Comments by "Lepi Doptera" (@lepidoptera9337) on "Can Physics Be Too Speculative? An Honest Opinion." video.

Yes, you are not a physicist.
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She knows as much and as little as everybody else.
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@jefferyzielke7665 That only means that you would bore her to death on a date, if that's what you mean. Having said that, I don't find most of her criticism of science particularly deep. She says what everybody knows: high energy physics is in a desert and cosmology keeps surprising us. Neither can be helped and we should call ourselves lucky that we haven't hit a desert in both areas, otherwise we would have a real crisis in physics. As is, however, we are not in the desert. We are having some of the best, most interesting times, ever. Well, maybe not if you are a high energy physicist, like she is. She made the wrong career choice. That's all.
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@jefferyzielke7665 You would be boring her if you tried asking her about the stuff she does for a living. That was my point. I don't study quantum gravity. I used to do experimental physics, which means I can differentiate between where the theorists would like us to be and where we really are. We are nowhere close to the parameter ranges that they are talking about, please trust me on that. It's like a snail talking about flying to Pluto squared... that's roughly the size of the parametric desert between current experiments and quantum gravity. Baring a technological miracle that gap will simply not close in anybody's lifetime, probably not even in the entire 21st century. I wouldn't suggest any career for Dr. Hossenfelder. She has made her choices. If you are a young physicists in your first couple semesters in university, right now, I would suggest that you stay far away from high energy physics, especially anything that uses an accelerator facility. It's not that there aren't interesting detail problems there, but the next big breakthroughs won't be happening for decades, well outside your likely career horizon. Astronomy, on the other hand, is going through a technological revolution, right now. There will be amazing new instruments for fifty years to come (especially space based, long baseline interferometers). The amount of data that's in the sky is absolutely astonishing and it's ripe for the taking. That's the much safer bet. Having said that, most physicists end up in other fields, anyway. Solid state physics and material sciences always offer solid employment opportunities in industry, if that is what somebody is interested in. Positions in astronomy are rare and hard to get and that won't change... so unless you are top of your field... tough luck.
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@jefferyzielke7665 Of course everybody wants to know what happens above 1 TeV. Even the astronomers need that information for cosmology. The problem is that nobody has the TDollar for the astronomical size accelerator. :-)
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If the opinion is well founded they are perfectly welcome to hear it. The problem with Sabine Hossenfelder's "critique" of science is that it's obvious. We (as in "we physicists") know what the problems are. We don't need Sabine to tell us what we are working on daily. It may be new to you, the general audience, but she is really not all that original. You can have these kinds of discussions between first semesters in every university cafeteria that is within ten miles of a physics department any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
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@ArcFixer There are no apologetics in science. There are only people who rise to the challenges and become the great scientists of the next generation and then there is everybody else who is not even mentioned in the history of science. That would be you and Sabine. And me. Take care. :-)
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Except that you are never being shown old science. You are only being shown kindergarten material that scientists think you can understand... and then you constantly disappoint us.
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That was a very odd way of saying "good is good enough for now". If god could live up to that level, he would even be believable. But then... he can't.
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@namehidden8854 Computer science doesn't have a godlike perspective, though. Instead it has a little thing called the halt-problem. You guys can't even tell if or when a ten--liner will come to a stop. So much delusion in every faculty... unbelievable.
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@namehidden8854 The point is that there is no "godlike perspective". Not in science, not in mathematics, not in computer science. That's just some bullshit that they believed in religiously in the 18th and 19th centuries (much less so later, though, the writing was kind of on the wall by the 1880s, I believe). The simple fact is that Newton already noticed that he couldn't solve the three-body problem. We still can't solve it. Nobody ever will. It actually turns out that one can only solve roughly one dozen classes of (so called integrable) Hamiltonians exactly. Among an infinity of an infinity (we are talking about the cardinality of real valued functions here, not just the cardinality of vector spaces) of cases we can solve a dozen. THAT is the power limit of physics. In mathematics they have Goedel's theorems and in computer science there are the related halt-problem and similar questions about the limits of computation. Science is inherently limited. One has to accept that and play to the best of ones abilities within those limits. People need to stop dragging these bs ideas about unlimited powers and "top-down-views" into the discussion. Those are long failed philosophical concepts, nothing less, nothing more. Reality is much more sobering... and also much more interesting.
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Yes, Bobby, they have been looking at ALL possibilities for the past 70 years, you just didn't know about it. Neither did I, for the longest time, and unlike you I was actually in science. Dark matter didn't have much of a signature in the community because it is so hard to exclude trivial reasons for it (like dark, cold ordinary matter) that one couldn't say anything substantial about it until very recently. Now we can exclude ordinary matter and THAT makes it interesting.
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@Bobby-fj8mk There are dozens of suggestions for different kinds of non-Newtonian gravity. The problem is that none of them seem to work well, either. That line of reasoning is not all that new, by the way. Modifications to general relativity have been under investigation since, at least, the late 1950s, very early 1960s. So far nature isn't very kind to us... every measurement, including dark energy, seems to confirm that Einstein was spot on with his guess. So it's really not because we aren't trying hard enough. We are. But we are also missing at least one major phenomenon that can open all of this up to a wider vista than what we are getting from our observations, so far. And with regards to dark matter... there is still plenty of experimentally/observationally untouched space inside the standard model where it can hide. It will take decades of work to rule out that nothing is hiding in there... and that assumes that the structure of the SM is actually the correct low energy theory... which is may not even be. It's simply a hard problem.
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Just because something is irrelevant to you doesn't mean anything. That's just your personal opinion getting too much weight.
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Especially among the crowd that listens to Sabine Hossenfelder. If I went to the physics library tomorrow, how many of you would I find there reading a serious science textbook? :-)
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The naive perspective is yours alone. You are exhibiting the usual DK effect of the philosopher.
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@xoxb2 You didn't have to be one. I am just putting a mirror in front of you.
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Physics is never speculative. It's descriptive. Hypotheses in physics, as in other sciences, are necessarily speculative and it really doesn't matter how far a theoretician leans out of the window. General relativity, for instance, was extremely speculative for its time. So was quantum mechanics. What matters is that the speculation turns into falsifiable prediction. That, of course, is in the hands of nature. There is nothing a theorist can do about what can and can not be tested with the financial/technological means of ones time. There are plenty of boring, more than obvious hypotheses that are untestable at the moment because nobody is willing to for a trillion dollars in funding over for the necessary size of the experiment.
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Yes, that is exactly why we built the LHC and why we will be launching the James Webb Telescope in six weeks. It's all theory, isn't it? ;-)
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Philosophy has been bullshit since 500BC.
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@jefbryant3340 There is nothing special about the date. One can probably push it back by another 50 years or more for the pre-Socratic philosophers. Either way, the Greek took a good thing (somewhat logical thinking) and made it worse by taking it too far into the abstract. Plato took it as far as to pretend that it can live entirely in the realm of the abstract without any connection to reality. That was peak-bullshit and philosophers never recovered from that false assumption. Unlike science, philosophy is not self-correcting and it shows.
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@jefbryant3340 I certainly don't envy your complete lack of understanding of what went wrong with philosophy. It does not bode well for your intelligence in general.
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Says the person who has never done even one second of science in his life.
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It must be cooling down where you live.
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The multiverse was never a topic among serious physicists. If you are falling for the guys who sell books to laymen with it, then that's your problem. :-)
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