Fake Science Exposed

Sabine Hossenfelder has a PhD in particle physics.  She gave up academic physics when she discovered that it made raising her children impossible.  For the last number of years, she has become a YouTube popularizer of science.  Many of her videos are interesting and entertaining.  I don’t find myself agreeing with every conclusion she draws but her talks are thought-provoking and often compelling.

In the above linked video, Sabine reads a letter from a colleague in answer to a journal paper she wrote seven years ago casting doubt on the validity and value of much of modern scientific research in general but specifically in what she calls research into the foundations of physics (particle physics).  In this letter she received from a colleague it is admitted that much of “research” done by academic physicists is worthless.  But that it supports thousands of physicists who otherwise would be unable to support themselves and their families through their educational background in physics.

In other words, because they are “scientists” they deserve to be supported by the government regardless of whether their work has any value to anyone.  Sabine spends most of the video attacking this mindset and declaring this academic fraud a severe danger to the whole enterprise of modern science.

In my opinion she’s absolutely correct.  And she is far from the only one admitting that academia (and to a large extent corporate research) have been getting less and less result from steadily more and more scientists.  And why is this?  Probably the top reason is falling standards at the universities.  Colleges have become mills stamping out more and more degree holders in scientific fields.  But the caliber of these graduates is decreasing.  A good place to look for the reason for this is affirmative action.  Universities now award more degrees to woman than to men.  If you allow for the discrepancy between male and female skills in math and science, you can infer that standards have been reduced to accommodate more women in these fields.

And all of this is happening just as DOGE is examining government programs to uncover waste and corruption.  Well, if Musk’s people were smart, they would look for whistle-blowers in all of the various NSF and other science funding entities and determine just how much of the research that is funded by the government is poorly done or even worthless.  I think they’ll find that the ratio of bad to good is close to 10:1.

During the Cold War an emphasis on scientific and engineering research was needed to “win” the arms race and the space race and every other technical challenge that we made up in our minds about beating the russkies.  Well, we won and we can stop worrying about the race and start worrying about our tax dollars being thrown away on worthless research.  Being a particle physicist should be the occupation for a very few highly gifted mathematical geniuses that can add to the store of human knowledge about an incredibly esoteric scientific field.  It isn’t the place for thousands of mediocre minds who’ve burrowed into a university payroll by checking a DEI box or two.  Likewise, the United States government shouldn’t be paying for research in pure and applied science if the results don’t provide value to some worthwhile project.  Injecting mice or rats with cocaine to see what aberrant behavior they will demonstrate is not something the United States government should pay for or even allow.

Not everyone is Einstein, Watson or Crick.  But at the very least the people who are paid US tax dollars to do science must be intelligent and competent enough to earn that money.  Currently, the great majority of academic (and corporate) researchers are neither of those things.  I hope that DOGE makes it one of their priorities to whittle down government research grants by a factor of ten.  That will be a good start.  It will save us billions of dollars and change the way the universities do business.