You should get the Nobel for just telling the truth. Most likely any new discovery from scientists will be kept a secret. But if it’s nice the we will here about it.
Why do none of these famous celebrity Physisists show of by applying their fancy equations to the 9/11 disaster in New York in 2001? Let me refresh your minds with my proof based on high school level energy equations. Epotential = Ekinetic remember? So Mgh = 0.5MV^2. V=52/m/s(terminal velocity of free falling objects) M= nonrelevant g =9.81m/s^2 Calculate h = 137.81m Thats the free space h underneath plane impact location that is needed for the upper tower part to reach free fall speed. But underneath the impact locations In the Towers there was no free space. There were 40 floors who should have resisted free fall. How did this magic trick happen celebrity physists ????????? Or are you'll also full of shit!!
Why do none of these famous celebrity Physisists show of by applying their fancy equations to the 9/11 disaster in New York in 2001? Let me refresh your minds with my proof based on high school level energy equations. Epotential = Ekinetic remember? So Mgh = 0.5MV^2. V=52/m/s(terminal velocity of free falling objects) M= nonrelevant g =9.81m/s^2 Calculate h = 137.81m Thats the free space h underneath plane impact location that is needed for the upper tower part to reach free fall speed. But underneath the impact locations In the Towers there was no free space. There were 40 floors who should have resisted free fall. How did this magic trick happen celebrity physists ????????? Or are you'll also full of shit!!
So yeah, I am a member of LHCb at CERN, I have been doing this for more than a decade and what she said in the video is 100% true. People at LHCb know it, they do not like it, feel embarrassed about it but their only choice is to just keep doing it or find a job elsewhere. For instance, we had a collaboration wide meeting a few months ago and Sabine was ridiculed by the Physics coordinator. Were there arguments? No, just plain mockery and it was endorsed by senior people, not students or postdocs, but faculty. I frankly would have expected either to have a discussion with Sabine, if the disagreement is so important and they care that much about Sabine's videos; or just ignore her, if they believe she's a crackpot. But mockery? That should be beneath our community. I felt deeply disappointed to see our community falling so low. When I started in the field I thought scientists were objective, data driven and open. No, they are tribal, sensitive and when they feel attacked that group mentality emerges. Do you remember the B meson anomaly that went away? Well, we cannot use the word "mistake", we have to talk about the new result "superseding" the old one, no one really wants to recognize mistakes here. One faculty from ATLAS used the word "mistake" in the seminar about the B meson anomaly that went away and immediately the LHCb physics coordinator (yes, the same one from whom the mockery mentioned above came from) reacted trying to keep LHCb safe. For all those people wanting to go into science because it is full of nice people who are only interested on science, the truth, etc Think twice, there is politics here too, I guess not unlike industry; you just make less money and have a short term contract, unless you are tenured. And that's why I am not posting with my real name, I am not going to expose myself to oversensitive angry colleagues.
The scary part is similar attitudes and defensive people across every industry across the whole world! How can progress happen if hubris grinds impressive well-funded science to a halt. Of course no one wants embarrassment, and wants to save face. But surely there is a balance where systems not producing real results can be wound down and resources re-allocated - theres too many 'lifers' in every field willing to protect things forever
Neurotypical people can smell them from miles away, their insecurity and hubris reeks. Tesla was a physics director. Hardly anyone can make sense of his models and yet he produced over 300 patents with 100 still in use. That is a director of physical forces. This crap is a money racket based on junk I'm sorry but I hate these people that don't care about the truth.
@@TheHeavyModd don't be ridiculous. least objective people... most people in the world don't even try to be objective with anything. they've never considered the importance of it.
Got my PhD in particle physics and while the subject is awesome, seeing “how the sausage is made” and seeing the egos involved was a huge turn off. Glad to be working in the software industry now.
@@cougar2013 most software jobs are you working for a company that makes useless products my biggest achievement is not working to a company but contributing code to open source software.
I worked in science my entire career almost. I also left it as I'm really a "old-fashioned" one, where I think the process should be simple and straightforward. I'm talking about the "rules" of doing proper science. In my work I got frustrated by the amazing amount of politics and management going on, having to pay to get published and if you didn't have 10 papers, you were a loser. Many get their PhD because it's required for a job later on, etc. All of which have nothing to do with science and in my opinion degrade it. Also, when applying for grant money, always include that it may cure cancer or something like that. :)
1) I hear you 2) "...and management..." Here I would like to add (as someone who ended up in quality management and hates how people doing QM wrong gives QM - which I like and find useful - a bad name...): Management is useful! Management is important! Good management and good managers seem hard to come by, and advancement politics (especially, but not only, in science) seem to focus on getting the worst possible people for management... & that sucks 😞, but not because management, in itself, is bad...
Here whining about particle physics always brings out others who complain. She herself is working on theories on DM and superdeterminism that are most probably dead ends. But that does not stop her from pointing at others who might be involved in the same dead end researches. Her own dead end research should have taught her a good lesson but maybe the publicity she gets is good enough for her.
Hi Sabine, My guess is that the reason for what you describe is due to the fact that universities put tremendous pressure on professors to publish. Coming up with good solid experiments is difficult. But, coming up with those experiments where over fitting is typically the result, is much easier. Thus you get 50 years of crappy experiments and papers that don’t end up proving anything. But they served a purpose. And that was to check a box for a professor to publish something that year.
Honestly... I don't think that is necessarily wrong. Publishing a good paper is extremely difficult, and at this point in time in our current system. Publishing papers is synonymous with doing research, is sometimes the only way to get paid for it, or to get government funding. So if we increase the bar for what it means for a paper to be good. Then you will inevitably just erase a good amount of researchers. Sure some of them would get inspired to be better and write better, but others won't keep up and just abandon research all together to just teach. And I think that is ultimately unhelpful, we need more researchers, not less, we need more funding for science, specially in developing countries. In a way, lousy papers are just something to keep your university professors occupied and up to date. Even if they publish bad papers, they are up to date experts on their field, and that is valuable. I think in general, this is more a symptom of a bigger problem, which is we putting so much value on the publication of scientific papers. That is kind of the ugly underground mafie-like side of science that not too many people know about. Scientists publishing multiple papers on the same topic just explained differently, citing their own papers multiple times and the papers of their friends. I don't blame them honestly, that is just the system, like the grind, click bait and collaborations a youtuber creator might have to do to be succesful.
The sad thing is, you look at some of the foundational papers that are forever-cited in their fields, and it feels like they were all written by people who only bothered to publish a handful of papers. There was a time when scientists were given the space to tackle difficult problems over many years and avoided polluting the space with fluff, thereby reducing the signal to noise ratio for other scientists. I went the professional route and abandoned academia because of my experience with the politics of research and publishing like clockwork. Ran into a lot of essentially made-up papers like the ones described here, and felt tremendous pressure to "see publishable results" in something that really could only be published as "well, our hypothesis was incorrect - don't bother wasting your time over here".
@@scottishrob13 Totally, and I personally think it is a little unfair to blame researchers are being dishonest or sneaky, I mean they sometimes are. But this is just a consequence of the unrealistic expectations put unto research. Primarily arround goverments and institutions measuring success (and consequently funding) just by the amount of papers. We should strive to reform the system.
@@diegog1853 "and just abandon research all together to just teach." that would be fantastic no matter the reason, actually. "teaching colleges" be more rare is actually a bug, or rather a crime, not a feature.
Actually, Universities put tremendous pressure on professors and staff to obtain grants, which the university then administers, for a fee. The universities actually want professors to be self supporting through generating grant money, then the university has more money to pay executives and administration, as well as building physical plant. This results in universities going to tremendous expense to recruit professors and researchers who are already well established in their field, and are already generating large amounts of grant money, or may have large grants whicgh they can transfer from another institution. What Sabine is describing however is more like the medieval professors debating how many angels can be on the head of a pin, a question which doesn’t have anything at all to do with science. Particle physics has turned into something with close resemblance to religion.
Back when I was in particle physics 20 years ago, shortly before a talk on super symmetry, the video projector wasn't connected to the speakers laptop yet, so it just said "no signal". That one super symmetry-sceptical experimentalist professor enters the room, checks the screen and goes, "Oh, the conclusion already?" We students had a great laugh. The theoretical physicists, not so much.
Very well put, and thank you! I'm not a scientist myself, and have only recently retired from a career of repairing cars, but the foundations of physics has always been a fascinating thing to me. Now with some time on my hands I can learn a bit, and it really helps to have someone rather unmercifully separating the wheat from the chaff. There seems to be a lot of chaff. I'd also add, as a mechanic, I always emphasized to the new guys how mistakes are inevitable, and machines don't care at all how confident or enthusiastic or certain you are that you are right. You either get it right or you don't. If you get it wrong as a mechanic, you need to explain to a customer how you wasted their money but you'd like another chance. Some guys never really get that part; honesty can be hard, and admitting you were wrong is hard. That's one thing I always looked at in trainees - how they dealt with their own mistakes. I haven't "lost faith in science" or anything like that, but I could judge a lot of particle physicists based on those terms, I guess. Not that I could do better, but I was a good mechanic: whenever I made a mistake or was wrong about something I'd talk about it with everyone, so they didn't make the same mistake themselves. If you ever hung out in the break room of a good shop, most of the best stories are guys talking about mistakes they made. I wonder if there is a string theorist's break room somewhere, and what kinds of stories they tell...
I completely agree. I did my PhD in gravitational theory and found similar attitude problems in the camp of gravitation and cosmology. I always resisted getting in the bandwagon and it didn't do my career any favors. It feels kind of vindicating to see Sabine articulating so clearly what has been my fundamental intuition for a very long time.
What’s your fundamental intuition? That the SM is the final law of nature, it’s multitude of free parameters is just how nature is and start working on new stock market gauss copulas? There are people researching MONDS go do that. Jesus it’s not like anyone forbade it.
@@Annou7la Nobody forbade genetically engineering a giant purple dragon... BUT when a turd destroys your car on the freeway, you might wish to hell they hadn't bothered either... Maybe ask if we SHOULD do it more often than if we CAN do it. ;o)
@John B Wow. Looks like someone hit a raw nerve. I see absolutely no shame in the idea that the laws of nature actually dictate the laws of nature. I guess that makes me the idiot. I'm okay with that. But I can also make predictions, just like a real scientist. Might it be accurate to predict that your wages and your funding are either directly or indirectly correlated to the study of cosmology/and or particle physics? Why am I asking specifically about the financial aspect? No reason, no reason at all.... (And @lexInWonderland is right. The current state of Cosmology and the LCDM is fk'd)
I highly doubt that you did any PhD, especially in theoretical physics. And it is clear from the way that you are speaking, there is no camp on gravitation or cosmology.
Sabine, I so strongly appreciate you. As a clinical psychologist, these problems show up a lot in my field, too. The tragedy is that those who are knowledgeable enough to speak to these fundamental issues are either 1) benefitting from the status quo and have a career wrapped up in psuedoproblems, 2) grad students don’t have enough power and risk destroying their future prospects at a research career, or 3) people throw in the towel because they feel like it’s not worth it and focus on shifting out of academia to industry (or in my field, clinical work).
All large groups of humans include immature people who want to get their egos massaged. The myth that science is free of human weakness is exactly that; a myth.
The reason I left my pursuit of psychology was because the methodology used to "study" it was so dubious. I think there is some value to "seeing what sticks" on some level but I think she really explained it best stating "It isn't working". We have come across interesting things and created neat machines but a little more focus and direction seems like it would help out a lot in science right now. I am also not sure if this was always an issue in the field - perhaps history just doesn't notate failed experiments like the present. We tend to know of the great scientists of yesteryear but we certainly don't discuss the "average" scientist of the past that had only a minor impact on the field.
@@dbmsolardesignworkorders194 or human society is just unraveling. I note the exponential increase in trolls from one or two per thread to forming their own alliances and majorities.
@@dbmsolardesignworkorders194 It's a newer problem. Technicians, engineers and science men of the past had more grounding in fundaments of reality. Tesla and Russel already have models that work better. But it's profitable to tell the story that the old guys with over 300 patents and 100 still in use and thousands of dirivitave technologies were "quacks" that the true model starts with Einstein (sham quack) and guys like Feynman who showed up drunk to lectures and couldn't explain how magnetism works. Leading up to the Degrasse's and Kaku who sell you bs now are somehow the true geniuses.
It reminds me about the story of Johannes Kepler who, until the end of his life, kept trying to fit the orbits of the six known planets into the ratios of the sizes of nested platonic solids. Even though he was the guy who figured out that the orbits are elliptical, he still felt his platonic solid theory was the true underlying structure of the orbits.
Exactly! And why do they think gravity should unite with the other three "forces"? The strong, weak, and e-m force have force carries in the standard model. Gravity has no such carrier. Gravity bends space and time. What does the strong force bend? What does the Weak force bend? What does the e-m force bend? Centripetal "force" is not a force like gravity. Calling some things "forces" is like calling Pluto a planet. 😉
I think a philosophy of science course should be required for undergraduate physics majors. It has always been my impression that particle physicists lack a basic understanding of what science is.
I remember as a physics undergraduate studying particle physics module in the late 70s. At times it felt like the more energy you could throw at the problem, the more exotic particles you could predict, and still fundamentally miss what was really happening. My friend, a fellow physics undergraduate, was so disillusioned with particle physics that he wrote poetry during his particle physics module exam and still came away with a 2:1 physics degree.
Good news, i will postulate and use only low normal dude logic with no maths to get a phd🤣. Also i can write poetry randomly throwing new particules names.
Reality is an information process, set in motion and sustained by God for a purpose. Understanding the purpose is more important than knowing anything about it. After one understands the purpose, knowing how Reality works is important. The continued growth and development of humanity depends on it. From this perspective what particle physicists are doing is similar to analyzing the Mandelbrot set, trying to develop math that describes it.
As a theoretical physics myself (complex system) that used to work in a department very famous for Particle Physics, I have to say that I fully understand Sabine but also Particle Physicists. It is not easy to be trained to understand and fix a refined and beautiful model - the greatest human achievement of all time - and, after finishing 10 years of specific training and getting a PhD, finding that the model works and there is nothing much left to do. Everything in our energy range has been understood, and we already made efforts to go 5-6 order of magnitudes more in the experimental range to find the missing parts (Higgs). A slow transition to a world with less particle physicists will be needed, but I understand why they keep trying to understand more of it, a last hit or miss to chisel their name in the model, to say "I am also part of the greatest human wonder, I was just born 10 years too late!"
That's why I did my Ph.D. in pure mathematics - a lot of open conjectures and applications be damned😅! Retired after 30 years in academia. I did research regarding differential geometry in GR.
When I was undergraduate physics major in my twenties I was influenced by Lee Smollin's critique of string theory, and was always surprised to see the contrast between the popular depiction in documentaries of string theory as something "scientists now know..." and the many physicists I met in person that thought it wasn't very promising. The arguments in this video are parallel to some that Lee Smolin brought up, and I'm so glad to see this perspective. It's desperately needed.
In my Freshman Physics major seminar class, our professors took turns, getting a class to explain their research to the class, and when the theorist working on the black hole information paradox, I asked some question I don't remember that required him to mention String Theory to answer, so before he did, he opened the door to look both ways in the hallway to make sure the department head wasn't going to "kick down the door and yell 'but can you test it?'" upon any mention of string theory.
@@maximan4363 That's a funny comment from Dr. Higgs, of all people. I always had theories I was interested in, but I'm not qualified to know why they get ignored, or whether they are on good grounds or not. Laurent Nottale's Scale Relativity at the very least hits me in an intuitive way that many theories don't. I like the unification on relativistic terms instead of on a fixed space-time. I'll have to look into Quantum Gravity when I can. I'm back in school again, but I'll be done in May and can nerd out on all the wonderful things again soon.
I agree. Not a fan of the "I lost faith in science" in the title when what she is critiquing is a stray from science from what I gather. But good video all together
For me as an experimental neutrino physicist I can say, this is why I work with Neutrinos... they exist and there are still fundamental questions open =)
@@oygeeh4915 haha, you crack me up. Lawyer here: working with things humans make more than real and still not interested after thousands of years into the 'matter' of conflicts. Very interesting field if you approach it openly and often enough astonshingly well to resolve. Too much belief = models into an alleged human nature makes it often a self fulfilling prophecies.
Sabine, this was a great lecture. I am an engineer, not a scientist. I have long envied the mathematical sophistication of particle physicists, and I hate ignorance, especially my own. Once I was reading a popular treatment of string theory and M theory. The author did a good job of setting up the historical context of the research, and of recounting the achievements of the brilliant pioneers in the field. As long as the story was about people, it was a good read. When the author tried to make concrete statements about the theories, it fell apart. I set the book down when, three-quarters of the way through, it descended into gibberish. In the later chapters the author went on and on gushing about the wonderfulness of these theories while explaining that they couldn’t be falsified using any experimental technology we possess. Supposedly there are as many as 15 dimensions, most of which are too small, in some sense, to be examined. No workable experiments can be conceived that might test these theories. This is very unsatisfactory to me. I felt that the string theory enterprise had tipped over into metaphysics. As far as the dimensions in which we are actually able to run tests go, it occurred to me that if one devised an overarching theory that was sufficiently complex, one might explain, or rather model accurately without explaining, anything that might be observed. Such a theory would be an ideal vehicle for overfitting data, with impressive untestable ramifications for dimensions we can never see. That theory would be string theory or its other non-falsifiable successors. That being said, your discussion raises some practical questions. How are we to train particle physicists if the standard model is perfectly correct? Must all particle physicists become experimental ones, forever searching for some falsification of the orthodox theory so that the field of theoretical particle physics may be reopened? Who will be capable of acquiring the necessary mathematical acumen if no one is working in the field? Please consider the possibility that the field has reached a state analogous to the pre-Rutherford era when a bright young man was advised not to go into physics because everything important had already been discovered. This was just before the early evidence for quantum mechanics blew the doors off that understanding and opened up a new era of discovery. Finally, we must have people working in unifying quantum theory and relativity. Couldn’t theoretical particle physicists make a contribution to that effort? Perhaps some of that talent and energy could be usefully redirected.
Particle physists are unhappy with the standard model precisely because it doesn't explain gravity. That's what she was talking about when she mentioned Grand Unified Theories or GUTS.
I did my master's degree in supersymmetry. I always felt stupid because I really never understood the importance of the field that seemed so obvious to the community. When I had to defend the thesis in front of the jury, I was afraid because I couldn't find a proper motivation to do SUSY. Everyone overlooked my dull explanations. It was at that time when I decided to leave the field. My decision was also influenced by your shared thoughts, and for that I'm grateful. Thanks to you Sabine and your team for your work.
@@gristlevonraben I don't think it is that sinister. The problem is not so much with scientists, but is rooted deeper in society. To be recognized, given funding etc, you have to show, that you are successful. So you start working on something, you think might be interesting or the community at the time tells you is interesting. You build a body of work, establish yourself and so on. And with time you figure out that there isn't any huge progress. Now you could just stop and work on something else. But in that area, you don't have any experience, you are not established. You will be seen as a loser, as you have done something that you have not succeeded at. So you stick with what you've got and if there are enough other people in the same situation, you can form a community. This happens in other fields too. You still find things to work on and produce knowledge. Yes it is knowledge about the theoretical aspects of theories that are just not connected to reality. But it is still complicated and keeps you busy.
That is sad. To give up on something at the time that should have been its shining moment. OTOH, I am near to retirement, and only now have I finally given up on my "life's project." You are just smarter than me.
The collider method is violence. The results of collision will likely be fragments of elementary particles rather than the elementary particles themselves. I’ve had some crude videos myself. If you have time to waste, please search play list: Physics, Nature’s Perspective. For example, I noticed that half-life uses a continuous concept to describe something finite and discrete, such as radioactive elements, which may have an odd number of atoms. Of course, it is the thinking pattern of modern physics, using continuous and even smooth concepts and methods, such as curvature and partial differential equations, to describe our finite and discrete universe.
@@salia2897 We see the same problems in Chomskyan linguistics, and Montague Grammer, and formal semantics and the rest of it. They crank out scores of PhDs, but there never is any progress, just more and more ad hoc logical formalism. Never an experiment, never an empirical observation, never a reality check. So now you are 42 and a tenured distinguished professor in the field and the scribble scrabble bores you ad nauseam. But what to do? Start all over again as a dishwasher in a hotel?
Hey Sabina: you will certainly not make any new friend in the particles phisics community but you made thousands of new ones in the science education field. Good job!
Science has thoroughly been infiltrated by subversive agents. I'm just going to assume by hostile forces seeking to prevent earth species reaching the stars. If i had to pick one date from when physics was subverted, it would be 1927... Everything ever since has largely been theoretical garbage that is mathematically brilliant but with no bearing upon reality.
PROBLEM, reaction, solution -- the time dependent Hegelian dialectic. Thesis Is dual to anti-thesis creates the converging thesis or synthesis -- the time independent Hegelian dialectic. Action (thesis) is dual to reaction (anti-thesis) -- Sir Isaac Newton or the duality of force. Attraction is dual to repulsion, push is dual to pull, stretch is dual to squeeze -- forces are dual. Classical reality is dual to quantum reality synthesizes true reality -- Roger Penrose. Energy is dual to mass -- Einstein. Dark energy is dual to dark matter. Dark energy is repulsive gravity or negative curvature, hyperbolic space (inflation). The big bang is a negative curvature singularity -- non null homotopic (duality). Gaussian negative curvature is defined using two dual points -- non null homotopic. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_curvature Points are dual to lines -- the principle of duality in geometry. "Always two there are" -- Yoda.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story about a map so perfect that it coincided with every single point of the empire it depicted. So useless that it was tossed in the desert and became a castle for mice and beasts. There you go, overfitting for not-science-friendly individuals.
This articulate summary of the problem with high energy physics was a long time coming. You've certainly been chomping at it for a while, but this time you really got to the bone. Brilliant. One of you're all time bests.
Hi Sabine, great video as always! I received my master's in particle physics last year and started a PhD working with the CMS collaboration last fall, and I definitely feel like an outlier for sharing the majority of your views (I was one of two out of ~250 people at a conference last year who dared to mention that we found the physics case for building the FCC to be flimsy at best, for example). It seems that most of the grievances you mention focus on theorists rather than experimentalists (understandable considering your own background), and I would add that the problem is worse than portrayed here because those claiming "it's falsifiable" are likely the minority, with many others working on models that have no chance of being verified/falsified in the foreseeable future-hence anyone claiming that their model is falsifiable believing that they're "one of the good ones." I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the problems in experimental HEP, and if you have any advice for someone just starting out in the field on what we can do to try pushing ourselves back on track. Thank you again for all that you do!
How do you get tenure at a good university when the FFC is decades out (publish, ofc, but publish what?)? And when it is built, it will need 10,000+ student and post docs...how many 2 year post docs can you do in a row, bouncing around academia? Do you check any hiring boxes? Is your PhD going to be searching through "used" data for a bump--with ML, ofc, so your advisor can get tenure? js/
The entire premise is nuts, by increasing proton energy into collisions then interpreting tracks is voodoo.. Anyway, higher energy equals smaller particles in a never ending circle jerk.. If I blast a chunk of glass at 100 fps with a bullet and then 4000 fps it’ll fragment smaller and smaller, particle physics does the same thing on a higher energy level and the particles are smaller and guesswork is crazy .. Find something else to do with your physics degree, this ain’t it
Every project needs a devil's advocate. Paradoxically, larger teams often have a harder time spotting structural problems, because people are less likely to speak out. I'd maybe push (discreetly) for pre-mortem style project-management exercises where people are given the job to find cracks in the status-quo ("hey Prof, I heard about this project management exercise, do you think it would be valuable for us?"). I can't stress enough though how important it is to be very, very diplomatic about how you approach this kind of thing. Be collaborative, not confrontational. Egos are a thing and rigid minds perceive devil's advocacy as incessant naysaying at best, active sabotage at worst.
This video very well summs up why I left particle physics more than 10 years ago after my first postdoc position. I had a strong impression that the golden years of particle physics are over and something is going wrong but couldn't explain to myself what exactly was going wrong. Because funding was still good and papers were being published and detectors being built... but there was a kind of flaw in all this.
It's okay for a field to just run cold for a bit. But I think this is a great example of something trapped in its ways. Much of it is looking to re-capture the golden age bringing about a revolution instead of building forward. The Penta-Quark was discovered after the Higgs Boson. The muon g-2 experiment was still going forward. New neutrino studies were being made, but you probably are aware of some of the ego problems there. People are chasing a theory of everything, just as in AI people keep coming back to an artificial generalized intelligence, though I think the latter is more reachable. People said we would be there back in the 1950s. AI stuttered a lot until the 90s and 2000s again. Now it is running extremely hot and we see how complex it is, but people keep talking about the AGI when we clearly haven't fully figured out all of the essential intelligence components.
Yeah it's hard to see what you could hope to accomplish at this point, that would be of any consequence. Poring over reams of data from one of the major accelerators, until you find the next "God particle" that only exists for about a septillionth of a second before it decays, does not sound like that much fun. And it took 40 years of tedious searching just to do that.
@@NondescriptMammal In the case of the Higgs boson, it mattered because there was a Higgs Boson shaped hole in the standard model. The fact that it was found was a further validation of the standard model.
Got me! I pride myself in how fast I can detect the segue into the ad. This time the word 'Brilliant" slipped in before I knew it. Congrats Dr. Hossenfelder.
One thing you have to respect is how much Sabine puts herself out there. If one of these wacky theories is proven in the colliders, a lot of folks would seek immediate revenge on her. But she's confident enough to put out this material anyway.
Even if one of those wacky theories were to be proven, it would simply be due to the fact that it's just bruteforcing. There's nothing sophisticated about throwing very expensive darts for an improbably bullseye and eventually being successful...
@@knowledgeacquirer2931 people who are petty and childish enough to revenge and put their little predictions out there as science are not the brightest and quietest of folk and thus wouldnt care about such nuances.
Nobody would be out for revenge, nobody that matters in academia anyways. Also, this isn't a brave stance to take at this moment in physics. Its becoming more and more the norm, and will be the general stance in the near future across the board. Once the remaining money set aside for certain things is spent the field will move on. You can't lose your funding because you decide there are better directions to go since that will affect future grants ect. This video was worth watching at least. She said Einstein. Her saying hypothesis and Einstein brings me joy.
People may complain about a challenge like this but a) it's healthy to have one's way of life challenged once in a while, b) people don't trust institutions that put themselves above challenge, so making discussions about challenges like this public can actually build trust (I can't wait to see response videos!) c) the rest of us can learn from the experience as well! Wanna hear how many JavaScript frameworks are overcomplicating things by "solving" imaginary problems? Thanks Sabine!
I know nothing about particle physics, but I am quite intimate with javascript, and you are spot-on about the number and ubiquitous-ness of frameworks. So unnecessary, so unhelpful.
As an Economist this really resonates with me, though I do not know anything about particle physics, I am all too familiar with a profession obsessed with pushing the goal posts and over fitting models to data ex-post!
To be fair, things aren't quite the same in economics because there is typically no direct experimentation. There is only the collection of data and development of models which fit it. Yes natural experiments exist, but these are "found" not "performed".
@@adrianapignolo Are you thinking of the sorts of studies like the mosquito net trials? Because for sure some of those exist. But if not that, what else are you thinking of?
That was exactly what I was thinking when I was a particle physics' student and that was exactly the reason why I quit it. I don't regret about my decision, but I feel so bad about the current situation in particle physics since it's still my favorite area of research. Thank you for verbalizing and sharing your thoughts, so I can see that I'm are not crazy and not alone with this vision of the situation.
It seems like the reasonable keep quitting and the echo chamber keeps on amplifying. there have been multiple other comments here that said something similar. I hope people like you find a way to work together to change what's going on there.
@@kapoioBCS usually people who see it as an extremely complicated field just do not have enough understanding about it. I quit it after my successful defense, but not before it.
I studied Mathematics and Computer Science but fell in love with all things Physics as a "hobby". Thank you for your videos and I plan to check out Brilliant. I realize this will be a very small subset of your viewers but I have fairly major hearing issues and usually lip read. Your diction and tone are perfect for these old ears as they let me concentrate on the subject instead of losing processing power to read the subtitles. I hope that came out as the compliment it was meant to be!
Ignore these first 3 commentors!! I watched the wole video and was pondering on how she spoke. I was considering leaving a comment explaining how to change her tone and delivery too more of an upbeat/ exclamating tone change but decided not to. I came to your comments point as a conclusion. Also when i read your comment it solidifyed my position. Thank you. And this is my small addenen to science lol
@@davidsauer3155- Yes. I find other videos with that CONSTANT "upbeat tone" rather tiring if they are longer than 5-8 minutes. The annoyance level then begins to distract from the content, at least for me. 🖖
I got my bachelors in physics and helped with nuclear physics research during that time. The title of the video worried me but after watching i appreciate this video. Getting so focused on the small details and forgetting the big picture was at times very easy to do in the work and research i did and am glad my teachers and mentors would push me in the right direction. That kind of thinking has stuck with me even in my current job that is not strictly science. It almost feels like these physicists are betting on their horse/model so if it wins then they could get more praise and recognition. This on top of the other negative aspects mentionedin other comments (politics, management, etc.) is what worries me about going into a PhD program in the future.
Have you looked into Rupert Sheldrake? His tedtalk got banned. Admittedly, he challenged the materialist paradigm to its core, much more so than in this video.
The problem comes down to how modern academia works. New breakthroughs in fundamental physics are hard, especially after having exhausted the consequences of relativity and QM by the 70s. Despite this challenge, theoretical physicists are compelled to publish new research consistently in order to advance their careers. This, coupled with the fact that experimentalists are hungry to test new theories in order to justify their increasingly big and expensive devices like the LHC, results in one speculative theory after another with little basis in reality.
A good read on the subject of scientists becoming consumed with the chase to be relevant (and failing to maintain proper scientific rigor when their pet hypotheses are demonstrated to be incorrect) is _The Stars Are Not Enough_ by Joseph C. Hermanowicz. Like Feynman said, it doesn't matter how elegant, or beautiful the math is, it doesn't matter how much you like it, if it's wrong, it's _wrong._ Letting go of stuff like that is part of science. Particle physicists make whole piles of wrong predictions, because that's what scientists _do._ The point of the game isn't to figure out what's true, that's the emergent property of the game that we leverage to improve our understanding; the game is to show how you might be _wrong_ with your prediction, and you need to be serious in trying to do so.
Great video. I was a graduate in particle physics and had the same thoughts, same doubts. Considering the amount of studying you have to commit to publish a decent paper, those who "survive" in the particle physics society are those who are mathematical nerds and those who doesn't have the time to pose these kind of questions. Because in the end it's the sum of published journals that you'll get a job anywhere in this field. Only if youtube and internet were as popular back then I could've also seek out people who had these same views to particle physics, but after thinking on my own I quit before getting a Ph.D. As a child, researching superstring theories was my dream job, now I don't regret having left this field. I turned my career to software engineering and A.I. which I think is a much more interesting subject. Who knows, that in the far future it would be faster to let generative A.I. to learn all the particle physics theories and then it could come up with a much more convincing theory.
I would be very interested in a companion video, about the non-pseudo problems that are mentioned here. What they are and if there is any work being done on them. Having said that, as a non-phyisicist, it might just go way over my head. 😄 Thank you for the clarity of your perspective. It always makes me reevaluate the assumptions in my own (completely unrelated) field. 🙂
as far as I know, almost none of them are, because there is nowhere else to go. there is no experiment that is feasible do to that can help with solving them. there is a reason why particle physics is stuck and people are shooting at every direction, we can't get better data.
@@danilooliveira6580 Sometimes, we need to evolve technologically, before we can make progress in certain areas of science. The problem I see is, that we are not using much of particle physics outside of science. Maybe I am missing something, but if you look at technology, engineering, industrial chemistry and so on, it goes down to the level of atoms, electrons, protons and neutrons, but all the particles from the standard model don't play a role in most industrial processes. Yes, we can build some very specialized experiments to detect or produce them, but there is no application. Now, I do not have any idea how we will get there, maybe nobody does. But when you look at history, that is how it usually is. It might just be that we are at a point, where we cannot make progress in that field, see some things we do not understand but lack the ability to generate the data we would need to understand it.
I want to say she has mentioned modified gravity in another video in further depth. I think the problem is the same for quantum gravity, where you get crazy infinity values when you try to model it. My Aristotle thinking on the problem is that gravity is a 4th dimensional particle somehow bound to our universe but can wiggle further in our out depending on some variables
@@salia2897 actually, we are, things like modern LEDs, microprocessors and communication, are completely dependent on our understanding of particle physics. the more understanding we have of quantum mechanics, the better we can make those things. doesn't mean however that finding the graviton will suddenly create superconductors, but simply having a more complete understanding of the area can have a huge impact in the future. its the same argument people use against astrophysics. they say that learning about blackholes on the other side of the observable universe will have no real impact here on earth. but that is not true, learning about the universe help us understand physics in general, there would be no relativity without astrophysics, and there would be no quantum mechanics without relativity.
13:56 "Change should be an improvement, not a complication." This is a beautifully blunt and delightfully well-reasoned video, one of your best. Three cheers for the Standard Model!
I found the same quote the most notable in the video. But doesn't that imply working toward a simplified Theory of Everything? I think we know Sabine's song about that. ;)
To a certain extent the opposite is true in biology. For a long time the DNA model was one gene one product. But reality was much more complicated. For example, now we know that structures on the outside of the nucleotides influence not only the regulation of genes, but even the chances that there will be mutations at that site; In a way showing that Lamarck was also somewhat correct. All these complications are however also improvements as well as responses to data That didn’t fit the simplified DNA model.
As an experimental astrophysicist I'm glad you spoke out. Many theoretical physicist are driven by a purely aesthetic ideal, wich comes from a romantic and idealist view on the history of science. I feel more and more that many are getting diminishing results as they get into that platonic way of thinking about reality.
PROBLEM, reaction, solution -- the time dependent Hegelian dialectic. Thesis Is dual to anti-thesis creates the converging thesis or synthesis -- the time independent Hegelian dialectic. Action (thesis) is dual to reaction (anti-thesis) -- Sir Isaac Newton or the duality of force. Attraction is dual to repulsion, push is dual to pull, stretch is dual to squeeze -- forces are dual. Classical reality is dual to quantum reality synthesizes true reality -- Roger Penrose. Energy is dual to mass -- Einstein. Dark energy is dual to dark matter. Dark energy is repulsive gravity or negative curvature, hyperbolic space (inflation). The big bang is a negative curvature singularity -- non null homotopic (duality). Gaussian negative curvature is defined using two dual points -- non null homotopic. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_curvature Points are dual to lines -- the principle of duality in geometry. "Always two there are" -- Yoda.
This entire video is evidence that scientists have just been lying for decades. As an experimental astrophysicist, your job never should have existed and you should stop stealing money from the economy.
the issue is: as per standard model we expect to see some new physics at about 10^12 higher energies than current particle accelerators can deliver. However that means we can unlikely ever build a machine to measure these effects, it is beyond any technical possibilities. So, unless the standard model is really really wrong there is no point to build a bigger particle accelerator
For the most part will all prove useless unless truely has a useful purpose & is also compatible with all… For that to happen nature to be agreeable, no way to know
For a layman, this is an absolutely clear, brilliant presentation. Sabine is the perfect presenter. I think she could also be the sublime stand-up comedian.
Too bad the basic premise is wrong. All of the data does not fit the standard model. Dark matter is just one example - we know it exists from multiple methods, but the standard model doesn't seem to explain it (and modified gravity has been essentially ruled out). She just waves it off here completely ignoring its implications for what she is saying. There are many other things as well such as the matter-antimatter asymmetry and some measurements coming out slightly different than what was expected. Should particle physicists just ignore these things and sweep them under the rug the way she sweeps dark matter under the rug? Should particle physicists not be curious about and try to understand why the standard model is the way it is?
"That's possible but not a good strategy for knowledge discovery " 👏 . I am a data scientist, now a days a lot of data scientists are creating models because that is what they do. But it doesn't solve the problem. Your video is so relatable. No matter what scientific profession you are in , quest for knowledge needs to be the utmost priority, for betterment of human kind
I feel your pain, though from a different perspective: In 1953, when I was 10 years old, my Bohemian single-mother's landlord was Frank Crawford, a physicist working on his doctorate at UC Berkeley. I have a vivid memory of Frank's excitement when he got wind of the work of Cowan and Reines: first hint of neutrino detection 1953; full report 1956. Frank introduced me to the periodic table; gave me a chemistry set; taught me algebra; took me on a tour of the brand-new Bevatron in 1954, etc. Those were incredibly exciting times. And although I went into a different field (Ph.D. in Chinese), I can sense the immense sea change in what particle physics is these days versus what it was back then, toward the end of its Golden Age. No comparison. (Some bibliographic notes: Wu et al Phys Review 105, 1957 [for my money, her demonstration that the universe has handedness marked the end of Golden Age of particle physics]; Crawford Phys Review 107, 1957 [follow-on to Wu 1957]; Crawford, WAVES -- Berkeley Physics Course Volume 3, 1965.)
GREAT K.IS.S. Sabine !!! How about explaining the greatest failure of physics ?The ontological /quintiessentail explanation of the fabtic of spacetime metrics e.g the Minkowski Metric - the 2D light cones boundaries bounding nothing if there is no mass-energy.The Einstein metric Tensor defines the curvature of spacetime as the curvature induce by the introduction of mass-energy to replace the almost null result of the Minkowski metric The light cone path boundaries of any photon must be infinite! Abandon almost all string theory and reassigam funded research to explain what is the substance curving Due to interaction of mass and energy
@@franklipsky3396 I'm aware of research into anti matter particles and dark matter particles, but Sabine bringing up research into "doesn't matter" particles has been an eye opener. Light cone boundaries interest me. As I see it, they have something to say about the nature and direction of causality and explain why even if we could see ghosts, the ghosts wouldn't be able to see us, which I find comforting. If there are no limits to them, then maybe I should be more worried about the mischievous spirits of departed toasters and microwave ovens that haunt my kitchen...
This was crushing to hear, but I'm really glad this video exists. I'm not a scientist but I took supersymmetry and proton decay for granted, because I didn't know particle physicists approach creating new theories like my friend making up new Naruto theories to explain what's going on with the aliens in Boruto.
I've been saying this for years and I'm glad people are waking up. In philosophy its called ad-hoc reasoning or in some cases post-hoc reasoning. ad-hoc is making stuff up. post-hoc would look like this physicists: i came up with a new particle to unify physics all we need to do is find it! scientists: we just ran the particle accelerator at the highest energies ever recorded and we found a new anomaly! physicist: thats it! my wiggle-doodoo particle! its all unified! scientists: thats great but what about... physicist: aww crap let me think of a new one
@@off6848 philosophy is constantly reinventing itself, the difference is that science actually deals with data instead of thinly veiled moral and religious beliefs.
@@DVSnarkphilosophy is not constantly reinventing itself; it's the exact opposite. More so; science depends on philosophy. It's not thinly vailed either; philosophy is basically just theology
My father was a theoretical physicists. He worked and retired from both Los Alamos and EIR SIN, an accelerator in Switzerland, with retirement packages both. Me, I’m seasoned electronics dude who worked his way up to a complementary computer science degree in the end and left both industries by reason of another story. Parallels to Prometheus in tail. With the advent of AI and UTube and folks like you my sphere of consciousness still grows and I note your disenchantment and I relate. Thanks for your continued and informational compositions. Nice work. I keep watching more and more of this stuff and am absolutly fascinated learneng about what my father did. Thanks. My father was more a scientific politician usually campaigning for funding. it was more what I ever heard him speak of but the depth of the topic now blows my mind. Because of your, her, level of understanding you would make a great department head rather than a staff physicist. It takes some pessimism too.
I enjoyed that. I'm not a physicist and work in telecoms / IT and we have similar problems with engineers. There are those that understand a problem and will produce a considered and relevant fix for that problem, and then there are the "poke and hope" people who invariably forget what the original problem was, make multiple changes without recording what they did and invariably make things much more complicated and very much worse. Much like the British Judiciary and legal system come to think of it..........
Sometimes understanding the problem is very elusive while finding a fix or at least a temporary remedy is extremely time sensitive, making poke and hope or brute force the most effective approach. It should however rarely be the first thing you go for. Point in case, many years ago we were running a massive performance test on behalf of a client, and was suffering from frequent data corruption. We threw the kitchen sink of experts at the problem, but at the end of it, we had not arrived at a root cause except suspecting but not confirming it was related to overheating or other environmental factors. Months later, after our testing was concluded, it turned out the failures were caused by cosmic background radiation. Their memory chips were impacted by the radiation, and they had to redesign them to include error correction.
@@bjornlangoren3002 Quite right, there is a "middle ground" where a temporary fix is required, but the people making the fix still need to know what they are doing and why, and also know that the temporary fix is still likely to be there in 5 - 10 years....
The solution for your (and many others) problem start with focused data collection, and documentation of the problems, the solving decisions/actions, and results. If U've data, U can calculate effectiveness, find the holes in the system, implement the actually working solving methods to other fields, other people. U can inspire people to teach/learn methods from each other, and demand the good practice. (Internal trainings.) After that U can inspire to learn universal problem solving methods from the world by external consultants. There are many of them fitting for different type of business, or problems (5 Why, Ishikava, 8D...). Some of them are statistical, some of them are simply focusing, or gap based. U can implement it in your system, train your people, demand the follow, and measure the results, collect data. From the data if U can identify spots, where the most/longest/biggest problems occur, U have to focus there. Search for causes, risks, and try to minimize them. (Go back to point no.1.) In a professional company there's no such thing as human error. Every human error is coming from a deeper cause hiding somewhere in the company system. (Lack of skill, lack of training, lack of inspection, lack of control, lack of resources, lack of time, contradictory goals...) Poke and hope seems only effective, when U're not well prepared for (any) changes, or issues (which will be inevitable). I can suggest instead: collect data (focused!), analize them, and implement the results, so when the time will come U'll have something to work with. (Btw. every action is somewhere a poke and hope, because U can never take into account every possibilities, U never know everything, and U know that. So the difference is in the size of knowledge regards the problem, the own profession, and the problem solving, and result analizing methods.) Some people realized I'm talking about a Quality Assurance system, which can be at a company pure document production, but if a company takes it seriously then it can be way-way more than that.
@@shaba1982 You make many sound points, so thanks for the reply. I agree with most of what you say, but you can never get rid of human error because regardless of how well trained, supervised, controlled, and automated a system is, a Human will always find a way to do something unpredicted and unpredictable. You either have to accept it and work with it, or you're in for a world of disappointment. Sure you can and should aim for perfection but as we know from various air crashes and Chernobyl (to name but two areas of note) major problems happen when several smaller issues combine to create a catastrophe.
In high school I wanted to be a Particle Physicist. I've always had the opinion that people are researching "problems" that distract from the actual ground breaking experiments. Since I'm in America, traditional education is expensive for me. I still like to learn though, and I'm really thankful for you to make videos like this. I recently found your channel and I already rate it 10/10!
Wow! Spot on analysis. So glad I didn’t continue with a career in particle physics. One aspect that wasn’t discussed but needs to be is the entrapment of graduate students and postdocs for sometimes 7 to 9 years trying to get there degrees. It’s down right abusive and financially crippling.
This is the point. In order to perpetuate junk science you have to make the people going into it commit their life, soul and earnings for so long that once they realize its garbage the sunk cost fallacy reasoning takes over and keeps the racket moving. Sabine is being nice in this video actually
I'm no scientist Sabine, but I do enjoy the fact that you make science as clear as you can to people all over the world. The fact that there is "tribalism" and "politics" in science is no surprise to me, particularly if there is money involved or a tenure... Keep your head up and keep being the you I am still getting to know.
Hi Sabine, Thank you very much! As a 68 year old trying to keep his neurons functional, I am at best only average in understanding at the level where you excel. I watch your videos in hopes of better understanding how and why matter exists. Sometimes, regardless of your simplification of an explanation, I still don't quite understand completely but at least get the gist which keeps me coming back for more! This time I watched intently to the very end and actually understood everything you were saying, partly because I watched many of your other videos, and partly because this wasn't heavy on theory and more of an insight into the wizardry of particle science and where ideas come from. Seeing how some "ideas" are just fantasy somehow makes me feel a tiny bit less "dumb" on the subject, haha. It's seems like a waste of the above average intelligence that I wish I had. 😆
It's nice to see lifelong learners out here. If you haven't already heard about chatgpt then drop what you are doing and and learn about it for a few minutes and give it a try. Then next time you watch/ read about something you don't quite understand use chatgpt to help you find out what it is you don't understand about the subject. Again if you dont know what it is, it's a chat bot that has very humanlike outputs and is conversational.
Agreed. To see those that squander their gifts... Also, don't be so hard on yourself mate. You're still curious, and willing to learn. I raise my beverage container in your virtual general direction.
James, if, when you've read/watch something you still don't understand, it is commonly because there is prior knowledge missing. If you can, identify the point at which you lost the thread and ask what it was you needed to know. A useful way is to go back to the school-level textbook on the subject and check there.
James, at 47, I'm doing exactly the same thing, with exactly the same results. Good on you for trying to "Get" the "Ungettable". LOL. I accept that I am smarter than the average monkey, but I am still far less intelligent than the intellectual giants whose mind play seems to make the universe make some sort of sense, until it all unravels and becomes some sort of nonsense. Then I start to wonder if I am just being fed a lifetime of guesswork far beyond my comprehension, or ability and resourcefulness to explore. I have no choice but to make the same claims as Socrates, "I only know that I do not know." Sadly, we are both (all of us, maybe?) functioning under a fallacious assumption "fretus auctoritate" (reliance upon authority), which leaves us "relying upon false principles" (our rules are out of whack, as Cicero suggested), and thereby stumbling around in the dark trying to make do with what we have available to us ... assumptions, contentions, and untested (untestable) blather passed along by-way of hear-say "ad absurdo" (unto absurdity).
"Invisible axions never detected". Reminds me of a letter my wife has of one of her distant relatives from the 1830s. All the sisters in that distant family were named after virtues, Faith, Hope, Charity... One sister writing to the other says "I'm worried about Silence, I haven't heard from her lately".
I was majoring physics, but caught the same problem you are talking, and I switched to applied math since. For me, math turns out to be a surprisingly concrete subject. It may often seem too abstract to be useful, but no direct physical correspondence (some algebraic structures for example) doesn't imply it's useless (e.g. cryptography). p.s. ofc physics still has a lot of interesting problems, but it's no longer finding first principles, and more like applying first principles to physical systems.
Genuine question. Arent a lot of these particles that are never found 'created' through mathematical models though and only exist in some mathematical construct?
@@bobbybrown1258 Not exactly but you could put it like that and most people would agree with you, the physicists (at least from what I know about it, the original commenter is a lot more qualified since they are an actual applied mathematician and not just a math student in uni like me) are using properties of symmetry (basically abstract(badly named I know) algebra) to make models based on data, trying to understand the physics of the real world. The math serves as more like a sort of blueprint, a blue piece of paper with measurements and such that is easy to draw on. The ruler you actually measure the plot with and all other tools are the experimental side of the lot. The blueprinting of the house based on those measures is the theoretical side. The math doesn't create anything since its up to the naughty naughty physics bros to make stuff up and see if it sticks.
@@bobbybrown1258 Yes. Don't hold out to see a gluon under any kind of microscope or with your eyes. Its magic fairy dust. And I'm going to tell you the truth right now. Tesla, Russel, Heaviside, Steinmetz were all right hold more patents than any of these people do more working experiments and contributed more than any of these eggheads could ever dream of yet their models are dismissed because the average scientist is in fact an intellectual moron. Intellect without wisdom is the most dangerous combination of human qualities on the planet. They see men with over 300 patents and working experiments and say "quack" because they are so monumentally stupid and ignorant that they can't comprehend REAL physics
@@bobbybrown1258yes. They have a number they are looking for and they define or quantize parts of that system to fit into the measured number. So when looking for particles in the standard model they started with math and then looked for the masses that could fit that math. This is how they knew to look for certain particles. It all starts and ends with math.
When I studied physics at university, I wanted to get into particle physics. But i switched to computer science and for a long time I regretted not sticking it out with the physics. This video makes me feel a bit better about not getting into particle physics. Astrophysics I find way more interesting now.
Similar experience here, though my interest was in low temperature physics. As I was working on my masters, I saw too many PhD physicists driving taxis and doing other non-physics things because the funding in their highly specialized areas had dried up. After many months of reevaluating, I turned my attention to software engineering, and often worked on projects where my physics and math skills were of great benefit. My physics training taught me how to think deeply and solve tough problems. Now that I'm retired, I spend part of my time rediscovering quantum mechanics and cosmology for my enjoyment.
Astrophysics is so interesting because they're solving problems all the time. Maybe they will eventually solve some of the real observational problems like dark matter without needing any help from particle physicists!
One problem is that in many institutions your performance is based on the number of publications, and it's certainly easier to just modify something theoretically than really discovering something new. I'll organize a conference, invite my colleagues from other institutions, publish the proceedings, and then my next friend will organize the conference next year, invite me, publish the proceedings, and so on and so forth.
right, and real progress requires peace of mind and stability in life in order to be able to focus on something for a longer time without constantly worrying about from where the next pay check comes from.
The collider method is violence. The results of collision will likely be fragments of elementary particles rather than the elementary particles themselves. I’ve had some crude videos myself. If you have time to waste, please search play list: Physics, Nature’s Perspective. For example, I noticed that half-life uses a continuous concept to describe something finite and discrete, such as radioactive elements, which may have an odd number of atoms. Of course, it is the thinking pattern of modern physics, using continuous and even smooth concepts and methods, such as curvature and partial differential equations, to describe our finite and discrete universe.
Yeah, the video was kinda dumb. The problem is insane commercialization of science and idiotic 'publish or perish' mantra that just wastes time of everyone involved and encourages paper spam, not people looking for new, promising leads...
The problem with the video is that we know for a fact that Standard Model is WRONG. It predicts 0 neutrino mass, so there should be (almost certainly) no neutrino oscillations (but there are). SM doesn't work with gravity and that's a problem not because we want all forces to be describes by one neat equation (that would be great though), but because at least one of the theories has to be inconsistent in certain conditions. So, yes, we are not entirely sure where exactly to dig, but we know for a fact that there is physics beyond SM. That's why the search for the breaking point of SM is important - it is what we need to drag ourselves beyond SM.
Well if it’s a case of digging anywhere, then start withe the Old Testament, Adam, Eve, Jesus and then move to Krishna and even Zeus. Why not, you never know what you might find?
This is a great comment, she doesn't even mention that SM doesn't work with gravity... the only time she brings it up is when she mentions it when speaking about dark matter in the common objections. In addition, the fact that the detail about the particle interactions of dark matter doesn't matter for explaining coslomogical and astrophysical phenomena doesn't change the fact that knowing something for the sake of knowing it is 90% of modern STEM anyways, for example: the whole of pure mathematics(some of applied mathematics aswell) is explored not to be later used in physics but for the reason of advancement in mathematics, that argument is increadibly stupid, cosmology and astronomy/astrophysics itself barely applied to us, beyond knowledge for engineering, the space-related sciences will not really be useful for us humans for hundreds of years...
"but Bigfoot would probbably have gotten me more views" and she also delivered that line martini-dry. Had me laughing for quite a while there. Well played :)
I envy you: I didn't give up on physics, physics gave up on me when I didn't get a postdoc position anywhere despite graduating Summa cum Laude and writing about 50 applications around the world. But then, I worked in heterotic string theory and ran around telling everyone they were using the wrong lattice classification in their orbifold compactifications and that didn't net me many friends either. Now that I'm long out of the field I seem to be racking up citations which feels like an additional insult.
Yep, it is good. Funny thing is, I read the book before finding her channel. I feel kinda dumb that it took me awhile to realize they're the same person.
Excellent, though challenging, presentation. I got my PhD in physics back in 1986 but didn't have the theory chops for particle physics (though Steven Weinberg was one of my professors). What I really regret was not joining the LIGO gravity wave experiment...now that was possibly the last beautiful experiment we will see for a long, long time. Though I'm not up on the latest particle theories and experimental results, Sabine offers a persuasive (to me) argument that the field is floundering. It's a shame.
This is a lovely talk by a physicist who can explain what I've been thinking about physics with a whole lot better Concepts and Foundation of course but it fits with a pattern that I've been feeling at an intuitive level that the science is broken and people are just making s*** up.
Dr. Hossenfelder the scientist and Dr. Hossenfelder the scientific journalist are making a huge crossover this episode. I'm thoroughly impressed, and I learned a lot from your distinction of pseudo problems from real problems. All in all, fantastic episode!
I'm not a physicist/scientist bt I do see the same sort of thing happening in my own field/profession ... and I can understand for Sabine that it does get frustrating ... and lonely ...to be one of the few who bothers and want to do something abt it.... which is why this channel appeals to me
This same "overfitting" problem happens with training AI models. If you train it too much on the same data, it will become too fitted to that data that its output will be closer to a duplication of the data that was fed to it, rather than coming up with its own result. If you give it a prompt that is unique from the data it was trained on, it will likely give you something near useless instead of making a coherent guess.
14:00 haha I’m not a particle physicist but this pseudo-problem phenomenon has been a terrible habit of mine I’ve applied to way too many things. Fantastic work on this video! It’s incredible how clear and concise you’ve broken down this topic and it’s trend of asymmetrical practices.
I see this, and have been guilty of this, in work environments all the time. We call it busywork, and some people use it as a means of pretending it'll lead to long term job security
@@edwardlulofs444, It is a new one. The Higgs Boson decays very quickly even if some scientists say that it doesn't spin. And it is not a behavior of a Boson.
Really appreciate your no-nonsense style Sabine. I love reading and learning about physics, but I am a writer and so much of what you say pertains to writing. And to creativity in general.
I was initially very skeptical when I saw the title, as I didn't and still don't really think that anyone claiming they've lost faith in science should taken seriously. I decided to listen when I saw your credentials, and what you're talking about reminds of guys like Ninov and Shöen in terms of making the results fit their predictions, not the other way around. Really good video!!
There is one problem with her whole argument and it is that the Standard Model is in fact wrong. Experimentally, I mean. We know since 2000’s or so that neutrino are not massless. Although that’s the exact prediction if the Standard Model. And the easiest solution points towards the existence of new particles. I don’t even know a solution to this problem that keeps the number of particles of the Standard Model unchanged. She does not mention this in the list of real problems even though it is the most important experimental problem of the Standard Model. I mean, she might have a point about writing papers and some unscientific behaviors but the main idea of the video is trash.
@@distantraveller9876 Science: the SM is experimentally wrong. There is actually a Nobel prize about that. We may discuss the validity of naturalness as a scientific motivation, but not the fact that there is no straightforward way of reconciling experiments and SM theory right now.
@@Thekingjamesft Of course it's wrong. People were to stupid, to greedy and to arrogant to understand Tesla, Russel, Steinmetz So now we have this. A model that can't keep up with our engineering, engineering largely in part to guys like Tesla with you know 300 patents 100 still in use. You know, real stuff not fake. Can't understand tho. To metaphysical for ya. Time to put the big boy pants on my guy it's time to come to terms.
I think your analogy was describing what Copernicus did. They only difference is, when his math got too complicated, he realized maybe the universe was simpler than he assumed in the first place. Basically, when the mathematical model didn’t fit, he looked for an alternate explanation and changed his theory.
@@robbhays8077 when physics replies lol no to your experiment you know you are wrong. when a blankface guy on RUclips replies lol no to your comment you know he is probably wrong.
It's how Science works, when it's being used correctly. But clearly not all Scientists are following this as Sabine is illustrating, they are trying to develop new excuses to ahear to the failed theories which don't pass the observation tests, rather than find a new one to find evidence for. @@paintspot1509
Sabine, you and your videos remain unparalleled to me in their refreshing perspective, directness, humor, and lack of fear to go against the majority. Thank you for your work!
I think also the problem is that we forgot the difference between a Model and the Objective. There are infinite models that can be theorized and found, agreeing to a certain degree to the precision we want to have (e.g. the Newton physics works really well with most everyday stuff). But we do not needs model. The objective is to solve stuff that does not work, or stuff that has not been found. I.e. my objective is that I wanna travel the universe in seconds, my current theory does not permit that, thus I try to find new theories that allow it.
The moment you brought up a lot of data points and mentioned having a lot of assumptions with it, and adding more just so it FITS what you want it to fit, you reminded me of one of the most important things I've learnt from one of the best professors I've had: the law of parsimony. Although people would tend to argue that "it's as complicated as it needs to be."
Videos like this one are why I subscribed to this channel. I predict that particle physicists will continue on the same course that Sabine describes because they like getting their paychecks in the "standard" way.
As she said, the money will dry out, the field will wither if not die completely. We've peaked global growth, global recession has begun and will last for at least 2-3 decades. This will put strain on funding of all those useless studies that were started and kept afloat for years by over-promising. When money is tight, results matter and particle physics has had very few of them recently. This whole branch of physics is overblown, with all the dark-matter/multiverse/string-theory theorists in close 2nd place.
I'm finishing a PhD in particle physics studying dark matter and this rings true with me. The first time I found thought that this was a problem was when a string theorist said that we just hadn't probed higher energies yet. I was shocked because the LHC is able to reach such amazingly high energies, what else did they think would work?
How about this hypothesis: Dark Matter is standard matter displaced in a 4th spatial dimension. Gravity passes along this dimension, but not electromagnetism. This could explain where the anti-matter went that balances ordinary matter. Since Dark Matter does not interact electromagnetically with standard matter, Dark Matter falling into earth's gravity well will pass right through the earth and collect in the core. Over 4.5 billion years a lot of Datk Matter should be collected inside the earth. The mass of Dark Matter could affect the spin of the earth's core, causing the periodic reversal of polarity of earth's magnetic field.
@@raymondswenson1268 cool idea, but just a couple of things to think about: 1. Looking at the abundance of Dark Matter in the universe, we would expect that there's only about a squirrel's worth in mass on the Earth at the moment. The change in polarity is probably because the iron core moves at a periodic rate. 2. It still wouldn't really explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry. Why is it that anti-matter was what was wisked away to that dimension? Why is it that early antimatter no longer is visible in the 3 spatial dimensions we have, but we can produce and even, to an extent, store antimatter pretty consistently?
I feel like we need a Part 2 to this video: "How to Fix Particle Physics" Where with some input from people in the field, you outline more viable approach strategies to advance particle physics.
I think the situation is not as bad as it is depicted here. One thing she omitted, which I think it's pretty relevant, is that many of these experiments searching for Dark Matter, or sterile neutrinos, or other kind of "new physics" are, more often than not, multipurpose experiments, meaning that they are not built with the sole purpose of searching for such new physics. Sure, the HESSE telescope that she mentions may have been used to look for the production of gamma rays from Dark Matter annihilation, but it was not build for that: it is primarily an observatory for gamma rays from celestial sources and it is doing great science in the field of very high energy astrophysics. Same goes for other missions such as NASA's Fermi: even if it was used to search for DM and axions, which they didn't find, this was only a small part of the science they are doing. Indeed, the Fermi satellite has revolution-ed our knowledge of gamma ray astronomy. Another example: Kamiokande (alo mentioned in the video) was originally built to search for proton decay -- and indeed they didn't observe it. However they won the Nobel prize for detecting, for the first time, the neutrino emission from a SuperNova explosion in 1987. Nowadays, the upgraded version of that detector is leading the field of neutrino science. Experiments at LHC did not observe supersimmetry, but they are doing precision measurements in many other areas. Improving the Standard Model isn't the only task left for physics, there are many other things in the Universe that we understand imperfectly - if at all.
Yes, i agree with you. I believe that, besides that she points out many things, at the end, i believe she is kind piss about the ways the all science was made and is made. Also, she tends to speak a lot superficial stuff from areas she doesn’t major on
None of this, Pro or Con, is going to change the quality of my life. When people began telling me the world was flat I told them I didn't care what shape it is - I'm sticking with the one I know. It makes more sense and believing it to be different isn't going to change the quality of my life.
@@fresnocruz4159 a great deal of the technology we use today, including a lot of medical treatments as well as the phone or PC you are using to comment here, come from scientist researching completely unrelated stuff. So yeah, you are welcome. Also, that the earth was non flat has been common knowledge since well before the Middle Age, so it isn't exactly frontier science.
@@albertomanfreda2125 I'm not against science. That implication is nonsense. I came across this video while checking to see what peroxide will do for my cousin's septic tank. Everyone uses science.
This was a very interesting video. As a PhD chemist who spent his career working mostly in the fields of physical chemistry, instrumentation development, and clinical chemistry I am not highly knowledgeable in the field of particle physics. However, I have been aware that progress in that field has been very slow, especially in recent years. As luck would have it, a few weeks ago I was having a discussion of an undergraduate physics major about possible career paths in physics, and I suggested to her that, although particle physics is very interesting and deals with some of the most fundamental aspects of nature, it is probably not a very good career choice for most young physicists. There are several reasons, two of which are that the chances of making a significant discovery are very remote, and that most particle physicists become small gears embedded and pretty well lost in the machinery of Big Physics. I suggested that biophysics might be a more suitable area of specialization because there are undoubtedly many significant discoveries that can be made in that field (and the related field of biochemistry), and it doesn't necessarily require a Big Science approach to make those discoveries. Also, because a reasonable argument can be made that biophysics can relate ultimately to human health, this can enhance the possibility of obtaining funding for one's research. Chemical physics might be another possibility for a career choice, though the risk there is that one might spend a career on searching for better ways of calculating or measuring things rather than making discoveries. Also, because chemical physics is not tied very closely to biology (hence to medicine), funding opportunities might be harder to come by. Anyway, the video was extremely interesting, and while it presents a point of view that is a bit more extreme than mine, I can certainly sympathize with this point of view and agree with it at least in part.
Dr. Hossenfelder, thanks for this. I'm tired listening to the so-called " popularizers" of science talking about their "discovery" without empirical basis. I teach Kant in my literary criticism classes, i understand how his philosophy of science shapes our understanding of reality.
If you got a time machine and brought John von Neumann to the present, as soon as he stopped screaming in terror at being ripped across space and time, he'd have a lot to say to a lot of physicists.
I would be slightly kinder and say that physicists are drawn to models that promise the biggest scientific impact. They are only proven bad in hindsight after all.
Not really. Science exists in a historic continuum with natural philosophy, its 'former self' so to speak, which is itself nested both classically and protohistorically in a continuum with pre-modern mathematics and its early applied domains, as both its disciplines (early geometry and arithmetic) and applications (in craftsmanship, surveying, construction and astronomy) were intimately tied. Notably, the original meaning of Geometry was, literally, 'measurement of the Earth', a big enough hint toward its practical use for data gathering and knowledge production about human surroundings. All of these ancient disciplines attested from the dawn of civilisations can be extended in a prehistoric continuum whereby humans began sedentary life's that required ever more refined methods for observing, quantifying, measuring, inferring and ultimately, knowing things about their now (semi-)permanent environments. Put simply, those disciplines came about naturally, rising from necessity and sociocultural evolutions which were only possible because of neurochemical evolutions that permitted our species to do so. In other words, science is a knowledge-production tool naturally selected for by evolutionary circumstances, itself in constant, artificial evolution, whereby philosophy plays only a feedback role as yet another mechanism, not because it is necessary, but simply because philosophy was one of science's evolutionary steps, thus philosophical functions are now part of the scientific activity, hence its use of hypotheses, principles, laws, and theories. TLDR version: science doesn't need philosophy because science _is_ a branch philosophy, that happened to become its own thing, a process that keeps repeating as new species of knowledge disciplines evolve. (Which is ironically something only science can provide as insight into philosophy, its origins, and its offspring).
Absolutely amazing explanation of this phenomenon. It seems that our economic model operates the same way and economists are doing what particle physicists are doing-make idealistic assumptions, manipulate the model to fit those assumptions in order to achieve its preconceived outcome, keep tweaking the model until the assumed grand outcome occurs, stick to the plan at all costs. It’s probably an underlying error in worldview that’s motivating many areas of research and science.
As someone who is not a physicist, I think the most important things to be concerned with are quantum gravity, dark matter, and high-temperature superconductivity. Quantum gravity has some backing behind it. Dark matter would complete the gravimetric model of the universe. Superconductors have tons of engineering applications
Having worked on one of the bigger experiments looking for a WIMP particle in a specific energy range, I remember going in that I didn't have confidence whatsoever that we would find anything. I understood the model, the science, but I still felt something was terribly wrong that I and others had so little faith that the predictions would amount to a discovery or new understanding (beyond having falsified it). It was a great opportunity for me to contribute to a useless paper though, as an aspiring student. We're just reaching in the dark randomly; it's not motivating and it shouldn't be this way. This video is spot on.
I remember particel physics being the end goal for the most brilliant students when I was in university, but besides the horribly complicated math (I wasn't one of the most brilliant students), I did have a feeling it was just about throwing an infinite number of permutations of theories at a wall to see what would stick, and overfitting in the process. That said, I think Sabine glosses over the dark matter (and dark energy) problem a bit too easily. Just like theories about new particles keep getting disproven, theories about how standard model particles can account for dark matter keep getting disproven as well. Maybe modified gravity is the answer, but that is also a field where physicists just keep throwing increasingly more complicated models at the wall, so most of this video applies to that as well. In the end one of these fields has to be correct so they're not entirely wrong in wanting to explore new models, they should just be more narrow and focused on the real problem of dark matter (and dark energy).
@@Khosann1 Dark matter is on topic here since a dark matter particle would fall outside of the standard model and all the criticisms she lobbs at particle physics apply just as much to modified gravity theories.
@@Khosann1 Maybe I'm missing something (but I'm also suspecting the comment section on this channel is becoming like Jordan Peterson's where every inconsistency or hole will be explained away as just not understanding the infinite wisdom of the Dear Leader) but I fail to see how she has. She seems to be a follower of the superfluidity model family, but those still postulate a particle beyond the standard model. Sabine is human and fallible as sometimes makes inconsistent claims or goes on weird tangents, and we should be able to admit that. That doesn't mean she's not brilliant and doesn't raise some good points.
Well that sums up very well my general feeling about particle physics. As a young master student I went for an internship in particle physics as I thought that was my dream job, and that’s where the best physicists would go (and who wouldn’t want to be among the best?). After spending time in the literature and talking to actual particle physicists I realized exactly all of that, and it didn’t fit with my view of what is good science (I mean compare a generic current particle physicist with, say, a Feynman…). Knowing that I had only little experience with experimental physics work (which otherwise would probably have been my first choice) my goal then became to slowly shift to maths, which at least has the advantage of being much more demanding in terms of level of proof, and, doesn’t require gigantic amounts of money to be wasted in gigantic experiments testing hypothesis which by design (!) will almost surely turn out to be wrong. Plus I can still look at physics inspired problems (a lot of what I do is related to complex systems, statistical physics and quantum information), so it’s for the best. The shame is that they are a few bright minds in particle physics and they’d certainly be much more useful for science or society working on other problems.
It sounds like the book describes what this layperson feels as they look in from the outside. Particle physics, maybe much of physics appears to be more art than science. The creation of their equations seems to be more faith than something based in reality. Your equation doesn't work and looks a bit brutal? Hell, let's throw in a couple more "dimensions" to make it work better. Are the dimensions real or is it a contrivance to make a more "elegant" equation.
@@johnsolo123456 I haven't read the book, but I'll say that as someone who admits to having a bit of a bias to elegant models and explanations, my educated guess is that the book is talking more about how the elegant theories in people's minds may not align with experimental data and how endlessly chasing that unicorn can be an issue.
i dont like how she dismisses objections to her argument. They're all really good objections like the serendipity one. i mean she's kinda right but at the end of the day i think its just the way discovering new science goes, everyone who has a theory should be doing their best to get it tested, i mean whats her alternative, that anyone with a theory present it to a special group of elite people who will determine if its worth being tested. i mean i see soooo many problems with that
Hi Sabine, I worked in science for my entire career and am retired now. I saw this problem back in the 70's when people in mathematical and theoretical Physics were convinced they were 100% correct because their model said so. To me a model and prediction without hard data and experiment is just an interesting SF story. I suppose that's why I ended up in experimental physics. Over fitting and extrapolation of model ranges to fit "your own ideas" is happening in many areas now and it is not science. It throws Occam's razor out the window. The assumption is made that what you have is defective and something new needs to be added without supporting data. I see this happening in many areas these days including climate change papers. But I suppose it generates useless jobs for graduates
The ever more convoluted particles and sub-particles remind me of the epicyclic model of the Solar System, where the modelling was horrendous because of a fundamental misconception (and adding epicycles to improve the model to match more accurate observed data must have been good research material).
Yeah man, we just shouldn’t bother with models at all. Fucking boomers. Retire so we can move on with physics without dinosaurs in the back room holding us back.
The philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, who happens to have been Karl Popper's successor at the LSE, put forward an interesting theory for evaluating competing scientific theories. He also drew attention to theories that need to complicate themselves in order to fit with observation. He observed that that, in general, this was unavoidable (we should not be too quick to refute) but that any such change is an ad hoc modification and theories that do this frequently are degenerate (A theory can also become degenerate if it ceases to make new interesting predictions).
I graduated in physics and was always intrigued by quantum physics, particle physics and cosmology. However, I was and I still am under the impression that climate and atmospheric physics has much more relevance nowadays. And I feel confirmed by the most recent Nobel laureates. Hence, I pursued a PhD in this field. As a postdoc, now, heavily depending on third party funding, I am frustrated about the imbalance of available funding for particle physics and the lack thereof in fields like geophysical fluid dynamics. The problems in this field are often old as well as very complicated. This seems to be the reason that it is not attractive for young researchers. But that is the crux really. As we need to solve them in order to make solid predictions for climate change. Also physicists pretend those problems do not belong to physics anymore which is rediculous as the methods to approach them all come from physics. tldr: too much funding and focus on particle physics, no love for fundamental climate and atmospheric physics.
There are many funding bodies that prefer the idea of "pure" science (e.g particle physics) to "applied" science (e.g mitigating avalanches). This problem is made worse by the fact that many funding organisations have strict limits imposed on them regarding on what topics they may spend their money,.
Because "unravelling the deepest mysteries of nature" sounds more cool than doing science at the macro scale. "In principle" you can solve everything with particle physics, except it is extremely impractical and very useful to study phenomena from a "higher level". This is a purely romantic notion, but I think it influences public perception and where funding goes. I blame *metaphysical* reductionism as a philosophy for this. Reductionism is a useful intellectual tool, try to understand the whole by the interactions of its parts. But the fact that this is a useful heuristic is confused with a much stronger assertion about the underlying nature of reality, an assertion you don't have to believe in to practice science. All you have to believe to trust science is that we can make observations, make hypotheses and models, create experiments and test to what degree the model makes accurate predictions. You don't have to know *why* we are capable of doing this, you only have to believe that for whatever reason, this appears to be possible.
You see, particle physics sounds fancy, climate physics is supposedly a settled consensus and we no longer need to concern ourselves with any of the gaps.
One reason we know there is a problem with the standard model is because it incorrectly predicts that neutrinos have zero mass. Also, Karl Popper did, in fact, view falsifiability as being synonymous with being scientific. Simplicity in the model was never a requirement.
Reminds me of Ptolemy's model of the solar system, where an overly complex model was made up to fit existing data. It was useful in predicting the movement of bodies in the solar system, but a better and simpler theory came along that did the same and with better results. I think that particle physics has reached its end of life just like Ptolemy's model of the solar system, and we need to shift our perspective to a different vantage point and try to explain things from that point, if we are to proceed further with our understanding of the world.
Ptolemy's system was complicated because it didn't correctly fit the observations they had. Copernicus did better, but still had complexities to fit the data because they insisted orbits had to be circles with epicycle circles. Kepler found that a single ellipse explained everything. To some tastes breaking the perfection of a circle was a deal breaker. To my mind adding features to a theory that explains all observations is wrong. Work on something else for a while
What I never understood is how we can possibly make any strong conclusion about the double slit experiment, when we're sending in electrons/photons, yet we can't even create vaccuum strong enough to clear out all the molecules inside the space, let alone particles that are way smaller. Who knows what kinds of interractions could be going on inside any empty space for particles way smaller than molecules, but we're claiming all kinds of wild shit, like the idea of wave-particle duality.
Sabine you have a unique way of looking at the state of things. You can see things just the way they actually are and explain them clearly with pinpoint accuracy, which is a quality of a good scientist. Moreover you have the courage to put your opinions forward even though it goes against standard practice of your colleagues. What you are doing is a service to the entire scientific project and our society 🙏🙏
They need more application and less theory. In large branches of academia that are without any applied problems it is only a matter of time before ti devolves into people just inventing imaginary stuff while patting each others back in reviews and use their titles to prove the importance, not results. And by results I mean a thing that can cook coffee, fly to Mars or teleport, not papers.
It saddens me to think critical thought, as displayed by Sabine, is so unusual that it is considered unique. Schools, at all levels should be helping people learn how to think critically. We are clearly failing at this as a global society.
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This video comes with a quiz that helps you make your new knowledge stick: quizwithit.com/start_thequiz/1689034259496x415360144818764740
A youtube vid with homework. I love it.
You should do a video on big foot you would get billions of views
You should get the Nobel for just telling the truth. Most likely any new discovery from scientists will be kept a secret. But if it’s nice the we will here about it.
Why do none of these famous celebrity Physisists show of by applying their fancy equations to the 9/11 disaster in New York in 2001? Let me refresh your minds with my proof based on high school level energy equations. Epotential = Ekinetic remember? So Mgh = 0.5MV^2. V=52/m/s(terminal velocity of free falling objects) M= nonrelevant g =9.81m/s^2 Calculate h = 137.81m Thats the free space h underneath plane impact location that is needed for the upper tower part to reach free fall speed. But underneath the impact locations In the Towers there was no free space. There were 40 floors who should have resisted free fall. How did this magic trick happen celebrity physists ????????? Or are you'll also full of shit!!
Why do none of these famous celebrity Physisists show of by applying their fancy equations to the 9/11 disaster in New York in 2001? Let me refresh your minds with my proof based on high school level energy equations. Epotential = Ekinetic remember? So Mgh = 0.5MV^2. V=52/m/s(terminal velocity of free falling objects) M= nonrelevant g =9.81m/s^2 Calculate h = 137.81m Thats the free space h underneath plane impact location that is needed for the upper tower part to reach free fall speed. But underneath the impact locations In the Towers there was no free space. There were 40 floors who should have resisted free fall. How did this magic trick happen celebrity physists ????????? Or are you'll also full of shit!!
So yeah, I am a member of LHCb at CERN, I have been doing this for more than a decade and what she said in the video is 100% true. People at LHCb know it, they do not like it, feel embarrassed about it but their only choice is to just keep doing it or find a job elsewhere.
For instance, we had a collaboration wide meeting a few months ago and Sabine was ridiculed by the Physics coordinator. Were there arguments? No, just plain mockery and it was endorsed by senior people, not students or postdocs, but faculty. I frankly would have expected either to have a discussion with Sabine, if the disagreement is so important and they care that much about Sabine's videos; or just ignore her, if they believe she's a crackpot. But mockery? That should be beneath our community.
I felt deeply disappointed to see our community falling so low. When I started in the field I thought scientists were objective, data driven and open. No, they are tribal, sensitive and when they feel attacked that group mentality emerges. Do you remember the B meson anomaly that went away? Well, we cannot use the word "mistake", we have to talk about the new result "superseding" the old one, no one really wants to recognize mistakes here. One faculty from ATLAS used the word "mistake" in the seminar about the B meson anomaly that went away and immediately the LHCb physics coordinator (yes, the same one from whom the mockery mentioned above came from) reacted trying to keep LHCb safe.
For all those people wanting to go into science because it is full of nice people who are only interested on science, the truth, etc Think twice, there is politics here too, I guess not unlike industry; you just make less money and have a short term contract, unless you are tenured. And that's why I am not posting with my real name, I am not going to expose myself to oversensitive angry colleagues.
The scary part is similar attitudes and defensive people across every industry across the whole world! How can progress happen if hubris grinds impressive well-funded science to a halt. Of course no one wants embarrassment, and wants to save face. But surely there is a balance where systems not producing real results can be wound down and resources re-allocated - theres too many 'lifers' in every field willing to protect things forever
Scientists are perhaps the least objective people in the world. Immensely tribal as you say, but also susceptible to bowing to authority
Neurotypical people can smell them from miles away, their insecurity and hubris reeks.
Tesla was a physics director. Hardly anyone can make sense of his models and yet he produced over 300 patents with 100 still in use. That is a director of physical forces. This crap is a money racket based on junk I'm sorry but I hate these people that don't care about the truth.
@@TheHeavyModd Have you met the gender studies department? At least some of them are still making scientists look objective 😀
@@TheHeavyModd don't be ridiculous. least objective people... most people in the world don't even try to be objective with anything. they've never considered the importance of it.
Got my PhD in particle physics and while the subject is awesome, seeing “how the sausage is made” and seeing the egos involved was a huge turn off. Glad to be working in the software industry now.
I work in the software industry too and believe me there are some massive egos in here too.
That's a whole different sort of sausage, lol.
@@coalhater392for sure, but it’s different. In software, you’re actually trying to help people 😂
@@cougar2013 most software jobs are you working for a company that makes useless products my biggest achievement is not working to a company but contributing code to open source software.
@@fkeyvan You are confused , my dear Fart Hard ....
You should have posted a helpline number for any particle physicist affected by this video
You mean a type “Samaritans” for depressed particle physicists?
At least a trigger warning
😂😂
Lol so true
Its not just particle physics or "science". Its academia in general and the math goes like this: Mortgage+bills+food+fame+grant money > integrity
I mean it is pretty hard to raise a family on integrity
I worked in science my entire career almost. I also left it as I'm really a "old-fashioned" one, where I think the process should be simple and straightforward. I'm talking about the "rules" of doing proper science. In my work I got frustrated by the amazing amount of politics and management going on, having to pay to get published and if you didn't have 10 papers, you were a loser. Many get their PhD because it's required for a job later on, etc. All of which have nothing to do with science and in my opinion degrade it. Also, when applying for grant money, always include that it may cure cancer or something like that. :)
Capitalism will bring us victory, oh wait....
I hear you.
@@thomasvnl What does this have to do with capitalism?
1) I hear you
2) "...and management..." Here I would like to add (as someone who ended up in quality management and hates how people doing QM wrong gives QM - which I like and find useful - a bad name...):
Management is useful! Management is important! Good management and good managers seem hard to come by, and advancement politics (especially, but not only, in science) seem to focus on getting the worst possible people for management...
& that sucks 😞, but not because management, in itself, is bad...
Here whining about particle physics always brings out others who complain. She herself is working on theories on DM and superdeterminism that are most probably dead ends. But that does not stop her from pointing at others who might be involved in the same dead end researches. Her own dead end research should have taught her a good lesson but maybe the publicity she gets is good enough for her.
Hi Sabine, My guess is that the reason for what you describe is due to the fact that universities put tremendous pressure on professors to publish. Coming up with good solid experiments is difficult. But, coming up with those experiments where over fitting is typically the result, is much easier. Thus you get 50 years of crappy experiments and papers that don’t end up proving anything. But they served a purpose. And that was to check a box for a professor to publish something that year.
Honestly... I don't think that is necessarily wrong. Publishing a good paper is extremely difficult, and at this point in time in our current system. Publishing papers is synonymous with doing research, is sometimes the only way to get paid for it, or to get government funding. So if we increase the bar for what it means for a paper to be good. Then you will inevitably just erase a good amount of researchers. Sure some of them would get inspired to be better and write better, but others won't keep up and just abandon research all together to just teach. And I think that is ultimately unhelpful, we need more researchers, not less, we need more funding for science, specially in developing countries.
In a way, lousy papers are just something to keep your university professors occupied and up to date. Even if they publish bad papers, they are up to date experts on their field, and that is valuable.
I think in general, this is more a symptom of a bigger problem, which is we putting so much value on the publication of scientific papers. That is kind of the ugly underground mafie-like side of science that not too many people know about. Scientists publishing multiple papers on the same topic just explained differently, citing their own papers multiple times and the papers of their friends. I don't blame them honestly, that is just the system, like the grind, click bait and collaborations a youtuber creator might have to do to be succesful.
The sad thing is, you look at some of the foundational papers that are forever-cited in their fields, and it feels like they were all written by people who only bothered to publish a handful of papers. There was a time when scientists were given the space to tackle difficult problems over many years and avoided polluting the space with fluff, thereby reducing the signal to noise ratio for other scientists. I went the professional route and abandoned academia because of my experience with the politics of research and publishing like clockwork. Ran into a lot of essentially made-up papers like the ones described here, and felt tremendous pressure to "see publishable results" in something that really could only be published as "well, our hypothesis was incorrect - don't bother wasting your time over here".
@@scottishrob13 Totally, and I personally think it is a little unfair to blame researchers are being dishonest or sneaky, I mean they sometimes are. But this is just a consequence of the unrealistic expectations put unto research. Primarily arround goverments and institutions measuring success (and consequently funding) just by the amount of papers.
We should strive to reform the system.
@@diegog1853 "and just abandon research all together to just teach." that would be fantastic no matter the reason, actually. "teaching colleges" be more rare is actually a bug, or rather a crime, not a feature.
Actually, Universities put tremendous pressure on professors and staff to obtain grants, which the university then administers, for a fee.
The universities actually want professors to be self supporting through generating grant money, then the university has more money to pay executives and administration, as well as building physical plant.
This results in universities going to tremendous expense to recruit professors and researchers who are already well established in their field, and are already generating large amounts of grant money, or may have large grants whicgh they can transfer from another institution.
What Sabine is describing however is more like the medieval professors debating how many angels can be on the head of a pin, a question which doesn’t have anything at all to do with science.
Particle physics has turned into something with close resemblance to religion.
Back when I was in particle physics 20 years ago, shortly before a talk on super symmetry, the video projector wasn't connected to the speakers laptop yet, so it just said "no signal". That one super symmetry-sceptical experimentalist professor enters the room, checks the screen and goes, "Oh, the conclusion already?" We students had a great laugh. The theoretical physicists, not so much.
Nice sassy prof throwing shade haha
sounds like a joke to me.
Very well put, and thank you! I'm not a scientist myself, and have only recently retired from a career of repairing cars, but the foundations of physics has always been a fascinating thing to me. Now with some time on my hands I can learn a bit, and it really helps to have someone rather unmercifully separating the wheat from the chaff. There seems to be a lot of chaff.
I'd also add, as a mechanic, I always emphasized to the new guys how mistakes are inevitable, and machines don't care at all how confident or enthusiastic or certain you are that you are right. You either get it right or you don't. If you get it wrong as a mechanic, you need to explain to a customer how you wasted their money but you'd like another chance. Some guys never really get that part; honesty can be hard, and admitting you were wrong is hard. That's one thing I always looked at in trainees - how they dealt with their own mistakes.
I haven't "lost faith in science" or anything like that, but I could judge a lot of particle physicists based on those terms, I guess. Not that I could do better, but I was a good mechanic: whenever I made a mistake or was wrong about something I'd talk about it with everyone, so they didn't make the same mistake themselves. If you ever hung out in the break room of a good shop, most of the best stories are guys talking about mistakes they made. I wonder if there is a string theorist's break room somewhere, and what kinds of stories they tell...
I completely agree. I did my PhD in gravitational theory and found similar attitude problems in the camp of gravitation and cosmology. I always resisted getting in the bandwagon and it didn't do my career any favors. It feels kind of vindicating to see Sabine articulating so clearly what has been my fundamental intuition for a very long time.
What’s your fundamental intuition? That the SM is the final law of nature, it’s multitude of free parameters is just how nature is and start working on new stock market gauss copulas?
There are people researching MONDS go do that. Jesus it’s not like anyone forbade it.
@@Annou7la Nobody forbade genetically engineering a giant purple dragon... BUT when a turd destroys your car on the freeway, you might wish to hell they hadn't bothered either...
Maybe ask if we SHOULD do it more often than if we CAN do it. ;o)
@@gnarthdarkanen7464 what?
@John B Wow. Looks like someone hit a raw nerve. I see absolutely no shame in the idea that the laws of nature actually dictate the laws of nature. I guess that makes me the idiot. I'm okay with that. But I can also make predictions, just like a real scientist. Might it be accurate to predict that your wages and your funding are either directly or indirectly correlated to the study of cosmology/and or particle physics? Why am I asking specifically about the financial aspect? No reason, no reason at all....
(And @lexInWonderland is right. The current state of Cosmology and the LCDM is fk'd)
I highly doubt that you did any PhD, especially in theoretical physics. And it is clear from the way that you are speaking, there is no camp on gravitation or cosmology.
Sabine, I so strongly appreciate you. As a clinical psychologist, these problems show up a lot in my field, too. The tragedy is that those who are knowledgeable enough to speak to these fundamental issues are either 1) benefitting from the status quo and have a career wrapped up in psuedoproblems, 2) grad students don’t have enough power and risk destroying their future prospects at a research career, or 3) people throw in the towel because they feel like it’s not worth it and focus on shifting out of academia to industry (or in my field, clinical work).
All large groups of humans include immature people who want to get their egos massaged. The myth that science is free of human weakness is exactly that; a myth.
The reason I left my pursuit of psychology was because the methodology used to "study" it was so dubious. I think there is some value to "seeing what sticks" on some level but I think she really explained it best stating "It isn't working". We have come across interesting things and created neat machines but a little more focus and direction seems like it would help out a lot in science right now. I am also not sure if this was always an issue in the field - perhaps history just doesn't notate failed experiments like the present. We tend to know of the great scientists of yesteryear but we certainly don't discuss the "average" scientist of the past that had only a minor impact on the field.
@@dbmsolardesignworkorders194 or human society is just unraveling. I note the exponential increase in trolls from one or two per thread to forming their own alliances and majorities.
@@dbmsolardesignworkorders194 It's a newer problem. Technicians, engineers and science men of the past had more grounding in fundaments of reality. Tesla and Russel already have models that work better.
But it's profitable to tell the story that the old guys with over 300 patents and 100 still in use and thousands of dirivitave technologies were "quacks" that the true model starts with Einstein (sham quack) and guys like Feynman who showed up drunk to lectures and couldn't explain how magnetism works. Leading up to the Degrasse's and Kaku who sell you bs now are somehow the true geniuses.
It reminds me about the story of Johannes Kepler who, until the end of his life, kept trying to fit the orbits of the six known planets into the ratios of the sizes of nested platonic solids. Even though he was the guy who figured out that the orbits are elliptical, he still felt his platonic solid theory was the true underlying structure of the orbits.
Cognitive dissonance.
Who knows maybe if we add another dimension he'll be correct :P
Exactly! And why do they think gravity should unite with the other three "forces"? The strong, weak, and e-m force have force carries in the standard model. Gravity has no such carrier. Gravity bends space and time. What does the strong force bend? What does the Weak force bend? What does the e-m force bend? Centripetal "force" is not a force like gravity. Calling some things "forces" is like calling Pluto a planet. 😉
After all, what are planets if not heavy hadrons?
Some times in science, it takes the dying off of the old guard before new ideas are finally accepted.
I think a philosophy of science course should be required for undergraduate physics majors. It has always been my impression that particle physicists lack a basic understanding of what science is.
Philosophy of anything should not be required as part of science curriculum.
but the clown Degrasse said philosophy is useless.
@@jotarokujo5132 He said that? Rather naive.
It is compulsory where I am from
@@clips9294 That's good. Where is that, if you don't mind?
I remember as a physics undergraduate studying particle physics module in the late 70s. At times it felt like the more energy you could throw at the problem, the more exotic particles you could predict, and still fundamentally miss what was really happening. My friend, a fellow physics undergraduate, was so disillusioned with particle physics that he wrote poetry during his particle physics module exam and still came away with a 2:1 physics degree.
Gee! Imagine that!
Good news, i will postulate and use only low normal dude logic with no maths to get a phd🤣.
Also i can write poetry randomly throwing new particules names.
It is clear that physics is stuck. We got nothing left to find with current measurement methods.
Heh, I wrote poetry during my GCSE chemistry exam. Unsurprisingly, I got a 3.
Reality is an information process, set in motion and sustained by God for a purpose. Understanding the purpose is more important than knowing anything about it. After one understands the purpose, knowing how Reality works is important. The continued growth and development of humanity depends on it. From this perspective what particle physicists are doing is similar to analyzing the Mandelbrot set, trying to develop math that describes it.
Best roast of Particle physicist for greater good of future of Physics. Great and bold video by Sabine.
As a theoretical physics myself (complex system) that used to work in a department very famous for Particle Physics, I have to say that I fully understand Sabine but also Particle Physicists. It is not easy to be trained to understand and fix a refined and beautiful model - the greatest human achievement of all time - and, after finishing 10 years of specific training and getting a PhD, finding that the model works and there is nothing much left to do. Everything in our energy range has been understood, and we already made efforts to go 5-6 order of magnitudes more in the experimental range to find the missing parts (Higgs). A slow transition to a world with less particle physicists will be needed, but I understand why they keep trying to understand more of it, a last hit or miss to chisel their name in the model, to say "I am also part of the greatest human wonder, I was just born 10 years too late!"
That's why I did my Ph.D. in pure mathematics - a lot of open conjectures and applications be damned😅! Retired after 30 years in academia. I did research regarding differential geometry in GR.
As a theoretical physisist*, or physician*
@@mrstogie912 The OP is probably not a Native speaker of English ... 🤷♀️
@@barneyronnie Always a good option. I doubt that the day will ever come when everythin in maths will have been researched!
They'll never stop trying to calculate π. Not ever.
When I was undergraduate physics major in my twenties I was influenced by Lee Smollin's critique of string theory, and was always surprised to see the contrast between the popular depiction in documentaries of string theory as something "scientists now know..." and the many physicists I met in person that thought it wasn't very promising. The arguments in this video are parallel to some that Lee Smolin brought up, and I'm so glad to see this perspective. It's desperately needed.
In my Freshman Physics major seminar class, our professors took turns, getting a class to explain their research to the class, and when the theorist working on the black hole information paradox, I asked some question I don't remember that required him to mention String Theory to answer, so before he did, he opened the door to look both ways in the hallway to make sure the department head wasn't going to "kick down the door and yell 'but can you test it?'" upon any mention of string theory.
@@maximan4363 That's a funny comment from Dr. Higgs, of all people. I always had theories I was interested in, but I'm not qualified to know why they get ignored, or whether they are on good grounds or not. Laurent Nottale's Scale Relativity at the very least hits me in an intuitive way that many theories don't. I like the unification on relativistic terms instead of on a fixed space-time. I'll have to look into Quantum Gravity when I can. I'm back in school again, but I'll be done in May and can nerd out on all the wonderful things again soon.
You wait until you hear Dr James Tour burn down the whole of origin of life studies in a few minutes.
I agree. Not a fan of the "I lost faith in science" in the title when what she is critiquing is a stray from science from what I gather. But good video all together
Just needs moar dimensions
For me as an experimental neutrino physicist I can say, this is why I work with Neutrinos... they exist and there are still fundamental questions open =)
How do you detect a non-charged particle.
@@federerfanatic they interact via weak force. Final state of neutrino scattering are easily detectable
@@federerfanatic i am really curious about what is a charged particle.
@@oygeeh4915 haha, you crack me up. Lawyer here: working with things humans make more than real and still not interested after thousands of years into the 'matter' of conflicts. Very interesting field if you approach it openly and often enough astonshingly well to resolve. Too much belief = models into an alleged human nature makes it often a self fulfilling prophecies.
@@endemikpandemi a particle that has an electric charge, like the positively charged proton or a negatively charged electron
Thia is an absolutely fantastic presentation, Sabine.
Sabine, this was a great lecture. I am an engineer, not a scientist. I have long envied the mathematical sophistication of particle physicists, and I hate ignorance, especially my own. Once I was reading a popular treatment of string theory and M theory. The author did a good job of setting up the historical context of the research, and of recounting the achievements of the brilliant pioneers in the field. As long as the story was about people, it was a good read. When the author tried to make concrete statements about the theories, it fell apart. I set the book down when, three-quarters of the way through, it descended into gibberish.
In the later chapters the author went on and on gushing about the wonderfulness of these theories while explaining that they couldn’t be falsified using any experimental technology we possess. Supposedly there are as many as 15 dimensions, most of which are too small, in some sense, to be examined. No workable experiments can be conceived that might test these theories. This is very unsatisfactory to me. I felt that the string theory enterprise had tipped over into metaphysics.
As far as the dimensions in which we are actually able to run tests go, it occurred to me that if one devised an overarching theory that was sufficiently complex, one might explain, or rather model accurately without explaining, anything that might be observed. Such a theory would be an ideal vehicle for overfitting data, with impressive untestable ramifications for dimensions we can never see. That theory would be string theory or its other non-falsifiable successors.
That being said, your discussion raises some practical questions. How are we to train particle physicists if the standard model is perfectly correct? Must all particle physicists become experimental ones, forever searching for some falsification of the orthodox theory so that the field of theoretical particle physics may be reopened? Who will be capable of acquiring the necessary mathematical acumen if no one is working in the field? Please consider the possibility that the field has reached a state analogous to the pre-Rutherford era when a bright young man was advised not to go into physics because everything important had already been discovered. This was just before the early evidence for quantum mechanics blew the doors off that understanding and opened up a new era of discovery.
Finally, we must have people working in unifying quantum theory and relativity. Couldn’t theoretical particle physicists make a contribution to that effort? Perhaps some of that talent and energy could be usefully redirected.
Particle physists are unhappy with the standard model precisely because it doesn't explain gravity. That's what she was talking about when she mentioned Grand Unified Theories or GUTS.
Ok, ok, but don’t hate ignorance ! Without it we would have nothing to do!
So then standard model is wrong
But the we don't have nothing besides that model
I did my master's degree in supersymmetry. I always felt stupid because I really never understood the importance of the field that seemed so obvious to the community. When I had to defend the thesis in front of the jury, I was afraid because I couldn't find a proper motivation to do SUSY. Everyone overlooked my dull explanations. It was at that time when I decided to leave the field.
My decision was also influenced by your shared thoughts, and for that I'm grateful. Thanks to you Sabine and your team for your work.
Maybe that's what they want, for such smart people to give up and leave the resources all for them.
@@gristlevonraben I don't think it is that sinister. The problem is not so much with scientists, but is rooted deeper in society. To be recognized, given funding etc, you have to show, that you are successful. So you start working on something, you think might be interesting or the community at the time tells you is interesting. You build a body of work, establish yourself and so on. And with time you figure out that there isn't any huge progress. Now you could just stop and work on something else. But in that area, you don't have any experience, you are not established. You will be seen as a loser, as you have done something that you have not succeeded at.
So you stick with what you've got and if there are enough other people in the same situation, you can form a community. This happens in other fields too. You still find things to work on and produce knowledge. Yes it is knowledge about the theoretical aspects of theories that are just not connected to reality. But it is still complicated and keeps you busy.
That is sad. To give up on something at the time that should have been its shining moment. OTOH, I am near to retirement, and only now have I finally given up on my "life's project." You are just smarter than me.
The collider method is violence. The results of collision will likely be fragments of elementary particles rather than the elementary particles themselves.
I’ve had some crude videos myself. If you have time to waste, please search play list: Physics, Nature’s Perspective.
For example, I noticed that half-life uses a continuous concept to describe something finite and discrete, such as radioactive elements, which may have an odd number of atoms. Of course, it is the thinking pattern of modern physics, using continuous and even smooth concepts and methods, such as curvature and partial differential equations, to describe our finite and discrete universe.
@@salia2897 We see the same problems in Chomskyan linguistics, and Montague Grammer, and formal semantics and the rest of it. They crank out scores of PhDs, but there never is any progress, just more and more ad hoc logical formalism. Never an experiment, never an empirical observation, never a reality check.
So now you are 42 and a tenured distinguished professor in the field and the scribble scrabble bores you ad nauseam. But what to do? Start all over again as a dishwasher in a hotel?
Hey Sabina: you will certainly not make any new friend in the particles phisics community but you made thousands of new ones in the science education field. Good job!
Science has thoroughly been infiltrated by subversive agents. I'm just going to assume by hostile forces seeking to prevent earth species reaching the stars. If i had to pick one date from when physics was subverted, it would be 1927... Everything ever since has largely been theoretical garbage that is mathematically brilliant but with no bearing upon reality.
Try not to misunderstand her, though
PROBLEM, reaction, solution -- the time dependent Hegelian dialectic.
Thesis Is dual to anti-thesis creates the converging thesis or synthesis -- the time independent Hegelian dialectic.
Action (thesis) is dual to reaction (anti-thesis) -- Sir Isaac Newton or the duality of force.
Attraction is dual to repulsion, push is dual to pull, stretch is dual to squeeze -- forces are dual.
Classical reality is dual to quantum reality synthesizes true reality -- Roger Penrose.
Energy is dual to mass -- Einstein.
Dark energy is dual to dark matter.
Dark energy is repulsive gravity or negative curvature, hyperbolic space (inflation).
The big bang is a negative curvature singularity -- non null homotopic (duality).
Gaussian negative curvature is defined using two dual points -- non null homotopic.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_curvature
Points are dual to lines -- the principle of duality in geometry.
"Always two there are" -- Yoda.
She also just handed the science deniers an entire video they can point at to say “See! Even the scientists admit they’re lying!!”
Congratulations??
@@MrMadsci7 So, does that mean you'll continue to lie? 😳
That...was the best explanation of overfitting I have ever seen.
It was so damn good. She kicks ass
You find this is software engineering also. If your algorithm takes many exceptions to work correctly, you don't understand the problem.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story about a map so perfect that it coincided with every single point of the empire it depicted. So useless that it was tossed in the desert and became a castle for mice and beasts. There you go, overfitting for not-science-friendly individuals.
and she's wrong btw
@@pier9955 why?
This video cemented one of the reasons why after my PhD I didn't dare do a post-doc or go further into academic research.
This articulate summary of the problem with high energy physics was a long time coming. You've certainly been chomping at it for a while, but this time you really got to the bone. Brilliant. One of you're all time bests.
Already forwarding the *cough* out of it 😉
Of course, the people that are designing the next big cool collider will not like this video.
Hi Sabine, great video as always! I received my master's in particle physics last year and started a PhD working with the CMS collaboration last fall, and I definitely feel like an outlier for sharing the majority of your views (I was one of two out of ~250 people at a conference last year who dared to mention that we found the physics case for building the FCC to be flimsy at best, for example).
It seems that most of the grievances you mention focus on theorists rather than experimentalists (understandable considering your own background), and I would add that the problem is worse than portrayed here because those claiming "it's falsifiable" are likely the minority, with many others working on models that have no chance of being verified/falsified in the foreseeable future-hence anyone claiming that their model is falsifiable believing that they're "one of the good ones." I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the problems in experimental HEP, and if you have any advice for someone just starting out in the field on what we can do to try pushing ourselves back on track. Thank you again for all that you do!
How do you get tenure at a good university when the FFC is decades out (publish, ofc, but publish what?)? And when it is built, it will need 10,000+ student and post docs...how many 2 year post docs can you do in a row, bouncing around academia? Do you check any hiring boxes? Is your PhD going to be searching through "used" data for a bump--with ML, ofc, so your advisor can get tenure? js/
It's almost like the formation of a cult that mixes a great deal of fringe beliefs in with their research.
The entire premise is nuts, by increasing proton energy into collisions then interpreting tracks is voodoo.. Anyway, higher energy equals smaller particles in a never ending circle jerk.. If I blast a chunk of glass at 100 fps with a bullet and then 4000 fps it’ll fragment smaller and smaller, particle physics does the same thing on a higher energy level and the particles are smaller and guesswork is crazy .. Find something else to do with your physics degree, this ain’t it
Do you work at DESY, Hamburg? I used to work for CMS there.
Every project needs a devil's advocate. Paradoxically, larger teams often have a harder time spotting structural problems, because people are less likely to speak out. I'd maybe push (discreetly) for pre-mortem style project-management exercises where people are given the job to find cracks in the status-quo ("hey Prof, I heard about this project management exercise, do you think it would be valuable for us?").
I can't stress enough though how important it is to be very, very diplomatic about how you approach this kind of thing. Be collaborative, not confrontational. Egos are a thing and rigid minds perceive devil's advocacy as incessant naysaying at best, active sabotage at worst.
This video very well summs up why I left particle physics more than 10 years ago after my first postdoc position. I had a strong impression that the golden years of particle physics are over and something is going wrong but couldn't explain to myself what exactly was going wrong. Because funding was still good and papers were being published and detectors being built... but there was a kind of flaw in all this.
except that the golden years of most things are over by this point ^-^ except anarchy
It's okay for a field to just run cold for a bit. But I think this is a great example of something trapped in its ways. Much of it is looking to re-capture the golden age bringing about a revolution instead of building forward. The Penta-Quark was discovered after the Higgs Boson. The muon g-2 experiment was still going forward. New neutrino studies were being made, but you probably are aware of some of the ego problems there.
People are chasing a theory of everything, just as in AI people keep coming back to an artificial generalized intelligence, though I think the latter is more reachable. People said we would be there back in the 1950s. AI stuttered a lot until the 90s and 2000s again. Now it is running extremely hot and we see how complex it is, but people keep talking about the AGI when we clearly haven't fully figured out all of the essential intelligence components.
Yeah it's hard to see what you could hope to accomplish at this point, that would be of any consequence. Poring over reams of data from one of the major accelerators, until you find the next "God particle" that only exists for about a septillionth of a second before it decays, does not sound like that much fun. And it took 40 years of tedious searching just to do that.
@@NondescriptMammal In the case of the Higgs boson, it mattered because there was a Higgs Boson shaped hole in the standard model. The fact that it was found was a further validation of the standard model.
Read "The Three Body Problem" - it will explain all the issues - the Sophons are messing with us!
Got me! I pride myself in how fast I can detect the segue into the ad. This time the word 'Brilliant" slipped in before I knew it. Congrats Dr. Hossenfelder.
One thing you have to respect is how much Sabine puts herself out there. If one of these wacky theories is proven in the colliders, a lot of folks would seek immediate revenge on her. But she's confident enough to put out this material anyway.
Even if one of those wacky theories were to be proven, it would simply be due to the fact that it's just bruteforcing. There's nothing sophisticated about throwing very expensive darts for an improbably bullseye and eventually being successful...
@@knowledgeacquirer2931 people who are petty and childish enough to revenge and put their little predictions out there as science are not the brightest and quietest of folk and thus wouldnt care about such nuances.
Nobody would be out for revenge, nobody that matters in academia anyways. Also, this isn't a brave stance to take at this moment in physics. Its becoming more and more the norm, and will be the general stance in the near future across the board.
Once the remaining money set aside for certain things is spent the field will move on. You can't lose your funding because you decide there are better directions to go since that will affect future grants ect.
This video was worth watching at least. She said Einstein. Her saying hypothesis and Einstein brings me joy.
i don't like your wording "revenge", but yes you make a valid point
She's just telling it like it is.
People may complain about a challenge like this but
a) it's healthy to have one's way of life challenged once in a while,
b) people don't trust institutions that put themselves above challenge, so making discussions about challenges like this public can actually build trust (I can't wait to see response videos!)
c) the rest of us can learn from the experience as well! Wanna hear how many JavaScript frameworks are overcomplicating things by "solving" imaginary problems?
Thanks Sabine!
Agree, getting all defensive about it isn't exactly the scientific way.
I know nothing about particle physics, but I am quite intimate with javascript, and you are spot-on about the number and ubiquitous-ness of frameworks. So unnecessary, so unhelpful.
@@sunnyinvladivostok the phrase "a solution in search of a problem" comes to mind
@@2bfrank657 I imagine a solution would get very lonely with no problem to keep it company
In the software world, I've heard the term: "Promotion Based Development"
As an Economist this really resonates with me, though I do not know anything about particle physics, I am all too familiar with a profession obsessed with pushing the goal posts and over fitting models to data ex-post!
To be fair, things aren't quite the same in economics because there is typically no direct experimentation. There is only the collection of data and development of models which fit it. Yes natural experiments exist, but these are "found" not "performed".
@@hoagie911 In my experience there is a lot of experimentation in economics. Especially for the evaluation of economic programs.
@@adrianapignolo Are you thinking of the sorts of studies like the mosquito net trials? Because for sure some of those exist. But if not that, what else are you thinking of?
@@hoagie911 No, I don't know what that is, I'm sorry. I think I should have used the word 'research', not 'experimentation'.
"An economist will be able to tell you tomorrow exactly why they were wrong yesterday."
That was exactly what I was thinking when I was a particle physics' student and that was exactly the reason why I quit it. I don't regret about my decision, but I feel so bad about the current situation in particle physics since it's still my favorite area of research. Thank you for verbalizing and sharing your thoughts, so I can see that I'm are not crazy and not alone with this vision of the situation.
Why feel bad, stupid is as stupid does
@@peteparadis1619 as far as i know somewhere between feeling bad and being stupid lies the full breadth of the human experience
It seems like the reasonable keep quitting and the echo chamber keeps on amplifying. there have been multiple other comments here that said something similar.
I hope people like you find a way to work together to change what's going on there.
You quit it because you could not really understand them because they require massive amount of work and study.
@@kapoioBCS usually people who see it as an extremely complicated field just do not have enough understanding about it. I quit it after my successful defense, but not before it.
I studied Mathematics and Computer Science but fell in love with all things Physics as a "hobby". Thank you for your videos and I plan to check out Brilliant. I realize this will be a very small subset of your viewers but I have fairly major hearing issues and usually lip read. Your diction and tone are perfect for these old ears as they let me concentrate on the subject instead of losing processing power to read the subtitles. I hope that came out as the compliment it was meant to be!
You can also turn on subtitles haha
@@actionjumper42learn to read
@@actionjumper42 "instead of losing processing power to read the subtitles"
Ignore these first 3 commentors!! I watched the wole video and was pondering on how she spoke. I was considering leaving a comment explaining how to change her tone and delivery too more of an upbeat/ exclamating tone change but decided not to. I came to your comments point as a conclusion. Also when i read your comment it solidifyed my position. Thank you. And this is my small addenen to science lol
@@davidsauer3155- Yes. I find other videos with that CONSTANT "upbeat tone" rather tiring if they are longer than 5-8 minutes. The annoyance level then begins to distract from the content, at least for me. 🖖
I got my bachelors in physics and helped with nuclear physics research during that time. The title of the video worried me but after watching i appreciate this video. Getting so focused on the small details and forgetting the big picture was at times very easy to do in the work and research i did and am glad my teachers and mentors would push me in the right direction. That kind of thinking has stuck with me even in my current job that is not strictly science. It almost feels like these physicists are betting on their horse/model so if it wins then they could get more praise and recognition. This on top of the other negative aspects mentionedin other comments (politics, management, etc.) is what worries me about going into a PhD program in the future.
Have you looked into Rupert Sheldrake? His tedtalk got banned. Admittedly, he challenged the materialist paradigm to its core, much more so than in this video.
@@sevenidols607 it literally wasn’t even banned… they just added a disclaimer to warn people that his talk is pseudoscientific nonsense 😂
The problem comes down to how modern academia works. New breakthroughs in fundamental physics are hard, especially after having exhausted the consequences of relativity and QM by the 70s. Despite this challenge, theoretical physicists are compelled to publish new research consistently in order to advance their careers. This, coupled with the fact that experimentalists are hungry to test new theories in order to justify their increasingly big and expensive devices like the LHC, results in one speculative theory after another with little basis in reality.
@@sevenidols607 Not banned ,just bs.
A good read on the subject of scientists becoming consumed with the chase to be relevant (and failing to maintain proper scientific rigor when their pet hypotheses are demonstrated to be incorrect) is _The Stars Are Not Enough_ by Joseph C. Hermanowicz. Like Feynman said, it doesn't matter how elegant, or beautiful the math is, it doesn't matter how much you like it, if it's wrong, it's _wrong._ Letting go of stuff like that is part of science. Particle physicists make whole piles of wrong predictions, because that's what scientists _do._ The point of the game isn't to figure out what's true, that's the emergent property of the game that we leverage to improve our understanding; the game is to show how you might be _wrong_ with your prediction, and you need to be serious in trying to do so.
Great video. I was a graduate in particle physics and had the same thoughts, same doubts. Considering the amount of studying you have to commit to publish a decent paper, those who "survive" in the particle physics society are those who are mathematical nerds and those who doesn't have the time to pose these kind of questions. Because in the end it's the sum of published journals that you'll get a job anywhere in this field. Only if youtube and internet were as popular back then I could've also seek out people who had these same views to particle physics, but after thinking on my own I quit before getting a Ph.D. As a child, researching superstring theories was my dream job, now I don't regret having left this field. I turned my career to software engineering and A.I. which I think is a much more interesting subject. Who knows, that in the far future it would be faster to let generative A.I. to learn all the particle physics theories and then it could come up with a much more convincing theory.
I would be very interested in a companion video, about the non-pseudo problems that are mentioned here.
What they are and if there is any work being done on them.
Having said that, as a non-phyisicist, it might just go way over my head. 😄
Thank you for the clarity of your perspective. It always makes me reevaluate the assumptions in my own (completely unrelated) field.
🙂
I 2nd this. A video on the actual problems, maybe a compilation of some sort, would be awesome!
as far as I know, almost none of them are, because there is nowhere else to go. there is no experiment that is feasible do to that can help with solving them. there is a reason why particle physics is stuck and people are shooting at every direction, we can't get better data.
@@danilooliveira6580 Sometimes, we need to evolve technologically, before we can make progress in certain areas of science. The problem I see is, that we are not using much of particle physics outside of science. Maybe I am missing something, but if you look at technology, engineering, industrial chemistry and so on, it goes down to the level of atoms, electrons, protons and neutrons, but all the particles from the standard model don't play a role in most industrial processes. Yes, we can build some very specialized experiments to detect or produce them, but there is no application.
Now, I do not have any idea how we will get there, maybe nobody does. But when you look at history, that is how it usually is. It might just be that we are at a point, where we cannot make progress in that field, see some things we do not understand but lack the ability to generate the data we would need to understand it.
I want to say she has mentioned modified gravity in another video in further depth.
I think the problem is the same for quantum gravity, where you get crazy infinity values when you try to model it.
My Aristotle thinking on the problem is that gravity is a 4th dimensional particle somehow bound to our universe but can wiggle further in our out depending on some variables
@@salia2897 actually, we are, things like modern LEDs, microprocessors and communication, are completely dependent on our understanding of particle physics. the more understanding we have of quantum mechanics, the better we can make those things. doesn't mean however that finding the graviton will suddenly create superconductors, but simply having a more complete understanding of the area can have a huge impact in the future.
its the same argument people use against astrophysics. they say that learning about blackholes on the other side of the observable universe will have no real impact here on earth. but that is not true, learning about the universe help us understand physics in general, there would be no relativity without astrophysics, and there would be no quantum mechanics without relativity.
13:56 "Change should be an improvement, not a complication." This is a beautifully blunt and delightfully well-reasoned video, one of your best. Three cheers for the Standard Model!
I would buy a shirt with this quote, so many people need to get this idea!
I found the same quote the most notable in the video. But doesn't that imply working toward a simplified Theory of Everything? I think we know Sabine's song about that. ;)
Hi Terry! I've missed seeing you around, I hope you're going well. 🙂
To a certain extent the opposite is true in biology. For a long time the DNA model was one gene one product. But reality was much more complicated. For example, now we know that structures on the outside of the nucleotides influence not only the regulation of genes, but even the chances that there will be mutations at that site; In a way showing that Lamarck was also somewhat correct. All these complications are however also improvements as well as responses to data That didn’t fit the simplified DNA model.
We're up to 17 "fundamental particles" now, what's wrong with that picture?
As an experimental astrophysicist I'm glad you spoke out. Many theoretical physicist are driven by a purely aesthetic ideal, wich comes from a romantic and idealist view on the history of science. I feel more and more that many are getting diminishing results as they get into that platonic way of thinking about reality.
According to Wolfgang Smith, the problem is too much Cartesian bifurcation and not enough Platonism.
PROBLEM, reaction, solution -- the time dependent Hegelian dialectic.
Thesis Is dual to anti-thesis creates the converging thesis or synthesis -- the time independent Hegelian dialectic.
Action (thesis) is dual to reaction (anti-thesis) -- Sir Isaac Newton or the duality of force.
Attraction is dual to repulsion, push is dual to pull, stretch is dual to squeeze -- forces are dual.
Classical reality is dual to quantum reality synthesizes true reality -- Roger Penrose.
Energy is dual to mass -- Einstein.
Dark energy is dual to dark matter.
Dark energy is repulsive gravity or negative curvature, hyperbolic space (inflation).
The big bang is a negative curvature singularity -- non null homotopic (duality).
Gaussian negative curvature is defined using two dual points -- non null homotopic.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_curvature
Points are dual to lines -- the principle of duality in geometry.
"Always two there are" -- Yoda.
This entire video is evidence that scientists have just been lying for decades. As an experimental astrophysicist, your job never should have existed and you should stop stealing money from the economy.
@@hyperduality2838 As a nondualist, I neither approve nor disaaprove.There is just this.
@@liberality Right. I'm not sure how science has at any recent point been remotely "idealist". Fundamentalist materialism seems to be the issue
the issue is: as per standard model we expect to see some new physics at about 10^12 higher energies than current particle accelerators can deliver. However that means we can unlikely ever build a machine to measure these effects, it is beyond any technical possibilities. So, unless the standard model is really really wrong there is no point to build a bigger particle accelerator
And that is why this Chemist was sad at how the Higgs was found where expected. I wanted a more interesting result.
For the most part will all prove useless unless truely has a useful purpose & is also compatible with all…
For that to happen nature to be agreeable, no way to know
Finally someone agree with me that standard model could be wrong
For a layman, this is an absolutely clear, brilliant presentation. Sabine is the perfect presenter. I think she could also be the sublime stand-up comedian.
😊😊
This should be required viewing, the culture needs to change.
Too bad the basic premise is wrong. All of the data does not fit the standard model. Dark matter is just one example - we know it exists from multiple methods, but the standard model doesn't seem to explain it (and modified gravity has been essentially ruled out). She just waves it off here completely ignoring its implications for what she is saying. There are many other things as well such as the matter-antimatter asymmetry and some measurements coming out slightly different than what was expected. Should particle physicists just ignore these things and sweep them under the rug the way she sweeps dark matter under the rug? Should particle physicists not be curious about and try to understand why the standard model is the way it is?
@@davegrote266 Sabine decided that the community needed a popular, easily recognizable face to continue the crackpot model.
"That's possible but not a good strategy for knowledge discovery " 👏 .
I am a data scientist, now a days a lot of data scientists are creating models because that is what they do. But it doesn't solve the problem.
Your video is so relatable. No matter what scientific profession you are in , quest for knowledge needs to be the utmost priority, for betterment of human kind
I sometimes wonder if scientists are in research for the grant money, knowing they will not be able to solve whatever problem they're working on.
I feel your pain, though from a different perspective: In 1953, when I was 10 years old, my Bohemian single-mother's landlord was Frank Crawford, a physicist working on his doctorate at UC Berkeley. I have a vivid memory of Frank's excitement when he got wind of the work of Cowan and Reines: first hint of neutrino detection 1953; full report 1956. Frank introduced me to the periodic table; gave me a chemistry set; taught me algebra; took me on a tour of the brand-new Bevatron in 1954, etc. Those were incredibly exciting times. And although I went into a different field (Ph.D. in Chinese), I can sense the immense sea change in what particle physics is these days versus what it was back then, toward the end of its Golden Age. No comparison. (Some bibliographic notes: Wu et al Phys Review 105, 1957 [for my money, her demonstration that the universe has handedness marked the end of Golden Age of particle physics]; Crawford Phys Review 107, 1957 [follow-on to Wu 1957]; Crawford, WAVES -- Berkeley Physics Course Volume 3, 1965.)
GREAT K.IS.S. Sabine !!! How about explaining the greatest failure of physics ?The ontological /quintiessentail explanation of the fabtic of spacetime metrics e.g the Minkowski Metric - the 2D light cones boundaries bounding nothing if there is no mass-energy.The Einstein metric Tensor defines the curvature of spacetime as the curvature induce by the introduction of mass-energy to replace the almost null result of the Minkowski metric The light cone path boundaries of any photon must be infinite! Abandon almost all string theory and reassigam funded research to explain what is the substance curving Due to interaction of mass and energy
@@franklipsky3396 I'm aware of research into anti matter particles and dark matter particles, but Sabine bringing up research into "doesn't matter" particles has been an eye opener.
Light cone boundaries interest me. As I see it, they have something to say about the nature and direction of causality and explain why even if we could see ghosts, the ghosts wouldn't be able to see us, which I find comforting. If there are no limits to them, then maybe I should be more worried about the mischievous spirits of departed toasters and microwave ovens that haunt my kitchen...
Kind of sounds like glass tubing wasn't the only thing bending over in your mother's household when this man was around
@@destructionman1 "Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens" - Schiller
This was crushing to hear, but I'm really glad this video exists. I'm not a scientist but I took supersymmetry and proton decay for granted, because I didn't know particle physicists approach creating new theories like my friend making up new Naruto theories to explain what's going on with the aliens in Boruto.
your comment is hilarious even before watching the video, the Naruto stuff really cheered me up for my exams tomorrow
I've been saying this for years and I'm glad people are waking up.
In philosophy its called ad-hoc reasoning or in some cases post-hoc reasoning.
ad-hoc is making stuff up. post-hoc would look like this
physicists: i came up with a new particle to unify physics all we need to do is find it!
scientists: we just ran the particle accelerator at the highest energies ever recorded and we found a new anomaly!
physicist: thats it! my wiggle-doodoo particle! its all unified!
scientists: thats great but what about...
physicist: aww crap let me think of a new one
@@off6848 philosophy is constantly reinventing itself, the difference is that science actually deals with data instead of thinly veiled moral and religious beliefs.
@@DVSnark most philosophers are particle physicists, if you know what I mean. But philosophy is ought to a science like any other nonetheless
@@DVSnarkphilosophy is not constantly reinventing itself; it's the exact opposite. More so; science depends on philosophy. It's not thinly vailed either; philosophy is basically just theology
My father was a theoretical physicists. He worked and retired from both Los Alamos and EIR SIN, an accelerator in Switzerland, with retirement packages both. Me, I’m seasoned electronics dude who worked his way up to a complementary computer science degree in the end and left both industries by reason of another story. Parallels to Prometheus in tail. With the advent of AI and UTube and folks like you my sphere of consciousness still grows and I note your disenchantment and I relate. Thanks for your continued and informational compositions. Nice work. I keep watching more and more of this stuff and am absolutly fascinated learneng about what my father did. Thanks. My father was more a scientific politician usually campaigning for funding. it was more what I ever heard him speak of but the depth of the topic now blows my mind. Because of your, her, level of understanding you would make a great department head rather than a staff physicist. It takes some pessimism too.
I enjoyed that. I'm not a physicist and work in telecoms / IT and we have similar problems with engineers. There are those that understand a problem and will produce a considered and relevant fix for that problem, and then there are the "poke and hope" people who invariably forget what the original problem was, make multiple changes without recording what they did and invariably make things much more complicated and very much worse. Much like the British Judiciary and legal system come to think of it..........
This whole world is run by “pokers and hopers” who get paid *not* to solve problems, but to find interesting new ways to ignore them
Sometimes understanding the problem is very elusive while finding a fix or at least a temporary remedy is extremely time sensitive, making poke and hope or brute force the most effective approach. It should however rarely be the first thing you go for. Point in case, many years ago we were running a massive performance test on behalf of a client, and was suffering from frequent data corruption. We threw the kitchen sink of experts at the problem, but at the end of it, we had not arrived at a root cause except suspecting but not confirming it was related to overheating or other environmental factors. Months later, after our testing was concluded, it turned out the failures were caused by cosmic background radiation. Their memory chips were impacted by the radiation, and they had to redesign them to include error correction.
@@bjornlangoren3002 Quite right, there is a "middle ground" where a temporary fix is required, but the people making the fix still need to know what they are doing and why, and also know that the temporary fix is still likely to be there in 5 - 10 years....
The solution for your (and many others) problem start with focused data collection, and documentation of the problems, the solving decisions/actions, and results. If U've data, U can calculate effectiveness, find the holes in the system, implement the actually working solving methods to other fields, other people. U can inspire people to teach/learn methods from each other, and demand the good practice. (Internal trainings.) After that U can inspire to learn universal problem solving methods from the world by external consultants. There are many of them fitting for different type of business, or problems (5 Why, Ishikava, 8D...). Some of them are statistical, some of them are simply focusing, or gap based. U can implement it in your system, train your people, demand the follow, and measure the results, collect data. From the data if U can identify spots, where the most/longest/biggest problems occur, U have to focus there. Search for causes, risks, and try to minimize them. (Go back to point no.1.)
In a professional company there's no such thing as human error. Every human error is coming from a deeper cause hiding somewhere in the company system. (Lack of skill, lack of training, lack of inspection, lack of control, lack of resources, lack of time, contradictory goals...)
Poke and hope seems only effective, when U're not well prepared for (any) changes, or issues (which will be inevitable). I can suggest instead: collect data (focused!), analize them, and implement the results, so when the time will come U'll have something to work with. (Btw. every action is somewhere a poke and hope, because U can never take into account every possibilities, U never know everything, and U know that. So the difference is in the size of knowledge regards the problem, the own profession, and the problem solving, and result analizing methods.)
Some people realized I'm talking about a Quality Assurance system, which can be at a company pure document production, but if a company takes it seriously then it can be way-way more than that.
@@shaba1982 You make many sound points, so thanks for the reply. I agree with most of what you say, but you can never get rid of human error because regardless of how well trained, supervised, controlled, and automated a system is, a Human will always find a way to do something unpredicted and unpredictable. You either have to accept it and work with it, or you're in for a world of disappointment. Sure you can and should aim for perfection but as we know from various air crashes and Chernobyl (to name but two areas of note) major problems happen when several smaller issues combine to create a catastrophe.
In high school I wanted to be a Particle Physicist. I've always had the opinion that people are researching "problems" that distract from the actual ground breaking experiments. Since I'm in America, traditional education is expensive for me. I still like to learn though, and I'm really thankful for you to make videos like this. I recently found your channel and I already rate it 10/10!
Wow! Spot on analysis. So glad I didn’t continue with a career in particle physics. One aspect that wasn’t discussed but needs to be is the entrapment of graduate students and postdocs for sometimes 7 to 9 years trying to get there degrees. It’s down right abusive and financially crippling.
Exactly. I left after masters, because I didn't want to be enslaved to my "supervisor" who takes credit but does nothing.
This is the point. In order to perpetuate junk science you have to make the people going into it commit their life, soul and earnings for so long that once they realize its garbage the sunk cost fallacy reasoning takes over and keeps the racket moving.
Sabine is being nice in this video actually
I'm no scientist Sabine, but I do enjoy the fact that you make science as clear as you can to people all over the world.
The fact that there is "tribalism" and "politics" in science is no surprise to me, particularly if there is money involved or a tenure...
Keep your head up and keep being the you I am still getting to know.
Hi Sabine, Thank you very much! As a 68 year old trying to keep his neurons functional, I am at best only average in understanding at the level where you excel. I watch your videos in hopes of better understanding how and why matter exists. Sometimes, regardless of your simplification of an explanation, I still don't quite understand completely but at least get the gist which keeps me coming back for more! This time I watched intently to the very end and actually understood everything you were saying, partly because I watched many of your other videos, and partly because this wasn't heavy on theory and more of an insight into the wizardry of particle science and where ideas come from. Seeing how some "ideas" are just fantasy somehow makes me feel a tiny bit less "dumb" on the subject, haha. It's seems like a waste of the above average intelligence that I wish I had. 😆
It's nice to see lifelong learners out here. If you haven't already heard about chatgpt then drop what you are doing and and learn about it for a few minutes and give it a try. Then next time you watch/ read about something you don't quite understand use chatgpt to help you find out what it is you don't understand about the subject. Again if you dont know what it is, it's a chat bot that has very humanlike outputs and is conversational.
Agreed. To see those that squander their gifts...
Also, don't be so hard on yourself mate. You're still curious, and willing to learn. I raise my beverage container in your virtual general direction.
@@LukeBunyip Thanks! I have raised my coffee mug to my desktop monitor, in the relative direction of your virtual beverage container. Cheers!
James, if, when you've read/watch something you still don't understand, it is commonly because there is prior knowledge missing. If you can, identify the point at which you lost the thread and ask what it was you needed to know. A useful way is to go back to the school-level textbook on the subject and check there.
James, at 47, I'm doing exactly the same thing, with exactly the same results. Good on you for trying to "Get" the "Ungettable". LOL. I accept that I am smarter than the average monkey, but I am still far less intelligent than the intellectual giants whose mind play seems to make the universe make some sort of sense, until it all unravels and becomes some sort of nonsense. Then I start to wonder if I am just being fed a lifetime of guesswork far beyond my comprehension, or ability and resourcefulness to explore. I have no choice but to make the same claims as Socrates, "I only know that I do not know." Sadly, we are both (all of us, maybe?) functioning under a fallacious assumption "fretus auctoritate" (reliance upon authority), which leaves us "relying upon false principles" (our rules are out of whack, as Cicero suggested), and thereby stumbling around in the dark trying to make do with what we have available to us ... assumptions, contentions, and untested (untestable) blather passed along by-way of hear-say "ad absurdo" (unto absurdity).
"Invisible axions never detected". Reminds me of a letter my wife has of one of her distant relatives from the 1830s. All the sisters in that distant family were named after virtues, Faith, Hope, Charity... One sister writing to the other says "I'm worried about Silence, I haven't heard from her lately".
oh my goodness😂
HA! Hilarious.
I was majoring physics, but caught the same problem you are talking, and I switched to applied math since. For me, math turns out to be a surprisingly concrete subject. It may often seem too abstract to be useful, but no direct physical correspondence (some algebraic structures for example) doesn't imply it's useless (e.g. cryptography).
p.s. ofc physics still has a lot of interesting problems, but it's no longer finding first principles, and more like applying first principles to physical systems.
Genuine question. Arent a lot of these particles that are never found 'created' through mathematical models though and only exist in some mathematical construct?
@@bobbybrown1258 Not exactly but you could put it like that and most people would agree with you, the physicists (at least from what I know about it, the original commenter is a lot more qualified since they are an actual applied mathematician and not just a math student in uni like me) are using properties of symmetry (basically abstract(badly named I know) algebra) to make models based on data, trying to understand the physics of the real world. The math serves as more like a sort of blueprint, a blue piece of paper with measurements and such that is easy to draw on. The ruler you actually measure the plot with and all other tools are the experimental side of the lot. The blueprinting of the house based on those measures is the theoretical side. The math doesn't create anything since its up to the naughty naughty physics bros to make stuff up and see if it sticks.
@@bobbybrown1258 Yes. Don't hold out to see a gluon under any kind of microscope or with your eyes. Its magic fairy dust. And I'm going to tell you the truth right now.
Tesla, Russel, Heaviside, Steinmetz were all right hold more patents than any of these people do more working experiments and contributed more than any of these eggheads could ever dream of yet their models are dismissed because the average scientist is in fact an intellectual moron. Intellect without wisdom is the most dangerous combination of human qualities on the planet.
They see men with over 300 patents and working experiments and say "quack" because they are so monumentally stupid and ignorant that they can't comprehend REAL physics
@@bobbybrown1258yes. They have a number they are looking for and they define or quantize parts of that system to fit into the measured number. So when looking for particles in the standard model they started with math and then looked for the masses that could fit that math. This is how they knew to look for certain particles. It all starts and ends with math.
Only found out your channel recently but boy does the world need more people like you!
When I studied physics at university, I wanted to get into particle physics. But i switched to computer science and for a long time I regretted not sticking it out with the physics. This video makes me feel a bit better about not getting into particle physics. Astrophysics I find way more interesting now.
Astronomy is a joke too
the hunt for dark matter is still confounding the stupid astronomers
Similar experience here, though my interest was in low temperature physics. As I was working on my masters, I saw too many PhD physicists driving taxis and doing other non-physics things because the funding in their highly specialized areas had dried up. After many months of reevaluating, I turned my attention to software engineering, and often worked on projects where my physics and math skills were of great benefit. My physics training taught me how to think deeply and solve tough problems. Now that I'm retired, I spend part of my time rediscovering quantum mechanics and cosmology for my enjoyment.
You shouldn’t have had faith in it to begin. Doing so implies that it’s no longer a method and is instead a religion.
Theres a lot more unknown to discover in space than there is to discover in particle physics.
Astrophysics is so interesting because they're solving problems all the time. Maybe they will eventually solve some of the real observational problems like dark matter without needing any help from particle physicists!
One problem is that in many institutions your performance is based on the number of publications, and it's certainly easier to just modify something theoretically than really discovering something new. I'll organize a conference, invite my colleagues from other institutions, publish the proceedings, and then my next friend will organize the conference next year, invite me, publish the proceedings, and so on and so forth.
It’s easier to point at a problem than to offer a workable and effective solution.
right, and real progress requires peace of mind and stability in life in order to be able to focus on something for a longer time without constantly worrying about from where the next pay check comes from.
The collider method is violence. The results of collision will likely be fragments of elementary particles rather than the elementary particles themselves.
I’ve had some crude videos myself. If you have time to waste, please search play list: Physics, Nature’s Perspective.
For example, I noticed that half-life uses a continuous concept to describe something finite and discrete, such as radioactive elements, which may have an odd number of atoms. Of course, it is the thinking pattern of modern physics, using continuous and even smooth concepts and methods, such as curvature and partial differential equations, to describe our finite and discrete universe.
Yeah, the video was kinda dumb. The problem is insane commercialization of science and idiotic 'publish or perish' mantra that just wastes time of everyone involved and encourages paper spam, not people looking for new, promising leads...
@@KuK137 This is really what this video should have been about. She correctly identified a symptom, but not the cause.
This is the closest thing I've ever seen to Sabine having a hot take and I am here for it.
The problem with the video is that we know for a fact that Standard Model is WRONG.
It predicts 0 neutrino mass, so there should be (almost certainly) no neutrino oscillations (but there are).
SM doesn't work with gravity and that's a problem not because we want all forces to be describes by one neat equation (that would be great though), but because at least one of the theories has to be inconsistent in certain conditions.
So, yes, we are not entirely sure where exactly to dig, but we know for a fact that there is physics beyond SM. That's why the search for the breaking point of SM is important - it is what we need to drag ourselves beyond SM.
Well if it’s a case of digging anywhere, then start withe the Old Testament, Adam, Eve, Jesus and then move to Krishna and even Zeus. Why not, you never know what you might find?
They should focus on explaining the oscillations then, rather than making up new particles. But I guess that would be too difficult.
@@x-act That is a wild oversimplification of what modern particle physics is, stemming from a lack of knowledge.
This is a great comment, she doesn't even mention that SM doesn't work with gravity... the only time she brings it up is when she mentions it when speaking about dark matter in the common objections. In addition, the fact that the detail about the particle interactions of dark matter doesn't matter for explaining coslomogical and astrophysical phenomena doesn't change the fact that knowing something for the sake of knowing it is 90% of modern STEM anyways, for example: the whole of pure mathematics(some of applied mathematics aswell) is explored not to be later used in physics but for the reason of advancement in mathematics, that argument is increadibly stupid, cosmology and astronomy/astrophysics itself barely applied to us, beyond knowledge for engineering, the space-related sciences will not really be useful for us humans for hundreds of years...
@@spoperty4940 I would appreciate not having my knowledge undermined in the comments section of a RUclips video, thanks.
In the 90's I dropped out (for personal reasons) of a PhD in WIMP dark matter. A quarter- century later it really looks like I dodged a bullet.
baerbock claims science is at war with the particle physics community.
You may have dodged a bullet, but if the particle physicists are right then you're currently being bombarded by billions of WIMPs! ;-)
Sounds like you wimped out.
"but Bigfoot would probbably have gotten me more views" and she also delivered that line martini-dry. Had me laughing for quite a while there. Well played :)
I envy you: I didn't give up on physics, physics gave up on me when I didn't get a postdoc position anywhere despite graduating Summa cum Laude and writing about 50 applications around the world. But then, I worked in heterotic string theory and ran around telling everyone they were using the wrong lattice classification in their orbifold compactifications and that didn't net me many friends either. Now that I'm long out of the field I seem to be racking up citations which feels like an additional insult.
Can you link some of your work please? I’d love to read some
@@user-fd9rx8dh9b mediatum.ub.tum.de/doc/1225178/1225178.pdf I've since changed my name, please don't doxx me.
Brilliant, as always. You keep reminding me why I had hesitations and so many unanswered questions when I became a physicist.
If you liked the video, be sure to read her book "Lost in Math". It's basically an elaboration of the topics in the video.
Yep, it is good. Funny thing is, I read the book before finding her channel. I feel kinda dumb that it took me awhile to realize they're the same person.
"The Higgs Fake" is also a good one. Written by another German dissident.
Excellent, though challenging, presentation. I got my PhD in physics back in 1986 but didn't have the theory chops for particle physics (though Steven Weinberg was one of my professors). What I really regret was not joining the LIGO gravity wave experiment...now that was possibly the last beautiful experiment we will see for a long, long time. Though I'm not up on the latest particle theories and experimental results, Sabine offers a persuasive (to me) argument that the field is floundering. It's a shame.
This is a lovely talk by a physicist who can explain what I've been thinking about physics with a whole lot better Concepts and Foundation of course but it fits with a pattern that I've been feeling at an intuitive level that the science is broken and people are just making s*** up.
Dr. Hossenfelder the scientist and Dr. Hossenfelder the scientific journalist are making a huge crossover this episode. I'm thoroughly impressed, and I learned a lot from your distinction of pseudo problems from real problems. All in all, fantastic episode!
Also Dr. Hossenfelder the passive-aggressive-traumatized-in-the-past and Dr. Hossenfelder the emotional-and-misleading are present.
I'm not a physicist/scientist bt I do see the same sort of thing happening in my own field/profession ... and I can understand for Sabine that it does get frustrating ... and lonely ...to be one of the few who bothers and want to do something abt it.... which is why this channel appeals to me
This same "overfitting" problem happens with training AI models. If you train it too much on the same data, it will become too fitted to that data that its output will be closer to a duplication of the data that was fed to it, rather than coming up with its own result. If you give it a prompt that is unique from the data it was trained on, it will likely give you something near useless instead of making a coherent guess.
Overfitting is universal problem in any thing requires mathematical modeling.
This is basic cybernetics.
Have you ruled out Black Magic ?
Aka dark energy?
Like God?
If we build a larger collider, we could
@@exciton9861 Good one. Seriously!
14:00 haha I’m not a particle physicist but this pseudo-problem phenomenon has been a terrible habit of mine I’ve applied to way too many things.
Fantastic work on this video! It’s incredible how clear and concise you’ve broken down this topic and it’s trend of asymmetrical practices.
I see this, and have been guilty of this, in work environments all the time. We call it busywork, and some people use it as a means of pretending it'll lead to long term job security
Perhaps, human nature implies creating pseudo-problems. Since that's psychology, I'm not going to think about any further.
The Higgs Boson is likely the first Higgs Boson, and there are two more.
@@smlanka4u Is this a reference to the bad ideas in the video or some new theory that I have not heard?
@@edwardlulofs444, It is a new one. The Higgs Boson decays very quickly even if some scientists say that it doesn't spin. And it is not a behavior of a Boson.
Really appreciate your no-nonsense style Sabine. I love reading and learning about physics, but I am a writer and so much of what you say pertains to writing. And to creativity in general.
This video demonstrates why I love Sabine - she tells it the way it is, not the way we want it to be. Thank you, Sabine.
Come for the physics. Stay for the brutality.
Yeah i didn't expect to enjoy this so much. She makes an incredible case.
She tries, but trying really hard is all one can do and the least.
Savage and savvy... brava! 👏
@@lloydgush what is it she said that you would challenge?
This was fascinating and a little discouraging. I am grateful for Sabine's honest and integrity though. I can only hope we find the path again
I was initially very skeptical when I saw the title, as I didn't and still don't really think that anyone claiming they've lost faith in science should taken seriously. I decided to listen when I saw your credentials, and what you're talking about reminds of guys like Ninov and Shöen in terms of making the results fit their predictions, not the other way around. Really good video!!
There is one problem with her whole argument and it is that the Standard Model is in fact wrong. Experimentally, I mean. We know since 2000’s or so that neutrino are not massless. Although that’s the exact prediction if the Standard Model. And the easiest solution points towards the existence of new particles. I don’t even know a solution to this problem that keeps the number of particles of the Standard Model unchanged. She does not mention this in the list of real problems even though it is the most important experimental problem of the Standard Model. I mean, she might have a point about writing papers and some unscientific behaviors but the main idea of the video is trash.
@@Thekingjamesft Average particle physicist: The Standard Model is wrong and i'm right.
@@distantraveller9876 Science: the SM is experimentally wrong. There is actually a Nobel prize about that. We may discuss the validity of naturalness as a scientific motivation, but not the fact that there is no straightforward way of reconciling experiments and SM theory right now.
Interesting that your first reaction is emotional and practically religious
@@Thekingjamesft Of course it's wrong. People were to stupid, to greedy and to arrogant to understand Tesla, Russel, Steinmetz
So now we have this. A model that can't keep up with our engineering, engineering largely in part to guys like Tesla with you know 300 patents 100 still in use. You know, real stuff not fake.
Can't understand tho. To metaphysical for ya. Time to put the big boy pants on my guy it's time to come to terms.
I think your analogy was describing what Copernicus did. They only difference is, when his math got too complicated, he realized maybe the universe was simpler than he assumed in the first place. Basically, when the mathematical model didn’t fit, he looked for an alternate explanation and changed his theory.
This is still how science works. Just because some jaded academics can make more money making youtube doesn't mean they are honest.
Lol, no.
@@robbhays8077 when physics replies lol no to your experiment you know you are wrong. when a blankface guy on RUclips replies lol no to your comment you know he is probably wrong.
It's how Science works, when it's being used correctly. But clearly not all Scientists are following this as Sabine is illustrating, they are trying to develop new excuses to ahear to the failed theories which don't pass the observation tests, rather than find a new one to find evidence for. @@paintspot1509
Or universe is more complicated than we have admit
Sabine, you and your videos remain unparalleled to me in their refreshing perspective, directness, humor, and lack of fear to go against the majority. Thank you for your work!
Just crazy to me how “majority” spends their time with simulation theory and unscientific ideas
I think also the problem is that we forgot the difference between a Model and the Objective. There are infinite models that can be theorized and found, agreeing to a certain degree to the precision we want to have (e.g. the Newton physics works really well with most everyday stuff). But we do not needs model. The objective is to solve stuff that does not work, or stuff that has not been found. I.e. my objective is that I wanna travel the universe in seconds, my current theory does not permit that, thus I try to find new theories that allow it.
The moment you brought up a lot of data points and mentioned having a lot of assumptions with it, and adding more just so it FITS what you want it to fit, you reminded me of one of the most important things I've learnt from one of the best professors I've had: the law of parsimony. Although people would tend to argue that "it's as complicated as it needs to be."
Videos like this one are why I subscribed to this channel. I predict that particle physicists will continue on the same course that Sabine describes because they like getting their paychecks in the "standard" way.
Your prediction is falsifiable, but I for one require data to falsify that. I'm going to watch this space. I think you're right
As she said, the money will dry out, the field will wither if not die completely.
We've peaked global growth, global recession has begun and will last for at least 2-3 decades. This will put strain on funding of all those useless studies that were started and kept afloat for years by over-promising.
When money is tight, results matter and particle physics has had very few of them recently. This whole branch of physics is overblown, with all the dark-matter/multiverse/string-theory theorists in close 2nd place.
@@vaakdemandante8772 Very true.. It’s like the how many angels are on the head of a pin analogy
Nobody does physics for a paycheck. It's less than minimum wage when you consider all the hours you put in.
Brilliant
I'm finishing a PhD in particle physics studying dark matter and this rings true with me. The first time I found thought that this was a problem was when a string theorist said that we just hadn't probed higher energies yet. I was shocked because the LHC is able to reach such amazingly high energies, what else did they think would work?
I"ve never liked string theory
They haven't tried a taco-bell toilet yet.
@@RealCadde no, that would be "stink" theory
How about this hypothesis: Dark Matter is standard matter displaced in a 4th spatial dimension. Gravity passes along this dimension, but not electromagnetism. This could explain where the anti-matter went that balances ordinary matter. Since Dark Matter does not interact electromagnetically with standard matter, Dark Matter falling into earth's gravity well will pass right through the earth and collect in the core. Over 4.5 billion years a lot of Datk Matter should be collected inside the earth. The mass of Dark Matter could affect the spin of the earth's core, causing the periodic reversal of polarity of earth's magnetic field.
@@raymondswenson1268 cool idea, but just a couple of things to think about:
1. Looking at the abundance of Dark Matter in the universe, we would expect that there's only about a squirrel's worth in mass on the Earth at the moment. The change in polarity is probably because the iron core moves at a periodic rate.
2. It still wouldn't really explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry. Why is it that anti-matter was what was wisked away to that dimension? Why is it that early antimatter no longer is visible in the 3 spatial dimensions we have, but we can produce and even, to an extent, store antimatter pretty consistently?
I feel like we need a Part 2 to this video: "How to Fix Particle Physics"
Where with some input from people in the field, you outline more viable approach strategies to advance particle physics.
Didn't she say that the field grew scornful of her attempts to put it back on line
it's hard to fix something that doesn't want to be fixed
I think the situation is not as bad as it is depicted here. One thing she omitted, which I think it's pretty relevant, is that many of these experiments searching for Dark Matter, or sterile neutrinos, or other kind of "new physics" are, more often than not, multipurpose experiments, meaning that they are not built with the sole purpose of searching for such new physics. Sure, the HESSE telescope that she mentions may have been used to look for the production of gamma rays from Dark Matter annihilation, but it was not build for that: it is primarily an observatory for gamma rays from celestial sources and it is doing great science in the field of very high energy astrophysics. Same goes for other missions such as NASA's Fermi: even if it was used to search for DM and axions, which they didn't find, this was only a small part of the science they are doing. Indeed, the Fermi satellite has revolution-ed our knowledge of gamma ray astronomy. Another example: Kamiokande (alo mentioned in the video) was originally built to search for proton decay -- and indeed they didn't observe it. However they won the Nobel prize for detecting, for the first time, the neutrino emission from a SuperNova explosion in 1987. Nowadays, the upgraded version of that detector is leading the field of neutrino science. Experiments at LHC did not observe supersimmetry, but they are doing precision measurements in many other areas. Improving the Standard Model isn't the only task left for physics, there are many other things in the Universe that we understand imperfectly - if at all.
Yes, i agree with you. I believe that, besides that she points out many things, at the end, i believe she is kind piss about the ways the all science was made and is made. Also, she tends to speak a lot superficial stuff from areas she doesn’t major on
I agree... It's worse.
None of this, Pro or Con, is going to change the quality of my life. When people began telling me the world was flat I told them I didn't care what shape it is - I'm sticking with the one I know. It makes more sense and believing it to be different isn't going to change the quality of my life.
@@fresnocruz4159 a great deal of the technology we use today, including a lot of medical treatments as well as the phone or PC you are using to comment here, come from scientist researching completely unrelated stuff. So yeah, you are welcome. Also, that the earth was non flat has been common knowledge since well before the Middle Age, so it isn't exactly frontier science.
@@albertomanfreda2125 I'm not against science. That implication is nonsense. I came across this video while checking to see what peroxide will do for my cousin's septic tank. Everyone uses science.
This was a very interesting video. As a PhD chemist who spent his career working mostly in the fields of physical chemistry, instrumentation development, and clinical chemistry I am not highly knowledgeable in the field of particle physics. However, I have been aware that progress in that field has been very slow, especially in recent years.
As luck would have it, a few weeks ago I was having a discussion of an undergraduate physics major about possible career paths in physics, and I suggested to her that, although particle physics is very interesting and deals with some of the most fundamental aspects of nature, it is probably not a very good career choice for most young physicists. There are several reasons, two of which are that the chances of making a significant discovery are very remote, and that most particle physicists become small gears embedded and pretty well lost in the machinery of Big Physics. I suggested that biophysics might be a more suitable area of specialization because there are undoubtedly many significant discoveries that can be made in that field (and the related field of biochemistry), and it doesn't necessarily require a Big Science approach to make those discoveries. Also, because a reasonable argument can be made that biophysics can relate ultimately to human health, this can enhance the possibility of obtaining funding for one's research.
Chemical physics might be another possibility for a career choice, though the risk there is that one might spend a career on searching for better ways of calculating or measuring things rather than making discoveries. Also, because chemical physics is not tied very closely to biology (hence to medicine), funding opportunities might be harder to come by.
Anyway, the video was extremely interesting, and while it presents a point of view that is a bit more extreme than mine, I can certainly sympathize with this point of view and agree with it at least in part.
Dr. Hossenfelder, thanks for this. I'm tired listening to the so-called " popularizers" of science talking about their "discovery" without empirical basis. I teach Kant in my literary criticism classes, i understand how his philosophy of science shapes our understanding of reality.
As a statistician, I loved your analogy between data overfitting and how particle physicists invent bad models!
No, economists have!
Not just particle physicists but also economists, finance people and the climate change lobby.
If you got a time machine and brought John von Neumann to the present, as soon as he stopped screaming in terror at being ripped across space and time, he'd have a lot to say to a lot of physicists.
I would be slightly kinder and say that physicists are drawn to models that promise the biggest scientific impact. They are only proven bad in hindsight after all.
Except that's not how physicists invent models, and none of the models she lists are overfit. It is practically impossible to overfit models.
This is why understanding the philosophy of science is important to actually doing science. This channel rules!
But, but, but... science has superseded philosophy. Or so say the materialist reductionists.
The argument of philosophy was made in ChemTech years ago. Chemistry was so nearly complete that what was left was the philosophy of physics.
Not really. Science exists in a historic continuum with natural philosophy, its 'former self' so to speak, which is itself nested both classically and protohistorically in a continuum with pre-modern mathematics and its early applied domains, as both its disciplines (early geometry and arithmetic) and applications (in craftsmanship, surveying, construction and astronomy) were intimately tied.
Notably, the original meaning of Geometry was, literally, 'measurement of the Earth', a big enough hint toward its practical use for data gathering and knowledge production about human surroundings. All of these ancient disciplines attested from the dawn of civilisations can be extended in a prehistoric continuum whereby humans began sedentary life's that required ever more refined methods for observing, quantifying, measuring, inferring and ultimately, knowing things about their now (semi-)permanent environments.
Put simply, those disciplines came about naturally, rising from necessity and sociocultural evolutions which were only possible because of neurochemical evolutions that permitted our species to do so. In other words, science is a knowledge-production tool naturally selected for by evolutionary circumstances, itself in constant, artificial evolution, whereby philosophy plays only a feedback role as yet another mechanism, not because it is necessary, but simply because philosophy was one of science's evolutionary steps, thus philosophical functions are now part of the scientific activity, hence its use of hypotheses, principles, laws, and theories.
TLDR version: science doesn't need philosophy because science _is_ a branch philosophy, that happened to become its own thing, a process that keeps repeating as new species of knowledge disciplines evolve. (Which is ironically something only science can provide as insight into philosophy, its origins, and its offspring).
Absolutely amazing explanation of this phenomenon. It seems that our economic model operates the same way and economists are doing what particle physicists are doing-make idealistic assumptions, manipulate the model to fit those assumptions in order to achieve its preconceived outcome, keep tweaking the model until the assumed grand outcome occurs, stick to the plan at all costs.
It’s probably an underlying error in worldview that’s motivating many areas of research and science.
As someone who is not a physicist, I think the most important things to be concerned with are quantum gravity, dark matter, and high-temperature superconductivity. Quantum gravity has some backing behind it. Dark matter would complete the gravimetric model of the universe. Superconductors have tons of engineering applications
Having worked on one of the bigger experiments looking for a WIMP particle in a specific energy range, I remember going in that I didn't have confidence whatsoever that we would find anything. I understood the model, the science, but I still felt something was terribly wrong that I and others had so little faith that the predictions would amount to a discovery or new understanding (beyond having falsified it). It was a great opportunity for me to contribute to a useless paper though, as an aspiring student. We're just reaching in the dark randomly; it's not motivating and it shouldn't be this way. This video is spot on.
I remember particel physics being the end goal for the most brilliant students when I was in university, but besides the horribly complicated math (I wasn't one of the most brilliant students), I did have a feeling it was just about throwing an infinite number of permutations of theories at a wall to see what would stick, and overfitting in the process.
That said, I think Sabine glosses over the dark matter (and dark energy) problem a bit too easily. Just like theories about new particles keep getting disproven, theories about how standard model particles can account for dark matter keep getting disproven as well. Maybe modified gravity is the answer, but that is also a field where physicists just keep throwing increasingly more complicated models at the wall, so most of this video applies to that as well. In the end one of these fields has to be correct so they're not entirely wrong in wanting to explore new models, they should just be more narrow and focused on the real problem of dark matter (and dark energy).
She did many dark matter videos and discussed them at length. Here she justs stays on topic.
Glad you mention gravity. The gyrations necessary to make that theory comply with the real world such as stable planetary orbits, are beyond belief.
@@Khosann1 Dark matter is on topic here since a dark matter particle would fall outside of the standard model and all the criticisms she lobbs at particle physics apply just as much to modified gravity theories.
@@gulliverdeboer5836 She made and answered them on other videos.
@@Khosann1 Maybe I'm missing something (but I'm also suspecting the comment section on this channel is becoming like Jordan Peterson's where every inconsistency or hole will be explained away as just not understanding the infinite wisdom of the Dear Leader) but I fail to see how she has. She seems to be a follower of the superfluidity model family, but those still postulate a particle beyond the standard model.
Sabine is human and fallible as sometimes makes inconsistent claims or goes on weird tangents, and we should be able to admit that. That doesn't mean she's not brilliant and doesn't raise some good points.
I was going to fix particle physics--but then things got really busy at work.
Well that sums up very well my general feeling about particle physics. As a young master student I went for an internship in particle physics as I thought that was my dream job, and that’s where the best physicists would go (and who wouldn’t want to be among the best?). After spending time in the literature and talking to actual particle physicists I realized exactly all of that, and it didn’t fit with my view of what is good science (I mean compare a generic current particle physicist with, say, a Feynman…). Knowing that I had only little experience with experimental physics work (which otherwise would probably have been my first choice) my goal then became to slowly shift to maths, which at least has the advantage of being much more demanding in terms of level of proof, and, doesn’t require gigantic amounts of money to be wasted in gigantic experiments testing hypothesis which by design (!) will almost surely turn out to be wrong. Plus I can still look at physics inspired problems (a lot of what I do is related to complex systems, statistical physics and quantum information), so it’s for the best. The shame is that they are a few bright minds in particle physics and they’d certainly be much more useful for science or society working on other problems.
To anyone who either enjoyed or was intrigued by this, can I recommend Sabine's book "Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray".
It sounds like the book describes what this layperson feels as they look in from the outside.
Particle physics, maybe much of physics appears to be more art than science. The creation of their equations seems to be more faith than something based in reality. Your equation doesn't work and looks a bit brutal? Hell, let's throw in a couple more "dimensions" to make it work better.
Are the dimensions real or is it a contrivance to make a more "elegant" equation.
Beauty is a weird word to use. It was never the problem.
@@johnsolo123456 I haven't read the book, but I'll say that as someone who admits to having a bit of a bias to elegant models and explanations, my educated guess is that the book is talking more about how the elegant theories in people's minds may not align with experimental data and how endlessly chasing that unicorn can be an issue.
It's really a great book too!!!
i dont like how she dismisses objections to her argument. They're all really good objections like the serendipity one. i mean she's kinda right but at the end of the day i think its just the way discovering new science goes, everyone who has a theory should be doing their best to get it tested, i mean whats her alternative, that anyone with a theory present it to a special group of elite people who will determine if its worth being tested. i mean i see soooo many problems with that
Hi Sabine, I worked in science for my entire career and am retired now. I saw this problem back in the 70's when people in mathematical and theoretical Physics were convinced they were 100% correct because their model said so. To me a model and prediction without hard data and experiment is just an interesting SF story. I suppose that's why I ended up in experimental physics. Over fitting and extrapolation of model ranges to fit "your own ideas" is happening in many areas now and it is not science. It throws Occam's razor out the window. The assumption is made that what you have is defective and something new needs to be added without supporting data. I see this happening in many areas these days including climate change papers. But I suppose it generates useless jobs for graduates
Isn't it amazing how much unnecessary work scientists who paid attention in philosophy 201 get to skip?
The ever more convoluted particles and sub-particles remind me of the epicyclic model of the Solar System, where the modelling was horrendous because of a fundamental misconception (and adding epicycles to improve the model to match more accurate observed data must have been good research material).
Yeah man, we just shouldn’t bother with models at all.
Fucking boomers. Retire so we can move on with physics without dinosaurs in the back room holding us back.
here's a compelling model, imo: geophysical fluid dynamics
The philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, who happens to have been Karl Popper's successor at the LSE, put forward an interesting theory for evaluating competing scientific theories. He also drew attention to theories that need to complicate themselves in order to fit with observation. He observed that that, in general, this was unavoidable (we should not be too quick to refute) but that any such change is an ad hoc modification and theories that do this frequently are degenerate (A theory can also become degenerate if it ceases to make new interesting predictions).
I graduated in physics and was always intrigued by quantum physics, particle physics and cosmology. However, I was and I still am under the impression that climate and atmospheric physics has much more relevance nowadays. And I feel confirmed by the most recent Nobel laureates. Hence, I pursued a PhD in this field. As a postdoc, now, heavily depending on third party funding, I am frustrated about the imbalance of available funding for particle physics and the lack thereof in fields like geophysical fluid dynamics. The problems in this field are often old as well as very complicated. This seems to be the reason that it is not attractive for young researchers. But that is the crux really. As we need to solve them in order to make solid predictions for climate change. Also physicists pretend those problems do not belong to physics anymore which is rediculous as the methods to approach them all come from physics. tldr: too much funding and focus on particle physics, no love for fundamental climate and atmospheric physics.
You see, particle physics sounds fancy, climate physics is against big oil.
Sadly.
There are many funding bodies that prefer the idea of "pure" science (e.g particle physics) to "applied" science (e.g mitigating avalanches). This problem is made worse by the fact that many funding organisations have strict limits imposed on them regarding on what topics they may spend their money,.
Because "unravelling the deepest mysteries of nature" sounds more cool than doing science at the macro scale. "In principle" you can solve everything with particle physics, except it is extremely impractical and very useful to study phenomena from a "higher level". This is a purely romantic notion, but I think it influences public perception and where funding goes.
I blame *metaphysical* reductionism as a philosophy for this. Reductionism is a useful intellectual tool, try to understand the whole by the interactions of its parts. But the fact that this is a useful heuristic is confused with a much stronger assertion about the underlying nature of reality, an assertion you don't have to believe in to practice science.
All you have to believe to trust science is that we can make observations, make hypotheses and models, create experiments and test to what degree the model makes accurate predictions. You don't have to know *why* we are capable of doing this, you only have to believe that for whatever reason, this appears to be possible.
It's because the governments don't want actual understanding of climate. They need thier big practical joke.
You see, particle physics sounds fancy, climate physics is supposedly a settled consensus and we no longer need to concern ourselves with any of the gaps.
One reason we know there is a problem with the standard model is because it incorrectly predicts that neutrinos have zero mass. Also, Karl Popper did, in fact, view falsifiability as being synonymous with being scientific. Simplicity in the model was never a requirement.
Simplicity must be a requirement otherwise you can build a monstrosity of adhoc justifications for every observation that contradicts the theory
@@maalikserebryakov You are welcome to hold that opinion, but I was just pointing out that this was not the opinion of Karl Popper.
It is true that the standard model predicted neutrinos had zero mass. It is also correct that Popper viewed falsifiability as being scientific. 😃😆
What if neutrinos have no mass
What if standard model is wrong
Reminds me of Ptolemy's model of the solar system, where an overly complex model was made up to fit existing data. It was useful in predicting the movement of bodies in the solar system, but a better and simpler theory came along that did the same and with better results.
I think that particle physics has reached its end of life just like Ptolemy's model of the solar system, and we need to shift our perspective to a different vantage point and try to explain things from that point, if we are to proceed further with our understanding of the world.
Ptolemy's system was complicated because it didn't correctly fit the observations they had. Copernicus did better, but still had complexities to fit the data because they insisted orbits had to be circles with epicycle circles. Kepler found that a single ellipse explained everything. To some tastes breaking the perfection of a circle was a deal breaker. To my mind adding features to a theory that explains all observations is wrong. Work on something else for a while
Yes. This.
What I never understood is how we can possibly make any strong conclusion about the double slit experiment, when we're sending in electrons/photons, yet we can't even create vaccuum strong enough to clear out all the molecules inside the space, let alone particles that are way smaller. Who knows what kinds of interractions could be going on inside any empty space for particles way smaller than molecules, but we're claiming all kinds of wild shit, like the idea of wave-particle duality.
Thank you, Sabine. Glad someone is speaking up about the problems in fundamental physics research.
Sabine you have a unique way of looking at the state of things. You can see things just the way they actually are and explain them clearly with pinpoint accuracy, which is a quality of a good scientist. Moreover you have the courage to put your opinions forward even though it goes against standard practice of your colleagues. What you are doing is a service to the entire scientific project and our society 🙏🙏
They need more application and less theory. In large branches of academia that are without any applied problems it is only a matter of time before ti devolves into people just inventing imaginary stuff while patting each others back in reviews and use their titles to prove the importance, not results. And by results I mean a thing that can cook coffee, fly to Mars or teleport, not papers.
That's called having a critical mind?
It saddens me to think critical thought, as displayed by Sabine, is so unusual that it is considered unique. Schools, at all levels should be helping people learn how to think critically. We are clearly failing at this as a global society.
Sabine UNLEASHED! I love every bit of this. Spitting truths