravity interacts with other forces and understanding gravity at the quantum scale. To the populace, that conjures up thoughts of anti-gravity hoverboards and cheap space travel and artificial gravity in orbital habitats. It's a bunch of cool imaginings, but realistically finding the Higgs Boson in 2012 puts us no closer to a hoverboard from Back to the Future II than we were when the movie came out in 1989.
If you pay attention, you'll see this in popular science media outside physics too: Chemistry talks about making current batteries obsolete with Graphene, Materials Science promises us better and cheaper houses through some novel material and process, Biology promises worms that digest plastics to fix landfills, Medicine together with Biology promises us abundant rejection-free organ replacements, etc. It's all hogwash pulled out of extrapolating from ideas that admittedly are present in modern science, but there's huge strings of unlikely possibilities attached to get us to any of those futures. The science media will gladly spout it like it's the truth and you'll definitely see it in your lifetime, though.
Damn preach complicated username person!
Ridiculously true. It's why I find political progressives so hilarious. They're existing as a movement solely off of hype for technologies and science that either doesn't exist yet (and won't for another century) or that is being kept firmly under lock down by governments with no intentions to release it ever (gotta keep problems around to control the masses).
History is not and has never been a straight line of progress tracking upward. It's always been a cycle. That's why I'm a traditionalist and not a progressive, we're about to end this cycle with a bang and enter a new one starting from bottom. All this time and energy wasted on "science" will evaporate and only people like me will be left, teaching our kids how to build houses and grow crops, not complex theoretical math.
Stop doing equations, start having a family.
Graphene is physicsts, not chemists. The only reason graphene shows up all the damn time is because it's a 2D system that physicists actually know how to make. It's not actually particularly special which is why the condensed matter guys are finally starting to move on and bite the bullet and actually learn synthesis. Pop chem is basically nonexistent because the dirty little secret with chemistry and materials science is that we don't need pop sci to get funding. Astronomy and a lot of the more fundamental fields of physics do because it being neat and training people who incidentally are highly skilled in other useful things is more or less the entire justification for it. Even physical chemistry, the subfield that has the least practicality, does work with a lot of applications in remote sensing, general analytical chemistry, semiconductors, and drug discovery. Don't get me wrong, we also have navel gazers who take pride in doing stuff that's worthless, but it's not nearly as bad because we're grounded enough that it's uncommon. Like, my actual research interest is open shell systems and low temperature kinetics. In practice this means I study combustion and occasionally atmospheric chemistry because combustion has a ton of hard to study open shell systems and atmospheric chemistry occasionally runs into reactions with non arrhenius behavior which our technique is uniquely good at probing.
Also, material scientists *definitely* make things that make us better and cheaper houses. That was a really weird comment. Who do you think makes high performance alloys in the first place? For an example that we will almost assuredly see within the decade, they've also developed passively cooling paints. It's still a bit expensive at the moment, but they work, the chemistry required for the paints isn't particular uncommon, and while it's a bit hard to wrap your head around why/how it works, it doesn't actually break thermodynamics even though it sounds like it should. In a nutshell it reflects sunlight extremely well, but it absorbs really strongly at wavelengths slightly longer than sunlight for really efficient radiative cooling. The end result is the thing you paint is several degrees colder than the environment. Or for an example that you can buy right now, ocean compostable plastic straws. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if those don't catch on, we can't convince people that your stomach isn't a store shelf and that preservatives are just a benign way to reduce food spoilage after all, but they completely fix the problem that caused us to go to paper straws in the first place.
On the one hand, yes, it is a science communication problem. But, scientists have a responsibility to recognize this and take that into account when they interact with media or write books or whatever
> (1) find someone with science knowledge who's willing to take time writing books instead of writing papers and experimental setups and grant proposals
*THAT* is where it is a problem of science. Too many scientists are convinced that the general public can be disposed of in the process of funding and directing science, leaving the field to the charlatans and carnival hucksters. Then, when (and not if!) the charlatans are caught, it costs all of science.
Scientists: Learn to communicate science. Develop a taste for communicating science. The alternative is, well, what we have now: a general public who doesn't trust scientists.
this video answers like so many of my questions. I have spent so many hours trying to understand why some people wrote headlines like "we have wasted our careers on nothing"
Welp I just wandered in after being auto played from a video on the second raid on Schweinfort in WWII. Algorithm be praised. Sat through the whole thing and you completely changed my understanding of where physics is these days. So thank you very much for that.
A girl in my high school class did a book report on string theory probably around 2002 (I just looked it up and it was Polchinski's from 1998). I thought it was really interesting until I asked her what it would mean, practically and experimentally, if it was true. Her answer was basically that the book didn't say, so I filed it under stuff like Simulation Hypothesis and Last Thursdayism. Just neat ideas to think about for fun.
You're the first person who I've heard point out Simulation theory doesn't have much real-world practical implication.
I hear people talking about 'we're in a simulation', usually without much knowledge behind it so they can't explain it well to me. But I also never really feel too compelled or scared of the idea because it doesn't change anything of my experience.
I should look into it as it's probably interesting but the whole 'woohh scary' vibe some laymen go with Simulation theory is off-putting. I like psychology, and I've seen that same behaviour with some misunderstood concepts of psychology that don't seem remotely scary or like they change our experience at all; like how there's thought before you actively word thoughts in your head; some people internalise that as something 'other than you' controlling you. I see that as your natural way of thinking pre-language. We translate our thoughts into our mother tongue, which takes some time, so that's the delay. What is scary about a translation delay, and why would that split 'us' from our pre-language cognition? lol It seems like a misuse of the theory for spooky points and no real practical implication.
I once read that simulation theory spreading across the net was some form of psyop to make people even more nihilist.
Sounds about as plausible as simulation theory.
@@qwandary Well, this singular concept of us performing an action or movement before knowingly thinking about or processing it, has been disproven as nonsense for decades now.
The idea is based on a couple of experiments where it turns out, or is heavily implied, that someone fiddled with the numbers, most probably to make sure the book written about that shit sells well. This happens practically every fucking time when someone claims to have stumbled upon something that "revolutionises" the way we see any perception of reality based on well-prooven standard models. These ideas are disingenuous at best, and at worst, they bring a cult following of basement-dwelling idiots to the table who pollute the Internet with their beliefs or want to make a quick buck from gullible simpletons.
The simulation hypothesis, if correct, would at least suggest an entirely new avenue of research: bug/glitch hunting.
@@InfiniteAnvil lol now I'm imagining speedrunners becoming the new vanguard of experimental physics
As a fan of both The Binding of Isaac and being a fan of physics, I have to say that you've blown me away with this video. I can explain physics things or play the binding of Isaac, but doing both at the same time while maintaining a coherent train of thought... is absolutely insane to me. Great work! Thanks for creating such great content.
I had the same exact thought hahaha. I came here purely because of isaac in the thumbnail. Did not expect some whole unscripted off the cuff dissertation as well.
I was amazed at the ability to both beat Issac and String Theory (relatively) at the same time. Incredible! Great video.
@@heartboy0 she can read the comments homie its still creepy
@@alansujansky8591 i doubt she will read it in a reply but it is a fair point. i will delete my post. 1 less problem.
As a member of the "popular science" crowd you talk about, I think blaming string theory for "screwing up science communication" seems really misdirected to me. The idiocy and short sightedness of modern science reporting, and the general anti-science BS that's gripped many societies around the world making science communication difficult is a LOT larger than Michiu Kaku & co selling a lot of books about an untestable theory. There is a set of much larger socio political factors that screwed all this up....but I understand the frustration.
"String theory lied to us" still feels a bit reductive when you acknowledge it was research done in good faith, if a bit over zealous and fueled by book sales money, but I don't think anybody *lied.* I'll take your word for it though, I enjoyed this video and will be going through you back catalog.
I'll buy that not being up front enough about the testability and status over decades is lying.
But you're absolutely right you can't divorce that from the factors that let such lies go unchecked or even rewarded them
agree, it is pop sci to blame. scientists do the work, and media reports it wrongly and typically fails to even cite the paper they report wrong
Finally, someone reasonable
came for the isaac, stayed for the science way beyond my comprehension
One of my favorite parts about the Red Mars trilogy is that its like 2080 and the string theorists are still trying to make the jump from math to reality.
"We're a decade away from something amazing" had me dying everytime 😂
We are 30 years from a breakthrough in nuclear fission 🤣🤣🤣
You died? Do you need help? Are you ok?
@@JanWnogu lol funny and true, though Oppenheimer already covered fission, I think you meant fusion.
@@rayneweber5904 Lmao If I am indeed dead then worry not, that precludes all assistance apart from funeral expenses.
@@_Woo I meant using fusion for energy production. For several decades we've been "30 years from breakthrough" all the time and we still are 🤣🤣🤣
i can barely make a sentence if im really focusing on the game, respect.
Very cool format and you are very likable and it's fun to hear you see your face and see you play at the same time!
What Collier leaves out is just how complicated the math of string theory is. Even with assistance from computers, solvable equations are only approximations. With recent advancements in AI, I expect new breakthroughs in String Theory... should take about ten years.
Yes, I thought the suggestion to "just pick up a textbook" was a little optimistic. So, eh, string theory's results are ten years in the future, and always will be ;-)
@@victotronics Be careful. So was useable AI and now it's here.
@@ianedmonds9191 ELIZA was doing the same thing in 1965. Gullibility is all powerful.
@@ianedmonds9191 can you elaborate?
@@williambranch4283 what is ELIZA?
This young woman is a fantastic scientific communicator.
I'm instantly a big fan of anyone who casually, but respectfully, shits on Michio Kaku's entire career while playing Binding of Isaac like its so easy a toddler could crush it.
P.S. that looks like a really fun seed and i wish you had saved it.
You can see the seed at 22:20 when she pauses, it's L1TV 707A
@@INRamos13 u da real MVP bro
"Michio Kaku is out of control" - Eric Weinstein
Damn I actually know someone who would be so mad at this video but I'm not gonna send it cause I don't need the headache
Michio Kaku's media presentations in a nutshell: "I'm going to show you how we can build a time machine. All we need is exotic matter that we haven't discovered yet, Dark energy that we haven't verified as being real, a power source 10 times more powerful than our sun and a way of mapping out time to avoid paradoxes. See? Thanks for watching."
As a non-physicist, I'm actually a sociologist and sign language interpreter, I always enjoyed physics and astronomy content on youtube and I thought for years that there were some sort of general consensus on string theory, today I got to view Penrose position on this and I was baffled, and here I'm watching this video. Thanks for your work and posting this "general public"
Ok I'm a female soft matter physicist who grew up in the 90s and I obsessively play hades and this video is like looking in an alternate-universe mirror
You have demonstrated that your resentment towards the string theory community can function autonomously while you do other stuff, like play videogames for fun. Impressive and excellent use of your time, thanks for the video :)
I would be really pissed off if I'd devoted years to studying String Theory only to discover that it was crap, and in some cases, bad faith crap
I have to say, I am super impressed that you were able to record this in one take and without reading a script, while playing Binding of Isaac. I certainly would not have been able to accomplish that.
For real
She has notes, which honestly is a better idea than trying to read a script aloud while distracted. Still wildly impressive to play a videogame while talking, without making any lethal errors.
I'm not tbh. I find it very distracting to the point I have to just listen and not watch.
@@lokanoda you don't have to watch. I think she just puts the game play up so people can see what she's looking at. The point of her playing the video game is to distract herself from talking which calms her down. It makes a single take, surprisingly, more relaxing.
When I was a budding paleontologist in the 1960s, we believed that creating life in a test tube would be here by the 70s.
feels like I’m part of that subway surfer joke..
That said it was a very interesting video, I was the ”public” as a kid (though string theory had already faded by then) and I can recognize how this applies to some ideas introduced to me. Thanks for the video, I’m a fan 👍
I'm only a couple minutes in, but hearing you talk about the Higgs boson made me smile. At the time people were trying to find it, I was a young kid. My dad told me about them trying to find it and I didn't really know what a boson was so in 2012 I claimed I'd found it under my bed (it was dark and my brain was seeing things moving that weren't there, I assumed that was the boson). A few months later the Higgs boson was actually found, but now it's a household joke that I found it first.
mom said it's my turn on the particle accelerator
This is adorable
i love this format, its exactly how it is to be on a discord call with a friend who is extremely knowledgeable about a subject and is streaming their gameplay whilst forming a coherent history
Can't really relate
@@kalma5003 dont know anyone this smart and skilled.
@Gabriel huhu what does your friend talk about??
i love parasocial relationships
@@mercster …no to? elaborate?
Weirdly a long format video I actually enjoyed. Also, I'd like to know your opinion about the holographic principle or the AdS/CFT correspondence (I began to search a little about string theory after the video and a rabbit hole led to this but I didn't understand much)
Wasn't sure to check a 1h long video, but was not dissappointed.
Really good one
I love this. Great job.
Hi there.
Sometimes I forget you're not just the best meme sharer around, but also a smart science guy too aha
Thank you so much!
@@acollierastro accept my thanks, too. it was great to get a nice clean summary of the situation because I'd heard murmurings of this sentiment here and there the past few years.
@@acollierastro I still have love for the particle physicists, as "The Public" (who happens to be a laser engineer by trade). I was fortunate to get 'vaccinated' around 1992, when I read Sheldon Glashow's 1988 book _Interactions: A Journey Through the Mind of a Particle Physicist and the Matter of This World_ (which I highly recommend). Toward the end, he airs his gripe against the stampede he was seeing towards String Theory. He likened it to Einstein's later years, when he turned so hard into untestable 'thought experiments', that virtually none of his ideas from that period survive today.
So, at least one Sheldon got it right.
I have never seen a single video from this channel, and she just pulled up The Binding of Isaac in the first minute of a video essay about physics
I'm dying this is great
A similar debasement has occurred in philosophy. A lot of people throw out the philosophy baby with the mystical multi-verse truefalse paradox puzzle-logic "philosophy".
What I noticed:
The more confusing and garbled the String Theory presentation, (meaning the listener couldn't understand it) the more the Theorists was assumed to be a genius.
I am a mathematician i think a lot of the tools developed in am and in string theory are useful in mathematics, i recall that string theorists worked out the dimensionality of a path space that was important in the Lapland’s program. So i would say its probably a mathematical tool rather than a physics tool at this point in history. I do like your coverage - thanks so much for doing it.
This is the thing though, mathematicians have a tendency to force their newest toys into physics, so they can say it has applications. But most of them have no physical insights whatsoever.
@@michaelpieters1844 this exactly OP has no clue what they are talking about, and really should refrain from ever commenting on anything ever again.
@@ocoolwow that's a bit rude for a comment that adds nothing to the conversation don't you think?
@@michaelpieters1844Physical insight is shaped by mathematical insight and vice versa. Having an awareness of the nature of the tools in a mathematicians repertoire allows one to abstract away and get at the core of a physical reasoning or construction and adapt to new situations with new mathematical perspectives.
Where would physics today without Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics? These don’t contain any new information beyond Newtonian mechanics but rather provides a useful mathematical framework and a lamplight that allowed physicists to navigate developing the foundations of quantum theory.
Just like how understanding the nature of a classical physical theory in the abstract leads to a wealth of understanding of physics in general even though there is nothing immediately physically intuitive about, say, a Poisson bracket, so too does studying the nature of n-dimensional qft’s in the abstract.
I have always thought it should be called string toolkit. To be a theory, it needs to predict something specific that can be tested. String 'theory' can be made to predict nearly anything at all just by adjusting the free parameters, so nothing is testable.
This is a message that needs to get out more.
When I was a babby science enthusiast, I read "The Universe in a Nutshell" by Stephen Hawking, and watched lots of stuff on the discovery channel and stuff, and I came out of it with the impression that string theory was not just a valid theory, but pretty much established fact, just with some details yet to be worked out. So imagine my surprise when I started getting a physics degree and realized that it's, famously, Not Even Wrong.
Also, big fan of BoI, very surprised to see that as an accompaniment lmao
This has been exactly my experience. Except I'm not quite as far along, I'm not involved in the physics community but I'm interested to hear about developments, and my understanding was that String Theory was just sort of "Basically fact" except for the fact that I couldn't understand why nobody was explaining how it worked to me. This video makes that make sense
It doesn’t require a physics degree to figure out that an unfalsifiable theory that plays on its „beauty“ is treading on dodgy ground.
Same here - went from studying about Relativity and its high-level maths, to the basically math-free string theory. The math leading to the numerous dimensions were somewhat hidden from the science-reading crowd, lest we be scared away - this combined with the analogy of violins & cellos felt like a fantasy. ST overshadowed QFT for decades, and drove my decision to study business & computers in college instead of physics. And now, on the far side, it feels like physicists stopped doing math in the 1960s, and have been following an ideological drive not because the math made sense, but because they thought the ideas were pretty. Culturally, this feels as though it's "liberal mathematics", and undergoing the same anti-left push back as in other areas of contemporary culture, with a return to traditional values. DJs gotta dance more - mathematicians gotta write computer simulations and play these as video games.
String theory is a framework for learning more about quantum field theory. It is very successful at that which is why it plays a role in the majority of papers today that call themselves "high energy theory". People who didn't understand their own theory well enough (in particular the fact that "compactifications" don't necessarily have to be geometric and introduce new dimensions) overstated what it would do. But the tradition of lending ideas to mathematicians and particle physicists (which could've been thought of without string theory if humans were smarter) was just getting started when the SUSY standard model stuff described in the video happened.
@@dinobotpwnz Hi yes, as a mathematician I would like to return this that was lent to me *slides string theory in library return slot*
A joke, of course, but I had to make it. I am automatically skeptical of any theory that seems like it does/solves too much, but problems arise when the theory is so complex that it is not easily understandable even by those in the field. It gets worse when it’s unfalsifiable. The idea of a grand but (as I understand) ultimately unfalsifiable theory being widely accepted as fact makes me uncomfortable. To me it’s weird to accept a new axiom unless it provides some necessary quantifiable benefit to the system/space it’s a part of, and it’s not clear to me how ST is such, though I have been out of the physics loop for quite some time.
44:10 "did I win? I won!" that was so delightful. Thank you for posting this :)
I'm very much "the public" you're talking about: someone who's not a trained physicist who follows what's happening in physics and tries to understand what's going on to the level my math will allow me to. This explained a lot to me. Thank you!
17:56 "They spent the 1990s lying to this small child specifically" LMAO me too 😆😆😆.
I'm glad you went so hard and called them out for *lying* , not just "exaggerating" or "being mistaken". I'm especially angry at Michio Kaku who I think deliberately used stuff from science fiction to manipulate young people who don't quite know the difference between science *fiction* and *actual* science. I went to grad school and had a crisis of faith when I realized I didn't exactly know why I was there, whether this was actually a useful field or if I was just going because of dumb lies I absorbed as a child. Eventually I dropped out and (like everyone else I know) went to "industry," which is to say, stuff totally unrelated to physics.
As a graduate student in the early 80s I was at a high-energy physics conference. Andrei Linde was there, talking about cosmology before it was sexy, and there were talks by several early string theorists. Apparently - so they said - there is only one mathematically possible string theory, unlike QFT where you can have any number of consistent ones. I was enchanted. I was blown away. I wanted to do string theory. A year or two later, there were a dozen string theories, none of which looked anything like reality. Soon after that, I left the field.
@@mertanos Maybe my BS detector was fine-tuned back in my undergrad. Or maybe I developed a critical posture about all the hype of the 90s, from fractals to high-temperature superconductivity (I did honors thesis on that subject), passing through nanomaterials, all high energy physics (do you really need 14k PhDs in physics for just that?), the femtosecond universe (religious) explanations by Hawking, and the self-fulfilled prophecies of particle physics.
During my PhD, I attended a lecture by the great Lisa Randall, and she explained how they needed at least 8 dimensions but really 11 to explain gravity and how the next year they would have definite proof. It has been 13 years since that lecture, and still no proof. But she has the #6 book in Particle Physics at Amazon ("Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs").
Michio Kaku in particular is a charlatan. He goes and twists everything into pure pie-in-the-sky fantasy fiction.
I know...
@@DJVARAO Funny, I was just a few years behind you from the sounds of it; and I never bothered learning beyond a surface level of string theory because I got that same impression at first blush. But then, there were already enough clues by that point to warrant skepticism... I honestly can't say for certain I wouldn't have been swept away were I studying in the '80s.
"And that suuuuucks man" I feel that. Despite having a degree in physics, I have random people who've never studied science tell me the things I say are wrong and they know better.
I don't think you really felt that because I read on Facebook... 😉😁
You mean flat earthers?
@@3seven5seven1nine9 Your "education" has been compromised.
@@sunrazor2622 Quantum quackery is a thing. A kind of big thing.
As a computer scientist living in the AI boom. I feel this immensely
BA in physics practically makes you can expert
I read a book in maybe 2007 that explored surface level string theory and its problems, like needing 17 dimensions... It also brought up the gatekeeping which occured in the 80s where one could not obtain a doctorate in physics without doing it on string theory.
Watching you play the Binding of Isaac while talking about the downfall of String Theory really brings me back. My roommate in undergrad when I was studying Physics played that game a lot, and that's when I was just transitioning from being in "the general public" to being on the "inside" of Physics. I actually had a professor, my favorite Physics professor, a really great guy, who made this entire career shooting down theories of quantum gravity by finding the subtle ways current experimental evidence already rules them out. Great times.
Holy shit i can barely form a coherent thought while playing a game. Holding a convo with my friends while trying to do well in the game is so difficult, this is really impressive
I find it easier because of my ADD. Otherwise too many intrusive thoughts disrupt my thought process.
I was gonna say! This is harder than it looks.
Most people have Intel Core i3 inside. She has an Intel Core i9.
@@oldi184 I''m stuck with a 286. =:o(
@@therealpbristow
You are not alone. I have something similar.
Imagine if Ed Witten had been doing something productive for the past 50 years...
As a kid in the 80s I was very interested in science. I picked up on two things that interested me... Fractals and String Theory. I knew a superficial idea of string theory well before I had any understanding of the standard model. Through my life I learned a little bit of physics and the standard model and saw how rooted it was in experiment and slowly realized string theory had little to no experiment-based proof, but hey the math was neat. Then it just stalled but books and movies kept bringing it up as an ultimate understanding of matter. It just seems to always stall and I'm glad someone is willing to call "prove sonething or move out of pure theory!"
I think imma go download Binding of Issac now.
I can't believe I just spent an hour listening to a random physicist rant about string theory, and I was so entertained I couldn't stop it.
Brilliant video
istg this is so unique it's amazing.
also, your passion for physics flows through the screen it's so beautiful
to me the death knell of string theory was when I learned that it applies to anti-DeSitter space, which is not the universe we live in... Ironically that was pointed out by Avi Loeb. I hadn't realized the public perception had flipped on physics generally, that's a damned shame. Also, I don't think I can give a talk like that playing video games 😯
That reminds me of an Alpha Centauri quote "A brave little theory, and actually quite coherent for a system of five or seven dimensions -- if only we lived in one."
- Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "Now We Are Alone"
@PositronicTofu You seem to be missing the significance of AdS/CFT correspondence. Any theory which applies to AdS should have a corresponding representation in Minkowski space. Just because string theory operates in AdS doesn't immediately disqualify it.
To be clear, I'm not saying that string theory is a good theory, just that your particular justification for dismissing it (according to your post, since it's entirely possible that you've got a more nuanced position on this than the text of your post implies) is not good. There are better reasons to consider looking elsewhere for a useful theory.
@@Bobbias thanks for pointing that out. Im not sure if that correspondance is speculative or straightforward, in the case of the present formulation of string theory. Many commentators such as Sabine Hodenfelder suggest that it's a stretch, but I'm out of my depth. Still, we're left with it being utterly unfalsifiable
@@positronictofu6505 I'm not a string theory advocate, but I feel the need to point out that Sabine Hossenfelder has somewhat of a negative reputation when it comes to her polemics. I would be wary of using her as a sole source of physics information.
@@keldencowan I've never actually watched her, but the videos of hers that pop up in my feed from time to time, tend to have titles like "this is why I don't believe in science anymore", which is not something that inspires faith in someone as a communicator of science. Having not watched the videos, I can't say anything about the actual information in them, but the titles alone come off as a sort of conspiracy theory "here's what scientists WON'T tell you" kind of thing that they've always turned me off from watching them.
That's why I'm watching this video instead.
I remember first reading about the development and evolution of string theory when I was in high school in the late nineties. It was an article in Astronomy magazine (which I subscribed to and read cover to cover because amateur astronomy was and is my passion) which was a rough overview of string theory, m-theory, and SUSY. What immediately struck me was an overall lack of falsifiability and how quickly the string theorists almost seemed to resort to a form of mathematical special pleading.
Supersymmetry bothered me more. It felt to me like Kepler trying to tie the orbits of the planets to the platonic solids. A futile endeavor driven by anthropocentric ideas of aesthetics, built on a human idea of what the universe SHOULD BE.
Nothing happened since then that dissuaded me from that first impression.
Edit upon finishing video:
Great rant. Echoes many of my own frustrations as a fellow science communicator. I've been doing public outreach astronomy education for my entire adult life and this had me cheering and earned a subscribe.
Minor point around 35 minutes in: The planned particle accelerator to be built in Texas was canceled in 1993. Clinton was trying to keep the budget under control and he said that he had to make a tough choice of the accelerator or the space station. We had international commitments for the space station, so it survived. There was some other project that was cut too, but can't remember what it is and my internet search isn't finding it.