Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math | Locklin on science

Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math

My pal Bill Dreiss suggested I have a look at this one the other day. I had seen Frau Dr. Professor gabbling on in various videos circulating among the nerdetariat; never really listened as I don’t have time for podcast type entertainments, and certainly not in the subject of high energy physics, which is a field I am mostly contemptuous of. She seemed fairly sensible; an earnest and apparently well-meaning person who is disillusioned with the direction of high energy physics. She also seemed a little late to the party; I came to virtually the same conclusion on my own while I was still in grad school, just looking at the behavior of high energy guys in physics departments. Woit and Lee Smolin wrote fairly convincing take downs of noodle theory back in 2006, though I suppose they didn’t go after the larger enterprise of High Energy Theory as a field. Apparently her book made people in my old physics department REALLY MAD. In fact one of the last things my late thesis advisor Chuck Fadley said to me before checking out for the great unknown was a strong recommendation I read this book. I had clean forgotten, but I remember being in the hotel in Hamburg and being confused (post Sauna and beer) why he was trying to get me to read some German lady’s pop science book, and chalked it  up to his illness. Sorry Chuck: you were right, I should have read it when you said.

Hossenfelder describes the group madness of the high energy physics community. It really is a sort of mass hysteria; literal tens of thousands thousands of presumably high IQ people are gripped by it, and it’s accelerated and intensified by the internet, which makes peer pressure and communication practically instant. It’s also encouraged by the pyramid scheme nature of generating new PhDs with nothing better to do. Consider the average high energy theorist; they are effectively doing the kind of work they did in grad school; working on “cutting edge” problems in the latest woo. The average paper I’d say represents approximately the kind of mindset and work effort of a couple dozen (90s era, pre solutions websites) JD Jackson homework problems. It’s not that this stuff is easy; neither were JD Jackson problems. I’m just saying these guys are grinding the proverbial organ box like trained monkeys rather than, you know, being curious and thinking about things. Their “field” is a sort of shared delusion about what people should be working on, based on what everyone else they know is working on, and ridiculous hero worship of the 1920s theoretical physics community. And “aesthetics” and various quasi philosophical views about how their godless universe will conspire to be “aesthetic” and “natural” to them for some reason.

One thing she hammers on is the idea that “aesthetics” is bullshit (something I mentioned in 2009). Most of physics isn’t particularly aesthetic or beautiful. Physics is weird and often surprising. Frankly, so is mathematics, biology, human nature, the appearance of the universe: just about everything is weird and surprising. The only people who think the world around them isn’t weird and surprising are navel gazers who don’t get out much. In particular the idea that certain physical constants would be conveniently sized for perturbation theory (aka “naturalness“) is just fucking insane. La Hossenfelder talks about it, but doesn’t emphasize how crazy this is, but it’s rather like assuming your checkbook will always have 00 in the cents columns because it’s more convenient for you that way. Or that useful hashing functions will have lots of 00s on randomly generated numbers. This numerology assumes  that the universe will conspire to make itself understandable with current year fashions in mathematical tools used by the clown car that is contemporary theoretical high energy physics.

The book has an odd style (I assume it’s a translation) and is a combination of editorializing, layman didactics and interviews with important figures in the field. Some of the choices of didactic effort are peculiar; explicitly calling out matrices as tables of numbers while describing perturbation techniques and various group theories as some kind of woo. As the interviews go on, you get the feeling that physicists and cosmologists are not great people. They’re kind of … losers. She never exactly says this, but on some inner emotional level she must be thinking it, because that’s how all her interlocutors come off; sweaty palmed, lost, over grandiose, goofball nerds.

And let’s face it; postwar theoretical high energy physics has been a big basket of failure.  Sure we have electroweak theory from the early 50s which was verified in the 70s. What has come of it? It’s been 70 years. 70 years after Maxwell we had television. 70 years after quantum mechanics we had pentium chips. It’s been 70 years guys; where’s my electroweak technology? Really we all know there will never be a technological implication to electroweak theory. Which makes it not some great achievement of humanity: it makes it irrelevant to the point of being a sort of theology for nerds. The field of theoretical high energy physics (and frankly the experimental part) itself is, in every respect, a failure rather than something for humans to be proud of. While it is difficult to master the mathematics involved in it, that’s not much of an argument that it should actually be worthy of respect. Respectable branches of physics make predictions and produce results in the physical world. High energy theory ought to be about as respectable as any other cult: at least those people handing out flowers in the airport are giving people beautiful flowers. For all I know, the indoctrination of airport-flower-people involves similarly difficult mental gymnastics. The very difficulty of the indoctrination is arguably what makes them so reluctant to give it up: career as sunk cost fallacy.

The various interviews are filled with dispiriting LARPing (Live Action Role Playing for those of you that don’t speak /chan). From the twittering astrophysicist wearing a NASA insignia from the 1960s, back when NASA wasn’t the DMV for rockets, to the various famous wrinkley brain scientists play-acting at profundity as if they were at the head of a successful, relevant and respected profession, rather than the fools who helped lead a failed intellectual enterprise into a ditch. Hossenfelder’s book exposes the whole squalid enterprise for the LARPy failure that it is. The people involved in it aren’t great savants anyone should be paying attention to; they’re losers. Like most losers, they’re only dimly aware of their failings; if losers were self reflective they’d probably find a way to, like, not be losers.

There were a few bits and pieces I was only dimly aware of; the latest experiments demonstrating what losers the theorists are, the odd Witten-victim condensed matter guy developing some goofy qubit based cosmology. My favorite such thing was actually from her blog; pointing out that the one time the noodle theorists thought they could make a useful calculation involving measurements in the world of matter, they failed. That’s ridiculously damning; for all the alleged brainpower put in service of noodle theory, they failed utterly in their attempts to be, you know, actual scientists making testable predictions.

String theorists’ continuous adaptation to conflicting evidence has become so
entertaining that many departments of physics keep a few string theorists around
because the public likes to hear about their heroic attempts to explain everything.
Freeman Dyson’s interpretation of the subject’s popularity is that “string theory is
attractive because it offers jobs. And why are so many jobs offered in string
theory? Because string theory is cheap. If you are the chairperson of a physics
department in a remote place without much money, you cannot afford to build a
modern laboratory to do experimental physics, but you can afford to hire a couple
of string theorists. So you offer a couple of jobs in string theory and you have a
modern physics department.”

Women named Sabine were at the beginnings of great things in the past. Her politely bullyciding high energy theorists into non-existence would be a great boon both to physics and the human race. It’s a shame more people didn’t listen to Phil Anderson back in the day, or John Horgan’s numerous educated outsider criticisms, but if this Sabine woman manages it: I, for one will be grateful. What makes physics powerful is the combination of mathematics with experiment: nature holds you accountable for your success or your blunders -not your dimwitted nerd friends on the tenure committee. The High Energy clowns play acting as Pauli or Einstein like figures are not physicists; they’re at best live action role players or overt mathematical mountebanks occupying seats which would be better issued to tribologists, fluid mechanists or optical physicists. If we can nudge the profession back to, you know, things like the scientific method and testing things involving matter, (quantum computers definitely don’t count) maybe humanity will get somewhere.