Comments by "Lepi Doptera" (@lepidoptera9337) on "The Problem With Sabine Hossenfelder" video.

  1. Her criticism is not valid. She just wants to throw the entire world under the bus because the world didn't indulge her narcissism.
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  2. That's a rather cool myth. A guy who can write a letter to the US president that actually gets read is not "anti-establishment". ;-)
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  3.  @futureshocked  I have been in research for a while and I didn't notice any malice towards women in physics in the last decades. There are few enough of them and the ones I met were doing their jobs very well. Now, if you mean that academia is "testy", then you are right. If you take the challenge of your ideas personally, then you don't belong in research. This won't change with the addition of more female researchers, either. Science is NOT about being nice. Science is about being right.
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  4. A scientist is somebody who works on science. Sabine works exclusively on YouTube content these days. She is a YouTuber.
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  5. That's correct. The people who actually know science who comment on Sabine's videos keep pointing out trivial mistakes and outright lies. ;-)
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  6. Physicists are not responsible for the awful choices of the Nobel committee. Sabine's problem is not that she is a woman. Her problem is that she is a sub-par theorist. You can easily verify this by reading her publications.
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  7. Because that is the public perception among her audience, which consists mostly of people who have been deeply humiliated in high school science and who are now holding a grudge against everybody who is associated with teaching good science.
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  8. Both. Almost all of her headlines are misleading and her physics content is often technically flawed.
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  9. What sets science apart from anything else is that it has an ultimate arbitrator: reality. Please validate Sabine on reality and let us know how it went. You will see that she keeps talking a whole lot of nonsense all the time.
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  10. Penrose has no clue about high energy physics either. He is a relativist. The two sub-fields are about as related as pharmacology and psychiatry are. Pharmacologists can make psychiatric drugs, but would you actually want them to treat patients with severe psychiatric disorders? If not, then you can't expect Penrose to give you an actual criticism of high energy physics.
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  11. So does Trump if you are into lies. ;-)
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  12. I have been in academia for quite a while. I didn't meet all that many horrible people. Certainly no more than on average everywhere else.
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  13. Truth in science has always meant the same thing: whatever you say has to describe reality correctly. That hasn't changed. It's just as valid for you, me and Dave as it is for Sabine. What she says simply does not reflect reality correctly. Please try to grow up.
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  14.  @leepretorius4869  All religion works like a Nigerian Prince scam. Can you tell me why you are a supporter of that particular kind of scam?
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  15. The problem is that if you don't already know physics, then you won't notice her technical mistakes in her physics content, either.
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  16. That's why I don't watch Sabine's videos. Too much posturing, not enough actually true content. ;-)
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  17. Can you tell me what was lucrative about LHC and its detectors for the 50,000-100,000 people who spent years to decades on building them? I was there. I didn't get rich. I didn't see any of my fellow researchers getting rich, either. There were no luxury cars on the parking lots of my university or the CERN parking lot. What in the world are you talking about? To me you sound like a total bullshitter. :-)
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  18.  @icantthinkofaname158  I have no idea what that is even supposed to mean. Of course all of the money for LHC came from governments. Why would a private investor build an accelerator of this size? The largest commercial accelerators I am aware of are the size of a few lab tables and they are mostly being used for medicine and in material sciences. I don't know what "prestige" means in this context. Does a project like this attract young people with an interest in science? Yes. Do these young people bring money? No. They can barely pay the rent. ;-)
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  19. Academia hasn't been toxic towards women for a long time and even if that was so, it's not the reason why Sabine Hossenfelder lack success in physics. She is just not good enough. You can easily see that by reading her publications.
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  20. I have no idea how we are supposed to make financial gains from academia. I have NEVER seen anybody who got rich from it. :-)
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  21. Dude, the first images from China that came out showed hospital personnel in full protective gear with full face masks. Are you high? What are you smoking? ;-)
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  22.  @jarlsparkley  What makes you think that there is no "public oversight" of academia? Would it be the fact that you have never been part of it? ;-)
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  23.  @St37One  There is nothing to disagree about. Anybody can tell you last week's lottery numbers but nobody can tell you next week's. That the universe is not deterministic is a trivial fact. No offense, but did all of you stop growing intellectually in kindergarten? I mean we can agree that they couldn't know the reason why the universe isn't deterministic (because of relativity) in the 18th and 19th centuries when this concept was the color of the season, but that it was always a horrible color is trivial to spot, isn't it? ;-)
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  24.  @georgelionon9050  Yes, it is a bad thing when somebody is using unfair criticism of others to enrich themselves. In the past this would have been called highly amoral, but Trump has unfortunately normalized lying.
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  25. That is exactly what Sabine is doing, though. She simply lies about it with a fake authoritative tone of voice. There is no there there once you dig through her crap.
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  26.  @ashedtogether  Nobody gives a shit about her personal experience. The world does not evolve around Sabine. She needs to grow up. Of course academia is brutal in the sense that somebody is always better than you. It is also paid for by TAXPAYER money, which means that a scientist is RESPONSIBLE for using it wisely. That takes a lot of hard work. Let me spell this out for you in bold, even though I hate screaming on the internet: THIS IS NOT A GAME. We don't get to do this exclusively for personal enjoyment. This is serious business and if you want the money, then you have to deliver.
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  27.  @ashedtogether  Yes, that's a lie. I have been involved in the grant money process and there was nothing junk about it. It was the hard work of dozens, hundreds and in one case thousands of professors, lab scientists and PhD students. If you think it is easy to get some money from a funding agency with some bullshit, then you are not thinking. That, exactly, was Sabine's problem. She wasn't getting enough grants because she was pushing bullshit. You can see it in her own publications. She just doesn't have it.
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  28. Sabine is not like Musk. Musk is successful and he knows how to deliver. Sabine is not successful and she didn't deliver anything other than nonsensical YouTube videos. ;-)
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  29. One of you favorite science communicators told you a lot of nonsense about physics. The only reason why you can't tell is because you don't know physics to begin with. :-)
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  30. Well, universities are schools and you sound exactly like the kind of person who doesn't like school. :-)
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  31. Mathematics is fundamentally different from physics. I am not saying that to diss you guys. Mathematicians are undoubtedly some of the smartest people in the room. I learned some of my core physics intuition from mathematicians. Having said that, you can see the actual difference in the experimental physics lab section. All those gadgets cost a lot of money. The most a mathematician will ever need beyond an office, pen, paper, a whiteboard, a laptop and the library is supercomputer time. Physicists need equipment worth tens of billions of dollars. That creates a very different level of accountability to the taxpayer.
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  32. You are correct. We only built LHC because Congress cancelled the SSC. Does the Higgs field give a hoot? No. ;-)
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  33. I am not aware that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are tenured professors. What did I miss? ;-)
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  34. Then we should be debating the merit of tenure (which I am critical of myself), but what does that have to do with Sabine's false explanations about quantum mechanics, special relativity and string theory? Now, let's say you remove tenure, how does that change the dependence of students on their advisors? The advisor is the person who brought the grants in to do the research. If a grant approves X, then the advisor is required to have a student do something that is at least closely related to X. You can't just take that TAXPAYER money and do with it whatever you want just because the student feels like doing something else. Unless, of course, you will require students to bring their own grant money and lab equipment. Now that will be interesting, won't it... then only the 100 times millionaire and billionaire kids will ever get a PhD. ;-)
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  35. I recently went into the nearest public library. There was not a single physics textbook in the physics section. Honest to god, not one. I would have expected at the very least one or two college level textbooks about classical mechanics, electrodynamics, quantum mechanics and optics. I wasn't even hoping to see an atomic, nuclear physics or general relativity textbook... but there was NOTHING. All I could find were nonsensical things like Hawking's layman's books and stuff like it. Not even Weinberg's "The First Three Minutes" was there, even though that's at least a somewhat useful classic. Not even one copy of Heisenberg's "Physics and Philosophy" or Feynman's "QED" for historical reference (the content of both books is questionable from a modern point of view, but you as a librarian are neither required nor expected to judge that). This is NOT a problem with academia. In comparison, the physics section of the university library closest to me has something like 15,000 physics textbooks and a hundred journals (with many more online), if I remember correctly. So, if you want to talk about a real crisis here, it's a crisis of the public library system.
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  36. Can you give us that citation for a 2005 study that 85% of physics papers are either fakes or very poorly done? See, physics is the only thing that Sabine has been trained in. She knows squat about anything else and I can tell that even within physics she doesn't know all that much.
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  37. Where does this idea come from that academia was ever easy????? If anything, academic research today is easier than in the past thanks to technology and intellectual tools that didn't exist fifty, a hundred or even four hundred years ago. Read Copernicus "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres" and you will see how this giant of science had to literally grind away for years on ideas that we can easily teach kids in kindergarten today because we have all these beautiful pictures of the planets and the sky.
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  38. Yes, that was a lot of bullshit.
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  39.  @Quinellipe  The general initial response by everybody I know was to grab the protective equipment. I even helped a friend in a hospital to find some expired facemasks that were sitting around in a lab storage room. Dude, you need to lay off the psychoactive substances. You seem to be taking them in random order. ;-)
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  40. Please try to choose better science communicators. Hossenfelder is, for sure, not one. An example of a good science communicator is Dr. Becky.
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  41. Academia is primarily about teaching. If your problem is that we don't let anybody just teach any nonsense, then you are right. We do not. We have very strict requirements for teaching at this level... which are actually still not strict enough, if you ask me.
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  42.  @georgelionon9050  I don't know what "the science system" is supposed to be. There is academia that teaches and does research. Then there is the national laboratory system for physics that does only research. That's a much easier environment to work in as a scientist. Other countries have equivalents of that. In medicine they have teaching hospitals. Geologists are working for the USGS, which provides a public service relating to health and safety. Oceanographers might be working for NOAA, space scientists are at NASA etc.. Each of these have individual oversight and org charts. They are all, at the end of the day, striving for excellence and have to account to the US taxpayer. If you think that this isn't being taken very seriously, then you must be a Trumper who feeds on fake news.
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  43. It isn't behind a paywall. You can simply walk into a university library and find all the literature for free. I do agree that there are not nearly enough textbooks in the public library system, though.
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  44.  @stargazer7644  The rest of you get in the car or on the bus and you drive or take a ride to the nearest one. Society makes this material available for free, but it doesn't have to serve it on a golden platter.
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  45.  @wawawuu1514  The internet is NOT academia. Academia are universities and colleges. Plenty of them allow public visitors to their libraries. At most they ask you to pay an annual user fee on the order of a few ten to a few hundred dollars. Running a library is very expensive and books and journals get damaged by use. Librarians need to pay the rent and so we pay them salaries. Surprise. What these institutions will not ask from you is a per item fee that the publishers are making their money with.
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  46.  @wawawuu1514  Then none of this should a big deal. We are generating scientific knowledge worth tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars a year and we are making it available for non-commercial use for basically for free. If you want a commercial license, then academic institutions will charge you. Depending on what you want to license you may have to pay thousands or even hundreds of millions of dollars for it. This, too, is necessary because the exploitation of inventions is expensive, so if anybody without a commercial license could use it, then corporations would simply not use it... without exclusive licenses one simply can't make a business case for investing the additional product R&D cost.
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  47. Her publications on quantum mechanics are complete nonsense. That's on the public record. I kind of doubt your statement about her intelligence. She may have an ability to manipulate math formally, but she lacks basic understanding of what it means and, more importantly, she doesn't have physics intuition. That's simply not enough to be a good physicist. If you want to see what the top people in the field look like, listen to Witten and Arkani-Hamed. There is an alternative explanation... if she knows what all of this means, then she doesn't mind lying, which is at least a moral flaw.
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  48. If that was "the only problem", then she would already be disqualified from modern physics. It hasn't been running on "hard determinism" since 1905.
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  49.  @St37One  Relativity tells us EXACTLY why the universe is not predictable: we have constantly energy flowing in from spacelike separated regions of spacetime. The point in time when we detect this energy (aka "event") is the first (and the last time) this energy can be detected. Nature won't and it can't give us a "heads up" for future events in general. A macroscopic example of this is NASA's "seven minutes of terror" video. During a Mars landing the radio signals from Mars are delayed by something like ten minutes. The actual atmospheric entry sequence, parachute deployment and ignition of landing engines/crane deployment for the lander payload are all over by the time the signal arrives. The ground controllers have no way of influencing these events, but they make a world of a difference to the folks who built the rover: if something goes wrong, they won't have a job for the next five to ten years (well, they have to start over from scratch). If it succeeds, then they will have a toy on Mars to play with. This is an example of non-determinism. The local future does not depend on the local past and present at all. It can not be influenced by any means imaginable and it can't be predicted with any formula from physics. It is like this all over the universe all the time on all temporal and spatial scales. "What happens next" is simply not fully predictable.
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  50. Physicists, chemists and biologist aren't saying anything about social problems. These are not our fields. We don't have the tools and we don't even have any interest in social problems. If you want cheaper housing for the poor, then you have to hire some architects and a construction company. The physics department does NOT design multi-story housing and we do NOT have earth moving equipment. You also need to stop drinking. It makes you delusional about the separation of roles in a modern society. :-)
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  51. Here, let me give you some attention for spewing nonsense. ;-)
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  52.  @georgelionon9050  If your nest is dirty then you might be right, but nothing about physics is dirty the way Sabine makes it appear. Her argument about high energy physics being at an impasse was discussed among high energy physicists when she was still in Kindergarten. She didn't discover the energy desert problem and she has done nothing to solve it. That string theory is "not even wrong" was also known long before Sabine was ever a name in the public's eye. It has nothing to do with theory. It's a trivial consequence of the weakness of gravity. It simply doesn't give us anything to describe beyond the level of general relativity. There is no reproducibility crisis in physics, either. We have literally spent billions of tax payer dollars to validate major results. Her understanding of quantum mechanics is trivially wrong. She hasn't even read the literature up to 1932 for all I can tell and the publications with her name on it are not worth the paper they have been printed on. Whenever she talks about nuclear energy and renewables or the climate she gets major facts wrong, which shows that she hasn't even spent ten minutes on research.
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  53.  @jarlsparkley  I am an experimental high energy physicist. I was there when they designed LHC and its detectors. I talked to the theorists about these problems. I sat in dozens of science talks where these problems were discussed seriously by people who actually understand them. I have read approx. 2000 pages of detector design proposal documents front to back (plus some of the design documents of the SSL, which was the way better machine) and as a result I got to design one of the central elements of one of the world's largest high energy physics detectors. Unlike Sabine I have actually accomplished something of lasting value in physics. ;-)
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  54.  @jarlsparkley  The reason why I can tell that Sabine is lying is because I am one of the people she is lying about. Now let me give you some more attention, lonely kid. You are begging for it so nicely. ;-)
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  55.  @jarlsparkley  All you are spelling out here is that you don't know anything about physics. :-) The existence of an energy desert, for instance, is not a problem. It's a highly likely fact. An adult simply accepts facts instead of complaining about them. That string theory is not even wrong is also just an EXPERIMENTAL fact. Theory doesn't change nature. Theorists can't make gravity stronger just because it would be more convenient for experimentalists. Let's say somebody discovers the correct theory of quantum gravity tomorrow by chance. It would be EXACTLY as untestable as string theory. That you don't understand this makes you the very kind of fool that Sabine is making money with. ;-)
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  56. Chomsky differs very little from Sabine Hossenfelder. Both have a huge ego that they can't back up with actual knowledge.
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  57. Can you please explain to me what you mean by "breakthrough" in physics?
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  58.  @PerpetualAbidance  You are correct. You didn't add anything to anything here. ;-)
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  59. Science isn't controlled by capitalism. It's mostly funded out of federal tax dollars and under control of government agencies. Most of the US R&D budget goes into medicine, if I remember correctly. Physics is a small side note in the budget.
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  60.  @ertymexx  In the US and Europe it's the voters. In Russia it's Putin. In China the man's name is Xi. ;-)
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  61. How much have you been drinking? ;-)
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  62.  @georgelionon9050  If somebody sounds like a drunk I tend to ask how much they have been drinking. I grew up in a wine town. I have seen a lot of drunks as a kid. They behave exactly like many people on the internet. :-)
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  63. Sabine isn't fighting a culture war. She is simply a science troll.
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  64.  @kypekka  That is unfortunately true.
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  65.  @Archimedes_1  Every one of her videos about quantum mechanics is complete nonsense and clickbait. ;-)
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  66.  @Archimedes_1  Is she occasionally correct by chance? Yes. Sound of one hand clapping. All of her titles are clickbait. ;-)
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  67.  @Archimedes_1  Pick a title that is not clickbait. :-)
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  68.  @Archimedes_1  Decoherence is not the correct explanation for what happens in quantum mechanics. You can't understand it from that angle. ;-)
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  69.  @Archimedes_1  So you want to hear the mainstream view, rather than the correct view? OK, that's not science, kid. That's fanboyism, at best. ;-)
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  70.  @efalien5926  I didn't ask you to trust me. None of us ever did. We asked you to pay attention in science class so that you would know enough about science that people like Sabine could not lie about it to you. Were you paying attention? No, of course not. ;-)
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  71.  @Archimedes_1  Yes. You read it on Wikipedia, so it must be true. How old are you and what did you do with the intelligent person that used to live inside you once? ;-) It is the incorrect view and you COULD easily understand that with high school physics, IF you wanted to. But that is not what you are doing here. You are NOT applying high school science to quantum mechanics. You are using a Wikipedia quote as a reason why you didn't actually think about QM yourself. What you are basically telling me is that your main criteria for deciding which way to run is by following the crowd, even when you can see that the crowd is running towards the cliff. That is absolutely nonsensical behavior for an adult person. We tried to teach you better in school in all matters, not just science.
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  72.  @Archimedes_1  Sabine has not dedicated her life to understanding what quantum mechanics is. She is simply repeating a lot of the standard nonsense about it and you can't differentiate her statements from real physics that actually describes nature. ;-)
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  73.  @aquathewise7838  Griffiths tells you openly in his textbook that he doesn't understand quantum mechanics and then he uses the entire book to prove that statement to you. If you haven't thought beyond what can be found in Griffiths, then you won't understand it, either. ;-)
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  74. Yes, that is part of what drives Sabine in her grudge. She didn't get funding because she wasn't good enough. ;-)
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  75. Mathematicians don't get funded much because mathematics is extremely hard. There are just not that many really good mathematicians.
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  76.  @aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaab1  And by "the big part of life" you mean being a man without education and girlfriend who pretends to know something about life on the internet? Dude. ;-)
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  77. Can you show me evidence for bias in high energy physics?
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  78. Name three false science articles off the top of your head. ;-)
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  79. Publish or perish only applies to the 1% of grad students who want to become professors. It's of no importance whatsoever to anybody who isn't trying to get tenure. I don't know why you would feel pressure unless you were planning on (a usually crappy) academic career. You were either never in academia or you completely misunderstood how the system works and what it actually does.
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  80. Sabine is not a sociologist and she has absolutely no working knowledge of your field. I have no idea why you would even take her seriously.
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  81.  @sarahcasm7893 Academia doesn't work that way, fake sociologist kid. You need to stop listening to fake news. ;-)
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  82. Wow, somebody is sour. ;-)
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  83. String theory didn't fail to live up to its promises. It's one of the most interesting pieces of mathematics that is around and it seems to converge rapidly with what the mathematicians call the Langland's program. The total expenses on string theory are a tiny fraction of the total science budget. If you are spending one buck a year of your taxes on theoretical physics, then it's probably a lot. ;-)
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  84. You can't believe in science. Nobody ever asked you, either. We were asking you to pay attention in science class so that people like Sabine couldn't lie to you about it. You didn't. That is YOUR problem.
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  85. The last theory to be introduced into physics was quantum mechanics, around 1930. We don't need a new theory. Quantum mechanics is (by design) correct. If you don't know why that is so, then you still have to learn a lot about it.
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  86. Her opinions about physics are no better. She keeps telling people a lot of nonsense in her videos that is just not so.
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  87. A civil war is being fought by roughly equally sized factions. Sabine is just a troll who is messing with uneducated people on the internet.
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  88.  @rsbah  Click on every single one of her YouTube videos and leave a one line comment like "Best science YouTuber ever!". That's what all the SEO bots do. ;-)
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  89. You have a point. But let's say we would make an actual online science course for you. Would you really watch fifteen 90 minute episodes to learn the basics of e.g. electromagnetism or quantum mechanics? These kinds of lecture series are online. You can see how many people are watching them. Now imagine taking five years worth of these classes (six to eight a year!). That is what it takes to learn a hard scientific discipline these days. Plus all the homework, exams and three to five years for a PhD thesis. Very few people have the stamina for that much suffering. ;-)
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