Modern Wisdom - #028 - Sabine Hossenfelder - How Politics And Beauty Leads Physics Astray

Episode Date: September 3, 2018

Sabine Hossenfelder is a blogger and Theoretical Physicist who researches quantum gravity, she is also a Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies. We often think of Physicists as being the smartest minds on the planet, bastions of cognitive perfection who are immune to the dogma & ideological biases of common humans. Today we learn that may not be the case. Expect to discover just how physicists' obsessions with "beautiful theories" may be holding the human race back from making it's next major leap forward, along with a fantastic background to just what how the landscape of theoretical physics looks right now. Further Reading: Sabine's Blog: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/ Follow Sabine on Twitter: https://twitter.com/skdh Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray: http://amzn.eu/d/gdpo29c Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends. This week I am talking to a theoretical physicist, a bit of a departure from my usual sort of guests, which is very interesting. Sabina Hassenfelder is a theoretical physicist, blogger, and author. Her most recent book, Lost in Math, How Beauty Leads Physics astray, talks about physicists' obsession with beautiful theories and how this is potentially leading to a restriction in progress for physics overall. It sounds like quite a nebulous and difficult to define area and it turns out that it actually is, but we do a pretty good job of working out just what is happening in the physics world at the moment. What I found particularly interesting was discovering just how much politics influences physics, to get your research funded, what the hurdles are that you need to jump through and who's rings you need to kiss in order

to be supported. It seems very contradictory to think that a scientific subject area requires requires people to play a game akin to what you would presume in Wall Street, where you're sticking to the right kinds of rhetoric, and you're pushing the correct narrative coming from the right educational background, coming from the right conceptual theoretical background. Really, really interesting. And it was a whole world that I didn't even know existed. So, here we go. Sabina Hassanfelder, how are you today?

I'm doing fine, how are you? Very good, thank you. Where are you in the world at the moment? I'm in Heidelberg, that's like 100 km south of Frankfurt. Ah, very nice indeed, very nice. So I want to get straight into it. You will be the first physicist which we've featured on the podcast. So the weight of the entire world of physics is resting on your computer at the moment.

I want to ask a really fundamental question. It's been a really long time since we've seen major breakthroughs in physics, global newsworthy breakthroughs. Is there a reason why that's the case? Well, one of the reasons is probably that you're reading the wrong news. There have been a lot of breakthroughs in physics. What I'm mostly concerned with are really the foundations of physics. So the biggest breakthroughs in physics are the ones that the Nobel prizes are getting handed out for. And you find a list of that on the website of the Nobel prize academy. But I'm really talking about the foundations of physics. And there you are right. It has been a really long time since

there has been a breakthrough where we have discovered something really new. I mean, the stuff that has made headlines, like I said, the direct detection of gravitational waves or neutrino masses, neutrino oscillation and so on and so forth. These are all ideas that go back at least 30, 40, in some cases, 100 years. So this is physical proof of something which theoretically has been around for a little while. Yes. Okay.

So is it a case at all that there's less stuff to discover in quotation marks? Are we mapping so much of physics that the remaining dark spots on the map are limited? Or is it something to do with the approach that physicists have got at the moment, or is there a sticking block or a glass ceiling that we've hit? Well, that's a very good question, but how would I know? What I know, what is still left to discover? What I can tell you is that we have already discovered a lot, and that just means that the easy things have been done You know the stuff that you can measure in your little laboratory with your handheld equipment and so on It's sort of that's all been done

That's the case in experiment. It's also the case in theory development You know the easy things have been tried So it's kind of natural to expect that it will become more difficult. Then on balance to that though, we also now have a lot of more people working on it. So that should help, but apparently it doesn't. So we have at least in the foundations of physics, we have had the mathematical structure of the theories that we're using right now since the mid-70s. Okay, so the low hanging fruit to one degree or another, as low hanging as physics can get, I suppose, has been gathered to a large degree, would you say that's fair?

Yes, certainly. Okay, so what is the current sticking point that we've got at the moment? Is it technological? Is it that the instrumentation that we're using? Is it the minds, as you say, there's more people than ever are dedicating their efforts towards physics? Are they looking in the wrong place? Well, I do think that they are looking in the wrong place, but of course, I don't know, you know, I don't know what's the right thing to do. But the question that we can reasonably look at and try to answer is whether they are

using good scientific methods that would give them the highest probability of making progress. And I think that's just currently not the case. Okay. Well, let's expand on that then. Why is that not the case? Well, we have seen a lot of null results in the foundations of physics in the last four decades. For example, in the search for dark matter, this has been going on since the mid-90s that people have looked for the rare interaction of the hypothetical dark matter particles with a normal matter. You can do this basically by building large tanks of some stuff and then you put detectors around this stuff and try to measure these interactions.

And people have tried, but they haven't seen anything. They have also looked for proton decay, that's a prediction of a certain new hypothesis. They have also of course looked for new particles and particle colliders. The most popular ones are probably supersymmetric partners of the already known particles and that hasn't worked out either. Is that coming out of the LHC? Well, that's actually a long story. I mean, supersymmetry is an idea that also dates back to Hang on, the late 1960s or something. Okay. Can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can Okay, can you can you can you be sure about the dead but people have you know I'm not a historian but people have looked for super symmetry for evidence of super symmetry

since at least the 90 90s and that didn't work out. Indeed they should have seen it already in the 90 90s so they actually had data that was just in conflict with the idea that super symmetries to bait by the loss of nature. And what they did was not to say, well, we've ruled out super symmetry, but they said, well, we will just modify the theory. And so they added a new symmetry on top of it, which is called our parity. So now we have super symmetric models that obey this additional symmetry called our parity. And that's compatible with observation

so far. Okay, so how long do you pursue down a route of trying to find a physical manifestation that proves a theory before you actually say, well maybe the theory is just wrong completely. actually, before you actually say, well, maybe the theory's just wrong completely. Well, you do it until you come up with something better. But that's the wrap because it's really, really hard right now to come up with something better in the sense that you can get funding for it and collect sufficiently many people so that sufficiently many people agree, it's better. And the problem is you have a community like super symmetry which for the foundations of physics is a really, really large community.

You have something like, I don't know, 1,000 or 2,000 people of that order of magnitude. And if you try to say, well, maybe that's not the right path, that's really hard to get people to listen to. And accordingly, it's also hard to get funding for it. Yeah, I can imagine. So how much your physics is about physics, and how much your physics is about politics?

There is unfortunately a lot of politics, not only in physics, but in science generally, or maybe you could call it psychology. You always have to think about how do I sell my research to get other people to listen to it, how do I get other people to like it, and of course, the easiest way to get other people to like what you're doing is to work on something that they like already. And you clearly see the strength that people work on stuff that other people like for sometimes not entirely scientific reasons. Super symmetry has a reputation

of being a particularly pretty theory. It has a lot of aesthetic appeal to it. That's something that you hear from this who work in these areas talk about very, very frequently. And that's something that you hear from this who work in these areas talk about very, very frequently. And that's certainly one of the reasons why I'd attract so many followers because people just like working with it. Can you briefly explain to us what supersymmetry is, please? Supersymmetry is an extension of the theories that we currently use. We have something that's called the standard model of particle physics in which we have 25 particles that for all we currently use. We have something that's called the standard model of particle physics in which we have 25 particles that for all we currently know make up or matter in the universe.

And in this standard model, we have two different types of particles. They're called fermions and bosons and they are just different things. Now, super symmetry is a symmetry that relates the fermions with the bosons so that they actually belong together. Now, the problem is a symmetry that relates the fermions with the bosons so that they actually belong together. Now, the problem is that from the particles

that we already have observed that are in the standard model, they do not pair up into the proper super-sumetric pairs. So what you have to do if you believe in super-sumetry is that you just postulate, they are new particles to find that pair up with the ones that we have already. And then there's the question, well, where are they? Because we haven't seen them. And the answer to this is that they are so heavy that we have not yet been able to produce them in particle colliders. Okay. Well, it's from a basic logical standpoint, it does seem a little bit like making the foot fit the shoe

as opposed to the other way around. And I guess it sounds like you, for all that physics and physicists have got unbelievably logical brains, there's a lot of probably ego and dogma and patriotism to particular approaches. Do you think that that's restricting physics and moving forward, this lack of ability to let go of existing models and potentially look elsewhere? Yes, sure, but I should add that, of course, these ideas do have certain scientific motivations that got them started in the first point. They're not just plucked out with the air, right?

No, I mean, super symmetry was something that attracted a lot of attention, for example, because it comes out of string theory. So if you believe in string theory, you actually need supersymmetry. The opposite is not necessarily true. If you have supersymmetry, you don't necessarily also need strings. But since there are a lot of people who like string theory, they are kind of forced to also have the supersymmetry.

So that's one thing. But supersymmetry is also something that people like to work with because it solves some mathematical problems with the theories. And that's just something that they find appealing. It's also it turned out that if you have the super symmetry and you add our parity to it, then you get particles that can also make up dark matter. So that fit very nicely with the story. But that was, as I said, it was something like 30 years ago. And since then the situation has just changed, you know, and I think that the appeal of super symmetry has dramatically fallen since, because we haven't seen it in the data.

But people keep adjusting their models, so they become more complicated to address the lack of evidence that we have. And then at some point you come to the question that you ask, like, when do you stop? When do you just conclude that businesses are not able to let go of their ideas because they have invested too much time and effort into it? Does it feel a little bit like flogging a dead horse sometimes? Sorry, that's an idiom that I don't know. That's fantastic. So it's not true. That's an idiom that I don't know. That's fantastic.

Not true, that's fantastic. What it means is you've taken every opportunity that you can, you've taken every root that you can to try and distill from one thing something else, and that something else hasn't worked, therefore it's time to move on. It's interesting that that hasn't crossed up into a into your vernacular. That's really cool. Actually, I actually once read a whole book with idioms, but I can't recall this. In any case, so that's interesting question because if super sumit symmetry is not the right thing, that it means that physicists have made some wrong decision pretty early on.

So we actually, yeah, so we have to go back and ask if one of the assumptions that entered all these arguments that let them to work on super symmetry to begin with was maybe the wrong path to take. Wow. So that's potentially an awfully big upheaval in the physics community. I'm going to guess. Well, you see people discussing this right now. So the argument that I make in my book is that this belief in naturalness is an issue. And that's a problem that needs to be rethought right now. issue and that's a problem that needs to be rethought right now. So naturalness is this idea that the theories of physics should only contain numbers without units that are close to one, not much larger than one or not much smaller than one. There are more complicated versions of

this, but that's the one, the easy case. And that's something that they use to construct theories. And now it just happens that super symmetry obeys this idea of naturalness. It actually helps to make the standard model natural. So the standard model, by itself, is not natural. But if you add super symmetry to it, it works. And a lot of theoretical physicists take that as strong evidence that there's something true about super symmetry, that it has power to

describe nature. And I just think that that's around conclusion. You know, I see no reason why the theories of nature should have this property that they call naturalness. Okay, so in your book Lost in Math, How Beauty Leads Physics Estray, you talk about this desire within the physics community to have beautiful theories. Can you describe what is considered to make a theory beautiful? Yes, so it's interesting that if you ask theoretical physicists what they mean by beauty, they all more or less say the same thing. So I think this is not an idea of beauty that you find, find among non-physuses, but for what physicists are concerned, beauty has

three major ingredients. The one is simplicity. And by this, I mean that the theory should be simple and absolute terms. I don't mean in relative terms where you say, well, I take the theory, that is simpler than some other theory, but it's the same. But just that the theory should have simple laws, like it should have simple laws, like it should have unified force, for example, is simpler than for different forces.

If you add symmetry to a model that usually combines two different concepts to one or several different concepts, like with super symmetry, we already talked about this, where you have the fermions on the bosons. They actually belong together. So that's the simplification in terms of the axioms of your theory. So simplification is one aspect of your read.

Then there's natuonus, I already told you about natuonus, the thing with the parameters that have no units, that should be of order one. Yeah. And then the third aspect is something that's usually referred to as elegance, and that's quite a fluffy criterion. It's not something I heard I expected to hear coming out of physics. Well, it's something that they talk about a lot. You actually find this also in a lot of older literature, like there's a book by Shandra Zika, where he goes on

about this already. So, what they mean with elegance is that the theory should be simple, but it shouldn't be too simple, so it should lead to some interesting insights. You should have some aha effect here and there. It should have unexpected connections, it should give you some surprises. So that's this idea of elegance. You also find these three aspects in a lot of artworks, by the way. I mean, simplicity is all well and fine, but if it's too simple, it's just boring. And so I think it's the same sense that you find here. That's really interesting.

It sounds like reducing the theory down to its simplest possible terms is, does this cause physicists to look in the wrong places? Sometimes when they're trying to develop theories, is this an artifact of E equals MC squared and other very, very short, very, very simple theories like that? You know, I would actually say that E equals MC squared is too simple, you know, it's not elegant enough.

That's all me shot it. Okay, so that's interesting. Yeah, but that makes an interesting point because the sense of what is elegant, you know, what is surprising, what gives you some new insights and so on depends of course on how much you know already. So the sense of what counts as elegant and what counts as beautiful changes throughout the history of science, you find evidence for this in the literature, you know, when we look back several hundred years, they thought that planets on circular orbits,

well, that's a beautiful idea. It also turns out to be wrong. But that's an idea of beauty that you just wouldn't find today among physicists. It's something that no one would pull upon. Now they have other ideas of beauty, and well, maybe these work, or maybe these don't work, we just don't know. So generally, I think it's a bad idea to impose our current ideals of beauty on the laws of nature in the sense

that we use it to construct new theories. Because the problem is, you know, we were talking about these experiments earlier where they look for a dark matter and the particle colliders and I don't know some telescopes and so on and so fourth. These are really costly experiments and we just can't test all theories that theoretical physicists come up with so we have to make a selection and of course we try to select those theories that we consider to be the most promising.

like those theories that we consider to be the most promising. Now, if we make a bad choice, we go and test theories that are wrong, then the only thing we get are null results. Now, the null results are all three results, of course. But they are not very useful results when you try to develop a new theory. So that gets you stuck in a cycle where looking at the wrong theories gives you no results that gets you stuck at the wrong theories and so on and so forth.

Yeah, it's just crossing one thing off the board as opposed to directing you on towards the right direction on the board. Yeah, that's exactly. Yeah, I mean it sounds in between the potential for dogma, this dogmatic and patriotic holding onto existing bodies of knowledge or existing directions within theories, plus this desire for beautiful theories to come out. It must lead to a little bit of an echo chamber and a lot of theories that are similar and, as you say, you add a section onto something which already exists. Now this works, despite the experiments not showing anything that supports it.

Yes, it's certainly true. I think that's an organizational problem with the academic system in general. If you want to get something funded, if you want to get something funded, if you want to get something published, it's much easier if you work on something that people already work on. And of course, people know this. So that's what they do.

It's, you know, in some sense, it's not particularly surprising. What is surprising is that they accept this and play along with it. Yeah, I understand. So, where do we go from here? Do you have a suggestion for how physicists can look at the field in a different way? Well, sure. I think the first step is that they become aware of what they are doing, so that they actually understand where they are using assumptions from beauty that are not scientific. In some cases, I think people know this, but in other cases, I'm pretty sure they don't. Like, this idea of naturalness, for example, I would say like half of the people know that it's not a scientific

criterion. But the other half thinks it is. So there's clearly there's something at odds there. And there's also this idea, for example, of unification or the theory of everything. I mean, these are all nice ideas. But there isn't really any good logical reason for why there should be a unified force or for why there should be a theory of everything. It's just something that people work on because they like the idea. And so at some point we should draw the conclusion that maybe that's not the right path to work on. And I think it would help if they would just take into account the arguments for and against it when they write a paper, say, or give a talk.

It's unfortunately, it's very common that they only list the arguments that speak for their theory. Yeah, I can totally see that you want to hear people. It's a very, very educated version of, yes, man, isn't it? Having someone who just says yes and agrees with what it is that your particular stance. You've touched on something now that I did want to discuss. There was once upon a time a dream of a theory of everything or a grand unification theory. Is that a lost cause now? Does it seem to the current state of theoretical physics suggests that that's not the direction

that we're going to end up in? Who knows? Personally, I think that this whole idea of a theory of everything doesn't make a lot of sense, because I mean, suppose I tell you, here's the theory of everything, and it explains everything that we see. How do you know that it will still be a theory of everything tomorrow? That we will not, at some point, measure something that does not fit into this theory. So I think that this is, you know, it just doesn't make a lot of sense conceptually. Then of course, there is this issue that what people in the foundations of physics mean when they say theory of everything does not actually explain everything. That's just a way to say, well, we have combined all the four known forces into one. So that's what they mean, just to get the terminology sorted out.

And that might still work out at some point, or it might not. I mean, presently, I think we just really don't know. Personally, I have developed an interest in an approach that is called as ontotically saved gravity. It basically solves the problem that we have with the quantum properties of space and time, but it does not also include a unification of the interactions. You kind of have a framework in which they all fit, but they are not unified in the way that

physicists usually speak about unification. But that theory seems to be working just fine. So, presently, I don't see any urgent reason for why these forces should be unified. You know, maybe our universe just has for different forces, and that's that. Yeah, what are the four forces, please? Well, one of the forces is gravity, you all know gravity, there's electromagnetism and then there's the strong and the weak nuclear force. And the odds are how much of that has been pulled together because there's obviously still conflict between certain areas of that.

Have you managed to unify certain areas and others are still out on Olim? It kind of depends on what you mean by unification. So the electromagnetic and the strong and the weak nuclear force are kind of of the same type. And we describe them all with the same mathematics basically in what we call the standard model of particle physics, but they are not unified in the sense that they are still three separate forces. And then there's gravity, which is described by a different mathematical framework. So it doesn't really fit together with the other three forces. Usually that doesn't really bother us because

in the circumstances where we use the standard model, so we describe collisions that have my particle colliders, then we are dealing with elementary particles and the gravitational forces so weak that we don't have to worry about what to do with gravity. But there are certain circumstances where it would be necessary to take both of these theories into account, like for example close to the center of a black hole or something like that. And for these cases, we just don't have a theory. Right, okay. So to a degree, gravity is the, it's the black sheep of the bunch, which is, is it the

most difficult to make fit? You said recently that we've discovered experiments have managed to detect gravitational waves. Is that correct? Yes, well, that's not so recent. There was in 2015. Okay, I guess in physics terms, that's a long time ago. Well, yeah, I mean, the prediction dates back, you know, 80 years or something. Okay, so going back, you'd mentioned there about particle colliders and the LHC was during the buildup to it was hailed as by sensationalist presses, something that was going to create a black hole in the middle of Europe and absorb the entire world. And then it didn't. And then what came out of it was the Higgs boson was detected. But since then

this huge 23 mile round trip experiment doesn't really seem to have elicited much else. Is that correct? No, that's not correct. Oh no. Oh, again, as I said, I think you're reading the wrong news. Probably because you're not a physicist. So the the LHT has detect the exposure. That's the news that everyone has heard of. But it has also done a lot of other things. It's just that these did not make so big headlines. You know, it has for example, probed the structure of the proton in much, much better details than was previously known.

And found a few surprises. There are people are working on it. It has also been able to measure a lot of the constants in a standard model of particle physics, too much higher precision than what was previously possible. It has also measured a lot of composite particles that are made of several quarks and measure their properties. So it's not like nothing has been going on besides the expose

on. It's just that the other stuff has not been quite as exciting as producing a tiny black hole that eats up Europe. Yeah, well, I mean, that would have made the news if it had happened. It would have definitely, if they would have been still news then. Yeah, exactly. News in America, perhaps. But that is, I am writing saying that that's the only new particle which it found. That's correct, right? The only new fundamental particle, yes.

OK. Is there a likelihood or is people still holding out hope that it's going to find more? Or again, if we hear a little bit of a glass ceiling with that particular, that? Oh, yes. Oh, yes, definitely. There are still people who think that

super-symmetric particles will eventually show up. So the thing is that this assumption of naturalness that I was talking about earlier would have put the super-symmetric particles in the regime of fallilow energies close by the Hicks basically. So we should have seen them already. Okay. So we know that this idea of naturalness was just wrong and it's gone out of the window, but nothing has replaced it. And this means that people who work on super symmetry

basically now have no particular reason to think that the particles should be at any particular mass scale. So it could be there in the data or it could not be there. There are definitely people who think that it will be there and the LHC has not totally analyzed all the data that they have. They're still collecting data and getting better statistics from which they try to extract more details and so on and so forth. So they are still hope that they will find something new. But the early evidence would suggest not.

Yes, I mean so far they haven't found anything. Okay, so moving on, I wanted to talk about dark matter or dark energy and discuss why that's so important to physicists to find that. Could you explain just why it's such an important concept within physics? Well, let me start with saying that dark matter and dark energy are totally different things. So dark energy is whatever is causing the accelerated expansion of the universe. You know, that's just the name that we gifted. We've called it dark energy. And personally, I think there's really nothing to explain because this acceleration of the universe can just be described with a constant.

That thing is called the cosmological constant and you can just go and measure it and it has a value and that's it. There are people who think that it should have some kind of microscopic explanation. It should be made up of something basically. And then there is something to explain. But I see no reason for why this should be made up of something basically. And then there is something to explain, but I see no reason for why this should be so. So the lines drawn underneath dark and G as far as your concern. Yes, unless you really show me some data that cannot be fitted with that constant. Okay. But so far there's not any and far the consent job does a good job.

So then there's the thing with dark matter. Dark matter is stuff, you know, basically similar to the stuff that we are made of, except that it does not interact with light in any form. So it does not absorb it, it does not emit it, it doesn't scatter it. And it's believed to sit around galaxies, hover around them in clouds, and it plays a big role in the formation of structures in the universe. That's for what the simulations are concerned.

Now, the problem with dark matter is that if you believe it's made of a particle, you want to actually measure the particle. And that has not happened. Then the other option is that we actually do not need any additional stuff, but that we should change the law of gravity so that it does not work the way that Einstein envisioned it as with his theory of general relativity,

you know, curvature of space time and the rubber sheet and so on and so forth. But we needed different theory for gravity and that's what's called modified gravity, maybe not the greatest term ever, but that's what it's called. And ever since people came up with this idea of modified gravity, we have had two camps. The one is the big camp, that's the particle dark matter camp. And then there's a smaller camp of modified gravity and the case still is not settled. I see.

But I'm right in thinking that if it was proven that dark matter didn't exist, I guess it's going to be very difficult to prove that it doesn't exist because there's always the potential to continue detecting up until the point at which you do detect it. Is that right? Is it difficult to disprove a theory like that? Some people are always going to hold on to the hope that we finally do detect it. Yeah, so it's basically impossible to rule out because as you say, you can always, I mean, you build a detector and the detector has a certain sensitivity to some interaction, probability and so on and so forth. And then you can always just say, well, maybe the particle, maybe the particle had a lower probability of interaction than what we have been able to probe so far. So

we need to build a bigger detect. Turn the sensitivity up. Yeah, right. And that's been going on since the mid-90s and the sensitivity has increased by at least a factor a hundred thousand since. Oh my god. Yeah, and I mean, you can continue to play this game as long as you want, as long as you can get money for it. So, but again, you know, the thing is that the theories that we think are plausible direct the efforts that we make in testing the theories. So if we invest money in building more detectors for dark matter, we will, we cannot invest the same money into, I don't know, building some telescope and put it on a satellite and measure gravitational lensing better, what have you, something that would allow us to test modified gravity.

So we have decisions to make and I think we have to be really, really careful as theoretical physicists in how we rate the promise of theory. It's very interesting how theoretical physicists and the relative weight behind each of their theories across all of the different subject areas, sub disciplines within physics, is having such an impact on the experimenters and what they get to do and where they can direct their efforts, that you

guys are kind of like the roots of the tree and from that determines what can grow out of it to a degree. Well, it's interesting, but it's not really surprising, is it? I mean, you have a lot of people in a community and they basically only talk to each other, and they constantly tell each other that what they are doing is interesting and it's probably the right thing. Then they believe it's the right thing. And of course, there are a lot of people.

They will be able to convince other people that probably what they're doing is the right thing. And then you have this small group of people who work on, you know, just to pick this example, modified gravity or something, you know, there may maybe a few dozen people who work on this, and they are full of self doubt, not so surprisingly, because a huge number of really smart people is working on something else. The opposite side of the scale.

Right, and they are constantly saying that modified gravity is a joke. And so the people who work on it are like, you know, they're really, really reluctant to make those big proclamations that the other people have no problem making. Yeah. So there's just you have this backup, you know, behind your back, you have a large group of people who support you that makes a big psychological difference.

Oh, 100%. It must be, I don't know, as someone from the outside looking in, I would, my goal or my aim would be to have to expedite the discovery of whichever theory is correct, not to dogmatically stick to whichever one is most popular. And it seems that it's definitely not for the benefit of physics, for anyone who's looking at alternative theories to be ostracized or to be ridiculed or whatever it might be, because if that research is the right direction, and these people are being reluctant,

or someone's in the camp of the existing model of gravity and is thinking that they might not be right, but they're terrified of moving over because of what their peers are going to say to them. That's not a tremendously holistic view of a holistic direction for physics to take overall, is it? Yeah, well, that's certainly true. The thing is, of course, that if you would go and ask

physicists, they would deny that this is what's going on. Because they are too smart to fall for mistakes like this. And, of course, they have good reasons to work on what they work on and so on and so forth. So they think that they are not biased. They cannot possibly be biased by the size of the group that they work on. It's just that's just a possibility that's not on their radar. You know, for the physicists, sociology and psychology are not real sciences. It's not something that they pay attention to. They think it's not necessary.

Which is crazy because it would appear that an obvious example of group think is going on here. You have this echo chamber, you have people that support theories that it would appear have more and more experiments proving nothing to support them and no one being prepared to move in a different direction.

It's so interesting how, as you say, the people that are in the field of physics are so clever, and yet fundamentally appear to perhaps be unable to see the wood for the trees a little bit here. Yeah, maybe. Well, you say that it's an obvious example for group thing, but I would be more careful there. I would say there's a possibility that it is group thing which cannot be ruled out because the current organization of

the research does not guard scientists for falling for it. There just are no measures against it. Indeed, it's actually the opposite that the current organizational research supports this group thing because, as I said earlier, it's easier for people to get funding, to get positions if they work in what is already a large group. So, you know, I don't really know what's going on. Maybe there's nothing wrong whatsoever. But either way, I think that we should institutionalize some measures that prevent people from falling into this group thing trap. That's interesting. So how do you suggest that you institutionalize that?

Well, one of the things I already said briefly previously is that I think that scientists generally not just physicists need an awareness for these cognitive and social biases that you develop when you work in large groups is just something that people should know of, you know, so that they can recognize what's going on, like this visual thinking or loss awareness that we already talked about, you know, that's this reluctance to abandon a research project that you have been working on for a long time just because you haven't invested a lot of effort into it. So I mean, there's a long, long list of these things that, you know, basically you can print

them and hand them out to students or something like that. I mean, something really trivial. But then there are other things that have to be done by funding agencies. Basically, we already previously talked about this problem that it's really hard to get out of a research area. If you notice that maybe it's not the best thing to work on. Yeah. And the major problem is that you have all your expertise in what you have previously worked on. So nobody will give you money to do something else. They will not hire you.

You will not get grants. It's just in the current organization, it's not possible. So it's not surprising that people continue to do what they are already doing because they wouldn't be able to do something as you know They wouldn't have money to pay the rent exactly and there are simple things that you can do to avoid this problem You know by offering people some kind of Re-education support, you know, you could say well, you know You you want to change fields and there are one- year scholarships or something in which you will be supported.

I mean, maybe not with the greatest pay, but you have one year or two years or whatever, it depends on the field. Of time, of learning the basics of a new area, you know, time in which you do not have to produce new results or something like that. Fischer, and do you think that that would allow a more free flowing of talent between different areas and different sub disciplines? I definitely think so. I mean, I can only see positive consequences of this.

And there are a few other things that I have noted down in the appendix of my book. But really, the point is that this is something that people in these communities should think about, you know, and they should come up with a list of changes that they want to implement and then just pull it through or at least try to. So the major problem right now is that no one takes these problems seriously to begin with. Yeah, it's really funny what you said about physicists wouldn't see psychology and sociology as real sciences and yet it would appear that those are influencing their ability to move forward, perhaps an awful lot more than they actually might think.

Their cognitive biases are leading them potentially into, I think you describe it as cul-disacts in the book, where they almost can't get themselves out again. We've touched on it a number of times throughout this, where the combination of this echo chamber and then you're getting backed in by financial restrictions and also you've got this, the weight of the existing rhetoric, the direction of this particular field that you're working within and all of the social influences that you've got from people in there. It must be a difficult situation for a number of physicists to work in at the moment who may want to make this move or who may want to expand their body of knowledge to a different area or an alternative theory but just feel like they can't do it.

Yes, sure. A lot of them just leave. I've seen people leave. You see, these are people who figure out that they will not be able to get money to work on the research that they think is most promising. And then they just conclude that it's not worth that time. So they just leave academia and do something else and you know there is life outside of academia too. There is but it seems like a terrible shame to lose fantastic talent in the field of academia because of this sort of systemic dogma. Yes it's a shame but it's also just a problem for science because of course the people that are left are the ones who don't have big problems with joining these large research programs and just producing papers.

If they had a large problem with it, then they would be leaving. Yeah, yeah, for sure. But it's not necessarily the best for the subject, the body of knowledge as a whole, right? People could be doing something a lot more productive if it was a little bit more free-flowing. I think so, you know, this is why I hope that making some organizational changes to academic research would help overcome this impasse. For sure, for sure. So Sabina, I really appreciate your time. Would you be able to tell the listeners where they can find you online? I'll make sure that I put a link to Lost in Math, how beauty leads physics, destroy your book in the show notes below. But where can they find you online? I really like your blog, so you need to put that in.

Well, it's not complicated, you know, for all I know, there's only one person with my name you type it into Google. And like the first 100 hits will actually direct you to my websites. I have a website that's called SabinaHosenfeldor.com. It's not hard to remember if you can remember my name. I have a blog that's called BackReaction and that's at Blockspot.com. And I'm also on Facebook and I'm on Twitter and I write for a lot of websites every now and then so you will find all this by the help of Google or your search engine

of choice. Fantastic. So, Vina, I really appreciate your time. I hope that we've opened some people's eyes to what the physics communities like at the moment. I hope this doesn't sound like a disparaging criticism of what's going on within there. You know, it's obviously a very difficult subject for everybody to wrap their heads around, even the best minds in the world. But I do think it's so interesting what you've said

about these social influences and cognitive biases influencing who we consider to be the some of the cleverest people on the planet and in a weird way I think it's actually a little bit it's a little bit reassuring that for us normal normal people who perhaps aren't Aren't at the level of a theoretical physicist that they are still subject to these These psychological and sociological influences. Oh my god, you just found out that physicists are humans. Yeah, I did. Do you know what it is?

Sometimes, I'm not sure, but I think I did. So thank you very much for your time, Sabina. I'll make sure everything's in the show now to be below. Thank you very much. Thank time Sabina. I'll make sure everything's in the show note to below. Thank you very much. Thank you. You're welcome.