Glad I didn’t spend the last ten years on that problem! As my CERN advisor suggested :)
pjmlp 1 days ago [-]
All Alumni know that the best discoveries happen after hours of reflection on R1 tables during Summertime. :)
whatsThisBtn4 1 days 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.
podocarp 19 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.
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.
3 hours ago [-]
aleph_minus_one 9 hours ago [-]
> Hence I feel heliocentrism is simply an observable fact.
It isn't. You can easily define a coordinate system for the universe in which the earth is the center.
Heliocentrism just makes some approximate computations easier because the sun is so heavy. Thus in heliocentrism, the orbits of the planets are approximately ellipses (near-circles) around the sun, while in a geocentric model, the orbits have more complicated shapes.
Nevertheless (to explicare "approximate" even in the Newtonian gravity model (i.e. not Einsteinian gravity)) be aware that even in the heliocentric coordinate system the earth (and the other planets) don't move along an elliptical (near-circular) orbit around the sun, but both the sun and the planet move around a common center which is near to the sun.
> There is no sane way to put the earth in the center once you do that. [...] 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.
Modern physics really is about that there is no preferred coordinate system: this manifests itself in the fact that conserved quantities can be derived via Noether's theorem from such symmetries in the natural laws. There is just a choice of a coordinate system which in our solar system makes computations easier.
kps 8 hours ago [-]
>both the sun and the planet move around a common center which is near to the sun.
Within the sun, with one exception.
xelxebar 14 hours ago [-]
Geocentric coordinates are easily observable; just look at the sunrise and sunset. And if you zoom out even more and look at the galaxy, heliocentric coordinates become unreasonable.
stbede 12 hours ago [-]
And at the speed at which the solar system is orbiting the galaxy, I don't know that it would even look much like like the planets are orbiting the sun.
We can't even see an electron. But we can see the effect of a beam of electrons on a low-pressure gas quite easily.
We can't even see a table. We can only see the nerve impulses resulting from the photons resulting from the sunlight bouncing off the table.
A computer can't play sound either, it can only send bits to a DAC.
podocarp 10 hours ago [-]
That is true. I'm not arguing for that standpoint, but it works perfectly fine for all classical matters and has been since Descartes.
I think in a common sense way you do get what I mean though when I say it is obvious that when we see two billiard balls colliding we know it but when think of electrons colliding it is only indirectly through whatever happens after the collision, never the process itself.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
We saw the things that were easy to see long ago. Now we're seeing the things that are harder to see. That is, of course, harder, and more complicated, and only gets worse as we probe deeper, with more and more indirection, but I think all the stuff we are seeing has a pretty good grounding so far that it's actually something we are seeing indirectly and not a model artifact, at least until you get to quarks and gravitational waves, and we definitely can't see the strings of string theory.
cindyllm 9 hours ago [-]
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stbede 12 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.
Or you can put the satellite in the back of a truck and back the truck out of your garage and see the sun orbiting the earth. Yet it remains sane to put anywhere in the center depending on your context.
podocarp 10 hours ago [-]
If you have a reasonable grasp of Newtonian gravity you would also be unable to conclude that. A wrestler flailing a skinny guy around, from the POV of the skinny guy, is still definitely not the skinny guy flailing the wrestler about. I don't see what's to argue here. Given all facts, then there is no POV that results in the conclusion the sun goes round the earth. Just like how there's no placement of the camera that results in you claiming I'm pushing the earth away.
GranularRecipe 12 hours ago [-]
> Yet it is very successful in all its predictions. So obviously the Popperian "falsifiability" is too simple a criteria for science.
Those two sentences contradict each other. If something unobservable implies some observable, i.e. predictable, consequences, then falsifying these predictions would also falsify the unobservable antecedents.
lazide 10 hours ago [-]
The hidden variable/better (unknown) alternative theory problem is what he is referring to.
Newtonian Mechanics are falsifiable, but no one could figure out an example that actually did so, until roughly when the orbit of Mercury was fully observed.
Then it was obvious something was missing.
Is there the equivalent for quarks? Or not?
analog31 17 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.
aleph_minus_one 9 hours ago [-]
Relevant concerning your point:
> What is the most misunderstood historical event?
> The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions.
This statement itself predicades on a Platonic realist metaphysics! Indeed, what is the ideal against which things are judge right and wrong? I think the psychological roots of Enlightenment rationality run deep in the West, making it brutally hard to usurp.
That said, I think we can go a long way in this one case by just throwing out the "wrong" judement and laser focusing on the particulars of utility that science provides. One zoomed-out facet sees it as a collaborative effort as squeezing out repeatable processes, a la Popper et al.
stbede 12 hours ago [-]
How do you feel about Aristotelian realism? Makes more sense to me than nominalism/conceptualism ever has.
dieselgate 23 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ColdStream 18 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.
jambalaya8 23 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 18 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.
jambalaya8 11 hours ago [-]
Well, not really. We can hypothesize there is certainly something _very_weird_ going on in the center, and we kinda know weird things happen at super-densities, and we can conjecture based on our understandings of things like gravity and celestial collapses, but any new black holes or even ones we know of that might have occured won't be in our timeframe, and we can never actually witness one even if it were (short of it suddenly happening to our own glowy ball of gas, but there'd hardly be a you to witness it)...
People like Wheeler and Hawking came up with theories and people basically sought to prove or disprove them, but maybe we have a limited capacity to think outside of those boxes. Like, who really knows, maybe the big bang had similarities... who knows how being close to a black hole really affects stuff like space-time curvature.
ButlerianJihad 11 hours ago [-]
> People like Wheeler and Hawking came up with theories and people basically sought to prove or disprove them
Basically, except that theories aren't "proven".
jeremyjh 8 hours ago [-]
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oersted 18 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).
Still remembering how many people bought into m-branes and p-branes.
jeremyjh 8 hours ago [-]
Black holes are simply a consequence of GR, which has made more successful predictions than just about any physical theory. Did M-branes make any successful predictions?
mmooss 18 hours ago [-]
> we have no clue what we don't know
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 22 hours ago [-]
"The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know." — Aristotle
shusaku 21 hours ago [-]
The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know to whom you should ascribe a quote.
odyssey7 20 hours ago [-]
Could have learned a thing from Socrates.
BobbyTables2 19 hours ago [-]
and Donald Rumsfeld (;->
CuriouslyC 18 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.
i_no_can_eat 12 hours ago [-]
The difference is that we have theorerically sound formation scenarious for black holes under very broad conditions, and we have absolutely no model for a formation scenario of such an exotic dark star.
mr_toad 9 hours ago [-]
Observations keep poking holes in those hypotheses (I’m not sure they even count as theories). We keep finding black holes with anomalous masses, or black holes that formed too early.
Part of the problem is that we have very little observational data. But another big problem is that our best ideas, based on general relativity are known to be incompatible with quantum mechanics.
i_no_can_eat 3 hours ago [-]
My comment was specifically about those alternative "dark stars" hypothesis. Is there one with a formation scenario?
gtowey 22 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 22 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 18 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.
mr_toad 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Exactly, waveform collapse is a philosophical question, it’s not an actual problem for the theory.
oersted 17 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 17 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.
oersted 14 hours ago [-]
Of course, but such a theory doesn't pop out of nowhere. Like in any technical field, new paradigms are always inferior to the incumbent on key metrics, and need room to be nurtured for long periods.
My perception is that there's a cultural issue suppressing the investigation of the causes of quantum mechanics, making it much harder for a better theory to flourish.
It's also really-really hard. If you take my earlier example, the probabilistic theory of the coin-flip is worlds apart in terms of complexity from a real understanding of the forces acting on the coin when it's flipped. It's a massive gap to jump over, you have to come at it from another easier and longer path, like it was done with classical physics.
exmadscientist 16 hours 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.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
A new theory could also explain known observations using fewer assumptions. The standard model has a lot of odd things baked into it - why these specific quarks and leptons? Why no right-handed neutrinos? Most simply, why does each particle have the rest mass it does? And why is there a Higgs field that's very similar to the field of condensation of Cooper pairs in a normal superconductor, but with more dimensions?
Solving just one "why" question might earn you a Nobel prize.
kazinator 1 days 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 23 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 19 hours ago [-]
Or an exceedingly rare random bit flip very subtly altered the simulated physics behavior…
amai 12 hours ago [-]
I bet on a loose cable as explanation for the difference.
This “data driven” science approach sure looks like empiricism from a distance. What am I missing?
throwawayffffas 12 hours ago [-]
Out of my depth really, but I believe the "data driven" approach probably refers to some sort of renormalization.
What renormalization does is your theory produces all sort of infinities but you know there is mechanism that eliminates them but your theory is not able to calculate how that happens and the exact degree so you go out look at real numbers and then tweak your model to predict the correct values .
I may be glossing over misrepresenting stuff but that is the gist of it I think. As far as I understand physists don't love this, Feynman and company had reservations (not objections mid you), but it works and allows you to do additional useful work.
physicsdude 3 hours ago [-]
The data-driven approach is referring to a more general technique --- it's a less fancy concept than renormalization, which only comes up when doing full-blown relativistic quantum field theory. Specifically, it refers to the use of a couple of well-grounded mathematical tricks to sidestep doing a from-first-principles calculation by, effectively, translating the results of different measurements into a prediction for something new (in this case, a quantity that contributes to the calculation of the magnetic moment).
In non-relativistic quantum mechanics, there is the concept of the "wavefunction," from which you can predict the results of measurements of a particle/system. But in most real-world scenarios, you can't actually compute the wavefunction, and so naively you can't make any predictions. But there is something called the "optical theorem," which relates a single evaluation of the wavefunction to a scattering cross-section, which is something that can be measured. If you're familiar with complex analysis, there is also the "residue theorem" which allows you relate individual function values with integrals of the function in the complex plane. Basically, you can combine those two relations to translate kind one integral (which you need to compute) into a different integral (which can be measured).
This is what was done here --- just instead of a simple QM wavefunction, the relevant concept is called a "vacuum polarization function."
teamonkey 13 hours ago [-]
I think it describes the methods needed to obtain and process a large amount of data in a field where getting a small amount of data is expensive and requires incredible hardware.
21asdffdsa12 14 hours ago [-]
The beauty of untestable abstractions upon abstractions? That even stay around when refuted -
17 hours ago [-]
ThrowawayTestr 1 days ago [-]
That's the best part about science.
pavel_lishin 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 22 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.
physicalecon 18 hours ago [-]
I believe at some point they disclose the Trisolaians aren’t actually interested in “solving” the problem. They do have analytical methods, but the problem isn’t prediction but rather the fact that everything they have will routinely burn to the ground and they’ll need to restart from 0. Also they will at some point get flung into a sun.
The “we need to solve this problem!” thread was a ploy to get earthly scientists invested in their plight such that they could convince them to support their cause from the inside.
worldthruword 1 days 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 22 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.
glenstein 1 days 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 22 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.
an0malous 1 days ago [-]
The history of scientific revolutions does not support this view
pavel_lishin 1 days 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 1 days 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 16 hours 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 20 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 22 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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.
fc417fc802 1 days 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 1 days 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 22 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 21 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.
glenstein 1 days 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 16 hours 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.
glenstein 10 hours ago [-]
>if I remember correctly, the plot point wasn't a "civilization level reaction"
Your memory is exactly right. But in this instance, what I'm reacting to is not the book but to an HN commenter who glibly claimed that "the history of scientific revolutions" demonstrated that scientists would be suicidal in response to negative data, a pretty extreme claim, followed by a different commenter attempting to support this claim with two examples of scientists frustrated by lack of acceptance of their work that did not die by suicide, massively underestimating the kind of data necessary to support the notion that of scientific revolutions demonstrate the self destructiveness of scientists in response to uncooperative data.
But you are right, that's completely unrelated to what happens in the book, which is all the more reason why appealing to it to explain the behavior of scientists in the Three Body is beside the point. The book doesn't even make that argument! You are not asked to believe that there's some baked in tendency of scientists toward self destruction, it's explained an entirely different way: they are subjected to a campaign of sabotage, harassment, and worse.
The whole detour into whether scientists in the usual case would off themselves is a frustrating non sequitur born of short attention spans, that's not even true (and certainly not at such a level of generality that it's a characteristic response to scientific revolutions throughout history) and it's not even applicable to the events in the book.
ceejayoz 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 21 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.
What do you think you've proven with these links?
glenstein 10 hours ago [-]
Someone who gets it! This whole branch of comments is like a comedy of errors of distractedness in multiple directions. The wrong theory, dramatically inadequate evidence in support of that theory, and a lack of applicability of that theory to the book even if it were true. The book explains it by a specific and intentional campaign of harassment and sabotage (and worse) aimed at scientists. Terrifying hallucinations, death threats, and violent sabotage by a group of domestic collaborators. It's not just scientists getting bummed out by not having agreeable data.
And for that matter you would think scientific revolutions, which to some degree are about how you struggle in response to the limits of an old theory that can't explain data, are nevertheless more properly understood as triumphant moments of progress that validate the practice of science, not failures and dead ends the scientists in the book experience.
Both examples from medicine rather than physics. Can you give an example from physics? Preferably from the last century or two?
ceejayoz 1 days 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 1 days 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.
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).
jpk 1 days ago [-]
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.
ASalazarMX 1 days 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.
black6 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
In the book they get different results on all tests they run, consistency is gone, that is something else.
ck2 1 days 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 22 hours ago [-]
[dead]
storywatch 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 18 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 23 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 1 days ago [-]
Einstein wanted to measure how fast Earth moves through ether as his research thesis.
DoctorOetker 17 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 1 days ago [-]
That’s life. Sometimes you see it coming and ride the wave, sometimes you’re late to the party.
qsera 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
Mathematicians proof theorems so they are always correct. Physicists don't have that privilege.
qsera 1 days ago [-]
>Physicists don't have that privilege.
Then don't claim it as a strength!
exmadscientist 1 days 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 17 hours 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.
qsera 12 hours ago [-]
Your "scientific method" can only correct the "mistakes" as long as economics allows it. A wrong belief held "scientifically" will go on and on if there is sufficient economic incentives to make it go on....And it is the "true believers" of science that provides such economic incentives..!
So much for celebration!
Sure this "Muon mystery" that no one cares about financially could be corrected without much effort. May be you should praise the gods of economics to make changes that are in the best interests of humanity possible..
pmontra 7 hours ago [-]
I don't understand this argument. Even ancient Greek philosophers could do their time's science because their economy allowed them to have time to think and food to eat and didn't have to go working in the fields. And they passed on their fair share of wrong beliefs that have been debunked only in the last few centuries.
It's in the nature of being humans. Or God created the universe and one is God and knows exactly how everything works. No wrong beliefs but please teach us.
qsera 2 hours ago [-]
>Greek philosophers could do their time's science because their economy allowed them to have time to think and food to eat and didn't have to go working in the fields. And they passed on their fair share of wrong beliefs that have been debunked only in the last few centuries.
Sure, it would have been much worse if only a select few had the privilege. Like if the king "funded" only those who said/stamped the things the king wanted as "scientific"...
clipsy 18 hours ago [-]
It isn't making mistakes that's a strength, it's the commitment to acknowledging and addressing mistakes.
ThrowawayTestr 19 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 17 hours 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.
1. "Science" can only correct when economics allows it to do so.
2. True believers of science who are ever apologetic to the problems with contemporary scientific method provides economic incentives, and prevent real science to happen.
Hence my irritation with the "Celebration" when ever science makes a mistakes (an apologetic gesture to stop the loss of "faith" in science), because that is the unmistaken mark of a "True believer".
24 hours ago [-]
shevy-java 13 hours ago [-]
If old results do not add up then I can see two immediate reasons:
- The new results are wrong. That's why there is a difference.
- The old results were wrong. In this case all involved scientists should be very much ashamed to have helpfully participated in worshipping wrongness and fakery.
A third option could be partial wrongness, but I group this into the second case. In the modern era I no longer buy into honesty of scientists at all times. Case in point: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1197258 - bacterium growing via arsenic. Totally fabricated, hence lateron "retracted" (originally published in 2010).
throwawayffffas 12 hours ago [-]
There is a fourth option, something has changed in between the old and new expirements.
This has happened before in other settings, disappearing polymorphs are a real thing.
sylware 12 hours ago [-]
Is Sabine H. on the case?
jongjong 22 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 22 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.
jongjong 14 hours ago [-]
Sure, but you can only solve a problem that you are aware of. My concern here is about the unknown unknowns. The task at hand is exceedingly complex and requires extreme precision, with many unknown variables... And the people solving the problems have conflicting interests as they are paid hourly.
Even if there are bonuses, all the bonuses would be given on the basis of solving known problems. There is literally zero monetary incentive to solve unknown problems; only owners care about that stuff. Employees don't care about that. They might point out some whilst not mentioning others.
I've been a software engineer for 15 years and my experience is that unknown unknowns in tech are like a secret piggy bank for engineers to tap into in times of need. They are rarely brought up; only in the event that an engineer feels the need to justify their value to the company/project. The accumulation of secrets gives engineers differentiable value within the project/company and makes them hard to replace... So they tend to keep at least a couple to themselves... They ration it; like retirement planning.
The individual incentive to conceal issues until a time of personal need (when layoffs are looming) outweighs the collective incentive to identify new issues to generate more billable hours of work for the team.
If you're the only person who knows the issue which prevents a multi-million dollar project from coming to fruition, that is valuable information and gives you a lot of leverage in terms of job security... Which is the biggest reward you can get in this line of work.
And it's not malicious; the people who know about those issues probably also solve more issues and contribute more solutions than anyone else. The concealment may be happening subconsciously; they won't admit to themselves that a specific kind of problem exists.
Like when I worked in crypto, all the engineers there believed that the project could scale and also be decentralized... When it couldn't, given the chosen approach. The belief is still there years later; though all the rational engineers left, they were promptly replaced by believers.
panda-giddiness 9 hours ago [-]
Precision results are usually blinded, so it's not as if scientists can just rejigger the calculation if it's giving an implausible result; once the result has been unblinded, the calculation is finished. The physicists working on these experiments are therefore extremely motivated to quantify all potentially non-negligible sources of systemic error beforehand.
That said, the issue in this case is almost certainly systemic, not new physics. But I don't think you should consider the misfortune of the data-driven calculation typical; rather, it's notable specifically because of the discrepancies. Most calculations do not have such large disagreements. The lattice results, in contrast to those from the data-driven approach, all line up very nicely.
exmadscientist 3 hours ago [-]
To be fair, sometimes the blinding is a piece of duct tape over the display on a piece of fancy OTS industrial equipment. Though we needed to poke at it occasionally, so we needed a duct tape flap we could lift up every now and then rather than just a bare piece. I forget if I made ours or if C made it, but I remember our little blinding flap fondly.
(This is more common than you'd think.)
teamonkey 13 hours ago [-]
Bluntly, I think this just highlights why software engineering is not a serious engineering discipline. There are some exceptions, like safety-critical systems, but on the whole, software is not designed and developed with a rigor comparable to physical sciences.
jongjong 13 hours ago [-]
Especially true now with AI coding. But I would push back on the idea that sciences or other engineering disciplines are not affected. Several of the people I met who were especially guilty of this in software sector had a PhD in mathematics and used to work in academic institutions.
I think intellectual integrity has been on the decline overall.
exmadscientist 3 hours ago [-]
> the people solving the problems have conflicting interests as they are paid hourly
LOL. No, no they are not. There's a lot of reasons I'm out of that game, and this is one of them. $1400 a month (2010 dollars), unlimited working hours, unlimited international travel. Sound fun? No?
> bonuses
I think I got a $5 Starbucks gift card once. I guess you could count the free leftover pizza as a "bonus"?
To address the heart of your argument, Science is not structured like software engineering, and if you're thinking it is, you're making a lot of mistakes. Scientists often do well as software engineers, should they change careers [waves hand!]; economics aside, software engineers very rarely make good scientists. The mentality is simply different.
As regards complexity management and dishonesty; yes, straight-up dishonesty does occur sometimes. We are all human, after all. But science is done in the physical world, and unlike software or mathematics, the physical world does not admit unlimited complexity. So things must be divided up in a manageable way right from the very beginning. On a big experiment, if your little "box" of responsibility does not work, you can and will be replaced. I have seen it done. Even to or by me. (If involved, I have historically been the one doing the replacing; but I've been on the other end, too.) And you will be cross-checked by independent people, if it is critical: I have seen this too. You had better get it right.
jcranmer 21 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 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
You dislike that people write for audiences other than yourself.
bawolff 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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.
pmontra 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, Quanta articles are way too long. They could get to the point in one quarter of the length.
jibal 16 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.
Someone who writes a sentence like that is in no position to comment on writing style.
gloryjulio 1 days 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'
odetojoy 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ordu 1 days 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 1 days 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 23 hours ago [-]
I suspect the universe is very very strange.
touisteur 1 days 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 24 hours ago [-]
Also read Greg Egan's short story Luminous :)
cyberax 1 days 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.
ordu 9 hours ago [-]
Wow, thank you. I'd love to learn what others are capable to come up with starting with these premises.
worldthruword 1 days ago [-]
Distress sounds like "Distributed Solipsism".
Rendered at 21:14:54 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
It isn't. You can easily define a coordinate system for the universe in which the earth is the center.
Heliocentrism just makes some approximate computations easier because the sun is so heavy. Thus in heliocentrism, the orbits of the planets are approximately ellipses (near-circles) around the sun, while in a geocentric model, the orbits have more complicated shapes.
Nevertheless (to explicare "approximate" even in the Newtonian gravity model (i.e. not Einsteinian gravity)) be aware that even in the heliocentric coordinate system the earth (and the other planets) don't move along an elliptical (near-circular) orbit around the sun, but both the sun and the planet move around a common center which is near to the sun.
> There is no sane way to put the earth in the center once you do that. [...] 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.
Modern physics really is about that there is no preferred coordinate system: this manifests itself in the fact that conserved quantities can be derived via Noether's theorem from such symmetries in the natural laws. There is just a choice of a coordinate system which in our solar system makes computations easier.
Within the sun, with one exception.
We can't even see a table. We can only see the nerve impulses resulting from the photons resulting from the sunlight bouncing off the table.
A computer can't play sound either, it can only send bits to a DAC.
I think in a common sense way you do get what I mean though when I say it is obvious that when we see two billiard balls colliding we know it but when think of electrons colliding it is only indirectly through whatever happens after the collision, never the process itself.
Or you can put the satellite in the back of a truck and back the truck out of your garage and see the sun orbiting the earth. Yet it remains sane to put anywhere in the center depending on your context.
Those two sentences contradict each other. If something unobservable implies some observable, i.e. predictable, consequences, then falsifying these predictions would also falsify the unobservable antecedents.
Newtonian Mechanics are falsifiable, but no one could figure out an example that actually did so, until roughly when the orbit of Mercury was fully observed.
Then it was obvious something was missing.
Is there the equivalent for quarks? Or not?
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.
> What is the most misunderstood historical event?
> The Galileo Affair
> https://tidbits.quora.com/What-is-the-most-misunderstood-his...
This statement itself predicades on a Platonic realist metaphysics! Indeed, what is the ideal against which things are judge right and wrong? I think the psychological roots of Enlightenment rationality run deep in the West, making it brutally hard to usurp.
That said, I think we can go a long way in this one case by just throwing out the "wrong" judement and laser focusing on the particulars of utility that science provides. One zoomed-out facet sees it as a collaborative effort as squeezing out repeatable processes, a la Popper et al.
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.
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.
People like Wheeler and Hawking came up with theories and people basically sought to prove or disprove them, but maybe we have a limited capacity to think outside of those boxes. Like, who really knows, maybe the big bang had similarities... who knows how being close to a black hole really affects stuff like space-time curvature.
Basically, except that theories aren't "proven".
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.
Part of the problem is that we have very little observational data. But another big problem is that our best ideas, based on general relativity are known to be incompatible with quantum mechanics.
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.
Exactly, waveform collapse is a philosophical question, it’s not an actual problem for the theory.
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.
My perception is that there's a cultural issue suppressing the investigation of the causes of quantum mechanics, making it much harder for a better theory to flourish.
It's also really-really hard. If you take my earlier example, the probabilistic theory of the coin-flip is worlds apart in terms of complexity from a real understanding of the forces acting on the coin when it's flipped. It's a massive gap to jump over, you have to come at it from another easier and longer path, like it was done with classical physics.
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.
Solving just one "why" question might earn you a Nobel prize.
Only 1/2 :-)
See
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/loose-cable-blamed-speed...
What renormalization does is your theory produces all sort of infinities but you know there is mechanism that eliminates them but your theory is not able to calculate how that happens and the exact degree so you go out look at real numbers and then tweak your model to predict the correct values .
I may be glossing over misrepresenting stuff but that is the gist of it I think. As far as I understand physists don't love this, Feynman and company had reservations (not objections mid you), but it works and allows you to do additional useful work.
In non-relativistic quantum mechanics, there is the concept of the "wavefunction," from which you can predict the results of measurements of a particle/system. But in most real-world scenarios, you can't actually compute the wavefunction, and so naively you can't make any predictions. But there is something called the "optical theorem," which relates a single evaluation of the wavefunction to a scattering cross-section, which is something that can be measured. If you're familiar with complex analysis, there is also the "residue theorem" which allows you relate individual function values with integrals of the function in the complex plane. Basically, you can combine those two relations to translate kind one integral (which you need to compute) into a different integral (which can be measured).
This is what was done here --- just instead of a simple QM wavefunction, the relevant concept is called a "vacuum polarization function."
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.
The “we need to solve this problem!” thread was a ploy to get earthly scientists invested in their plight such that they could convince them to support their cause from the inside.
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.
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.
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.
Your memory is exactly right. But in this instance, what I'm reacting to is not the book but to an HN commenter who glibly claimed that "the history of scientific revolutions" demonstrated that scientists would be suicidal in response to negative data, a pretty extreme claim, followed by a different commenter attempting to support this claim with two examples of scientists frustrated by lack of acceptance of their work that did not die by suicide, massively underestimating the kind of data necessary to support the notion that of scientific revolutions demonstrate the self destructiveness of scientists in response to uncooperative data.
But you are right, that's completely unrelated to what happens in the book, which is all the more reason why appealing to it to explain the behavior of scientists in the Three Body is beside the point. The book doesn't even make that argument! You are not asked to believe that there's some baked in tendency of scientists toward self destruction, it's explained an entirely different way: they are subjected to a campaign of sabotage, harassment, and worse.
The whole detour into whether scientists in the usual case would off themselves is a frustrating non sequitur born of short attention spans, that's not even true (and certainly not at such a level of generality that it's a characteristic response to scientific revolutions throughout history) and it's not even applicable to the events in the book.
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?
And for that matter you would think scientific revolutions, which to some degree are about how you struggle in response to the limits of an old theory that can't explain data, are nevertheless more properly understood as triumphant moments of progress that validate the practice of science, not failures and dead ends the scientists in the book experience.
(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."
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!
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!
So much for celebration!
Sure this "Muon mystery" that no one cares about financially could be corrected without much effort. May be you should praise the gods of economics to make changes that are in the best interests of humanity possible..
It's in the nature of being humans. Or God created the universe and one is God and knows exactly how everything works. No wrong beliefs but please teach us.
Sure, it would have been much worse if only a select few had the privilege. Like if the king "funded" only those who said/stamped the things the king wanted as "scientific"...
I won't engage further with such bad reasoning and arguments that verge on bad faith.
Summary:
1. "Science" can only correct when economics allows it to do so. 2. True believers of science who are ever apologetic to the problems with contemporary scientific method provides economic incentives, and prevent real science to happen.
Hence my irritation with the "Celebration" when ever science makes a mistakes (an apologetic gesture to stop the loss of "faith" in science), because that is the unmistaken mark of a "True believer".
- The new results are wrong. That's why there is a difference.
- The old results were wrong. In this case all involved scientists should be very much ashamed to have helpfully participated in worshipping wrongness and fakery.
A third option could be partial wrongness, but I group this into the second case. In the modern era I no longer buy into honesty of scientists at all times. Case in point: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1197258 - bacterium growing via arsenic. Totally fabricated, hence lateron "retracted" (originally published in 2010).
This has happened before in other settings, disappearing polymorphs are a real thing.
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.
Even if there are bonuses, all the bonuses would be given on the basis of solving known problems. There is literally zero monetary incentive to solve unknown problems; only owners care about that stuff. Employees don't care about that. They might point out some whilst not mentioning others.
I've been a software engineer for 15 years and my experience is that unknown unknowns in tech are like a secret piggy bank for engineers to tap into in times of need. They are rarely brought up; only in the event that an engineer feels the need to justify their value to the company/project. The accumulation of secrets gives engineers differentiable value within the project/company and makes them hard to replace... So they tend to keep at least a couple to themselves... They ration it; like retirement planning.
The individual incentive to conceal issues until a time of personal need (when layoffs are looming) outweighs the collective incentive to identify new issues to generate more billable hours of work for the team.
If you're the only person who knows the issue which prevents a multi-million dollar project from coming to fruition, that is valuable information and gives you a lot of leverage in terms of job security... Which is the biggest reward you can get in this line of work.
And it's not malicious; the people who know about those issues probably also solve more issues and contribute more solutions than anyone else. The concealment may be happening subconsciously; they won't admit to themselves that a specific kind of problem exists.
Like when I worked in crypto, all the engineers there believed that the project could scale and also be decentralized... When it couldn't, given the chosen approach. The belief is still there years later; though all the rational engineers left, they were promptly replaced by believers.
That said, the issue in this case is almost certainly systemic, not new physics. But I don't think you should consider the misfortune of the data-driven calculation typical; rather, it's notable specifically because of the discrepancies. Most calculations do not have such large disagreements. The lattice results, in contrast to those from the data-driven approach, all line up very nicely.
(This is more common than you'd think.)
I think intellectual integrity has been on the decline overall.
LOL. No, no they are not. There's a lot of reasons I'm out of that game, and this is one of them. $1400 a month (2010 dollars), unlimited working hours, unlimited international travel. Sound fun? No?
> bonuses
I think I got a $5 Starbucks gift card once. I guess you could count the free leftover pizza as a "bonus"?
To address the heart of your argument, Science is not structured like software engineering, and if you're thinking it is, you're making a lot of mistakes. Scientists often do well as software engineers, should they change careers [waves hand!]; economics aside, software engineers very rarely make good scientists. The mentality is simply different.
As regards complexity management and dishonesty; yes, straight-up dishonesty does occur sometimes. We are all human, after all. But science is done in the physical world, and unlike software or mathematics, the physical world does not admit unlimited complexity. So things must be divided up in a manageable way right from the very beginning. On a big experiment, if your little "box" of responsibility does not work, you can and will be replaced. I have seen it done. Even to or by me. (If involved, I have historically been the one doing the replacing; but I've been on the other end, too.) And you will be cross-checked by independent people, if it is critical: I have seen this too. You had better get it right.
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.