Sabine Hossenfelder
2022
Instantly stop all progress in the worldâs most successful scientific community using only two words inducing permanent paralytic failure that cannot be questioned.
Iâll go first: âQuantum Gravityâ
you're confusing the symptom with the disease
Hi Sabine!
I donât follow your statement here. How am I confused?
I just meant the cause of the problem is that theoretical physicists don't understand the responsibility they carry when experimental tests take longer and longer. That they got stuck on (a particular idea of) quantum gravity is the effect, but not the cause.
Hmm. As you know Iâm historically a big supporter of your courage & insight as critic. Perhaps you know something here that I do not as a nonphysicist. Open to that.
But I disagree. The Q-Gravity Mass Delusion is quite different in character. It is highly specific in its effect.
It is tied to all sorts of weirdness involving top physics and math people, bizarre funders, forgotten research institutes, aerospace companies, post Manhattan Project government secrecy, the golden age of General Relativity andâŚwords fail meâŚoutright quackery.
GUTs are a good test case. I believe you are in error going after Beauty when it comes to Grand Unified Theory. Your critique to Neil Degrasse Tyson recently applied to Georgi and Glashow Basic SU(5)âŚbut not to Pati-Salaam SU(4) x SU(2) x SU(2) for example.
I caution that you not fall into the trap of using Beauty as critique.
The abuse of Beauty in String Theory and Quantum Gravity more generally is valid as a target.
Critiquing the use of beauty, by contrast is a suicide mission. And I donât want to see you on it. As a friend.
Beauty *is* a light in the darkness as experiment becomes less accessible. Perhaps our best one.
But not all lights in the darkness are natural daylight leading to the exits from Platoâs cave.
2025
Itâs not that String Theorists ended up forgetting details of the physical world, so much as they ended up resenting the physical world for existing.
Imagine being lectured on how physics works by these people:
âI donât give a damn about the Standard Model.â
âThe Standard Model is âUgly as Sinâ.â
âI havenât had a lepton or hadron enter any work Iâve done in 25 years.â
âWe all know Supersymmetry is needed to make our best models work. When nature decided not to provide superpartners at the LHC we retaliated and snubbed her right back by ignoring her from then on.â
âItâs okay that you donât get all the magnificent progress made in quantum gravity and theoretical physics since Juan [Maldacena]. Itâs not for everyone. It requires a powerful mind and is very subtle if you are still focused on the physical world.â
âOutsiders canât get that it is the physical world that held physics back. Luckily we solved that, but it is awkward to talk about this with people outside quantum gravity.â
âRight. I just donât care about the physical world. Sorry.â
âWe have to admit the truth. String Theory with a capital S failed as physics. Period. Which is why we have to go back and re-examine everythingâŚAnd then rebuild String Theory again in light of what we learned.â
ââ-
These people are lecturing others about what science is. As professors. As journal editors. As prize recipients. As members of the National Academy.
This is a mass delusion Sabine. Or a cover story. I think I donât have a third option. What is clear is that the above is 100% anti-science. It is trying to stop science from happening in public physics. It is a community mass delusion threatened not only by science, but now by the PHYSICAL WORLD itself.
Am I the only person on earth experiencing this at this level?? This is something you learn by putting up a real alternative focused on the real world of 3 generations of chiral matter. The above is what is unlocked when there are alternatives presented.
This isnât about funding anymore Sabine. Itâs not about predictive power. Itâs not about being seduced by beautiful mathematics.
Itâs about physicts stopping physics in physics departments by resenting and spurning the physical world for failing THEM. And then lecturing us on what science is when they have not a clue how science works. At all.
I would argue that denying a genetic basis of skin colour is on a different level than forgetting the details of the standard model, but same energy I guess.
I have certainly met people with this attitude but I've found that to be quite rare.
The mass delusion that still persists in the foundations of physics is the idea that just guessing some maths amounts to making a scientific "prediction". It's a major methodological problem that physicists are evidently unwilling to solve, even though I am perfectly sure that most of them know very well what I am talking about. And the major reason for this is that many of them quite literally live from inventing nonsense theories and publishing them. They haven't learned anything else.
That said, it's somewhat tangential for the point I was trying to make in the comment that you quote. I just meant that the basics of genetics are middle school knowledge and even leaving that aside, one doesn't need a PhD to notice that skin colour, like many other physical features, is highly heritable. In contrast, I don't expect people to know the symmetry groups of the standard model.
I think we have different experiences.
The first line of defense is âOf course if anyone had any more promising ideas on how to go beyond the Standard Model, weâd all work on thatâŚâ