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whatsThisBtn4 9 hours ago [-]
9 years of philosophy and I'm over platonic realism and reading contemporary philosophy of science.
The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions. Everyone knows about the copernican revolution. But when it first happened, the old models(earth at the center of the solar system) were more accurate at predicting where the plenets would be.
Scientists pragmatically spend their time doing best fits. (Typically)
But then the paradigm shifts and we are closer to reality than the current local minimum/maximum.
Before reading philosophy of science, I was into m theory and string theory. Now I'm nearly sure it's bunk that might be replaced in our lifetime.
I thank scientists, but I do not envy them.
analog31 1 hours ago [-]
From what I've read, a problem with the Copernican model was that it assumed circular orbits. Galileo insisted on this as well. It doesn't matter what orbits what, if you've got the shape of the orbits wrong.
Oddly enough the Catholic astronomers were willing to accept a model that had the sun going around the earth, and the planets around the sun. What settled matters for them was Newtonian physics, which provided a way to detect whether the earth was rotating or not. That was what caused them to eventually lift their ban on Copernicus. Newtonian physics also eliminated the question of whether anything in the solar system is justifiably the center of the cosmos.
podocarp 3 hours ago [-]
The difference with the Copernican stuff is that you can fly a satellite (e.g. Voyager) to the edge of the solar system, look back, and see the planets orbiting the sun. There is no sane way to put the earth in the center once you do that. If I do a push up the Earth moves beneath me but no reasonable person says I'm pushing the Earth away. Hence I feel heliocentrism is simply an observable fact. It's not a mathematical convenience. It's a fact you can see with a camera. The relativism or perspective argument is irrelevant because as we established you have to be very unreasonable to describe a picture of a huge ass sun that hardly moves with small planets zooming around it as earth centric.
On the other hand nobody has observed any particle or ever will, we only see effects of particles (cloud chamber trails, other particles, radiation, etc). This makes it very different for the traditional "seeing is believing" claim. In this case you actually possible to argue it's a mathematical convenience. It's possible to say we are stuck in the pre Copernican age in QM, we're modelling these things in such a complicated way, maybe one day we will see aha we got it all backwards, electrons are actually made of trapped light, or some crazy theory will come out... And I can't blame string theorists and physicists in general for trying.
Take for example quarks. QCD actually forbids naked quarks. That means you can never observe one on its own. How's that for a falsifiable scientific theory? Yet it is very successful in all its predictions. So obviously the Popperian "falsifiability" is too simple a criteria for science.
aurareturn 2 hours ago [-]
In the 1500s, it might just as well be impossible to fly a spaceship to the outer edge of the solar system to confirm heliocentrism without doubt as it is right now to build a solar system sized detector to look for the graviton.
> The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions
I understand where you're coming from but this is a very cynical take. String theory is a strawman compared to the empirical "discoveries" of items like black holes or the Higgs boson.
jambalaya8 7 hours ago [-]
Aye, but we only sorta kinda "know" what things like black holes might be. We have models that make sense to us based on our understanding of science, and we think our instruments can faithfully report on what they can be with measurements we believe we are making correctly, but we have no clue what we don't know, and no real way to prove it, just theorize, and sort of bundle up what we believe is data supporting it.
jeremyjh 2 hours ago [-]
There are so many observations that fit the theory at this point, that we know there is a supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy just as well as we knew the earth orbited the sun before the voyager flight.
oersted 2 hours ago [-]
Well, it seems that the question still remains somewhat open. There are theories that fit the data as well or better than the black-hole model.
My naive intuition is that this is mostly just physicist publishing papers and throwing some exotic ideas out (we still don't know enough about dark matter), and that the black-hole model will remain as the consensus. But it's not as unquestionable as you say it is.
> An alternative to the black hole (BH) scenario has been recently proposed in terms of a supermassive compact object composed of self-gravitating fermionic dark matter (DM).
We have very good ideas about it, including the issue described in the OP. We also don't know how gravity and the other forces work together. We don't know where other life is in the universe. We don't know how to travel to other stars. We don't know what is under the surface of Europa (but we'll soon find out).
And we have a very good idea of what we know because our theories, based on our observations, predict things accurately.
The original upthread comment and followup seem like taking some philosophical questions to logical extremes.
blooalien 6 hours ago [-]
"The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know." — Aristotle
shusaku 6 hours ago [-]
The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know to whom you should ascribe a quote.
odyssey7 5 hours ago [-]
Could have learned a thing from Socrates.
BobbyTables2 3 hours ago [-]
and Donald Rumsfeld (;->
ColdStream 2 hours ago [-]
I think it is similar to the 'All models are wrong but some are useful' adage.
There is reality and there is the math at which we point at it with. The pointing will never be reality but that doesn't mean it is useless.
In the same way you cannot blow the wind with the word 'Fan'. But the concept of a fan is very useful.
CuriouslyC 2 hours ago [-]
The Higgs and black holes are quite different. We've basically observed Higgs according to how we've defined them, while we've only observed phenomena consistent with black holes as we hypothesize them. Singularities are the result of theories based on (ironically named) real numbers, it's entirely possible that what we call black holes are really dark stars formed from exotic matter that can only exist in hyper-extreme conditions, like a leveled up neutron star.
gtowey 7 hours ago [-]
The thing is we have a lot of models which make very accurate predictions most of the time, which are useful for doing some impressive science.
But we have no accepted theory of what is actually happening behind the math. What we have is that in 1925 most theoretical physicists decided that we have already uncovered the most fundamental structures of the universe and further investigation into how or why things are the way they are is fruitless. This view has dominated for the last 100 years. Physics has been focused only on modeling and testing, but nobody knows exactly what the models are telling us about the universe.
I agree with the above poster that this is wrong and we may yet learn that our models are only very close to reality, but the actual mechanics are different. At least I think more research should be pointed in this direction.
exmadscientist 6 hours ago [-]
> in 1925 most theoretical physicists decided that we [are done]
No. Just... no. Even advancing that fifty years to 1975, the Standard Model reigns not because people want it to reign, but because no one can knock it off its throne. There is no better idea that can explain more than the Standard Model can. It's not a conspiracy.
(I did used to joke with my students that progress in physics stopped around 1975, which is around when LSD got banned, so there might well be a lack of ideas. But I'll leave that one to the reader!)
podocarp 3 hours ago [-]
From my understanding of the parent I think he's not saying that nothing is trying to replace the standard model etc. But instead nobody is trying to explain the standard model (or whatever).
For example, wavefunction collapse. You can see the wikipedia page for all its interpretations. There's no such page for Newtonian dynamics (even though gravity is also spooky action at a distance) and classical EM (you're telling me there's more of these fields everywhere I can't see).
I think it's simply because classical experiments are a primary source and quantum experiments are a secondary source of information. The classical case you just see and know the result. Quantum experiments you're always looking at some medium that detects or measures or whatever the original interaction. So you're only interrogating the detector, not the original particles or interaction. So of course we're stuck with an interpretation problem. It's the same problem with news. The primary sources are always 100% certain what happened because they saw it. The secondary source will allow for more interpretation because they have heard from multiple primary sources, etc.
oersted 2 hours ago [-]
I'm reticent of falling into this endless conversation again, but it's a bit addictive.
I believe the point is that the Standard Model is still built on Quantum Field Theory, but looking into what's really going on under quantum mechanics is a bit taboo and very few people are spending time on it.
Frankly, I acknowledge that I am an outsider and that surely my perspective is far too naive and simplistic, I'm sure the reality in the field is far more nuanced. But still, I'm in good company when I question what's going on, like Einstein and many other prominent physicists have.
It is true that the end of the conversation was just "shut up and calculate", which is wise on some level, but it also implies that the mathematical model is the end-truth and you should unquestionably just build on it. There is a consensus that the mathematical model of quantum theory is really what is mechanistically happening, and that the wave function is a real physical thing.
But one can also argue that it is merely a probabilistic theory that, yes, describes the probability distributions of what will happen extremely accurately, but still is a partial answer and it doesn't actually predict what will happen. In every other context, we use probability to describe processes that we don't have a complete model for. It is a bit presumptuous to think that in quantum mechanics probabilities are somehow fundamental and not emerging from more deterministic underlying phenomena.
You can have a theory that says that there's an equal likelyhood of getting heads or tails on a coin, and that theory can reflect the statistics extremely accurately. But that is obviously not the end of the story, there are deeper mechanics determining if you get heads or tails at each given time, it is not fundamentally random, you just don't fully understand what's going on yet.
HappMacDonald 1 hours ago [-]
But the real litmus test is and always has been "can a theory predict the results of empirical measurements (such as controlled experiments) more accurately than its competitors".
The Danish-interpretation quantum physicists might urge you to shut up and calculate, but what we lack is any model capable of both describing why and how the wave function collapses and simultaneously offering more accurate predictions than QM does. The most well known low hanging fruit being: describing events in noticeably curved spacetime (or put in other words, in situations where the effects of gravity are non-trivial) because we don't even need a better model to know that QM breaks there, QM itself will happily tell us that much by piling on infinities and singularities that can no longer be canceled via renormalization.
So the take home is less "shut up and calculate" and more "don't waste their time with speculation about underlying mechanics until it can also offer more accurate predictions, and until then redirect your energies back to calculating: making use out of the tool we already have at least".
If nothing else, familiarity with the tool that does work up to a certain standard is more likely to lead someone to the next big step than hanging back in the wings of Newton and Aristotle with layperson intuitions about macroscopic objects in terrestrial gravity.
exmadscientist 25 minutes ago [-]
Yes, this, exactly.
The moment someone has a theory that's experimentally testable somehow (somehow possible, anyway), there will be plenty of interest. There has never been such a theory to date.
Until that arrives, it's all just hot air.
lokimedes 13 hours ago [-]
Glad I didn’t spend the last ten years on that problem! As my CERN advisor suggested :)
pjmlp 12 hours ago [-]
All Alumni know that the best discoveries happen after hours of reflection on R1 tables during Summertime. :)
kazinator 8 hours ago [-]
I bet you that old results still add up in the parallel universe in which the muon mystery has not yet been solved!
allenrb 7 hours ago [-]
I was thinking someone must have fixed a bug in the simulation (in which we live) between when the old results were generated and now.
Only 1/2 :-)
BobbyTables2 3 hours ago [-]
Or an exceedingly rare random bit flip very subtly altered the simulated physics behavior…
2 hours ago [-]
thisisauserid 10 hours ago [-]
Worst Feynman diagrams ever.
ThrowawayTestr 13 hours ago [-]
That's the best part about science.
storywatch 12 hours ago [-]
It's good for the world but terrible for the practitioners in academia. Imagine you are in your last year of your PhD and then something new comes out and completely invalidates/obsoletes your results. Cough natural language processing PhDs during COVID when GPT-3 came around..
tansey 12 hours ago [-]
Academic here. It's actually great for us. You're usually the first to see the implications for your niche area and have a chance to get a hot paper out rather than a moderately impactful one.
vouaobrasil 11 hours ago [-]
I think it depends on who has the hot paper and who has the outdated results. I was in academia for quite some time and when sometime cool comes out that renders other results less important, there are always winners and losers beccause the only thing that matters in academia is impact and the latest and greatest - not the blind alleys along the way.
There isn't really an "us" in academia like there is in a private company, who all have a common goal: in academia the goal is to get there before another does and be on top.
globalnode 2 hours ago [-]
im pretty sure in private companies people are vying for promotions and trying to out maneuver their colleagues in the eyes of management. just look at ai use, johnny knows how to prompt better than sammy, so johnny looks like a 2x more productive programmer. its every man, woman and child for themselves.
gertop 12 hours ago [-]
The perspective changes if you're in your last year of PhD as GP said. I'm sure the system is built in a way that you'll still graduate because your supervisor knows this is about learning how to conduct research and not about being right. But it's likely still soul crushing to come out with no published paper (unless you still publish knowing you're wrong, which in some cases might be valuable).
touisteur 10 hours ago [-]
If your soul can bounce back, finding ways your previous research might help, or combine with the breakthrough (or not !) can help. I've used many previous formal/analytic SOTA algorithms and methods for dataset tagging automation, or as feedback for RL, or to speed-up post-training.
scarlehoff 9 hours ago [-]
Three/four years of (honest) work is usually worth to publish.
The result might not be high impact (and thus end up in a lower tier journal, sadly) but knowing what didn't work is also a valid output.
radicaldreamer 12 hours ago [-]
This happens in biology all the time.
PHDs will spend years mastering some intricate multi-day long procedure to do some thing and a new discovery will obviate the need for the procedure completely.
randomImmigrant 8 hours ago [-]
Preach. The way out is to find truly basic problems that you’re attacking at a fundamental level.
That rarely gets funded. And even more rarely handed off to grad students. In a sense the failure of a bunch of grad students is priced in to the way science is done.
Which makes it so perverse their lives and careers depend on success as newcomers.
ahoka 11 hours ago [-]
Einstein wanted to measure how fast Earth moves through ether as his research thesis.
DoctorOetker 2 hours ago [-]
This is false, not his research dissertation at all, ... during his student years he did consider the design of a luminiferous ether experiment that he then believed would differentiate an ether world vs a non-ether world.
Of course his views (and most everyone elses) evolved when Lorentz derived the Lorentz transform on grounds of a physical argument, and pointed out that Maxwell's Equations were maintained their form after such a coordinate transform, in gravity-free universes (simple linearly related inertial systems).
When Einstein developed his special theory of relativity, he rejected the putative measurability of the ether in flat spacetime metrics.
Because the ether does exist, when considering the wider world of non-flat spacetime metrics.
You could say Michelson-Morley compared 2 horizontal axes (which are rotation symmetric with the gravity vector). Variations of predictable ether effects are perfectly measurable, when comparing horizontal with vertical paths!
It's different when you invalidate your own research.
kergonath 11 hours ago [-]
That’s life. Sometimes you see it coming and ride the wave, sometimes you’re late to the party.
pavel_lishin 13 hours ago [-]
I remember reading the Three Body Problem, and thinking to myself: this is implausible. If scientists started getting weird results, they'd be thrilled, not suicidal!
Diogenesian 13 hours ago [-]
I believe the alien scientists were depressed by the guaranteed collapse of their civilization, not the difficulty of certain differential equations. So it's more like a doctor getting weird results while working on a cure for a pandemic.
Edit: oops, see the reply below... and my grumpy response. I seriously forgot about that entire plot point.
glenstein 12 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty sure they're referring to scientists on Earth.
Edit: Though I agree that alien scientists of Tri-Solaris probably lead more depressing lives than their counterparts on earth
I don't know if this series is yet considered far enough in the past that we don't have to worry about spoiler warnings (I feel like the house rules about this apply differently to books than to movies), but I will just say that one of the most fascinating and mind-bending considerations in the book is the idea that some civilizations progress linearly and some progress exponentially, and how mind bending it is to have to plan ahead for exponential advances.
Diogenesian 12 hours ago [-]
Hmm, fair enough - I checked Wikipedia. My mind completely erased the "sophon" bit or whatever it was called, it just got erased again. Not a fan of that particular fairy dust.
I thought they were referring to the inability of the aliens to make an accurate calendar.
pavel_lishin 10 hours ago [-]
No, I was referring to the human scientists' reaction to the sophons' interference.
But I thought that the Trisolarians' inability to predict their planets' path also seemed weird. Yes, the three-body problem isn't analytically solvable, but you can brute force it, and I would imagine that a species that is capable of creating sophons and starships with hulls made out of the Strong-force could calculate their planet's trajectory for the next thousand years without too many problems. (It would be academic, anyway - if you can build that kind of technology, why do you even need planets?)
And I also hated the sophons.
d0mine 9 hours ago [-]
The error grows exponentially. For example, for equal-mass triple with Earth sized orbit initially, the prediction limit is just a few hundreds years even if you know initial conditions up to the plank length (LLM estimate of ~135 Lyapunov times).
rbanffy 7 hours ago [-]
The uncertainty increases and predictions are reliable only up to a couple hundred years but those hundred years are good enough at any point in time, because you redo your predictions all the time.
This kind of iterative process might yield some insights on how uncertainty creeps into the system.
worldthruword 9 hours ago [-]
Trisolarans had advanced technology which means they knew about probability. Probability immediately implies Lying and the two types of scientific error we have. ie false positives and false negatives
rbanffy 6 hours ago [-]
All we needed to do would be to introduce game theory to them. It doesn’t matter what we say. We deal with zero trust all the time.
physicalecon 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
glenstein 11 hours ago [-]
That's actually a great example for what it is. If I were a scientist I probably wouldn't be reacting with "yay science" to every next failure that destroys civilization, even if notionally those are building up the body of data that could eventually lead to success.
rbanffy 7 hours ago [-]
I can’t imagine aliens better suited for space travel than the Trisolarans. For them, deep hibernation is a natural state and they could easily build space ships to explore other nearby systems and seed them. Even better - their metabolism made them perfect for deep space habitats.
ASalazarMX 12 hours ago [-]
Specially because only particle physics suddenly became inconsistent. I can see scientists fruitlessly obsessing with finding why the universe was toying with them, but suicide? OK, they were also seeing intent with individualized hallucinations, and computer interference, but IIRC those messages asked them to to stop particle physics, not to off themselves. They could change fields and live on.
an0malous 13 hours ago [-]
The history of scientific revolutions does not support this view
pavel_lishin 13 hours ago [-]
How do you mean? I cannot remember any particular scientific revolution where scientists were suicidal, or even particularly crestfallen.
Quantum Mechanics is the closest thing I can think of, where Einstein famously refused to accept some of the implications, and where scientists had great disagreements about things like the Copenhagen interpretation and what it means for the actual nature of reality - but I don't think any of them were sad about it.
ben_w 12 hours ago [-]
One of the boldest chapter one introductions I've ever seen comes to mind:
Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
A very interesting story that's worth reading up on. "Natural philosophers" of the day refused to accept the idea of a particle too small to directly observe on purely philosophical grounds. They essentially bullied him out of the field for championing the idea of the atom, despite his math yielding numerous correct results. They fruitlessly pursued the idea of energetics instead. (One of the many instances of die hard philosophers playing the villain in physics history. See also why Emmy Noether wasn't given a professorship despite a letter of recommendation from Albert Einstein.)
This makes it perhaps not a particularly good example of the phenomena being discussed, as he was suicidal not because of what he had discovered, but because no one believed what he had discovered.
senderista 4 minutes ago [-]
Emmy Noether was a mathematician not a physicist (despite Noether's theorem), and the main obstacle to her obtaining a professorship was pretty obviously sexism (not to mention antisemitism).
sigbottle 12 hours ago [-]
I looked this up, and sure enough, Ernst Mach was the one who lead the charge (a self proclaimed positivist, which is a position that many scientists would gladly say they support).
Sure enough, it's what I thought - you don't mean that some evil boogeyman named Hegel lead a worldwide charge against physics. (I doubt Hegel even understood physics, lol. But you get my point.)
You mean that two physicists had a disagreement, one held institutional power, and ostracized the other.
Fine, but then why attack philosophy? Things are philosophy until they're not. Dogma happens in every field.
traes 11 hours ago [-]
Is it really wrong to blame this one on philosophy? The source of the disagreement was inherently philosophical, lead by a philosopher, backed up by other mainstream philosophers, and undeniably held back physics. I don't mean to imply that philosophy is fundamentally evil or useless even when applied to physics; most early physicists also considered themselves philosophers. I'm just pointing out a mildly interesting pattern that I have noticed while reading about the history of physics. I recall that Einstein credited many of his insights to the field of philosophy. He also famously rejected quantum mechanics due to his philosophical beliefs, which many consider a slight stain on his legacy.
GlibMonkeyDeath 5 hours ago [-]
>He also famously rejected quantum mechanics due to his philosophical beliefs, which many consider a slight stain on his legacy.
The stain comes from the distortion of what others have interpreted as Einstein's "rejection". Einstein believed that quantum mechanics must be incomplete, not wrong. The famous EPR paper wasn't a paradox at all - Einstein proposed a model (local hidden variables) that might have been valid. It took until Bell and later experiments of Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger (and others, but these three got the recent Nobel) to rule out local hidden variables.
rbanffy 6 hours ago [-]
> He also famously rejected quantum mechanics due to his philosophical beliefs
What you accept or not is irrelevant. It’s the math that guides you. I too believe we only perceive randomness because we don’t see the complete picture, but that’s irrelevant until we have the means to explore what that whole picture could be.
ben_w 12 hours ago [-]
> See also why Emmy Noether wasn't given a professorship despite a letter of recommendation from Albert Einstein
I thought that was sexism rather than philosophers? This was the same era and place that mostly ignored Bertha Benz.
(Or did you mean after moving to the USA?)
traes 12 hours ago [-]
It was indeed sexism, but it was not sexism from the math department, who very much wanted to hire her. In fact, the Chair of Mathematics David Hilbert (of Hilbert space fame) personally recruited her.
Ar-Curunir 10 hours ago [-]
It is, of course, meant to be taken in a humorous tone here, despite the morbid subject.
Scientists get hidebound just like the rest of us, at times.
glenstein 12 hours ago [-]
Those are definitely unfortunate examples and I can see how those environments pushed them to their limits. But if we're talking large-scale systematic thinking about what kind of data would be necessary to show that there's such a thing as a typical, characteristic civilization scale negative reaction to scientific revolutions, these don't demonstrate that this is the usual case. Obviously they're important in their own right.
But also the book doesn't suggest that scientists going missing was just a function of humanity's customary response to scientific progress. In the book, it's a very intentional sabotage campaign.
applfanboysbgon 12 hours ago [-]
The point being made is about the general reaction to weird results. The original supposition was that it would be implausible for scientists at large to have an adverse reaction to results that defied their current worldview. Given that we have seen this play out, there is in fact nothing implausible about it at all.
The specifics (proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging scientific experiments by altering the outcomes into incoherent results, the adverse reaction being suicide) aren't important here, because that's obviously the realm of fiction -- we don't need an actual instance of scientists committing suicide to suggest that it's plausible, because we don't have an actual instance of proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging results[1]. We just need to acknowledge that adverse reactions to unexpected results do happen, so plausibly in a fictional story if you have very unexpected results then your scientists could have very adverse reactions as well.
[1] That we know of.
glenstein 11 hours ago [-]
>Given that we have seen this play out
We saw two examples, definitely unfortunate for what they were but well short of a built in civilization level reaction to scientific progress writ large. I don't think there's a single by and large way that people react to scientific revolutions, negative or otherwise. Feels like it depends on a combination of how it impacts most powerful stakeholders, things about culture, and things about the zeitgeist of a particular moment.
>we don't need an actual instance of scientists committing suicide to suggest that it's plausible, because we don't have an actual instance of proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging results
Right, the specifics of the science fiction don't matter here. And plausibility counts for something though it's a dramatically lower threshold. And the person above who is appealing to scientific revolutions writ large seem to be attempting a general level inference to human reaction to scientific revolutions, which is a huge inference to make on the back of a pair of one-off examples.
Possibility counts for something, but I would say it only goes as far as explaining contingencies of particular circumstances and doesn't explain trends, and what happens within the fiction of the book is a trend, and it's explained by a sabotage campaign rather than by an appeal to the stresses of day-to-day science.
ImPostingOnHN 49 minutes ago [-]
> well short of a built in civilization level reaction to scientific progress writ large
if I remember correctly, the plot point wasn't a "civilization level reaction" to bad particle physics experiment results, but rather a very narrow reaction by less than 1/10,000,000th of civilization.
which makes sense: the vast majority of the members of "civilization" could not even accurately define "particle physics", much less understand the field, much less comprehend experimental results, much less understand the correctness of them, much less experience anguish over their correctness.
fc417fc802 9 hours ago [-]
> The original supposition was that it would be implausible for scientists at large to have an adverse reaction to results that defied their current worldview.
Indeed that is highly implausible. I daresay that anyone stating otherwise fundamentally lacks an understanding of the sort of people that are attracted to and work in the sciences. Paradigm shifts are a form of progress and progress is the raison d'etre.
Note that one or two outliers do not contradict a larger trend. Also that the examples given so far, in addition to being highly unusual, follow from social phenomena downstream of the new results rather than being a direct personal reaction to them.
That said, as noted by others that isn't what's going on in the book being discussed. So the plausibility of that plot point needs to be judged on its own merit as an entirely separate sort of thing.
applfanboysbgon 9 hours ago [-]
> Note that one or two outliers do not contradict a larger trend.
The listed cases are not outliers in the scientific community. The individuals were outliers, but the scientific community, in a mode of behaviour that was not outlier-ish, shunned them. This tendency of scientists is well-established:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
At the end of the day, humans are largely egotistical, self-centred creatures, and scientists are no exception. When you say that scientists believe that progress is their raison d'etre, you may not be incorrect, but their belief in progress is grounded in a self-centred way. Perhaps the ideal is "progress for humanity", but the reality is more like "progress for my career" or "progress for my worldview", in which case results challenging everything you hold as a foundation are a threat to you, being regressive rather than progressive in matters important to one's ego. People really, really don't like being told they're wrong. Even scientists.
fc417fc802 6 hours ago [-]
You're trying to shift the goalposts rather than concede the point. We weren't speaking of cliquish behavior or resistance to new ideas which are indeed (unfortunately) common enough even in the scientific world. Rather the point under dispute was individuals experiencing markedly adverse emotional reactions to the point of harm in direct response to results that challenge their understanding of how things work.
So there are two problems here. First, that the listed examples are social in nature as opposed to being directly due to scientific results thus they are irrelevant to the point being argued (but importantly not necessarily irrelevant to the plot point in the work of literature that led to this line of discussion). And second that they are very much outliers in that individuals came to direct physical harm which is not at all the expected outcome for the typical participant when a paradigm shift occurs in the sciences.
Despite the drama surrounding it, the way the discovery of quantum mechanics ultimately played out is a clear counterexample to the position you seem to be attempting to advance. Many participants expressed bitterness or frustration regarding some of their peers but there was not (at least in aggregate) a large scale negative reaction to the new results themselves. Physicists did not generally spiral into depression or develop drinking problems or whatever else upon being exposed to the new information. (Do note that disagreement and doubt are not a negative thing in the sciences but rather an essential part of the process.)
On a more personal note, your view of the sciences seems to me to be myopic and overly cynical. You are (to my eye) cherry picking only the worst behaviors you have witnessed and then painting the entire endeavor with those colors. No worthwhile scientist is overly bothered by being wrong because it is an almost daily occurrence when you are exploring topics at the edge of human understanding.
applfanboysbgon 6 hours ago [-]
> You're trying to shift the goalposts rather than concede the point. We weren't speaking of cliquish behavior or resistance to new ideas which are indeed (unfortunately) common enough even in the scientific world. Rather the point under dispute was individuals experiencing markedly adverse emotional reactions to the point of harm in direct response to results that challenge their understanding of how things work.
I wasn't shifting goalposts; I think we had a fundamentally different reading of this thread from the beginning. I was not considering the examples of individuals coming to harm in the same way you did. I took them as a point of evidence that scientists (the community, not individuals) can behave in a reactionary manner against findings that undermine their beliefs. I didn't necessarily think an actual example of self-harm was necessary to justify the plausibility of scientists committing suicide under sufficient scientific duress, if the fictional grievance against their worldview were sufficiently large. I believed it's simply enough to establish that in the real world, scientists are in fact frequently not "thrilled" at new discoveries at all, to establish plausibility. Given how the scientific community has reacted to new ideas in the past, it does sound plausible to me that a minority of scientists might commit suicide if their entire education, career, and life's work were upended by sabotaged "discoveries" they couldn't make any sense of, certainly more plausible than pure fascination as you would expect from the naive platonic ideal of a scientist.
> On a more personal note, your view of the sciences seems to me to be myopic and overly cynical.
My view isn't particular to the sciences. I am very, very cynical towards humanity as a whole. I simply think scientists, as a bunch, are no different.
> No worthwhile scientist
That's the catch, isn't it? How many would you estimate are worthwhile? There are undeniably great scientists who wouldn't get caught up on learning more about the world, even if their preconceptions about it were wrong, but my cynical reading of humanity is that the majority of people in most professions that can't be reduced to rote work are actually not worthwhile members of their profession, in terms of both skill and personal ethics.
ceejayoz 12 hours ago [-]
> In the book, it's a very intentional sabotage campaign.
Active malice seems more likely to succeed, doesn't it?
They can gaslight people in their own heads, after all.
glenstein 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I think we're agreeing. The breakdown of scientific progress in the book is due to an actively malicious campaign that scrambles data, intimidates researchers and worse.
pton_xd 13 hours ago [-]
> wound up in an insane asylum for suggesting surgeons should wash their hands.
Was rejected and mocked by the medical community for his idea, developed a drinking problem and eventually committed to an asylum by his colleagues after having a nervous breakdown. While in the asylum he was beaten by the guards and died from a wound infection ... yikes!!
stonedivot 5 hours ago [-]
The person you replied to was clearly asking of examples where some large paradigm shift caused large scale instances of suicidal thoughts, self harm, or otherwise, as a direct result of these new ideas.
Providing two cases is, first of all, certainly not anything like "large scale". Second, these two cases are in complete and total isolation of each other, so not evidence of people getting riled up over the same new idea. And third, these seem like extreme reactions to people not believe their OWN ideas, not reactions to other scientists presenting new ideas.
Both examples from medicine rather than physics. Can you give an example from physics? Preferably from the last century or two?
ceejayoz 12 hours ago [-]
The parent post said scientists; medicine is something I've more knowledge of. You can carry the goalposts yourself, if you wanna move them around!
(The parent post also already mentions Einstein on quantum physics.)
somenameforme 11 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure about self harm or whatever, but Planck's Principle [1] was not stated without cause: 'Science progresses one funeral at a time.' And that was a quote from an outsized figure during the golden age of physics.
Yeah. In principal, scientists should be excited by weird results. In practice, though, humans are complex creatures with intellectual and emotional inertia. There's an understandable element of dread when you realize your life's work finds itself on shaky ground.
tgarrett 12 hours ago [-]
I'm a plasma physicist, and personally I love weird results - new mysteries to solve! That said, there are a wide range of personality types out there. And I would also be extremely surprised if the correct solution to some particular weird result was, for instance, that the Maxwell equations are broken for that regime (other than expected quantum corrections, e.g. the Schwinger limit).
black6 13 hours ago [-]
They were getting inconsistent results, not just weird ones. However I agree that suicide probably wouldn't be where they would end up.
dguest 12 hours ago [-]
I seem to remember something about the scientist being distraught because physics didn't make sense, not because she was having trouble getting clean data.
That also stuck with me as weird: there are any number of places you could sabotage a precision physics experiment by injecting tiny amounts of noise, which would drive the scientists to think they were bad scientists. Instead they thought science was broken.
As someone who has looked for inconsistencies with the Standard Model for a while now, and seen every measurement land bang-on the prediction, I can say that I would love any deviation that said our existing theories are broken.
And sure, crank up the detector noise and we'd be sad, but ask any grad student: having your apparatus suddenly spit out garbage data is just an average day. I've known plenty of scientists with psychological problems but it's never coming from their data.
glenstein 11 hours ago [-]
>That also stuck with me as weird: there are any number of places you could sabotage a precision physics experiment by injecting tiny amounts of noise, which would drive the scientists to think they were bad scientists. Instead they thought science was broken.
I think in the context of the book, the specific means of sabotage was something close to impossible to figure out, so I can see the despair of checking every conceivable explanation, coming up empty, and making an inference about reality itself. And it wasn't a kind of peripheral, controllable amount of noise, it was a complete global sabotage of all particle physics, on a scale that amounted to a global catastrophe rather than just another blip in the daily grind.
I think one thing that really hooked me on the book series in the beginning was being able to appreciate the kind of cosmic despair one scientist was sharing during the pool table conversation, because thinking big about meaning and order in the universe, and how important the universes' intelligibility is to our relationship with it, informed by data, is a synthesis of things that really matter to me as a reader - taking the intersection of science and meaning seriously.
I don't think that would be enough for plausibly explaining particular scientists offing themselves, but the psychology of someone to whom that kind of question matters that much, which is very much the heart and soul of what drives my interest in non-fiction reading, seems tragically underrepresented as a driving motivation in fiction which I think is terribly unfortunate. But sci-fi sometimes cares about it, and sometimes a lot.
ASalazarMX 11 hours ago [-]
> I've known plenty of scientists with psychological problems but it's never coming from their data.
I want to read a spinoff of the Three-Body Problem with this premise.
Hikikomori 12 hours ago [-]
In the book they get different results on all tests they run, consistency is gone, that is something else.
ck2 13 hours ago [-]
well maybe depends how fundamental
if objects you put on a table started falling through the floor it would be a bit stressful
lol
but Dr. Becky gets really excited about all the various "crisis in cosmology" because she knows new science/knowledge will emerge from solving those questions
and you remind me there's another season coming up in that series, can't wait
"Is he still in the grandmother’s house? We would like to speak to him."
root_axis 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
qsera 11 hours ago [-]
I am a bit sick of this narrative. That science can make mistakes is in no shape or form, one of its strengths. It is a weakness of the process.
The lipstick putting can be exposed by simply asking if you would not prefer a version of the scientific method that is never wrong.
pmontra 10 hours ago [-]
Mathematicians proof theorems so they are always correct. Physicists don't have that privilege.
qsera 10 hours ago [-]
>Physicists don't have that privilege.
Then don't claim it as a strength!
exmadscientist 9 hours ago [-]
Celebrating the mistakes is, as you're saying, perhaps a bit too far. But mistakes will happen, it's just the nature of the world. That makes developing a robust error correction mentality something that genuinely is worth celebrating.
jibal 56 minutes ago [-]
No one celebrates the mistakes ... what an absurd strawman (qsera's). Rather we celebrate the scientific method that finds and corrects mistakes, as you say.
clipsy 3 hours ago [-]
It isn't making mistakes that's a strength, it's the commitment to acknowledging and addressing mistakes.
ThrowawayTestr 3 hours ago [-]
No human process is perfect. Every human makes mistakes. If more people were able to admit being wrong the whole world would be a better place.
jibal 58 minutes ago [-]
This is a ridiculous strawman argument that misconstrues what people are saying is good about science--that it constantly reexamines and improves upon its models. You're saying that it would be preferable to have an oracle that flawlessly tells us the truth, and therefore the fallibility of science is "a weakness of the process", but that's completely absurd, a radical failure of reasoning, as of course no such oracle is possible. Given the inherent limitations of finding empirical facts, and empirical generalizations that only hold because we live in a lawful universe (so far, and everywhere we've looked--it is of course logically possible for it to be otherwise, as Hume noted), science is a very effective and powerful method, the best method conceived.
I won't engage further with such bad reasoning and arguments that verge on bad faith.
8 hours ago [-]
jongjong 6 hours ago [-]
The framing that there is some unknown particle affecting the results is probably an understatement. Probably there are a LOT of unknown 'forces' affecting the results. Look at the size of the machine, the aging components, the number of components involved, the amount of software required, surely all of that is affecting the results.
Are humans even capable of building perfectly reliable systems?
exmadscientist 6 hours ago [-]
You would probably be very surprised about just how much work is put in to characterizing these things. My graduate work was on another experiment (though our postdoc worked on one of the earlier g−2 experiments mentioned here!), but we literally had man-years of work sunk into measuring one thing about the experiment, one number, as accurately as possible and with valid error bars.
That was not the only thing about the apparatus, just one of the most important, but the point is: we cared, we cared a lot, and we cared a lot about a lot of things.
jcranmer 6 hours ago [-]
My gut reaction is that the probable cause of the discrepancy is ultimately "someone calculated something wrong." It's not like particle physics experiments actually generate something directly measurable like the muon's magnetic moment; you instead get an indirect result that you have to calculate to the value you're trying to measure. And half of the constants in that calculation are themselves from reported results in other experiments, which similarly returned indirect results that are dependent on correct results from other experiments... and it's not hard to imagine that the result of "value X is A" depends on an assumption that "value X is B" somewhere in the calculation tree.
colechristensen 13 hours ago [-]
I really dislike the writing style of being so "friendly" for people who don't know anything about the space that you obscure what the topic of the article is at all.
It's a third of the way through the article when "g-2", the problem at hand, is mentioned. Information that should have been shared in the title took a third of the article to figure out.
wuliwong 12 hours ago [-]
You dislike that people write for audiences other than yourself.
bawolff 10 hours ago [-]
I dont particularly agree with this article, but there have been quanta articles i've read in the past that went so far trying to make the topic accessible that it became incomprehensible. Where they used so many metaphors and simplifications that it lost all meaning.
Science writing for a general audience is really challenging.
Dylan16807 10 hours ago [-]
Writing for an unfamiliar audience doesn't mean you should hide the name of the problem until after a huge pile of setup.
colechristensen 11 hours ago [-]
No.
If you're writing an article about a man going to the store to buy a sandwich, the man, the store, and the sandwich should all make appearances by the end of the first paragraph.
These people are writing informative articles like novels and it's incredibly irritating and a disservice if you're actually trying to inform anybody about anything. If you're writing an article about the g-2 anomaly, "g-2 anomaly" belongs in the title not 1/3 the way in.
jibal 52 minutes ago [-]
> I really dislike the writing style of being so "friendly" for people who don't know anything about the space that you obscure what the topic of the article is at all.
Someone who writes a sentence like that is in no position to comment on writing style.
pmontra 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah, Quanta articles are way too long. They could get to the point in one quarter of the length.
gloryjulio 12 hours ago [-]
Yep. This would backfire spectacularly for people just want to know what's going on. They would just dump the article in the llm and ask, 'what problem is this article about'
ordu 11 hours ago [-]
Hmm... The Reality changed itself when guys in Siberia changed the sensor? Some years ago I was playing with the idea that the Reality might invent new laws when people look for them, and doesn't bother with laws when no one observes them. It would be in the style of Copenhagen interpretation, though even with regard to it, the idea seems too weird to be true. But now we have an experimental evidence.
In any case it gives me ideas how to check the hypothesis. If the Reality has a limited horizon for planning for new laws, scientists can trick it into inventing new laws that eventually (after some more research and even more laws observed) would start contradicting to each other, and at that point the Reality would snap into a different set of rules.
If it is true, then the plan is like this: we need to wipe all the scientific knowledge from this world and start again, and trick the the Reality into devising better laws of nature. Ah, wait, we have no evidence that the Reality can abandon laws that were introduced already. Pity, the plan is brilliant, but how to check if the Reality can abandon its laws? If laws are local... we can do something like Stephenson described in his Anathem: establish maths doing independent research and comparing their results once in 1000 years.
xprnio 11 hours ago [-]
I love how the closer we get to “the edge of the Reality”, the more it sounds like the ramblings of someone that got their hands on some of that GOOD stuff
jambalaya8 7 hours ago [-]
I suspect the universe is very very strange.
touisteur 10 hours ago [-]
You might want to read Dan Simmons' Ilium and if you can stomach some weird post-9/11 shit, Olympos. One of the overarching themes is what you describe... or similar.
tatjam 8 hours ago [-]
Also read Greg Egan's short story Luminous :)
cyberax 10 hours ago [-]
> Some years ago I was playing with the idea that the Reality might invent new laws when people look for them, and doesn't bother with laws when no one observes them
There are several books from Greg Egan with this idea in mind: Permutation City and Distress. The latter one is exactly about this idea.
The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions. Everyone knows about the copernican revolution. But when it first happened, the old models(earth at the center of the solar system) were more accurate at predicting where the plenets would be.
Scientists pragmatically spend their time doing best fits. (Typically)
But then the paradigm shifts and we are closer to reality than the current local minimum/maximum.
Before reading philosophy of science, I was into m theory and string theory. Now I'm nearly sure it's bunk that might be replaced in our lifetime.
I thank scientists, but I do not envy them.
Oddly enough the Catholic astronomers were willing to accept a model that had the sun going around the earth, and the planets around the sun. What settled matters for them was Newtonian physics, which provided a way to detect whether the earth was rotating or not. That was what caused them to eventually lift their ban on Copernicus. Newtonian physics also eliminated the question of whether anything in the solar system is justifiably the center of the cosmos.
On the other hand nobody has observed any particle or ever will, we only see effects of particles (cloud chamber trails, other particles, radiation, etc). This makes it very different for the traditional "seeing is believing" claim. In this case you actually possible to argue it's a mathematical convenience. It's possible to say we are stuck in the pre Copernican age in QM, we're modelling these things in such a complicated way, maybe one day we will see aha we got it all backwards, electrons are actually made of trapped light, or some crazy theory will come out... And I can't blame string theorists and physicists in general for trying.
Take for example quarks. QCD actually forbids naked quarks. That means you can never observe one on its own. How's that for a falsifiable scientific theory? Yet it is very successful in all its predictions. So obviously the Popperian "falsifiability" is too simple a criteria for science.
I understand where you're coming from but this is a very cynical take. String theory is a strawman compared to the empirical "discoveries" of items like black holes or the Higgs boson.
My naive intuition is that this is mostly just physicist publishing papers and throwing some exotic ideas out (we still don't know enough about dark matter), and that the black-hole model will remain as the consensus. But it's not as unquestionable as you say it is.
> An alternative to the black hole (BH) scenario has been recently proposed in terms of a supermassive compact object composed of self-gravitating fermionic dark matter (DM).
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/546/1/staf1854/843111...
> Sagittarius A* Might Not Be a Black Hole
https://youtu.be/7tRww03EKlk?si=0XcJ1yw-gPj1IzQW
We have very good ideas about it, including the issue described in the OP. We also don't know how gravity and the other forces work together. We don't know where other life is in the universe. We don't know how to travel to other stars. We don't know what is under the surface of Europa (but we'll soon find out).
And we have a very good idea of what we know because our theories, based on our observations, predict things accurately.
The original upthread comment and followup seem like taking some philosophical questions to logical extremes.
There is reality and there is the math at which we point at it with. The pointing will never be reality but that doesn't mean it is useless.
In the same way you cannot blow the wind with the word 'Fan'. But the concept of a fan is very useful.
But we have no accepted theory of what is actually happening behind the math. What we have is that in 1925 most theoretical physicists decided that we have already uncovered the most fundamental structures of the universe and further investigation into how or why things are the way they are is fruitless. This view has dominated for the last 100 years. Physics has been focused only on modeling and testing, but nobody knows exactly what the models are telling us about the universe.
I agree with the above poster that this is wrong and we may yet learn that our models are only very close to reality, but the actual mechanics are different. At least I think more research should be pointed in this direction.
No. Just... no. Even advancing that fifty years to 1975, the Standard Model reigns not because people want it to reign, but because no one can knock it off its throne. There is no better idea that can explain more than the Standard Model can. It's not a conspiracy.
(I did used to joke with my students that progress in physics stopped around 1975, which is around when LSD got banned, so there might well be a lack of ideas. But I'll leave that one to the reader!)
For example, wavefunction collapse. You can see the wikipedia page for all its interpretations. There's no such page for Newtonian dynamics (even though gravity is also spooky action at a distance) and classical EM (you're telling me there's more of these fields everywhere I can't see).
I think it's simply because classical experiments are a primary source and quantum experiments are a secondary source of information. The classical case you just see and know the result. Quantum experiments you're always looking at some medium that detects or measures or whatever the original interaction. So you're only interrogating the detector, not the original particles or interaction. So of course we're stuck with an interpretation problem. It's the same problem with news. The primary sources are always 100% certain what happened because they saw it. The secondary source will allow for more interpretation because they have heard from multiple primary sources, etc.
I believe the point is that the Standard Model is still built on Quantum Field Theory, but looking into what's really going on under quantum mechanics is a bit taboo and very few people are spending time on it.
Frankly, I acknowledge that I am an outsider and that surely my perspective is far too naive and simplistic, I'm sure the reality in the field is far more nuanced. But still, I'm in good company when I question what's going on, like Einstein and many other prominent physicists have.
It is true that the end of the conversation was just "shut up and calculate", which is wise on some level, but it also implies that the mathematical model is the end-truth and you should unquestionably just build on it. There is a consensus that the mathematical model of quantum theory is really what is mechanistically happening, and that the wave function is a real physical thing.
But one can also argue that it is merely a probabilistic theory that, yes, describes the probability distributions of what will happen extremely accurately, but still is a partial answer and it doesn't actually predict what will happen. In every other context, we use probability to describe processes that we don't have a complete model for. It is a bit presumptuous to think that in quantum mechanics probabilities are somehow fundamental and not emerging from more deterministic underlying phenomena.
You can have a theory that says that there's an equal likelyhood of getting heads or tails on a coin, and that theory can reflect the statistics extremely accurately. But that is obviously not the end of the story, there are deeper mechanics determining if you get heads or tails at each given time, it is not fundamentally random, you just don't fully understand what's going on yet.
The Danish-interpretation quantum physicists might urge you to shut up and calculate, but what we lack is any model capable of both describing why and how the wave function collapses and simultaneously offering more accurate predictions than QM does. The most well known low hanging fruit being: describing events in noticeably curved spacetime (or put in other words, in situations where the effects of gravity are non-trivial) because we don't even need a better model to know that QM breaks there, QM itself will happily tell us that much by piling on infinities and singularities that can no longer be canceled via renormalization.
So the take home is less "shut up and calculate" and more "don't waste their time with speculation about underlying mechanics until it can also offer more accurate predictions, and until then redirect your energies back to calculating: making use out of the tool we already have at least".
If nothing else, familiarity with the tool that does work up to a certain standard is more likely to lead someone to the next big step than hanging back in the wings of Newton and Aristotle with layperson intuitions about macroscopic objects in terrestrial gravity.
The moment someone has a theory that's experimentally testable somehow (somehow possible, anyway), there will be plenty of interest. There has never been such a theory to date.
Until that arrives, it's all just hot air.
Only 1/2 :-)
There isn't really an "us" in academia like there is in a private company, who all have a common goal: in academia the goal is to get there before another does and be on top.
PHDs will spend years mastering some intricate multi-day long procedure to do some thing and a new discovery will obviate the need for the procedure completely.
That rarely gets funded. And even more rarely handed off to grad students. In a sense the failure of a bunch of grad students is priced in to the way science is done.
Which makes it so perverse their lives and careers depend on success as newcomers.
Of course his views (and most everyone elses) evolved when Lorentz derived the Lorentz transform on grounds of a physical argument, and pointed out that Maxwell's Equations were maintained their form after such a coordinate transform, in gravity-free universes (simple linearly related inertial systems).
When Einstein developed his special theory of relativity, he rejected the putative measurability of the ether in flat spacetime metrics.
Because the ether does exist, when considering the wider world of non-flat spacetime metrics.
You could say Michelson-Morley compared 2 horizontal axes (which are rotation symmetric with the gravity vector). Variations of predictable ether effects are perfectly measurable, when comparing horizontal with vertical paths!
Edit: oops, see the reply below... and my grumpy response. I seriously forgot about that entire plot point.
Edit: Though I agree that alien scientists of Tri-Solaris probably lead more depressing lives than their counterparts on earth
I don't know if this series is yet considered far enough in the past that we don't have to worry about spoiler warnings (I feel like the house rules about this apply differently to books than to movies), but I will just say that one of the most fascinating and mind-bending considerations in the book is the idea that some civilizations progress linearly and some progress exponentially, and how mind bending it is to have to plan ahead for exponential advances.
I thought they were referring to the inability of the aliens to make an accurate calendar.
But I thought that the Trisolarians' inability to predict their planets' path also seemed weird. Yes, the three-body problem isn't analytically solvable, but you can brute force it, and I would imagine that a species that is capable of creating sophons and starships with hulls made out of the Strong-force could calculate their planet's trajectory for the next thousand years without too many problems. (It would be academic, anyway - if you can build that kind of technology, why do you even need planets?)
And I also hated the sophons.
This kind of iterative process might yield some insights on how uncertainty creeps into the system.
Quantum Mechanics is the closest thing I can think of, where Einstein famously refused to accept some of the implications, and where scientists had great disagreements about things like the Copenhagen interpretation and what it means for the actual nature of reality - but I don't think any of them were sad about it.
This makes it perhaps not a particularly good example of the phenomena being discussed, as he was suicidal not because of what he had discovered, but because no one believed what he had discovered.
Sure enough, it's what I thought - you don't mean that some evil boogeyman named Hegel lead a worldwide charge against physics. (I doubt Hegel even understood physics, lol. But you get my point.)
You mean that two physicists had a disagreement, one held institutional power, and ostracized the other.
Fine, but then why attack philosophy? Things are philosophy until they're not. Dogma happens in every field.
The stain comes from the distortion of what others have interpreted as Einstein's "rejection". Einstein believed that quantum mechanics must be incomplete, not wrong. The famous EPR paper wasn't a paradox at all - Einstein proposed a model (local hidden variables) that might have been valid. It took until Bell and later experiments of Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger (and others, but these three got the recent Nobel) to rule out local hidden variables.
What you accept or not is irrelevant. It’s the math that guides you. I too believe we only perceive randomness because we don’t see the complete picture, but that’s irrelevant until we have the means to explore what that whole picture could be.
I thought that was sexism rather than philosophers? This was the same era and place that mostly ignored Bertha Benz.
(Or did you mean after moving to the USA?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis wound up in an insane asylum for suggesting surgeons should wash their hands.
Scientists get hidebound just like the rest of us, at times.
But also the book doesn't suggest that scientists going missing was just a function of humanity's customary response to scientific progress. In the book, it's a very intentional sabotage campaign.
The specifics (proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging scientific experiments by altering the outcomes into incoherent results, the adverse reaction being suicide) aren't important here, because that's obviously the realm of fiction -- we don't need an actual instance of scientists committing suicide to suggest that it's plausible, because we don't have an actual instance of proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging results[1]. We just need to acknowledge that adverse reactions to unexpected results do happen, so plausibly in a fictional story if you have very unexpected results then your scientists could have very adverse reactions as well.
[1] That we know of.
We saw two examples, definitely unfortunate for what they were but well short of a built in civilization level reaction to scientific progress writ large. I don't think there's a single by and large way that people react to scientific revolutions, negative or otherwise. Feels like it depends on a combination of how it impacts most powerful stakeholders, things about culture, and things about the zeitgeist of a particular moment.
>we don't need an actual instance of scientists committing suicide to suggest that it's plausible, because we don't have an actual instance of proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging results
Right, the specifics of the science fiction don't matter here. And plausibility counts for something though it's a dramatically lower threshold. And the person above who is appealing to scientific revolutions writ large seem to be attempting a general level inference to human reaction to scientific revolutions, which is a huge inference to make on the back of a pair of one-off examples.
Possibility counts for something, but I would say it only goes as far as explaining contingencies of particular circumstances and doesn't explain trends, and what happens within the fiction of the book is a trend, and it's explained by a sabotage campaign rather than by an appeal to the stresses of day-to-day science.
if I remember correctly, the plot point wasn't a "civilization level reaction" to bad particle physics experiment results, but rather a very narrow reaction by less than 1/10,000,000th of civilization.
which makes sense: the vast majority of the members of "civilization" could not even accurately define "particle physics", much less understand the field, much less comprehend experimental results, much less understand the correctness of them, much less experience anguish over their correctness.
Indeed that is highly implausible. I daresay that anyone stating otherwise fundamentally lacks an understanding of the sort of people that are attracted to and work in the sciences. Paradigm shifts are a form of progress and progress is the raison d'etre.
Note that one or two outliers do not contradict a larger trend. Also that the examples given so far, in addition to being highly unusual, follow from social phenomena downstream of the new results rather than being a direct personal reaction to them.
That said, as noted by others that isn't what's going on in the book being discussed. So the plausibility of that plot point needs to be judged on its own merit as an entirely separate sort of thing.
The listed cases are not outliers in the scientific community. The individuals were outliers, but the scientific community, in a mode of behaviour that was not outlier-ish, shunned them. This tendency of scientists is well-established: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
At the end of the day, humans are largely egotistical, self-centred creatures, and scientists are no exception. When you say that scientists believe that progress is their raison d'etre, you may not be incorrect, but their belief in progress is grounded in a self-centred way. Perhaps the ideal is "progress for humanity", but the reality is more like "progress for my career" or "progress for my worldview", in which case results challenging everything you hold as a foundation are a threat to you, being regressive rather than progressive in matters important to one's ego. People really, really don't like being told they're wrong. Even scientists.
So there are two problems here. First, that the listed examples are social in nature as opposed to being directly due to scientific results thus they are irrelevant to the point being argued (but importantly not necessarily irrelevant to the plot point in the work of literature that led to this line of discussion). And second that they are very much outliers in that individuals came to direct physical harm which is not at all the expected outcome for the typical participant when a paradigm shift occurs in the sciences.
Despite the drama surrounding it, the way the discovery of quantum mechanics ultimately played out is a clear counterexample to the position you seem to be attempting to advance. Many participants expressed bitterness or frustration regarding some of their peers but there was not (at least in aggregate) a large scale negative reaction to the new results themselves. Physicists did not generally spiral into depression or develop drinking problems or whatever else upon being exposed to the new information. (Do note that disagreement and doubt are not a negative thing in the sciences but rather an essential part of the process.)
On a more personal note, your view of the sciences seems to me to be myopic and overly cynical. You are (to my eye) cherry picking only the worst behaviors you have witnessed and then painting the entire endeavor with those colors. No worthwhile scientist is overly bothered by being wrong because it is an almost daily occurrence when you are exploring topics at the edge of human understanding.
I wasn't shifting goalposts; I think we had a fundamentally different reading of this thread from the beginning. I was not considering the examples of individuals coming to harm in the same way you did. I took them as a point of evidence that scientists (the community, not individuals) can behave in a reactionary manner against findings that undermine their beliefs. I didn't necessarily think an actual example of self-harm was necessary to justify the plausibility of scientists committing suicide under sufficient scientific duress, if the fictional grievance against their worldview were sufficiently large. I believed it's simply enough to establish that in the real world, scientists are in fact frequently not "thrilled" at new discoveries at all, to establish plausibility. Given how the scientific community has reacted to new ideas in the past, it does sound plausible to me that a minority of scientists might commit suicide if their entire education, career, and life's work were upended by sabotaged "discoveries" they couldn't make any sense of, certainly more plausible than pure fascination as you would expect from the naive platonic ideal of a scientist.
> On a more personal note, your view of the sciences seems to me to be myopic and overly cynical.
My view isn't particular to the sciences. I am very, very cynical towards humanity as a whole. I simply think scientists, as a bunch, are no different.
> No worthwhile scientist
That's the catch, isn't it? How many would you estimate are worthwhile? There are undeniably great scientists who wouldn't get caught up on learning more about the world, even if their preconceptions about it were wrong, but my cynical reading of humanity is that the majority of people in most professions that can't be reduced to rote work are actually not worthwhile members of their profession, in terms of both skill and personal ethics.
Active malice seems more likely to succeed, doesn't it?
They can gaslight people in their own heads, after all.
Was rejected and mocked by the medical community for his idea, developed a drinking problem and eventually committed to an asylum by his colleagues after having a nervous breakdown. While in the asylum he was beaten by the guards and died from a wound infection ... yikes!!
Providing two cases is, first of all, certainly not anything like "large scale". Second, these two cases are in complete and total isolation of each other, so not evidence of people getting riled up over the same new idea. And third, these seem like extreme reactions to people not believe their OWN ideas, not reactions to other scientists presenting new ideas.
What do you think you've proven with these links?
(The parent post also already mentions Einstein on quantum physics.)
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_principle
That also stuck with me as weird: there are any number of places you could sabotage a precision physics experiment by injecting tiny amounts of noise, which would drive the scientists to think they were bad scientists. Instead they thought science was broken.
As someone who has looked for inconsistencies with the Standard Model for a while now, and seen every measurement land bang-on the prediction, I can say that I would love any deviation that said our existing theories are broken.
And sure, crank up the detector noise and we'd be sad, but ask any grad student: having your apparatus suddenly spit out garbage data is just an average day. I've known plenty of scientists with psychological problems but it's never coming from their data.
I think in the context of the book, the specific means of sabotage was something close to impossible to figure out, so I can see the despair of checking every conceivable explanation, coming up empty, and making an inference about reality itself. And it wasn't a kind of peripheral, controllable amount of noise, it was a complete global sabotage of all particle physics, on a scale that amounted to a global catastrophe rather than just another blip in the daily grind.
I think one thing that really hooked me on the book series in the beginning was being able to appreciate the kind of cosmic despair one scientist was sharing during the pool table conversation, because thinking big about meaning and order in the universe, and how important the universes' intelligibility is to our relationship with it, informed by data, is a synthesis of things that really matter to me as a reader - taking the intersection of science and meaning seriously.
I don't think that would be enough for plausibly explaining particular scientists offing themselves, but the psychology of someone to whom that kind of question matters that much, which is very much the heart and soul of what drives my interest in non-fiction reading, seems tragically underrepresented as a driving motivation in fiction which I think is terribly unfortunate. But sci-fi sometimes cares about it, and sometimes a lot.
I want to read a spinoff of the Three-Body Problem with this premise.
if objects you put on a table started falling through the floor it would be a bit stressful
lol
but Dr. Becky gets really excited about all the various "crisis in cosmology" because she knows new science/knowledge will emerge from solving those questions
and you remind me there's another season coming up in that series, can't wait
"Is he still in the grandmother’s house? We would like to speak to him."
The lipstick putting can be exposed by simply asking if you would not prefer a version of the scientific method that is never wrong.
Then don't claim it as a strength!
I won't engage further with such bad reasoning and arguments that verge on bad faith.
Are humans even capable of building perfectly reliable systems?
That was not the only thing about the apparatus, just one of the most important, but the point is: we cared, we cared a lot, and we cared a lot about a lot of things.
It's a third of the way through the article when "g-2", the problem at hand, is mentioned. Information that should have been shared in the title took a third of the article to figure out.
Science writing for a general audience is really challenging.
If you're writing an article about a man going to the store to buy a sandwich, the man, the store, and the sandwich should all make appearances by the end of the first paragraph.
These people are writing informative articles like novels and it's incredibly irritating and a disservice if you're actually trying to inform anybody about anything. If you're writing an article about the g-2 anomaly, "g-2 anomaly" belongs in the title not 1/3 the way in.
Someone who writes a sentence like that is in no position to comment on writing style.
In any case it gives me ideas how to check the hypothesis. If the Reality has a limited horizon for planning for new laws, scientists can trick it into inventing new laws that eventually (after some more research and even more laws observed) would start contradicting to each other, and at that point the Reality would snap into a different set of rules.
If it is true, then the plan is like this: we need to wipe all the scientific knowledge from this world and start again, and trick the the Reality into devising better laws of nature. Ah, wait, we have no evidence that the Reality can abandon laws that were introduced already. Pity, the plan is brilliant, but how to check if the Reality can abandon its laws? If laws are local... we can do something like Stephenson described in his Anathem: establish maths doing independent research and comparing their results once in 1000 years.
There are several books from Greg Egan with this idea in mind: Permutation City and Distress. The latter one is exactly about this idea.