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I can't believe this really happened.
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Welcome to another episode of Sabina's
getting herself into trouble. I was
recently contacted by a physicist who
was very upset that I judge their
research to be 100% [ __ ] He
demanded that I remove my video and when
I politely declined, complained about me
to some people he must have thought were
my supervisors in a very deliberate
attempt to exert pressure on me.
I am no longer affiliated with the
Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy.
Philosophy.
Germany, the land of the free thinkers.
If science was a circus, they'd all be
clowns by now. Serves her right, you
might say. Shouldn't have used the B- word.
word.
Fair enough. I know some people get
offended by my language, though. I think
that when it comes to swear words, I'm
very moderate. Come on. What the [ __ ]
Is this the 16th century or what? I
express myself this way because well,
for one thing, it's what I think. But
more importantly, I don't want to leave
you guessing what I mean. But I can say
this entirely without swear words. A lot
of research and the foundations of
physics is now pseudocience. It hasn't
followed the scientific method for decades.
decades.
I'm not bothered by this person's
behavior or by losing my affiliation
again because thanks to you, I'm now
fully financially independent, which is
why I can, in contrast to many others,
afford to publicly criticize academic research.
research.
But what does bother me is that some
physicists still don't understand the
problem with what they call science.
Of course, I'm not the only one who has
noticed this problem. I call it
mathematical stories or mathematical
fiction or just [ __ ] Others have
called it mathematical gymnastics or
fairy tale physics. It's why David
Lindley declared the end of physics. And
one of the reasons why John Hogan
declared the end of science. I'm not
making any particularly novel
observation here. But it keeps going on.
This is what blows my mind. It doesn't
matter how obviously this is
pseudocience. It doesn't matter how many
people call out this problem, how many
books are written about it. It doesn't
matter what I say in any of my videos.
It keeps going. They keep on producing
more of these garbage papers each day
and they continue to get published and
they continue to get paid for it and
then they put out press releases and the
media picks it up and people ask me what
I think and I say it's [ __ ] because
that's what it is. The problem is widely
known among people in the field who tend
to acknowledge it privately but would
never admit to it in public because
their money and their reputation depends
on it. Well, most of them wouldn't admit
it. One of the fearless exceptions is
Will Kiny. Will works on cosmology, more
specifically inflation, which is one of
those highly problematic areas. Here is
what he recently wrote on Axe Twitter.
There are papers on inflation on the
archive almost every day, usually more
than one. It's an impressively
productive field, but the vast majority
of those papers are model building,
writing down a slightly tweaked version
of a previous model and working out its
consequences. There's no limit to the
number of papers that can be produced
this way. It's very productive. But the
papers are mostly useless. Nobody,
including the people writing the papers,
has any realistic expectation that any
of these models are correct. They're
just an exercise in empty mathematical
world building.
What prompted Will to write this was a
book that appeared recently, The Ant
Mill by Jasper Grimstrop, also a
theoretical physicist. Let me just read
you how Jasper summarized this. I've
written a new book about the sociology
of theoretical high energy physics. The
field is in crisis. No major
breakthrough in 50 years and yet a
remarkable absence of conceptually new
ideas. My analysis shows that a massive
social force towards mainstream research
has emerged. A force that pushes the
field towards tribalism and group think
and prevents young researchers from
pursuing their own independent research interests.
interests.
That is 100% correct. And this isn't
just about the tax money that's being
wasted. Think about what all those
intelligent people could do if they
didn't waste their time on this
nonsense. I don't blame the people who
work in these areas for what they're
doing. Most of them believe that what
they do is science because it's what
they've learned and what all their
colleagues are doing and they never
question it. This is how group think
works. Then they're shocked if someone
outside their bubble says it's
pseudocience. But look at it from a sane
distance and you can immediately see
what's the problem. In fact, I think
that most of you can see the problem
better than the people who work on it.
This is one of the hallmarks of
pseudocience. It seems to work like
science. From the inside, it's difficult
to tell. They have entire courses and
degrees and conferences and everything.
It's fascinating really. There are even
scientists studying pseudocience.
This book, which I highly recommend if
you're interested in these things, has a
very interesting report from a woman who
earned a degree in natureopathy.
That's some quack medical profession in
the United States. She explains in
detail what's wrong with the scientific
claims and then concludes it's taken two
years of investigation into the
naturopathic profession as well as
starting over in a master of science
program in biio medicine to understand
how deeply and effectively I was
brainwashed by my naturopathic
schooling. The naturopathic belief
system is strong. Many natural paths I
used to know would prefer to reject me
outright rather than consider a
perspective that challenges their world view.
The same can be said about most
theoretical physicists in the foundations.
foundations.
They'll reject what I say outright. It
can't be that what this woman says is
correct. They think they are too
intelligent to fall for group think. So
they conclude the problem isn't them.
The problem is me. Make Zabina go away
and the problem will go away.
But I'm not causing the problem. I'm
just drawing attention to it. The fact
is that the people in this discipline
have invented mathematical stories for
non-existing laws of nature for decades.
They invent new particles. They invent
new forces. They invent modified
gravities. There are hundreds of tales
for the beginning of the universe,
multiverses, extra dimensions, and so
on. You see some of this in the popular
science headlines every day, and it's
like naturopathy. There's zero evidence
that it works. Did Sabina really just
compare physicists to naturopaths? Some
of them, yes. The biggest difference is
that quack cures can actively harm
people, whereas quack paples about dark
matter don't do much besides wasting tax
money. Why did my institute decide to
discontinue my affiliation?
I've been advised they don't like the
public perception of me drawing
attention to these problems. They aren't
worried about what's going on. They're
worried about people finding out what's
going on. Exactly what's the problem
with those theories that they invent.
The problem is that science is based on
the principle of learning from mistakes.
These physicists method of theory
development which amounts to just
guessing some mathematics that looks
nice hasn't worked ever since they began
using it about half a century ago. Yet
they continue using it. They're not
learning from their mistakes. This is
what makes it pseudocience.
The underlying problem might be that
many physicists have this idea that the
scientific method just means you
generate hypothesis and then you test
them, rinse, repeat. But that isn't how
it works. Like in reality, this isn't
how it's ever worked because you need to
know what counts as a scientific
hypothesis to begin with. the world will
end on December 31st, 2025 is a
hypothesis. We don't accept it as a
scientific hypothesis. Why not? The
problem isn't that it's unfalsifiable.
It's totally falsifiable. And indeed,
you know what? It'll be falsified. So,
what's wrong with it? What's wrong with
it is that we've learned that such
hypothesis are not worth our time. We've
learned that just making a random guess
without any basis and evidence will just
lead to false hypothesis and testing
them wastess time and money. You don't
even need to know the reason for why it
doesn't work. All you need to know is
that we've learned from past mistakes
that hypothesis based on, say,
numerology aren't worth testing.
Guessing a date for the end of the world
doesn't meet the quality standard in any
field of research anymore. At least I
hope so because we've learned from the
past. Yes, there are some AI studies
where they've randomly picked hypothesis
and put them to test. But they don't
randomly pick from anything you could
possibly imagine. They randomly pick say
among some plausible combinations of
molecules or some plausible experimental
setups that is the scientific knowledge
goes into selecting the set from which
they randomly sample hypothesis. Now
each discipline has developed its own
quality standards for what counts as a
plausible and promising scientific
hypothesis. So it's not one
sizefits-all. But what they used to have
in common is that they learned from
mistakes. This is where the scientific
method really sits. You refine your
method for putting forward hypothesis
that are worthy being put to test. Of
course, there are also criteria for what
we mean by a scientific test. These
criteria have also developed over time,
but on the experimental side, physicists
are actually doing very well. When it
comes to theory development, that isn't
the case. Let me be clear that there are
many areas of theoretical physics, most
of which are what K might have called
normal science. Typically, this is when
you need to develop a theory to explain
observations. This is the case for
example for high temperature
superconductors. It might also be
because an already established theory
hasn't been fully understood. This is
for example what's driving most of
quantum information and quantum
computing at the moment and that's all
well and good. You know the problem with
theoretical physics is in those areas
where they've been inventing mathematics
to explain nothing. There's no data in
need of explanation. And those aren't
theories which solve any problems
either. There are superfluous,
unnecessary hypothesis, useless papers,
[ __ ] papers. They produce them in
the thousands. Do some calculations to
make predictions. And if these
predictions can be falsified, they will
be falsified. Like the idea that the
world will end in December. Some of
these physicists would now argue that
Sabina can't know that these
mathematical stories will all be
falsified. Two, I can't know this with
100% confidence. The same could be said
about the end of the world prediction.
But I can extrapolate from the decades
of failure of the method by which the
hypothesis were generated. This is why
I'm very comfortable sitting here and
saying all these particles and forces
and whatn not that they've made up,
they're all nonsense. I'm here not
making a philosophical argument about
what is or isn't a good scientific
hypothesis. One could do this and I have
done this on other occasions, but today
I'm just making an argument based on
evidence. This method of hypothesis
generation has not worked ever since it
began in the 1970s.
The only predictions in those research
areas which turned out to be correct in
the past decades go back to before the
1970s like for example nutrino masses or
the hick boson and so on. What did
physicists do differently before the 1970s?
1970s?
Well, that's what I analyzed in my book,
Lost in Math. In a nutshell, in the
first half of the 20th century, they
were solving real problems rather than
making up pseudo problems to justify
their pseudo science. This is my
explanation anyway. But whether you
think my explanation is plausible, it
doesn't change the fact that clearly
something did go wrong in the 1970s. Yet
physicists continue to use their failing
method of theory development. Why?
Because it easily produces papers that
get published. These papers get
published because they refuse to update
their quality standards. And this is why
it's pseudocience. It does not follow
the scientific method. The scientific
method requires that you learn from mistakes.
mistakes.
How many more failed predictions does it
take for them to realize that it doesn't work?
work?
This is exactly the same thing that
happened in psychology where P value
hacking became widespread causing the
publication of studies that were almost
all irreproducible.
Low quality standards, failed methods.
They didn't learn from mistakes. Not for
a long time. But psychologists did
eventually update their quality
standards, or at least they tried. In
the foundations of physics, this never
happened. What's happening in these
areas instead is that they pile more and
more guesses on top of each other. Each
time I look, it's worse. They now have
dark sectors of several hundred
invisible particles. Fifth forces that
mysteriously shield themselves in the
solar system so that we can't measure
them. extra dimensions that are always
just a little bit too small to be
detected. Fields with quantum
fluctuations that produce infinitely
many universes. There's maths for that
so you can get it published. I need to
clarify one thing that people often get
confused about which is the problem with
inventing dark matter particles. We do
have evidence that dark matter is there.
So why isn't it good science to produce
hypothesis for what it is? It's because
the observations that we have can be
explained with very simple models. Those
simple models are fine. But what most
physicists in this area do is that they
cook up much more complicated models.
Models with details that are unnecessary
to explain observations. Then they claim
that these models make new predictions
which are then being ruled out. But a
scientific hypothesis shouldn't have
unnecessary assumptions to begin with.
What can be done about it? It's fairly
simple actually. The journals which
publish papers in those areas should
just agree to stop publishing
mathematical fiction. They should
formulate guidelines for reviewers and
make editorial decisions accordingly.
Concretely, if it's proposing a new
theory, does it only make assumptions
that are necessary to explain existing
data? Yes or no? Does it solve a problem
of mathematical consistency or at least
work towards it? Yes or no. If the
answer is no, no, don't publish it. If
the journals and the foundations of
physics would do this that it would
solve 99% of the problem within a week.
It doesn't happen because the journals
also benefit from the paper production.
You see the more papers they publish and
the more these papers get cited the
easier it is to convince libraries to
subscribe and round and round it goes.
And that they all benefit from this
pseudo science is why it continues. If
you're still choking on the guy who
tried to get someone they thought is my
employer to pressure me to shut up. This
wasn't the first time. It's happened
repeatedly before. Some of them also
engage in smear campaigns in the attempt
to question my understanding of their
discipline. And they are successful at
least among their colleagues because
they all want to believe that what I say
it's wrong. It's like the ex naturopath
said, "Their belief system is strong.
Many physicists I used to know would
prefer to reject me outright rather than
consider a perspective that challenges
their world view."
I'm telling you about this not because
it surprises me or because I want your
pity. I'm telling you about this because
I think it's necessary context. It
explains why there are few physicists
publicly talking about this. Even
leaving aside the psychological cost of
being shunned by your colleagues, most
of them quite literally can't afford to
break ranks. But oh yes, they know what
I'm talking about. It doesn't bother me
what they say about me because it
doesn't matter. It doesn't change a
thing about the continued failure of
their unscientific methods which is
plain for everyone to see. But I do
appreciate your support and also your
interest because it gives me hope that
maybe one day things will change. Until
then, please excuse my language.
Information bubbles are a real problem,
not just in physics, but generally in
news reading. If you want to break out
of your bubble, I recommend you check
out Ground News, who've been sponsoring
this video. Ground News is a news
platform that collects and summarizes
news, which has been published all over
the world. Not only do they collect all
articles on the same story in one place
and give you a quick summary, they also
give you a lot of extra information that
you don't find in the standard media.
Take for example this recent story about
poll results which found that 85% of
Canadians want government to regulate
AI. You see right away that this news
hasn't been covered by the political
right. You also get a factuality rating
for each news item and it tells you whom
the media outlets are owned by and where
the news has appeared. You can also
switch between a focus on US and EU
news. Ground news also has this great
feature called blind spot. This tells
you which news has been almost
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the political spectrum. And you can
customize your interest areas and
follow, for example, science news. And
of course, I have a special offer for
you. That's a 40% discount on the
Vantage plan, which gives you access to
all their features. All you need to do
is use my link ground.news/sabina
or use the QR code so they'll know I
sent you. I really think that Ground
News is on to something with their news
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