All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
I know it’s a weakness of mine. I do enjoy listening to this intelligent, honest woman with a wonderful German accent lambast these fake scientists for wasting time, money and lives in a racket that must be shut down. And not just in physics. All of the academic disciplines that produce nothing useful but are subsidized by our money to the tune of billions and billions of dollars must be defunded.
Kudos to Sabine for saying it out loud.
The Future Circular Collider (FCC) or as I call it “The Really, Really, Really Large Hadron Collider (TRRRLHC) is proposed to be 91 kilometers in circumference and estimated to cost $30-40 billion. Now granted, this is chump change when US military projects are considered. But when it is taken into account the fact that it is very, very, very unlikely to provide any useful information at all to scientists it does seem somewhat uncareful with the public’s money.
I was just watching Sabine Hossenfelder’s latest video where she explains why the community of high-energy particle physicists despise her. You see she was a high energy particle physicist herself but she discovered that the whole field had become a racket. All of these highly intelligent scientists are basically engaged in fraud. Instead of doing actual research in physics they are employed at fabricating theories for which not a shred of evidence exists but for which tests can be devised to justify building larger and larger colliders.
I give Hossenfelder credit for her integrity. She describes the personal vitriol that her colleagues heap on her for calling out their fraud. She is right. American and European governments fund these outrageously expensive instruments and also foot the bill for all of the research grants that fund the half-century long careers of all the thousands of particle physicists that subsist on this government gravy train.
Well, at least in the United States a lot of this will probably be going away very soon. DOGE is tallying up the costs for and analyzing the alleged benefits of all these research grants. I think that the great majority of these research grants will be denied funding starting next year.
Now, before being accused of being a Luddite, let me state that a case can be made for some scientific research being facilitated by federal money. I can see how research on nuclear weapons, laser systems to knock down drones and lots of other military adjacent categories could justify the government underwriting some part of the work. And there is probably biological research that the various government agencies on health could decide deserve government funding. But anything with dark energy, dark matter, worm hole, black hole, multiverse or string theory in the title should definitely be denied funding automatically. Likewise, any social science grants with the words diversity, equity, inclusion, DEI, intersectional, BiPOC, Latinx, gender, transgender, gender fluid, pansexual, LGBTQ, pronouns, feminist, white nationalism, white supremacy, whiteness, white privilege, white fragility, resistance, sanctuary or Trump in the title should be denied and the authors put in a database for rejection from that point forward.
Look, industry will foot the bill for any scientific research for which applications in the real world exist. And the government can make a case for expanding knowledge in certain limited academic categories where knowledge can improve the lives of Americans. Predicting weather and solar storms are easy examples. But as fascinating as black holes and multiverses are let’s leave these subjects to the Marvel Cinematic Universe to imagine and let scientists try using reality and experiments involving reality as their province.
For my part I am willing to do my part and fund research on coffee that doesn’t turn bitter after fifteen minutes on the stove. You see I believe in following the science.
A few days ago I linked to a video by Sabine Hossenfelder who shared a letter from a colleague warning her not to expose the fact that most academic research papers in particle physics were useless nonsense.
Now she’s followed up that video with one with her thoughts on what will happen when an administration that wants to reduce waste in government starts looking closely at what kinds of research are being funded in the hard sciences. And that’s before we even get to the nonsense that the social sciences call research.
Now Sabine is far from a conservative. She’s a moderate climate change advocate and several other progressive ideas. But she seems to be a realist when it comes to the nonsense being funded in academic research centers.
She advocates for corporate research for anything that will have commercial applications and only sees government funding for things like defense applications and a very small set of other areas.
I agree with her. Government funding of academic research has become a feeding trough for bad science. It has created bloated university faculties doing useless research that benefits no one but the faculty and even they are dissatisfied because they know they’re frauds.
I can’t wait until Musk and DOGE gets to the NSF and the health research funding agencies. It should be a mighty bloodbath. And that will change the universities too, for the better. They’ll be poorer and smaller in the short term but they’ll be healthier and more useful in the long run.
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.
“Just the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.
“Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.”
(from “The Hunting of the Snark, An Agony in 8 Fits” by Lewis Carroll)
Sabine Hossenfelder is a German woman with a doctorate in theoretical physics and a YouTube channel full of videos that discuss all manner of scientific and engineering subjects. Her area of research is “analog models of gravity.” So, she’s trying to visualize things like black holes and think up tests to add to our understanding of these outlandish phenomena. And she’s an obvious girl nerd.
What I like about her popular work (YouTube videos) is that she has no fear of exposing just how dysfunctional modern day physics has become. From dark matter and dark energy to string theory, to futile attempts by particle physicists to invent extraneous particles and then waste untold millions of dollars proving they don’t exist, she exposes the transparent mediocrity and obvious academic make-work that these pseudoscientists are engaging in. They are the hunters of the that altogether mythical snark.
And that brings me to this video. Sabine chronicles the last fifty years of mythical particles that have been proposed and have failed to appear. She describes how the creators of these unicorn particles keep them alive by moving the goal posts whenever the experiments fail to confirm their existence. And finally, she shows how this form of “science” is basically worthless because it has no chance of asking the right questions needed to extend our knowledge. She uses a couple of graphs with data and then the extrapolations associated with these junk science predictions to show how truly worthless this half century of make-work particle physics has been.
It is my belief that the only way to bring rigor back to theoretical physics is to use corporal punishment for failures in achieving successful experimental results. I’m not talking about executions or amputations. Nothing barbaric. I’m talking about caning, possibly flogging. No cat o’nine tails, nothing over five lashes. Barely enough to draw blood. All very civilized and calibrated to bring about the desired results. And I’ll be fair. The physicists can decide whether he’d prefer losing his tenure or being publicly lashed. What could be fairer than that?
All kidding aside, scientific research, not only in this country but throughout the western world, has been stagnating and falling into disrepute. In the social sciences it has degenerated into gobbledygook with the results of the majority of research papers being unreproducible. Doctorates in sociology and psychology are now essentially worthless. Even in the “hard” sciences like physics and chemistry but especially in pharmaceutical research progress at answering fundamental problems has ground to a halt.
So, it’s very refreshing for someone in the academic world to be out there declaring that the emperor has no clothes. Now that’s not to say I agree with every one of her videos. She had a presentation about hydrogen as a fuel, the conclusions of which I completely disagreed with. But she at least lays out a lot of the facts and that allows an informed viewer to judge her opinion based on them. Kudos to Sabine.
On the more general front of scientific research today, all of this confirms something that has become clear. Government money, especially in the United States has turned academia into a racket. Research is a bottomless pit of money that funds unqualified “scientists” to waste resources without any hope of finding the results they are supposedly pursuing. All they accomplish is creating a bureaucracy of people defending their paychecks via government grants.
Other than weapons research the United States government needs to get out of the research business. If they want to incentivize scientific progress let them offer large monetary prizes for successful solutions to practical problems in the engineering and science realms, like the fabulous “cure for cancer” we’re always hearing is right around the corner. Even if the results are more incremental than this at least we would stop incentivizing fraud. Until then we will continue to hear about the latest search for the particle equivalent of the snark.