I worked in Academia and during the 90s I bore witness to the moment that research changed. I saw all the Professors have their path to tenure be shifted from "How well have your grad students done and how many prestigious journals have you been published in" to "How many millions of dollars in grants have you garnered for the university". When your metric of success shifts from good science to how much money you can attract to the University fundamentally changes how science is done and motivated
This has been codified and has been extended to what now is known as the "impact agenda". This type of extreme end goal focused endavour, undermines the entire process of knowlegde generation. However, what is worst of all, that it is so deeply ingrained in the system, that the people operating within academia are both blind to its corrupting effect, and cannot think of a science and research envrionemnt without it. Henceforth, what happens - psychologically - is that any type of criticism is moralised as "science deniers" or "conspirarcy theorists", pre-empting the impetues for self-reflection.
It does not matter the discipline, once bonuses are introduced most people start producing bonuses rather than the thing, because no matter the discipline people are people.
I am especially happy that you as a non English native has managed zo get this importance. Every discussion is dominated mostly by US YT and they bring a certain culture and approach to discussions and its good that we get an different approach wih you
Yeah the US culture is super saturated in science communication. I'm yet to find relevant videos of people talking about climate change in my native language. The people around me all acknowledge the problem, of course, but no one is talking about it and no one knows the nuances.
She still believes climate models that failed for 50 years. She's a physicist who believes trapping heat in a certain area explains why certain areas in that area are cooling
It is not all about Math, there is physics going on here too, uncertainty principle of fun states that you cannot measure both the fun factor and the number of scientists at the same time, wait for the video function to collapse ( go viral) then make your measurements again
@@SireJoechemist have predicted Elements and paleontologist have had expeditions to find predicted specie's and why doesn't she mention 50 years of climate models
I get sick of the phrase "science denier" in the first place because it's pathetic for anyone to speak as if they are the keeper of the practice or product of science. How grandiose can people get?
You're better than a cheerleader for science - you're science's best friend who loves it enough to tell it if it stays on its present course, it will get thrown in jail for drunk driving.
@@notanemoprog Wow, look at that! This person claims that Science is failing, yet he can’t even come up with an actual counter-argument! Another hypocrite fails…
For my first impressions of that channel. I found it mostly a rage bait shithole that dunks on idiots for easy views. The way Sabine dunks on them is more subtle and intelligent than him.
The entire problem is that science has stopped being evidence based. Every area of intellectual life has been infected by the same mind worm that seems to be behind wokeness. Everything is a proxy argument for deeply held personal philosophies
Perhaps. But as someone who has been on review panels for grant funding, often it seems funding is BS based. As in the one who can BS the best gets the most votes.
@@kmbbmj5857having been on many of those same panels, absolutely yes. It also has a very random component (i.e. who are the three-five random people that get to review a given grant..).
As a "professional" (astro)physicist, it's my observation that many scientists are now driven by popular trends and what is most "attractive" to funders. They don't want to undertake any serious research which runs counter to these trends for fear of being ostracised, or simply having the work/paper/proposal rejected (sunken cost). The actual scientific value (knowledge, deeper understanding etc.) seems to be secondary. It could be argued that the path of least resistance, and of greatest opportunity for funding, career advancement, prestige etc., is simply to conform to the status quo and climb the academic greasy pole. As an aside, I remember meeting you many years ago in Frankfurt/FIAS when I was a postdoc, where I was taken aback, and impressed, by your forthrightness! I'm glad you're continuing to raise awareness of these (and other) important issues - thank you.
@@ZiriYounsi in many places young students are encouraged to do trendy stuff and disencouraged to do what they would like to do. My friend is doing phd in economics, and was softly forced to do it on behavioral econimics, because its cool and people got Nobel in it.
Hi, industry guy here. What u say just means there's not much carrier in science. Apart from tenured track, most are very ill paid with little chance of growth. Hence the current situation.
I find it amusing how these sort of brash criticisms always seem to paint the person in question as the purist exception. So are you also a victim of this looking for the easy path or are you "one of the good ones"?
Money (and lack thereof) is certainly a big part of the problem, but on a more fundamental level I think this is connected with how academics, academic departments, and universities themselves are evaluated by different bodies (foundations, councils, government bodies etc.). I can only speak for my geographical region and discipline, but the criteria by which productivity and success are measured/quantified today are onerous and problematic. Many of the current problems can be interpreted as academics simply adopting the strategy of maximising these productivity/success metrics for internal/external assessment success (for which the pressure is enormous). Actual, original and long-term research is now a luxury and hobby rather than a prerogative.
Thanks you Sabine. In my field, the research that is cited to justify complete bullshit at best. The confidence therapists, nutritionists, and trainers speak with can induce nausea at times. To say I’m a fan is a massive understatement. We need more you on this planet. Please stick to this path. It’s greatly needed.
I hate it when others say you shouldn't criticize the institution of academic physics because it causes others to lose trust in it. They are more concerned about the optics of science rather than the integrity of it.
MM was null. null is the not the same thing as disproven. u want to "fix" physics... its easy light need REQUIRES a medium. waves are NOT things. THeir way of thinking if fundamentally flawed. like they say bad data in bad data out.
@@chrisdistant9040 why would a title stating, "I don't trust scientists," be problematic? If we have verifiable reasons to not trust scientists (some or all) why is that a problem? I dont trust Fauci and I have the evidence for my distrust to back it; why would that be a problem?
Science isn't failing. Governmental control of science is the problem. "97% of all scientists agree with whoever pays them." It's the old statistics game of, "What results do you want me to find" stays employed, vs, "I found these results" gets fired and blackballed. If you're the new hire, who's example will you follow. The lead scientist is writing grant proposals, and you vill support him. Have I mentioned that your job is on the line? "Science without math is like talking about religion without mentioning God. But editors know that 90% of readers tune out at the first equation."
As someone who has followed you for about four years, I’m very eager to hear your insights on these problems in physics. It would also be incredibly helpful, as I’m currently a physics graduate student. Thank you for all these years of guidance and education.
@@SabineHossenfelderOH NOW THIS MAD FURIOUS LADY HAS HER OWN SET UP LIKE A PROFESSIONAL SO CALLED SCIENCE COMMUNICATORS. GOOD PRETENDING TO BE GOOD, BUT FROM THE BOTTOM OF HELL, WE KNOW THIS LADY IS GOOD FOR SCIENCE. I rarely seen a person, that too a lady so furious to get the science on right track like a bad mummy. GOOD MOM FOR SCIENCE bad kids. KEEP ON modern science MOM. KEEP SLAPPING THESE NERD PHYSICS KIDS, WHO DO ANYTHING TO GET TAX PAYERS FUNDED GRANT CHOCKLETS. NOW ITS ENOUGH, SOME MOM ANY WHERE HAS TO RAISE HER VOICE AND HANDS. THIS LADY MOM IS PERFECT FOR THESE GRANT KIDS/ RETIRED SO CALLED PHYSICIST. keep your bitter words onn for good of science. OLD SCIENTISTS, NO NEED TO HURT HER. she is doing it for good of physics and NEXT GENERATION PHYSICISTS. KEEO IT ON WIERD MOM.
@@tnndll4294 TH-cam's doing. TH-cam has it that if a comment gets enough dislikes or engagement without likes its considered unpopular and moved to the bottom of the comment section (if you scroll to the bottom you will see negative comments (if they exist and the video is popular enough to make the negative comments unpopular). Its because her comment got many many responses quickly enough that it tricked the algorithm to think her comment was incredibly unpopular and moved it to the very bottom. Its still there, just very very far down. I think Dave should of just pinned it to fix the whole issue. He can still access the comment and there are links to it so I have no idea why he hasn't.
@@SabineHossenfelderyou don't trust scientists anymore? I don't trust you to give me non hyberbolic science info anymore if you continue to make statements like this. If you want to call out real problems and concerns in academia, you really need to watch yourself from becoming too extreme. But that's not where the money is, is it? Ironic. Subscribed for the science, unsubscribed for the conspiracy theory anti science pandering that pretends to be real criticism about a genuine problem. You really do just come across as someone who is only so vocally against this because you got rejected from being a part of the club
The thing that reassures me about Sabine and her critiques of the science community(as her brother I can be familiar by using her first name) is her rigorous and frequent use of the phrase ‘I could be wrong’. Humility is an ‘if and only if’ condition for avoiding doing science for one’s ego versus doing it solely as a means of searching out new knowledge.
Right, no scientist is going to get a medal for admitting that they're wrong, which is the very foundation of the discipline. By the way, ego driven science got humans on the moon. It's all very good to be noble and stuff, but at some point the motivation becomes irrelevant if the science is sound. This is a lesson both you and your sister could take to heart.
Chemist have predicted Elements and Set and performed test to find them and paleontologist have predicted specie's. And how doesn't mention climate model
Nuance is great when there is time and attention for it. Sometimes we have to boil important truths down to the basics. This is hard, let's accept that.
I see the same thing with my law work. The contrast between university and the actual practice is stark. I came to the conclusion recently that the whole justice system is a self-serving puppet show.
If there is one way to have people having trust in the scientific community, it is by being brutally honest and not by contorting yourself in making everything look shiny and happy. This practice is for the field of politics and religion… Thanks for your amazing work Sabine!
This, right here. Politics has influenced science. It's mostly bullshit now. And I don't and won't trust any of it, at face value, moving forward. Now it all must be critiqued ten fold what it used to require. The government needs to keep their hands out of science, because government corrupts. We have people in power claiming "I am the science". No rat face(fauxi), you are not. You are a criminal and liar.
Would that this were true. I know people _say_ "I take people who doubt themselves more seriously" but I don't think that actually holds true - at least, when one communicates to the layman (particularly those inclined towards science skepticism). [Although if there's a paper that studies that psychological aspect quantitatively, I'd love to abandon my cynicism if I am in fact wrong on this.]
“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say." ― George R.R. Martin
Definitely lacking nuance, but that’s because nobody has the time for 3 hour long explainer-videos and a 10 h meta-discussion, after every video. Most would be bored, many wouldn’t understand and we wouldn’t get anywhere. Your channel is about science news and communicating scientific ideas, thats fantastic, it’s helpful and it works.
Way back in the 60s and 70s the great scientist Sir Fred Hoyle was bemoaning the fact that it was becoming very difficult for a bright young person in academia to do original research because any elaborate project usually had to be vetted by an equally elaborate committee whose senior members were determined to keep youngsters working along standard lines.
Fred Hoyle in later life supported the steady state universe, was a proponent of panspermia and baselessly claimed that the fossil of archaeopteryx was fake. He is not the best person to be referring to for support.
9:26 I think for people who aren't aware why Sabine is repeating herself on the 'problems in science' topic: Prof Dave accused her of putting grist to the mills of science deniers and arguing that she shouldn't talk about problems in physics and science at all. Sabine is doubling down on her critique. Not sure whether Prof Dave picks up this glove. I hope not, as I think in the name of repetition: we've heard it now loud and clear - both sides!
Please keep doing this like you're talking to your brother. (I come armed with a degree in Electrical Engineering and a minor in Physics.) As others have already said, your honesty in calling out B S is a very large part of what makes your channel worth watching.
@@paulboulanger5 I agree with this 100%. I start to snarl at the monitor now when I see my new favorite educational channel go from Informative vids/informative Title to 'OMG the Universe is going to End' coupled with the obligatory wide open mouth etc within a few months of gaining traction.They've all become clones of each other. Obviously click bait works, because why would a creator do this to themselves, it looks juvenile in my opinion. They must notice a shift in viewers when they change to this tactic. I'm sure there will be studies on various Internet sales tactics like this some day!
What ”professor” Dave gets wrong is the basic advice: If you want to be trusted, act trustworthy. When there is a real problem, supressing criticism does not build trust, it destroys it. Conspiracy theorists wettest dream is to find out about obvious problems that are denied by the responsible authority. Be open about it instead and discuss possible sollutions. Be Sabine!
Exactically right. Too much of academia believes they *are* the science, and too many scientists mistake academic conventions (i.e. papers, peer review and publishing) for actual science. I appreciate the good and thoughtful ones like Sabine that recognize this problem.
"Particle physics" is failing. My sister is a biochemist, i assure you her lab is well funded and her salary is good enough, for her. A third of what the private sector is offering though.
dear Sabine, im an old man, i seen many greed and lies in my life, more nowadays.... politics, religion, science, greed lies smokescreens, and then there is you. let me be clear about this. you are a summer breeze in all of this, honnest, open, direct, no crap, no bullshit, tellem like it is. lot of what you say is what i see everywhere reflected. and good people shoved out if they dont play "the game along". like you. i been working with victims of all kinda agression half of my life, people who didnt even had an honnest chance at a life because of the greed and lies. i respect what you do and how you do it, and if there is a fight, im on your side dear sabine, im also a stubbern man, i dont give in neither. my deepest respect sabine for what you do there.
Even Lawrence Krauss has pointed out that physics hasn't made as much progress as we might think. Our impression of constant breakthroughs often comes from science magazines, which tend to over-hype discoveries to sell issues.
Hijacking your comment for the brains: I don't know why, but nuclear fusion reactors like this structured reminds me of black holes or better said: black holes are structurally and behaving like those nuclear fusion reactors. They also have plasma that is spinning in circles, but instead the EM field holding the plasma in its place, the mass rotates around the the plasma like a donut (as in this reactor holding the mass with magnets from the outside) just from the inside of a black hole. Exactly like this, thing. In the middle there exists exotic material plasma that is a soup and repells all matter (so it can work like this reactor), which would be NEGATIVE energy mass, thous is the singularity. In the middle exists "Nothing(ness)", which is in reality just negative mass. Black holes are soooo efficient, that they die in 100^100^100 years due to Hawking Radiation. So, it would make sense, that those reactors are practically black holes and have infinite energy source as long as you give them some matter (just like black holes lol)
Depends on the discipline. Biology is making huge strides and across a wide range of sub-disciplines. Paradigms are shifting on an almost daily basis. The problem in Physics may be just down to bang for buck - it costs increasingly vast amounts of money to tackle the remaining problems whereas Biology is relatively cheap.
I mean also our impression of constant breakthroughs comes from the fact that we've seen the most rapid technological advancements in the last 200 years. Before that it was a very mild progression over centuries and millennia. I feel like it's more that we're returning to average rather than it being that physics is falling apart.
I received my Physics Master of Science degree in 1983. I did not like the constraints of academics at that time, so I went into weapons design( a common thing in the cold war). I found far more money and far more latitude in what I did as I solved problems that had not been solved in 40 years of direct research. In the cold war weapons business we were not paid for research , but output of novel designs to outpace the other guys. The competition was in production of specific devices and it really showed advancement. When I defeated the evil empire ( I did have some help from a few hundred million other people) the contracts and the jobs ended. I went back to school to get my PhD, but found such obtuse behavior in academics holding to theories long abandoned in the weapons design business. When I tried to introduce the working theories from weapons industries,I was told that those ideas were misinterpretations and I had to be "reeducated" . The research of these thousands of researchers was buried under secret classification and so was dismissed by academics as unpublished drivel . I am not the only one with this experience as several other people I worked with had similar experiences.
This is a human mindset, "either you agree with our methods or you have to be reeducated", somewhat religious or cult like, and even science hasn't gotten rid of it. I'm not even surprised.
Ah the perils of the “I couldn’t care less” peer review process. I’m always shocked when I compare the three comments of another reviewer to the multiple pages of comments I submitted. It’s a flawed system.
I once reviewed a paper that claimed amazing results….the author had used an incorrect two particle Schroedinger equation…which the author insisted was correct .
Revievers of academic papers are not paid. Writers of those papers are not paid. Who gets money? Publisher. Publisher doesnt give a damn about quality of papers. For publisher everything that matters is sales.
I have seem so many medical and pharmaceutical papers with terrible statistical mistakes. You'd think they would be extra careful because they deal directly with people's lives, but no. It's infuriating
Who complains the most about Starbucks? Starbucks employees. Who complains most about the government? Government employees. Who complains most about science? Well we couldn’t have that, this would be providing ammunition to science deniers and the far right.
It's ok to complain about science so long as the complaint isn't hyperbolic or way overblown. Making overblown critiques DOES give ammo and cover to anti science freaks and flat earthers lol.
I will just say that I saw dozens of critical but respectful comments, including my own, disappear from "Professor Daves" comment section. There was heavy moderation going on, which didn't quite fit the aggressive tone of his own video. I've never had one deleted from yours, whether I agreed with you or not.
It could be TH-cam algorithms themselves. I sometimes write extremely innocent statements not attacking anybody in particular with inoffensive language and it sometimes just disappears.
@@Shadow1412a TH-cam's AI deletes my comments all the time, I would be surprised if even this one went through, but it seems like if the comments are long or mention anything poe-litick-al they get autodeleted.
@@SabineHossenfelderIn India we have a saying where people posses the same ideas that place is full of rotten minds. Keep up the good work the day scientists stop disagreeing that day science is dead.
"Don't change, Sabine, ever." Bad advice, and I am polite here. Not changing is what happened to physics, stuck in a rut, unable to grow. To change is to learn and adapt to new situations and work with new ideas. To change is to live. Even rocks change.
OH NOW THIS MAD FURIOUS LADY HAS HER OWN SET UP LIKE A PROFESSIONAL SO CALLED SCIENCE COMMUNICATORS. GOOD PRETENDING TO BE GOOD, BUT FROM THE BOTTOM OF HELL, WE KNOW THIS LADY IS GOOD FOR SCIENCE. I rarely seen a person, that too a lady so furious to get the science on right track like a bad mummy. GOOD MOM FOR SCIENCE bad kids. KEEP ON modern science MOM. KEEP SLAPPING THESE NERD PHYSICS KIDS, WHO DO ANYTHING TO GET TAX PAYERS FUNDED GRANT CHOCKLETS. NOW ITS ENOUGH, SOME MOM ANY WHERE HAS TO RAISE HER VOICE AND HANDS. THIS LADY MOM IS PERFECT FOR THESE GRANT KIDS/ RETIRED SO CALLED PHYSICIST. keep your bitter words onn for good of science. OLD SCIENTISTS, NO NEED TO HURT HER. she is doing it for good of physics and NEXT GENERATION PHYSICISTS. KEEO IT ON WIERD MOM.
There's corruption happening at all levels, probably running deeper than most of us imagine, and it's been this way for a very long time, reaching a crescendo now as the empire's cracks are showing more than ever. Corruption always impedes truth and progress.
When I was a grad student I was working in an area that another scientist was working in. For baby steps, I replicated his results and gained experience with the analytic tools. When it came to three or four papers I could not replicate the results - not exactly but close. That gap was the difference between yawn & wow. One of my mentors looked at the papers and said " That was just before he was up for tenure review and was publishing tons of papers. Don't put too much stock in them."
The French diarist Anais Nin stated we don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are. It is an easy trap to fall into and it sure looks like it might apply here. I applaud your calling it out. Keep it up!
I'm a 40 year old man with no collage at all but a general interest in science. I love your videos, cos it's just facts about science. You don't talk to me like I'm a child and sometimes I don't understand what your saying... but then I go off, learn a little about it and come back to watch the video again and usually it makes more sense. I feel like I've learned quite a bit from your videos and I don't want you to change how you do it. Your, factual no-nonsence approach appeals to me. If I wanted a cheerleader for science I'd go watch Dr Tyson, I come here for the facts.
But Sir, surely you are aware you have left this comment under an anti-science video? So maybe, like a growing part of Madam's audience, you might be here for the anti-science after all? Thank you so much for considering this proposition!
@@Mekchanoid I don't see anything an anti-science in this video, nor pseudo-science. Don't put words in anyone's mouth. It's about lack of progress, wrong direction. Nothing is wrong with science itself.
@@starling- Did you not notice the thumbnail at the top this page that proclaims Science is Failing? Look at her content. Go on. Go to the video list on her page and look for patterns. Every few weeks she repeats this essay claiming that all of science is broken because physics is broken. Very popular among all those who wish science would go away (not you, of course, kind Sir), and with better viewing figures than her normal content.
I hope you never get to read this comment because you should not spent too much time in the comment section. And never spend more time responding to critics than responding to fans. Just count the critics to confirm that you are doing something relevant and you are challenging the status quo. I’m a big fan of your work. Big thank you!
It’s not her fault obviously, but she has a part to play in it undeniably with the amount of content she makes like this on TH-cam and not an academic medium. While she’s not really done anything wrong it might be best to pack it in a bit or clear up the content more so it can’t be taken in the wrong way
Some nuance: science deniers latch onto Sabine's videos, probably without really understanding them or really paying much attention to the content. But this vastly increased viewership on her science-critical content as compared to her other stuff has led to audience capture, where Sabine keeps making this stuff. So while she can't really control who watches here videos or how they chose to interpret them (well, maybe she can, by not making these click-baity titles and thumbnails), she can focus more on the science and less on the "science is dead" stuff.
Wow, as a data person I knew fields like medicine and nutritional science have problems like this (statistical significance basically means strong evidence, needed research is impossible for ethical reasons, and most in the field don't seem to realize that "placebo effects" are pretty much indistinguishable from the unavoidable regression to mean effect that results from RCT selection criteria), but a field that uses 5 sigma as lower bound, has no statistically questionable methods like RCTs with RTM guarantee, and have no ethical considerations that keep alternate hypothesis from getting tested? Wow. I think if physics is in trouble, then what field isn't?
@@SabineHossenfelder Based on what I see, hear and read nutritional science seems to be mostly what you know as "Kaffeesatzlesen". Or following whoever sponsors you most: The original food pyramid seems to have been heavily sponsored. I won't say by whom to not influence your research though - also, I don't remember. 😀
@@Widestone001 There are I think two types of research in nutrition. Nutritional epidemiology and RCTs that are supposed to be the "golden standard". I don't think they are because of the RTM problem and the fact that they target seemingly random but "easy" surrogate end points such as BMI. The epidemiology branch has its own issues with self-reported data and papers that list loads of "adjusted for" variables without even a hint at a causal diagram. For both, the found correlations are "way" below the 5 sigma significance that physics uses, even for those bits of knowledge they are the most certain about. In the Netherlands, where I live, all of public policy seems to be based around three surrogate endpoints; BMI, blood pressure and LDL blood markers, each of which is correlated (somewhat) to health outcomes. LDL links to another interesting and I feel, questionable, subject in medicene because the strongest evidence for LDL as a suitable surrogate endpoints seems to be mendalian randomization. Randomization through the shuffling of genetic material throughout the population. But when you look into family trees of people doing genealogy, but also when you look into the actual mechanisms, it seems that mendelian randomization might be the world's worst croupier so to speak in terms of actual randomization. It makes sense that they can't do (much) better because of ethical considerations. Can't put a few thousand people on a diet of lard and butter for a decade to test if half of them die from heart desease. Put this all together, and physics looks like it has got its shit together pretty good. Quite an eye opener to see that even physics with its solid maths and 5 sigma significance has major problems too. Makes you wonder if there is any field of science that doesn't have major problems.
@@SabineHossenfelder There was an essay several years back that showed how every healthy nutrition trend didn't work in English speaking enclaves, with the conclusion it wasn't the food that Americans ate that made them sick. It was speaking English. The humorous article was both accurate and reflective of the way stats are used in nutritional studies.
My background is electrical engineering, it's crazy to see how problem solving went from designing ingenious new components and circuit topologies to "digitize asap and slap it into a microcontroller" way of thinking. I remember from university, they quite aggressively went to boycott most older technologies, you're nudged to solve every problem in the digital domain and you're technically told to reject whatever paper from the past since it is useless and outdated anyways. I ended up specializing myself in the analog domain purely at home as a hobby, but it ended up being the entire reason I got hired. Piles of "dated" lab equipment being thrown in the trash for not having touchscreens, being completely oblivious about the past, complaining about budget etc. They collectively killed an entire field of electrical engineering, but people fail to realize the guys who ARE doing most of the design in the analog domain WILL be retiring in a decade or two. Papers became quite unrepeatable, often I run into circuitry where simply the parts for conditioning a signal to put it safely into a microcontroller could've entirely taken over the TASK of the microcontroller to begin with. Why did your electronics become unreliable? It's not planned obsolescence, its because in most cases we get actively taught to design crap with as many stupid functionalities as possible, whilst using over complicated chips resulting in circuits 10000 times the transistor count than they technically need to have. "People landed on the moon with a computer the power of a pocket calculator" yeah, plus the million analog subsystems that did the majority of the heavy lifting where the majority of the literature ended up into archives. Innovation nowadays feels like problem solving, not through having a good brainstorm session, but by scaling up everything, faster clocks, more cores, wider buses, but little optimization. Both technologies can coexist, I get digital stuff is more approachable, but academics should know better and also provide the stuff people sometimes don't want to study because it is necessary. Another LARGE issue is there's no space to test good and actually innovative new ideas. You can't write a paper anymore where you show something that doesn't work, it MUST be a success. The easiest way to guarantee this success is by taking a known technology and do the absolute slightest optimization. Sometimes there needs to be space for fundamental change, but in the end, most of the "innovative" stuff has been proven, sometimes as far as a century ago, literally one or two decades after linear amplification becoming possible after the invention of the triode. If you completely neglect the knowledge of your predecessors using devices and schematic symbols that you've never worked with or seen before, papers in this domain became entirely unreadable and not understandable, obviously it's gonna be neglected. It results in reinventing the wheel for the millionth time. Research becomes super inefficient if you can not make use of the work of your predecessors. I wonder where our field is going to go once the old guys retire. I'm eternally grateful for my parents, radio amateurs, and colleagues for actively investing in me to really provide the materials and resources to dive deep into this field autonomously. One way I'm a bit excited for the wrong reasons, as the specialization becomes scarcer, the job opportunities will increase severely. The other way, I feel tech is going to eventually really stagnate and plateau. As long as people keep using as an excuse that all the easy stuff was invented, whilst 60 years ago they were building entire colour television sets with the use of less active devices than what's now in one of the many singular modern opamps used just in the audio circuit of a modern television, the motivation to think out of the box just went out of the window. I'm still stuck in the academic system, I am not going to give up not getting a good title as that's what seems to matter most nowadays, but I can tell you, the most talented guys that could've changed the world I met during my time at uni almost all ended up losing their minds and got either kicked out, burnt out, made massive career changes or in some rare cases, ended their lives. I can mindlessly trust whatever paper being written in the 80s and before to be true and repeatable, but if you do not personally know an author of a modern paper in this field, you should take the results with a grain of salt. Although I do have to say, research became so incredibly specific, I barely stumble upon anything thats both useful and recently written XD
To be fair, we all know the race to put every feature into an MCU and/or "highly integrated" IC packages is about cost, both per-device and development. What you have is a situation where hard problems used to be solved every time, but now they are only solved once and everyone can reuse the solution. This is exactly the same as the rise of libraries in programming. Yes, the side effect of hard problems being rarely solved is that few people get practice solving hard problems, but it is vastly more efficient. I also have to nitpick your point about reliability. Bloated software contributes to unreliability and/or reduced lifespan (especially products that rely on some junky "app") but in my experience the mere use of an MCU does not, even at modern small process sizes. The MCU itself is by far the least frequent failure point in a modern product. Indeed, 1980s and 1990s ICs were greatly more vulnerable to failure due to poorer integrated protection and less reliable processes. In my experience, the main reason electronics are less reliable is smaller package sizes (and leadfree process of course). Everything is physically weaker, contamination is much more likely to affect the entire joint, and no-lead packages are inherently vulnerable to differential thermal expansion fatigue.
AMEN. And before long, as microcontroller = PC from few years back with heap of badly written Software-as-Service , we'll see "Blackout" novel scenario or worse. Long time ago friend of mine said, that it was hard to find people in analogue or mixed-signal design.
you're being too harsh imo. the way i see it, we had a period of extrordinary advances (the cold war certainly played a role, as did "random" cirumstanses) so the natural thing is to slow down in order to absorb that knowledge. I get what you say though and i 50% agree but not 100
As a former physicist I can tell you exactly the reason for physics crisis. Staying in or doing science is actually pretty dumb. The current society doesn't value at all new scientific ideas, scientific work or scientific achievements. The current society values business achievements/financial achievements or political achievements (hint: that's where the money and power is). Science doesn't attract public attention (and thus money) and that's why people are leaving science. It's a downward spiral: No money -> no people -> no new ideas -> no money -> no people -> no new ideas etc... You know what happened with physics? There is probably some guy working at Risk modelling somewhere in Goldman Sachs who makes 6 figures a year who could have come up with some brilliant new physics theory that would turn the world of physics upside-down, but he concluded that he would be better off making 6 figures in Goldman Sachs than trying to look up for grants for his experiment (with unpredictable results). And you know what? For himself he made the best life-choice ever. That's the bottom line of the so-called physics crisis.
I agree that the financial pressures and the way grants are structured which give more weight for short term projects that emphasise practical results is what causes bad science. It also causes smart people to leave the field and enter more lucrative fields which align with their skills like quantitative finance.
This sounds to me more like a crisis of morality. If everyone is only making choices based on how much money they can earn, and no one is making a choice of how they can spend their life to create knowledge and improve humanity, then it feels like our whole society has lost its way. I'm no hypocrite, mind you. I'm sitting here doing my boring day job instead of pursuing something more worthwhile for the simple fact that it pays all my bills and gives me a life of comfort.
Really??? is string theory really leading to money? Supersymetry? I don't see how the current people driving this crisis have any relation to monetary rewards. I think you hypothesis is flawed or at least only a part of the problem.
@@Seagaltalk String theory is a TOE. As weird as it sounds, claiming you're building towards a TOE does win you grants from science organizations in developed countries. The excitement behind supersymmetry is what funded the LHC.
What a load of bullshit. There's lots of people in academia or trying to get there, the problem is they don't get much results since 70. Real economy (I mean real economy and standards of living for middle class not money printing) also doesn't grow since 70 in the west, so clearly something bad happened back then I guess?
Your professional honesty earn you my subscription and I agree with you. One of my supervisors use to complain about academia like so: "One guy describes a fly and publish a paper about it's parts, then other removes a leg from that fly and publish a paper, then other removes a wing and so on and so forth". It was done like that cause in the University I was, they were required to publish yearly as part of their obligations or risk losing the job (imagine what would be for pure mathematics research). The consequence of this was that researchers published yearly regardless of the quality of the research or the impact it may have.
I enrolled in a phd program. There was an extreme lack of creativity in problem solving when it came to object detection and pattern recognition. The algorithms were brute force and were anything but “smart” and when they failed, they failed miserable. There was only one path and it was riddled with difficult esoteric math, not saying that makes it wrong… but if you proposed alternative ideas, you were ridiculed. Do what you’re told, basically. Grad students are cheap labor for an industrial complex system, where people at the top lack vision. This is the real problem.
It's refreshing to see someone who calls out the problems. So many people today just throw up their hands and tell you "Thats just how things are, nothing we can do" Politics, homelessness, healthcare, etc. WE made this and WE can change it!
I saw, amd commented, on Daves hit piece on you Im not a physicist. Neither is my wife. But, we have both worked in academia, and I see more reality in what you say than what Dave said.
Yeah but academics don’t mainly interact on TH-cam, anti science videos probably are mainly seen by right wing loonies, this type of content it’s important but is probably in the wrong medium
Yes, I guess I would agree with this. But I am not sure what science is independent of the scientific community. (Long debates about this in philosophy books.)
Science is failng, because pure scientific endevor isn't sole reason to pursue scientific endevor. It have to do more and more with scientific institute internal politics.
@@SabineHossenfelder Well ig science is just an idea/method, so it cant fail. As much as the idea of honesty can fail. Moreso people can fail at being honest or properly doing science
It is just the academic part of science. Companies still make progress and if not only private money is lost. The main reason to finance academic institutions is to get educated specialists.
I am not a physics person but I am a doctor. I have seen medical field really grow during my medical career. I also love other fields of science and Regularly look for new discoveries or any kind of breakthrough, I have seen non in field of physics for as long as I can remember
Sabine, your core audience understands and agrees with your points. There will always be people misrepresenting and distorting your views for monetary reasons.
As a biologist, I feel for you. Our questions are much easier to answer because our systems are so much more malleable. We can delete a gene and see the effect. I can't imagine how it is to work on such a non-malleable system.
Unfortunately, the problem isn't limited to physics. See: Ioannidis JPA et al PLoS Med 2005 Aug;2(8):e124. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124. Epub 2005 Aug 30. Why most published research findings are false
As a biologist who's also worked in anthropology, I can say without reservation the same phenomena exists in those fields, specifically anthropology/history we write off every contradiction as an aborism and we don't fund research that explores hypothesis that don't jive with accepted theories. I'm not talking about aliens, just the multiple observations in anthropology and genetics that clearly show our history, specifically the history of society, is longer and more complex than is allowed to be truly explored at an academic level as based on grants and who receives them.
Don't your eyes see, your ears hear? Her wave function has collapsed. When people were there to see it happen. Now she shame-cast. And consumes 2 bottles of wine after breakfast.
I had a situation where there were doubts about an eminent professor's work....several decades later. I was told that we will have to wait till he dies until we can look at it again! That is politics, not science!
I heard the exact same thing in the field on Archaeology. It takes a professor who specialises in something like; "Early Ottoman army composition and ideology" to die before any new research can be conducted in that field.
It is scary that we are getting to the point where things cost so much to test. How to fund it. The problem is we tend to listen to the most persuasive person rather than the person who is necessarily right.
Sabine the problem goes all the way to the bottom. I've seen several STEM students with a passion for their field reach university and be devastated and failed by the lack of teaching involved. It was basically you need to know this, you'll be tested next week. If you need help form a student group. Now go away. One student with all the current aids just couldn't get the subject. I loaned them my 50+ year old text book and they understood. The difference is that 50+ was written during a time when teaching was important because we had to beat those dang commies. And students had to get up to speed as fast as possible. Today a textbook is all about making money for someone, teaching is secondary. And instructors at the University level don't teach anymore. And that circles us back to what you said. Universities have found a cash cow and writing papers and sports makes more money that teaching.
I'm an undergrad engineering student coming close to graduating and running into a few teachers this semester with an attitude like "you should know this already, it's not my job to teach you", and to some degree they're right. Someone else should have taught me this before. Like, I did take a class on diff eq. with 200 other people during COVID, taught in English by someone who didn't speak English well, and I did get an A+ but did I learn anything? A year later am I able to do a single problem from the first test? None of us are.
@@jackgude3969No doubt. Engineering as well. I was always amazed at the female students in my dpt (with a notable exception) who received the highest academic accolades, but had serious trouble stringing together concepts for exams. They were learning to the test; anything beyond that was kinda foreign to them. Thus, the attitude fed itself from both sides. How can a professor be disappointed with excellent grades and time on task, even if the end result is not a particularly cohesive learner?
For me your channel has just the right balance of everything in the field of science; explanations, enthusiasm, skepticism, frankness, humour, etc. (particularly the sarcastic humour, which I always appreciate). I also really appreciate your no-nonsense approach. As for the lack of nuance, I'm originally from the Industrial North of England. Us Northerners are not famous for our use of nuance. Keep up the great work! There's a reason you have over 1.5 million followers (and we're not all anti-science nuts).
Sabine, this is actually a very good point. Despite all the advancements in computation over the last 50 years, Physics hasn't made any major foundational discoveries. There is definitely enough funding, and we have better tools, so the issue must be with the direction. Thank you for your family remark, it is very kind of you :-)
But not every discovery has to be "foundational". And just because we make a "foundational" discovery it doesn't mean it will be practical or useful (of course many exceptions exist). However knowing that Quarks and Leptons exists has no impact in the real world outside of Universities and research labs. Fact!
Wrong. We've proven the existence of Higgs bosson, gravitational waves and have first image of a black hole taken. These are just examples to name a few examples.
She makes no mention of 50 years of climate models. . and paleontologist have had expeditions to find predicted specie's. And chemist have predicted Elements and done test to find them
The last great advance in theoretical physics was achieved with a note pad and pencil in a living room in Scotland in 1963 (or there abouts). Sure, the confirmation needed a billion Euro experiment
You assume that there's linear development, while it's not. Looks the at the maximum height of building that can be construct from 1950 to today. The improvement isn't that obvious. Because there's hard limit of what we could do with bunch of atoms. The limit of material science. The development of computing power really clouded a lot of people judgement about science progress.
Frau Hossenfelder, ich mag Ihren Stil. Ich sitze in Deutschland aber finde im deutschsprachigen Raum fast nie genügend Informationen zu den Themen, die mich interessieren. Im Englischen gibt es viel und vieles ist auch gut produziert aber auch oft zu Hype-orientiert. Sie lassen den ganzen Mist weg und machen es authentisch, mit Humor und (am wichtigsten) mit Sorgfalt. Ich bin kein Wissenschaftler sondern Musiker und seit ein paar Jahren Altenpfleger aber ich lerne einfach gern und mit Ihnen macht es Spaß, vielen Dank! Habe gerade endlich auf "Subscribe" geklickt.
And some random TH-camr named Dave who happens to be a professor, will still complain: stop criticising the flatness of our tires! Such rhetoric helps the flat earthers.
I was a scientist for many years(retired now). Inside of that world (data/proof is suppose to be the master). So then we look now and it is political forces(peer pressure,censorship, and money), that drives everything - if you are not part of the approved narritive you are anathema, a truth denyer, a charleton. This undermines everything that evidential, empirical science IS! Everytime I hear, "the Science is settled", I think - they don't have a clue what science is. Science is a process - I look at it like programmimg(a program is never 'done' lol). We have seen "settled science" proved incorrect innumerable times. Sorry for the rant.
@@euanthomas3423 rubbish, i prefer people who actually solved the problems, see Elementary lectures on electric discharges, waves and impulses, and other transients by Steinmetz, Charles Proteus, 1911. and wasnt it fraudstein that even admitted tesla was the smartest man alive at the time? if you think spacetime is a thing your in a cult bud.
The same is true in pure mathematics. Dream up a bunch of definitions and axioms and start turning the paper crank. There is a reason why so few pure mathematics papers are retracted, viz., nobody cares if they're right or wrong. Over 100,000 theorems are proven each year in the pure mathematics journals. Are all the proofs valid? Highly unlikely. Furthermore, a theorem in specialty A can be identical to a theorem in specialty B, with the only difference being that A's foo is B's bar. And then there's the issue of gratuitous generality. Does anybody care what goes on in a fossilated Jones space? Adm. Grace Hopper used to say there's nothing new in computer science; we just rename the old stuff. The same is true about pure mathematics. To a first approximation, humans have proven all the theorems that humans can prove. All we're doing now is proving old theorems with new terminology. AI recently found a way to multiply matrices and sort numbers more efficiently. AI just got two Nobel Prizes. The day is not too far away that AI will qualify for a Fields Medal or a Clay Millennium Prize. Keep truckin', Sabine.
Curiously enough, someone else who used to work in pure mathematics told me exactly the same thing just recently. I actually thought that the field was doing well, so this is news for me. (Quite depressing.)
Pure mathematics faces a hugely different issue as several thousand humans spend the best years of their life grinding out the Langlands Program. Noting that, pure mathematics has solved major open problems in the last 30 years. The Poincare Conjecture, Fermat's Last Theorem and the Fundamental lemma for Automorphic Forms. Are there paper mills? No doubt but it's not to the same degree as theoretical physics which has really seen a stagnation after not discovering SUSY at the LHC.
Dear Sabine, My primary reason for actually commenting for once, is in a desperate hope to offset some of the ever building circle of hate that seems to surround otherwise constructive criticism. The main thing that I would like to point out - and I'm sure you are aware - is that there is a difference between "Science deniers": those who would willfully dismiss genuine evidence derived from the scientific method, and those - like you - who are simply pointing out that there are potential issues related to the organization of scientific institutions that support science. I too grow weary of having genuine constructive criticism being written off in a fashion that feels a great deal like simple political rhetoric. Perhaps it is time to do some good science into the nature of the organizations that support that very science in the first place (a little meta I know :). Given that all of our collective institutions, from government to private enterprise, are ultimately comprised of individuals. It is frustrating when people either dismiss the possibility of systemic failure with the "that cannot happen again" attitude, or believe that the system itself has some sort of malice. No, organizational systems by their nature are not malevolent (barring AI becoming sentient, after multitudes of rude humans have abused it). I'm sure the good people of Germany can attest to the fact that individuals within organizations - via corruption or misdirected passion - can quickly and drastically change entire governments... We need to collectively question, maintain accountable, and constantly improve our institutions just as we do our homes, so as to prevent entropy from claiming, and rendering them susceptible to those who would abuse them. I appreciate you for having the courage and consideration to speak honestly in a world that seems to prefer tearing things apart rather than building them up. Cheers!
I feel your pain. As a retired physician I see similar things happening in medicine. It’s almost always due to outside influences and money. Pure science does not occur in a vacuum, unfortunately. And the worst part? People are involved.
And what was that pristine status quo. Where scientists were free to do all the science without worrying about money? I'm pretty sure that aside from brief periods where technological advancement gives many opportunities for scientific discoveries. Most of the time it's hard work without much remuneration.
Speaking the truth can upset some. Science is all about failing, admitting the error, and trying again only after rethinking and learning from what you got wrong.
I once heard a philosopher say: criticism is an act of love. You may not be a cheerleader of science, but you are a lover of it. Especially if you have the courage to stand up to unfair opposition.
Sabine, I can't tell you how much I enjoy your videos. Your blunt candor and straight forward approach to physics is delightful. May I suggest a new title for videos of this nature? "Sabine Goes Off on Physics" Much love!
Some TH-camr: "Sabine is making the same claims as science deniers." In the comment section, hundreds of scientists respond: "Actually, she has a point."
Not surprised tbh. International PhD student here in the UK, to me it feels that nowadays science, or at least physics (my field) is just (very toxic) politics and networking, elititsm/nepotism and winning the game of publishing. Cannot wait to get out of this mess.
Yup. I left academia after 8 years of bullying by a professor gaming the system in a London university. I made up my mind to leave once I had realised I would be expected to pull the same tricks to get anywhere.
People who accuse you of lacking nuance don’t pick up your irony and sarcasm. And your phrasing always includes room for error. How much more nuance do people want?
@@paintspot1509 So don't talk about meta issues without doing a 6 hour video without going into excruciating detail that nobody will watch? Sounds like you just want to silence criticism.
I think almost everyone will agree: Incentives matter. The incentives in academics have become very dysfunctional. The incentives on youtube aren't much better, but I would argue they are much clearer, and when it comes to their impact on "scientific discourse" much less problematic... because its MEDIA not ACADEMIC SCIENCE. - a fellow Academic Science ex-pat.
The incentives on TH-cam are much worse. Science denial pays vastly more than genuine science content. For example Sabrina's most viewed videos are the ones which have the least scientific content and that appeal primarily to that audience.
As an RF engineer, I always admired Oliver Heaviside when in school. Pushing the boundaries even though the work was considered trivial by serious scientists. He explored the practical side and solutions to electromagnetic theory problems. When you push the theory into the practical side far enough someone tends to notice strange things when they extend the practical performance. Think of Claude Shannon. Later, when RF and signal theory was considered mature, it was noticed that there was something going on with signals and error when performance was pushed to its limit. I'm sure a serious scientists would sigh, and say "Of course, Claude. This is trivial and boring." But the Shannon information Limit ended up making profound contributions to communication and information theory which pushed technology and science forward again.
Slightly OT but I once went to an HP event promoting their latest oscilloscope where it became very apparent that the sales people understood neither the Nyquist limit or the statistical limits of extracting informtion from noisy signals. I asked a couple of questions and was never asked back again.
@@EbenBransome If you want competent sales people, give money to the techies to buy there own equipement. If you give it to sourcing departments, you get sellers, specialized in sourcing department flirtation.
A lot of people misunderstand some of Claude’s theorems or his work in general. Those people who sigh probably haven’t even thoroughly read them. They just know the conclusions about them they were taught.
Hi Sabine! I like your videos really much! And being a particle physicist by education (my life followed a path far from active research) I fully agree with your standpoint. A couple of years ago I had a lunch with a group of friends including a great theoretical physicist. In that private situation, he shared my concern toward such a way of doing physics (and science in general). Fundamental physics looks more and more magical thinking, with people seriously discussing how many angels dance on the tip of a pin. I'm also quite furious to read about the incredibile amount of money we are going to spend for a new accelerator (nobody knows for finding what) while we don't have a clear understanding (for lack of enough data) of the role of aerosols in the climate machine. So, please, go ahead in your struggle for a better science. Maybe it's useless, but it's worth trying
I have had many conversations like this. It's an interesting example you mention about the question of funding for particle physics vs climate physics. The issue is (for what I have heard) that climate physicists aren't remotely as organized or internationally united as particle physicists. Basically, particle physicists are much better at lobbying for their own cause. All comes down to politics in the end, sigh.
@@SabineHossenfelder Well, there are several reasons. First, climate science is a threat for big corporations. Second, when I entered University of Rome in 1974, many people were not able to see the difference between particle and nuclear physics; It is a sort of original sin, we are the heirs of the Manhattan Project. So, there is always a hidden thought that some breakthrough can give us some miracolous new energy source (do you know that there are people suggesting to tap the vacuum energy?) or some fancy new weapon
@@SabineHossenfelder Climate science has political implications for responses to climate change. Lot's of money is at stake. No one cares outside those doing the research what fields / particles are part of the standard model.
Brilliantly put, and I couldn't imagine a more "Sabine" reply to that other youtuber. In my own field, though progress is getting made, that progress is funded through a grant process that is increasingly "gamified" by over-stating potential benefits of new methods or materials, reinforced by university press-releases to "science journalists". Lots of wasted money on useless things that were over-hyped.
I feel like all parts of human society currently double down on concepts that have been proven to be wrong by experience, not just sience. Be it to a lack of good alternatives or a lack of willingness to accept the failure of the concepts. We truely live in strange times.
Being honest, I think it's primarily due to money that everything stagnates and lies keep being prompted up even after proven over and over again... If capital is what governs the direction of society then lacking capital indicates you have no voice in society...
@@zloyboy8 Well, speaking of concepts that have been repeatedly proven wrong, all the suggested alternatives to the situation you describe so far would be included in that basket. More convincing ones may exist, but there's still no point considering the notion until we actually _find_ some.
Academia has gone from the pursuit of knowledge to an industrial complex. It's all about raising funding, and overcomplicated theories that don't do anything useful, but show off the researchers "brilliance" in creating (needless) complexity are the pinnacle of success in this new model.
There are not enough thumbs up buttons, like buttons, claps and hoorays to give Sabine's tirades. Especially this one. And the last two like this, that she got raked over the coals for by supposed science communicators and fellow scientists, that she is now trying once again to explain here.
One thing i do not hear many people talk about is how some people that promote studying science never talk about the bad stuff in the career. If i knew that my primary choices for employment as a physicist were either high school/Collage teacher or a grant beggar in a University i would never have chosen this career. I was never prepared to search for grants or formulate a project. Not to mention the chances of getting grants which are scarce also usually depends on the amount of people with PhDs and their H index which further enhances the publish or perish culture. Publish or perish culture leads to a bunch or crap papers to be published to increase H index to get grants, is a vicious cycle.
Sabine vs Professor Dave round 2, fight !! joke aside, I appreciate you both and consider that you are valuable communicator in your video most of the time.
You're not boring! You're the voice I never had when I was in academia for almost two decades. And you're not repeating yourself, you're making your arguments sharper and your game better. After all, you don't hear tennis players that what they do (hitting the ball with a racket over and over and over again) is repetition. You're growing and your arguments grow with you. Do you think Thomas Kuhn just came up with the Structure? No! He gave countless seminars, wrote much more than he published, talked to thousands of people... If you have the courage to stay true to yourself without closing yourself to the world, to stay on course and balance (just as you do!) the novelty with repetition, something undeniable, something that cannot be ignored will emerge one day. Thank you!
@@SABINE THANKYOU For making this video. I think some of his criticism was ok but i do think that he mis understands your POV and like you said about your viewers usually knowing how to take you. plus a lot of us have seen your seminars and i think he doesn't realize that this channel is more from your perspective rather than some formal educational thing. and we all get making videos about things that get more views that's just how it works. anyways stay true. LOVE YOU BROTHER! SIS
You're pretty much the only physicist/ science communicator that I can listen to these days. Everyone else is so full of it. Thank you for being sober and honest
I'm a lawyer, not a scientist. But even I can understand when Dr. Hossenfelder says that physicists are treading water rather than finding out new things about the universe. I suspect her greatest critics feel professionally threatened because they don't know how to break out of the status quo either. But I appreciate that she is brave enough to identify the problem even if she doesn't have a solution at hand.
Law isn't all that different from science (laws of nature, evidence, burden of proof, etc.). If you want a solution to cosmology involving no "dark" fudging stuff, try Eric Lerner's "The Big Bang Never Happened", also great on the history and sociology of science.
@@Thomas-gk42 If you are for real, I must get that book. I was already into that after this video, but now you made me really curious that she has solved at least bits of that.
@@pawegrzanka5494 Yes, she wrote two books, "Lost in Math" was pulished already in 2018. It´s not that easy to read, because she reasons her criticism in there very scientific. But I´m just a craftsman and came through, so you will. I have a lot of understanding for her anger, cause nothing changed since that. I also recommend her new book from 2022, titeled "Existential Physicis". Easier to read, it´s a wonderful and hopeful overview on the borderline of physicis and philosophy. All the best.
It worries me how in high school I considered studying physics because I thought it was the pinnacle of science, and all the others were "lesser". Well I don't think that anymore. At least biologists do something useful (most of the time, like pharma research).
I have three questions, and would be honored if you answered one of them (super-honored if you answered all 3). 1. What methods should physicists be using that they're not currently using? I.e., what should they be doing instead, and how? 2. Are all physicists contributing to the problem? Or just some? 3. Should zero physicists be pursuing super symmetry, string theory, and multi-verse theories, or just fewer?
You’re the type of individual each one of us ought to strive to emulate Sabine. True to your core beliefs, that tough friend who will tell you that one thing you really don’t want to hear. The type of individual who actually, truly cares. This is my favorite format of yours, it feels authentic and informative with out any stunts. Thank you for sharing your experiences and intellect with all of us
@@Anonymous247n meaningless statement. A complaint full of nuance, critical thought and passionate thought. Your lack of critical thought when posting your comment is the exact problem with the world today. People love handing out their opinions, and offer absolutely nothing to back up said opinion.
I disagree. While Dr. Sabine's criticisms are correct. Most scientists are well aware of them. What Dr. Sabine never even talks about is the root cause behind them. Many pointed out this in the comment. But academia today is more centered around grant collection with science being a secind priority. Also, there little carrier in science for young people. Sabine brought these issues very rarely.
@@Jack_Redview As meaningless as your "I'm a fanboy and i like this" statement. They are both just opinions, and opinions need not be backed up. Did i ask you for proof?.. I just said, i like the scientific content better. You put your comment into the public and you are obviously a fanboy of sorts. It's obvious from the baseless hostility you showed me. That's fine, be a fanboy all you want, do all the donos you want, but accept other people having different opinions. Oh, and don't demand proof or "backing up" for their "Well i like this better" opinion :P Then again, this is your "favorite format", so i suppose you're in the right place... :P
These physicists are not disimilar to religious dogmatists. Pushing proof into the future and demanding blind faith while asking for financial contributions to further the cause.
Thank you my 10 year younger sister (I actually have no siblings)! I left science 25 years ago - and I like your directness... allows me to understand what's (not) going on in science since I left without having to do all the reading. Thank you for your work!
Sabine, I love watching your videos on a wide range of science issues. I do not know enough about particle physics and the related fields discussed to be able to judge the options for progress. However, your argument is compelling in that even with my minimal knowledge, progress has been slow, although ongoing confirmations of relativity and quantum mechanics are stunningly impressive given the era in which they were established and their survival through trials unimaginable at the time. I work a lot on how to bring science to transit (of all things...). I tend to use your approach - cut to the problem and show what is wrong. That has not been as successful as the approach I have been using in my very senior years; talking directly to opportunities ahead, instead of problems behind. It is the same question, but those who have surplus money to do good or create investment opportunities that have secondary effects of public benefit, don't want to invest in a negative. They want the joy juice of being the hero who saves the day. Optimism is just more fun. Please forgive me if I have missed this in your online materials (I strongly suspect that I have), but how can this hoped for new direction be expressed through emphasizing the opportunities, be they scientific or economic, like a list of experiments that could pile up to the cost of a larger collider. There are probabilities of success among them all and the positives can be guestimated. It would be no contest, even though super-colliders are cool. Brian
We don't need "Professor" Dave to point out the earth is round, and we certainly don't need anyone else jumping on that bandwagon. His criticism came off as tone policing because Sabine's perspective could be used by conspiracy theorists. His other points really were not substantiated. I think he's upset because Sabine is significantly more legitimate of an academic than he is, so he can't stand when conspiracy theorists use her as a higher appeal to authority than he can offer himself. Conspiracy theorists should be ignored. The popular part of "Professor" dave's channel could disappear, and nothing of value would be lost.
@@crimson_comet I didn't say it's because they are jealous. I said it's because she is significantly more legitimate in academia, so she can be used as a higher authority against him. I'm sure he is jealous and maybe it is relevant but that wasn't my point.
@@crimson_comet "Professor" Dave appears to rely a lot on argumentation from authority for his defenses of various topics. When someone with "authority" in his system argues against (or could be construed to argue against) his belief, he loses his only real path to demonstrating his points. The problem is, he shouldn't be arguing from authority in the first place, as that is a clear logical fallacy. While fallacies can, at times, be useful for convincing people or where a formal defense is not needed, they are never where the fundamentals of an argument should be stated. "Professor" Dave should either bone up on the actual physics Sabine is discussing or bow out of a conversation that he's not equipped to have. Theoretical physicists are (or should be) perfectly capable of defending their work without someone else trying to appeal to their authority.
This problem happens in The Arts too. it's all about ticking boxes for funding. No original art is encouraged to come out of academia without compromise. It's falling to bits. But people still love new music... I think.
@@Katelizaj We give too much weight to bureucracies. Directors at all kinds of academia, presidents, prime ministers, they all dress and generally conduct themselves the same, and i think its strenghtened this subconcious idea of ''the person with the fitted suit has the authority'' and its literally ruining all sides of society, from government to any one area of academia. Hell theres even uni courses to become a youtuber now, the one thing that was always meant as a self learn type of career
@@aguspuig6615 That needs to be way more creativity in every field in academia because everything is open source all information is available now I always proved to not be creative but very good at solving problems we give it this time to say we can educate ourselves. They just needs to be away of measuring it.
Hi Sabine, I really enjoy these types of videos where you break down the current state of affairs within the scientific community. For those of us on the outside, it’s eye-opening and something we’d never think to question. I’m humble enough to recognize that even the researchers behind these papers are on a whole different level! So please keep challenging the status quo from time to time-it’s truly inspiring to hear someone with your brilliance navigate these complex topics. Cheers!
![[Part 1] ทารกน้อยถูกทิ้ง👶 หญิงชราเก็บขวดขายเลี้ยงดูเขาจนโต #โลกการละคร](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/nPTDvFCExks/mqdefault.jpg)
I worked in Academia and during the 90s I bore witness to the moment that research changed. I saw all the Professors have their path to tenure be shifted from "How well have your grad students done and how many prestigious journals have you been published in" to "How many millions of dollars in grants have you garnered for the university". When your metric of success shifts from good science to how much money you can attract to the University fundamentally changes how science is done and motivated
This has been codified and has been extended to what now is known as the "impact agenda". This type of extreme end goal focused endavour, undermines the entire process of knowlegde generation. However, what is worst of all, that it is so deeply ingrained in the system, that the people operating within academia are both blind to its corrupting effect, and cannot think of a science and research envrionemnt without it. Henceforth, what happens - psychologically - is that any type of criticism is moralised as "science deniers" or "conspirarcy theorists", pre-empting the impetues for self-reflection.
It does not matter the discipline, once bonuses are introduced most people start producing bonuses rather than the thing, because no matter the discipline people are people.
It does show that the economists and game theorists who came up with "perverse incentives" were entirely correct.
And it gets so much worse when the people in charge of the grants have an agenda 📉
Honestly the science was failing since the Analen of Physics were bought 1898.
I am especially happy that you as a non English native has managed zo get this importance. Every discussion is dominated mostly by US YT and they bring a certain culture and approach to discussions and its good that we get an different approach wih you
Interesting pov, hadn't considered this at all.
Yeah the US culture is super saturated in science communication. I'm yet to find relevant videos of people talking about climate change in my native language. The people around me all acknowledge the problem, of course, but no one is talking about it and no one knows the nuances.
@@SabineHossenfelder Thank you for the answer and the great work. I just became a member. Servus und schöne Grüße aus Wien
@@SabineHossenfelderplease lower your microphone -some of us need to read your lips 😅
@@daduzadude1547 So what you're saying is is that Sabine is against deaf people? (jk, that's supposed to be my take on "Professor" Dave logic)
No funnier scientist exists. I have done the math(s).
She still believes climate models that failed for 50 years. She's a physicist who believes trapping heat in a certain area explains why certain areas in that area are cooling
Oh thank f-. Someone who notices that mathematics is plural.
@@osmosisjones4912 Sabine! We found one!
It is not all about Math, there is physics going on here too, uncertainty principle of fun states that you cannot measure both the fun factor and the number of scientists at the same time, wait for the video function to collapse ( go viral) then make your measurements again
@@SireJoechemist have predicted Elements and paleontologist have had expeditions to find predicted specie's and why doesn't she mention 50 years of climate models
I get sick of the phrase "science denier" in the first place because it's pathetic for anyone to speak as if they are the keeper of the practice or product of science. How grandiose can people get?
You're better than a cheerleader for science - you're science's best friend who loves it enough to tell it if it stays on its present course, it will get thrown in jail for drunk driving.
@@weltschmerzistofthaufig2440 you're jewish
Why no mention of 50 years ago climate models and chemist have predicted Elements and paleontologist have had expeditions for specie's they predicted
@@weltschmerzistofthaufig2440 You are the only actual tool here.
@@notanemoprog Wow, look at that! This person claims that Science is failing, yet he can’t even come up with an actual counter-argument! Another hypocrite fails…
@@weltschmerzistofthaufig2440 Did you just assume my gender? You ghastly bigot.
wait, so Sabine is my sister?? Sweet.
The "theactionlab" channel is Shiite 🤡
Wow ActionLab !
Collab with her
that made you my brother. Coooool
Claim its true now, prove it later.
The Thanksgiving dinner conversation will be awesome this year. You bring the snark and I’ll bring the disdainful side eye.
We got Sabine and Professor Dave beef before GTA 6
Dave's a joke.
Don't insult jokes like that jokes are funny dave is poop @@TheLuminousOne
Dave treats science like it's his religion. It's really not healthy for anyone involved.
@@TheLuminousOne why? Sabine pretty much agreed with him.
The difference is, he expects her to be an educator while she doesn't want to be one.
For my first impressions of that channel. I found it mostly a rage bait shithole that dunks on idiots for easy views. The way Sabine dunks on them is more subtle and intelligent than him.
Science is evidence based; funding is eminence based.
Good one.
The entire problem is that science has stopped being evidence based. Every area of intellectual life has been infected by the same mind worm that seems to be behind wokeness. Everything is a proxy argument for deeply held personal philosophies
Perhaps. But as someone who has been on review panels for grant funding, often it seems funding is BS based. As in the one who can BS the best gets the most votes.
@@kmbbmj5857having been on many of those same panels, absolutely yes. It also has a very random component (i.e. who are the three-five random people that get to review a given grant..).
I disagree. Science and funding both ought to be evidence based. But sadly both are eminence based..
As a "professional" (astro)physicist, it's my observation that many scientists are now driven by popular trends and what is most "attractive" to funders. They don't want to undertake any serious research which runs counter to these trends for fear of being ostracised, or simply having the work/paper/proposal rejected (sunken cost). The actual scientific value (knowledge, deeper understanding etc.) seems to be secondary. It could be argued that the path of least resistance, and of greatest opportunity for funding, career advancement, prestige etc., is simply to conform to the status quo and climb the academic greasy pole.
As an aside, I remember meeting you many years ago in Frankfurt/FIAS when I was a postdoc, where I was taken aback, and impressed, by your forthrightness! I'm glad you're continuing to raise awareness of these (and other) important issues - thank you.
@@ZiriYounsi in many places young students are encouraged to do trendy stuff and disencouraged to do what they would like to do. My friend is doing phd in economics, and was softly forced to do it on behavioral econimics, because its cool and people got Nobel in it.
Hi, industry guy here. What u say just means there's not much carrier in science. Apart from tenured track, most are very ill paid with little chance of growth. Hence the current situation.
@@DiegoLopezVlog
I deny that there is a Nobel prize for economics....
I find it amusing how these sort of brash criticisms always seem to paint the person in question as the purist exception. So are you also a victim of this looking for the easy path or are you "one of the good ones"?
Money (and lack thereof) is certainly a big part of the problem, but on a more fundamental level I think this is connected with how academics, academic departments, and universities themselves are evaluated by different bodies (foundations, councils, government bodies etc.). I can only speak for my geographical region and discipline, but the criteria by which productivity and success are measured/quantified today are onerous and problematic. Many of the current problems can be interpreted as academics simply adopting the strategy of maximising these productivity/success metrics for internal/external assessment success (for which the pressure is enormous). Actual, original and long-term research is now a luxury and hobby rather than a prerogative.
Thanks you Sabine. In my field, the research that is cited to justify complete bullshit at best. The confidence therapists, nutritionists, and trainers speak with can induce nausea at times. To say I’m a fan is a massive understatement. We need more you on this planet. Please stick to this path. It’s greatly needed.
what's your field?
@@inveterateforeigner2780human biomechanics
I hate it when others say you shouldn't criticize the institution of academic physics because it causes others to lose trust in it. They are more concerned about the optics of science rather than the integrity of it.
MM was null. null is the not the same thing as disproven. u want to "fix" physics... its easy light need REQUIRES a medium. waves are NOT things. THeir way of thinking if fundamentally flawed. like they say bad data in bad data out.
This isn’t the criticism at all. Criticisms is great! But titles like “I don’t trust Scientists” are not. See the difference?
@@chrisdistant9040 100% this.
@@chrisdistant9040 why would a title stating, "I don't trust scientists," be problematic? If we have verifiable reasons to not trust scientists (some or all) why is that a problem?
I dont trust Fauci and I have the evidence for my distrust to back it; why would that be a problem?
@@chrisdistant9040 That's a feature of TH-cam. If you don't clickbait, your video never gets recommended.
Science isn't failing. Governmental control of science is the problem.
"97% of all scientists agree with whoever pays them."
It's the old statistics game of, "What results do you want me to find" stays employed, vs, "I found these results" gets fired and blackballed. If you're the new hire, who's example will you follow. The lead scientist is writing grant proposals, and you vill support him. Have I mentioned that your job is on the line?
"Science without math is like talking about religion without mentioning God. But editors know that 90% of readers tune out at the first equation."
Government meaning political parties, both Democrats and Republicans, or any other party.
As someone who has followed you for about four years, I’m very eager to hear your insights on these problems in physics. It would also be incredibly helpful, as I’m currently a physics graduate student. Thank you for all these years of guidance and education.
Thanks for the feedback!
@@SabineHossenfelderOH NOW THIS MAD FURIOUS LADY HAS HER OWN SET UP LIKE A PROFESSIONAL SO CALLED SCIENCE COMMUNICATORS.
GOOD PRETENDING TO BE GOOD, BUT FROM THE BOTTOM OF HELL, WE KNOW THIS LADY IS GOOD FOR SCIENCE.
I rarely seen a person, that too a lady so furious to get the science on right track like a bad mummy.
GOOD MOM FOR SCIENCE bad kids.
KEEP ON modern science MOM.
KEEP SLAPPING THESE NERD PHYSICS KIDS, WHO DO ANYTHING TO GET TAX PAYERS FUNDED GRANT CHOCKLETS.
NOW ITS ENOUGH, SOME MOM ANY WHERE HAS TO RAISE HER VOICE AND HANDS.
THIS LADY MOM IS PERFECT FOR THESE GRANT KIDS/ RETIRED SO CALLED PHYSICIST.
keep your bitter words onn for good of science.
OLD SCIENTISTS, NO NEED TO HURT HER. she is doing it for good of physics and NEXT GENERATION PHYSICISTS.
KEEO IT ON WIERD MOM.
@@SabineHossenfelder Your written response to Professor Dave is being hidden. Is that TH-cam or Dave's doing?
@@tnndll4294 TH-cam's doing. TH-cam has it that if a comment gets enough dislikes or engagement without likes its considered unpopular and moved to the bottom of the comment section (if you scroll to the bottom you will see negative comments (if they exist and the video is popular enough to make the negative comments unpopular).
Its because her comment got many many responses quickly enough that it tricked the algorithm to think her comment was incredibly unpopular and moved it to the very bottom. Its still there, just very very far down.
I think Dave should of just pinned it to fix the whole issue. He can still access the comment and there are links to it so I have no idea why he hasn't.
@@SabineHossenfelderyou don't trust scientists anymore? I don't trust you to give me non hyberbolic science info anymore if you continue to make statements like this. If you want to call out real problems and concerns in academia, you really need to watch yourself from becoming too extreme. But that's not where the money is, is it? Ironic. Subscribed for the science, unsubscribed for the conspiracy theory anti science pandering that pretends to be real criticism about a genuine problem. You really do just come across as someone who is only so vocally against this because you got rejected from being a part of the club
The thing that reassures me about Sabine and her critiques of the science community(as her brother I can be familiar by using her first name) is her rigorous and frequent use of the phrase ‘I could be wrong’. Humility is an ‘if and only if’ condition for avoiding doing science for one’s ego versus doing it solely as a means of searching out new knowledge.
I'm guessing that's the only time a comment gets a heart and a hug
I love that Dr. Hossenfelder's actual brother replied!
Why no mention of 50 years of climate models
Right, no scientist is going to get a medal for admitting that they're wrong, which is the very foundation of the discipline. By the way, ego driven science got humans on the moon. It's all very good to be noble and stuff, but at some point the motivation becomes irrelevant if the science is sound. This is a lesson both you and your sister could take to heart.
@@DanielMasmanian You guessed wrong.
Some would call it “lack of nuance”, while others would call it “complete honesty”.
Thank God for your lack of so-called “nuance”!!!
The honest position is always the nuanced one. Unfortunately, you’ve set up a false dichotomy.
Chemist have predicted Elements and Set and performed test to find them and paleontologist have predicted specie's. And how doesn't mention climate model
@@weltschmerzistofthaufig2440 Not always. Death penalty is barbaric and there is no nuance which could be more honest.
@@oakpope Really? Would a death penalty be barbaric for a dictator? How about a genocidal maniac?
Nuance is great when there is time and attention for it. Sometimes we have to boil important truths down to the basics. This is hard, let's accept that.
Professor Dave is one of the people that exchanged dogmatic faith in a religion for a dogmatic faith in Academia
That globetard shill whose parents are related and takes money from feds?
I see the same thing with my law work. The contrast between university and the actual practice is stark. I came to the conclusion recently that the whole justice system is a self-serving puppet show.
Everyone is lining their own pockets before the whole system collapses.
It's always been that way. Justice is an illusion.
Which country?
@@uurk5lo4 Germany.
@nil981 but revenge is justice and for most ppl revenge is the only justice they are ever going to get
If there is one way to have people having trust in the scientific community, it is by being brutally honest and not by contorting yourself in making everything look shiny and happy. This practice is for the field of politics and religion…
Thanks for your amazing work Sabine!
This, right here. Politics has influenced science. It's mostly bullshit now. And I don't and won't trust any of it, at face value, moving forward. Now it all must be critiqued ten fold what it used to require. The government needs to keep their hands out of science, because government corrupts. We have people in power claiming "I am the science".
No rat face(fauxi), you are not. You are a criminal and liar.
Would that this were true. I know people _say_ "I take people who doubt themselves more seriously" but I don't think that actually holds true - at least, when one communicates to the layman (particularly those inclined towards science skepticism).
[Although if there's a paper that studies that psychological aspect quantitatively, I'd love to abandon my cynicism if I am in fact wrong on this.]
And stop linking everything to climate change.
Personal attacks are always related to the lack of arguments on the attacker's side. It's pretty common nowadays.
Always has been. Sadly, because they are easy and they work.😔☹😡
“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say." ― George R.R. Martin
You dont want to waste your time with people that won't respond to arguments so the choices are personal attacks, laughing at him or ignoring him.
Which personal attacks are you talking about?
What personal attacks were made? Prof Dave took on Dr. Hossenfelder’s views; he didn’t make personal attacks against her.
Definitely lacking nuance, but that’s because nobody has the time for 3 hour long explainer-videos and a 10 h meta-discussion, after every video. Most would be bored, many wouldn’t understand and we wouldn’t get anywhere. Your channel is about science news and communicating scientific ideas, thats fantastic, it’s helpful and it works.
Way back in the 60s and 70s the great scientist Sir Fred Hoyle was bemoaning the fact that it was becoming very difficult for a bright young person in academia to do original research because any elaborate project usually had to be vetted by an equally elaborate committee whose senior members were determined to keep youngsters working along standard lines.
At every time it is easy to look backwards and notice that the lower hanging fruit has always been picked.
Fred Hoyle in later life supported the steady state universe, was a proponent of panspermia and baselessly claimed that the fossil of archaeopteryx was fake. He is not the best person to be referring to for support.
9:26 I think for people who aren't aware why Sabine is repeating herself on the 'problems in science' topic: Prof Dave accused her of putting grist to the mills of science deniers and arguing that she shouldn't talk about problems in physics and science at all. Sabine is doubling down on her critique. Not sure whether Prof Dave picks up this glove. I hope not, as I think in the name of repetition: we've heard it now loud and clear - both sides!
Please keep doing this like you're talking to your brother. (I come armed with a degree in Electrical Engineering and a minor in Physics.) As others have already said, your honesty in calling out B S is a very large part of what makes your channel worth watching.
That's the problem though isn't it. This isn't very honest.
@paintspot1509 Please clarify what you mean by "this" and explain what's not honest about it.
@@jimreed87 Clickbait titles like "Science is failing".
@@paulboulanger5 I agree with this 100%. I start to snarl at the monitor now when I see my new favorite educational channel go from Informative vids/informative Title to 'OMG the Universe is going to End' coupled with the obligatory wide open mouth etc within a few months of gaining traction.They've all become clones of each other.
Obviously click bait works, because why would a creator do this to themselves, it looks juvenile in my opinion. They must notice a shift in viewers when they change to this tactic. I'm sure there will be studies on various Internet sales tactics like this some day!
Thanks for the clarification. It's a fair criticism.
What ”professor” Dave gets wrong is the basic advice: If you want to be trusted, act trustworthy. When there is a real problem, supressing criticism does not build trust, it destroys it. Conspiracy theorists wettest dream is to find out about obvious problems that are denied by the responsible authority. Be open about it instead and discuss possible sollutions. Be Sabine!
Science is not failing.
Academia is failing.
Many scientists just go and work for the private sector now.
Exactically right. Too much of academia believes they *are* the science, and too many scientists mistake academic conventions (i.e. papers, peer review and publishing) for actual science. I appreciate the good and thoughtful ones like Sabine that recognize this problem.
Academia isn't failing in all areas. It's failing fundemental physics, which doesn't have new private sector uses.
You have discovered the The Root Cause, please now work on the southern border!
Fundamental science is done by academia, the private sector doesn't do any as far as I know.
"Particle physics" is failing. My sister is a biochemist, i assure you her lab is well funded and her salary is good enough, for her. A third of what the private sector is offering though.
dear Sabine, im an old man, i seen many greed and lies in my life, more nowadays.... politics, religion, science, greed lies smokescreens, and then there is you. let me be clear about this. you are a summer breeze in all of this, honnest, open, direct, no crap, no bullshit, tellem like it is. lot of what you say is what i see everywhere reflected. and good people shoved out if they dont play "the game along". like you. i been working with victims of all kinda agression half of my life, people who didnt even had an honnest chance at a life because of the greed and lies. i respect what you do and how you do it, and if there is a fight, im on your side dear sabine, im also a stubbern man, i dont give in neither. my deepest respect sabine for what you do there.
I can see your age from the poeticness in your soul.
Even Lawrence Krauss has pointed out that physics hasn't made as much progress as we might think. Our impression of constant breakthroughs often comes from science magazines, which tend to over-hype discoveries to sell issues.
Just like on youtube with clickbait.
Hijacking your comment for the brains:
I don't know why, but nuclear fusion reactors like this structured reminds me of black holes or better said: black holes are structurally and behaving like those nuclear fusion reactors. They also have plasma that is spinning in circles, but instead the EM field holding the plasma in its place, the mass rotates around the the plasma like a donut (as in this reactor holding the mass with magnets from the outside) just from the inside of a black hole. Exactly like this, thing. In the middle there exists exotic material plasma that is a soup and repells all matter (so it can work like this reactor), which would be NEGATIVE energy mass, thous is the singularity. In the middle exists "Nothing(ness)", which is in reality just negative mass.
Black holes are soooo efficient, that they die in 100^100^100 years due to Hawking Radiation. So, it would make sense, that those reactors are practically black holes and have infinite energy source as long as you give them some matter (just like black holes lol)
But does that mean science is failing? Seems to me humans or failing to discover new things.
Depends on the discipline. Biology is making huge strides and across a wide range of sub-disciplines. Paradigms are shifting on an almost daily basis. The problem in Physics may be just down to bang for buck - it costs increasingly vast amounts of money to tackle the remaining problems whereas Biology is relatively cheap.
I mean also our impression of constant breakthroughs comes from the fact that we've seen the most rapid technological advancements in the last 200 years. Before that it was a very mild progression over centuries and millennia. I feel like it's more that we're returning to average rather than it being that physics is falling apart.
Yes, we want all the details. You’ve touched on funding before, and I would love to hear more.
I received my Physics Master of Science degree in 1983. I did not like the constraints of academics at that time, so I went into weapons design( a common thing in the cold war). I found far more money and far more latitude in what I did as I solved problems that had not been solved in 40 years of direct research. In the cold war weapons business we were not paid for research , but output of novel designs to outpace the other guys. The competition was in production of specific devices and it really showed advancement. When I defeated the evil empire ( I did have some help from a few hundred million other people) the contracts and the jobs ended. I went back to school to get my PhD, but found such obtuse behavior in academics holding to theories long abandoned in the weapons design business. When I tried to introduce the working theories from weapons industries,I was told that those ideas were misinterpretations and I had to be "reeducated" . The research of these thousands of researchers was buried under secret classification and so was dismissed by academics as unpublished drivel .
I am not the only one with this experience as several other people I worked with had similar experiences.
That's actually fascinating.
Maybe this is why DARPA hosts meetings to propose futuristic science and their possible implication in the weapons race.
wow. thank you for defeating the evil empire
This is a human mindset, "either you agree with our methods or you have to be reeducated", somewhat religious or cult like, and even science hasn't gotten rid of it. I'm not even surprised.
If there is anything you are allowed to say about it, I’m curious what scientific theories you were talking about being genuinely outdated.
I've reviewed over 80 papers on Elsevier and most of them have math errors or incorrect assumptions. I'm saddened by the state of science these days.
Ah the perils of the “I couldn’t care less” peer review process. I’m always shocked when I compare the three comments of another reviewer to the multiple pages of comments I submitted. It’s a flawed system.
I once reviewed a paper that claimed amazing results….the author had used an incorrect two particle Schroedinger equation…which the author insisted was correct .
Science is absolutely fucked.
Revievers of academic papers are not paid. Writers of those papers are not paid. Who gets money? Publisher. Publisher doesnt give a damn about quality of papers. For publisher everything that matters is sales.
I have seem so many medical and pharmaceutical papers with terrible statistical mistakes.
You'd think they would be extra careful because they deal directly with people's lives, but no. It's infuriating
Who complains the most about Starbucks? Starbucks employees. Who complains most about the government? Government employees. Who complains most about science? Well we couldn’t have that, this would be providing ammunition to science deniers and the far right.
I like that!
@ Thanks! I should have replaced “science” with “academia” but you get the picture
It's ok to complain about science so long as the complaint isn't hyperbolic or way overblown. Making overblown critiques DOES give ammo and cover to anti science freaks and flat earthers lol.
@@onielrodriguez9194 underrated post
"Far right"..😂😂😂...Sure, Sure, science is a gift of "leftists" beautiful souls. 😂😂😂
Please keep talking about the issues in science. Reform is desperately needed.
"Some of science is great, some of it isn't; I talk about both." What a line. Please have that put in the merch dept.
I will just say that I saw dozens of critical but respectful comments, including my own, disappear from "Professor Daves" comment section. There was heavy moderation going on, which didn't quite fit the aggressive tone of his own video.
I've never had one deleted from yours, whether I agreed with you or not.
It could be TH-cam algorithms themselves. I sometimes write extremely innocent statements not attacking anybody in particular with inoffensive language and it sometimes just disappears.
@@Shadow1412a TH-cam's algorithm is SO censorious, it drives me insane!!
My comment also seems to ahve disappeared in Professor Daves
@@Shadow1412a TH-cam's AI deletes my comments all the time, I would be surprised if even this one went through, but it seems like if the comments are long or mention anything poe-litick-al they get autodeleted.
Same.
Don't change, Sabine, ever. 😊
Thank you for your support!
And don't read the comments. Oh, you just did.
@@SabineHossenfelderIn India we have a saying where people posses the same ideas that place is full of rotten minds. Keep up the good work the day scientists stop disagreeing that day science is dead.
"Don't change, Sabine, ever." Bad advice, and I am polite here. Not changing is what happened to physics, stuck in a rut, unable to grow. To change is to learn and adapt to new situations and work with new ideas. To change is to live. Even rocks change.
OH NOW THIS MAD FURIOUS LADY HAS HER OWN SET UP LIKE A PROFESSIONAL SO CALLED SCIENCE COMMUNICATORS.
GOOD PRETENDING TO BE GOOD, BUT FROM THE BOTTOM OF HELL, WE KNOW THIS LADY IS GOOD FOR SCIENCE.
I rarely seen a person, that too a lady so furious to get the science on right track like a bad mummy.
GOOD MOM FOR SCIENCE bad kids.
KEEP ON modern science MOM.
KEEP SLAPPING THESE NERD PHYSICS KIDS, WHO DO ANYTHING TO GET TAX PAYERS FUNDED GRANT CHOCKLETS.
NOW ITS ENOUGH, SOME MOM ANY WHERE HAS TO RAISE HER VOICE AND HANDS.
THIS LADY MOM IS PERFECT FOR THESE GRANT KIDS/ RETIRED SO CALLED PHYSICIST.
keep your bitter words onn for good of science.
OLD SCIENTISTS, NO NEED TO HURT HER. she is doing it for good of physics and NEXT GENERATION PHYSICISTS.
KEEO IT ON WIERD MOM.
There's corruption happening at all levels, probably running deeper than most of us imagine, and it's been this way for a very long time, reaching a crescendo now as the empire's cracks are showing more than ever. Corruption always impedes truth and progress.
When I was a grad student I was working in an area that another scientist was working in. For baby steps, I replicated his results and gained experience with the analytic tools. When it came to three or four papers I could not replicate the results - not exactly but close. That gap was the difference between yawn & wow.
One of my mentors looked at the papers and said " That was just before he was up for tenure review and was publishing tons of papers. Don't put too much stock in them."
ouch… that sucks
The French diarist Anais Nin stated we don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are. It is an easy trap to fall into and it sure looks like it might apply here. I applaud your calling it out. Keep it up!
Love that quote, thanks for sharing!
@@SabineHossenfelder
Das Problem mit der Subjektivität.
Wir können der Subjektivität nicht entkommen.
@@SabineHossenfelder
Ich mag sehr Ihre Arbeit.
She said a lot of other things. Not all can be quoted here.
Anyone who quotes Anaïs Nin is okay by me!
I'm a 40 year old man with no collage at all but a general interest in science.
I love your videos, cos it's just facts about science. You don't talk to me like I'm a child and sometimes I don't understand what your saying... but then I go off, learn a little about it and come back to watch the video again and usually it makes more sense. I feel like I've learned quite a bit from your videos and I don't want you to change how you do it. Your, factual no-nonsence approach appeals to me.
If I wanted a cheerleader for science I'd go watch Dr Tyson, I come here for the facts.
Very well said!
But Sir, surely you are aware you have left this comment under an anti-science video? So maybe, like a growing part of Madam's audience, you might be here for the anti-science after all? Thank you so much for considering this proposition!
@@Mekchanoid I don't see anything an anti-science in this video, nor pseudo-science. Don't put words in anyone's mouth. It's about lack of progress, wrong direction. Nothing is wrong with science itself.
@@starling- Did you not notice the thumbnail at the top this page that proclaims Science is Failing? Look at her content. Go on. Go to the video list on her page and look for patterns. Every few weeks she repeats this essay claiming that all of science is broken because physics is broken. Very popular among all those who wish science would go away (not you, of course, kind Sir), and with better viewing figures than her normal content.
I hope you never get to read this comment because you should not spent too much time in the comment section. And never spend more time responding to critics than responding to fans. Just count the critics to confirm that you are doing something relevant and you are challenging the status quo.
I’m a big fan of your work. Big thank you!
The fact that people hold you responsible for science deniers beliefs is shocking.
Fr, it such a lazy fallacy, it's totally normal tho, ideologues usually blame people who point out the decay in the state of things they support
It’s not her fault obviously, but she has a part to play in it undeniably with the amount of content she makes like this on TH-cam and not an academic medium. While she’s not really done anything wrong it might be best to pack it in a bit or clear up the content more so it can’t be taken in the wrong way
Well the click bait titles like "Science in dying" doesn't do your question any favors.
@CristianmrWuno for sure, I mean how could "Physics is dying" not be responsible for anti-science......
Some nuance: science deniers latch onto Sabine's videos, probably without really understanding them or really paying much attention to the content. But this vastly increased viewership on her science-critical content as compared to her other stuff has led to audience capture, where Sabine keeps making this stuff. So while she can't really control who watches here videos or how they chose to interpret them (well, maybe she can, by not making these click-baity titles and thumbnails), she can focus more on the science and less on the "science is dead" stuff.
Wow, as a data person I knew fields like medicine and nutritional science have problems like this (statistical significance basically means strong evidence, needed research is impossible for ethical reasons, and most in the field don't seem to realize that "placebo effects" are pretty much indistinguishable from the unavoidable regression to mean effect that results from RCT selection criteria), but a field that uses 5 sigma as lower bound, has no statistically questionable methods like RCTs with RTM guarantee, and have no ethical considerations that keep alternate hypothesis from getting tested? Wow. I think if physics is in trouble, then what field isn't?
Nutritional science is an interesting example, never looked at that. Thanks for the suggestion!
@@SabineHossenfelder Based on what I see, hear and read nutritional science seems to be mostly what you know as "Kaffeesatzlesen". Or following whoever sponsors you most: The original food pyramid seems to have been heavily sponsored. I won't say by whom to not influence your research though - also, I don't remember. 😀
@@Widestone001 There are I think two types of research in nutrition. Nutritional epidemiology and RCTs that are supposed to be the "golden standard". I don't think they are because of the RTM problem and the fact that they target seemingly random but "easy" surrogate end points such as BMI. The epidemiology branch has its own issues with self-reported data and papers that list loads of "adjusted for" variables without even a hint at a causal diagram. For both, the found correlations are "way" below the 5 sigma significance that physics uses, even for those bits of knowledge they are the most certain about.
In the Netherlands, where I live, all of public policy seems to be based around three surrogate endpoints; BMI, blood pressure and LDL blood markers, each of which is correlated (somewhat) to health outcomes.
LDL links to another interesting and I feel, questionable, subject in medicene because the strongest evidence for LDL as a suitable surrogate endpoints seems to be mendalian randomization. Randomization through the shuffling of genetic material throughout the population. But when you look into family trees of people doing genealogy, but also when you look into the actual mechanisms, it seems that mendelian randomization might be the world's worst croupier so to speak in terms of actual randomization.
It makes sense that they can't do (much) better because of ethical considerations. Can't put a few thousand people on a diet of lard and butter for a decade to test if half of them die from heart desease.
Put this all together, and physics looks like it has got its shit together pretty good. Quite an eye opener to see that even physics with its solid maths and 5 sigma significance has major problems too. Makes you wonder if there is any field of science that doesn't have major problems.
@@SabineHossenfelder There was an essay several years back that showed how every healthy nutrition trend didn't work in English speaking enclaves, with the conclusion it wasn't the food that Americans ate that made them sick. It was speaking English. The humorous article was both accurate and reflective of the way stats are used in nutritional studies.
@@SabineHossenfelder Gary Taubes wrote the book on the topic. He also wrote books on other bad science, like Cold Fusion.
My background is electrical engineering, it's crazy to see how problem solving went from designing ingenious new components and circuit topologies to "digitize asap and slap it into a microcontroller" way of thinking. I remember from university, they quite aggressively went to boycott most older technologies, you're nudged to solve every problem in the digital domain and you're technically told to reject whatever paper from the past since it is useless and outdated anyways. I ended up specializing myself in the analog domain purely at home as a hobby, but it ended up being the entire reason I got hired.
Piles of "dated" lab equipment being thrown in the trash for not having touchscreens, being completely oblivious about the past, complaining about budget etc. They collectively killed an entire field of electrical engineering, but people fail to realize the guys who ARE doing most of the design in the analog domain WILL be retiring in a decade or two. Papers became quite unrepeatable, often I run into circuitry where simply the parts for conditioning a signal to put it safely into a microcontroller could've entirely taken over the TASK of the microcontroller to begin with. Why did your electronics become unreliable? It's not planned obsolescence, its because in most cases we get actively taught to design crap with as many stupid functionalities as possible, whilst using over complicated chips resulting in circuits 10000 times the transistor count than they technically need to have. "People landed on the moon with a computer the power of a pocket calculator" yeah, plus the million analog subsystems that did the majority of the heavy lifting where the majority of the literature ended up into archives.
Innovation nowadays feels like problem solving, not through having a good brainstorm session, but by scaling up everything, faster clocks, more cores, wider buses, but little optimization. Both technologies can coexist, I get digital stuff is more approachable, but academics should know better and also provide the stuff people sometimes don't want to study because it is necessary. Another LARGE issue is there's no space to test good and actually innovative new ideas. You can't write a paper anymore where you show something that doesn't work, it MUST be a success. The easiest way to guarantee this success is by taking a known technology and do the absolute slightest optimization. Sometimes there needs to be space for fundamental change, but in the end, most of the "innovative" stuff has been proven, sometimes as far as a century ago, literally one or two decades after linear amplification becoming possible after the invention of the triode. If you completely neglect the knowledge of your predecessors using devices and schematic symbols that you've never worked with or seen before, papers in this domain became entirely unreadable and not understandable, obviously it's gonna be neglected. It results in reinventing the wheel for the millionth time. Research becomes super inefficient if you can not make use of the work of your predecessors.
I wonder where our field is going to go once the old guys retire. I'm eternally grateful for my parents, radio amateurs, and colleagues for actively investing in me to really provide the materials and resources to dive deep into this field autonomously. One way I'm a bit excited for the wrong reasons, as the specialization becomes scarcer, the job opportunities will increase severely. The other way, I feel tech is going to eventually really stagnate and plateau. As long as people keep using as an excuse that all the easy stuff was invented, whilst 60 years ago they were building entire colour television sets with the use of less active devices than what's now in one of the many singular modern opamps used just in the audio circuit of a modern television, the motivation to think out of the box just went out of the window. I'm still stuck in the academic system, I am not going to give up not getting a good title as that's what seems to matter most nowadays, but I can tell you, the most talented guys that could've changed the world I met during my time at uni almost all ended up losing their minds and got either kicked out, burnt out, made massive career changes or in some rare cases, ended their lives.
I can mindlessly trust whatever paper being written in the 80s and before to be true and repeatable, but if you do not personally know an author of a modern paper in this field, you should take the results with a grain of salt. Although I do have to say, research became so incredibly specific, I barely stumble upon anything thats both useful and recently written XD
..wow I just learned a lot. and I've only read two paragraphs..
I felt all gooey and warm from the way you said "Analog" :P
To be fair, we all know the race to put every feature into an MCU and/or "highly integrated" IC packages is about cost, both per-device and development. What you have is a situation where hard problems used to be solved every time, but now they are only solved once and everyone can reuse the solution. This is exactly the same as the rise of libraries in programming. Yes, the side effect of hard problems being rarely solved is that few people get practice solving hard problems, but it is vastly more efficient.
I also have to nitpick your point about reliability. Bloated software contributes to unreliability and/or reduced lifespan (especially products that rely on some junky "app") but in my experience the mere use of an MCU does not, even at modern small process sizes. The MCU itself is by far the least frequent failure point in a modern product. Indeed, 1980s and 1990s ICs were greatly more vulnerable to failure due to poorer integrated protection and less reliable processes.
In my experience, the main reason electronics are less reliable is smaller package sizes (and leadfree process of course). Everything is physically weaker, contamination is much more likely to affect the entire joint, and no-lead packages are inherently vulnerable to differential thermal expansion fatigue.
Zgadzam się z tobą obecny system opiera się na wkuwamiu wiedzy bez jej zrozumienia więc ktoś potem mówi co wie, zamiast wiedzieć co mówi.
AMEN. And before long, as microcontroller = PC from few years back with heap of badly written Software-as-Service , we'll see "Blackout" novel scenario or worse. Long time ago friend of mine said, that it was hard to find people in analogue or mixed-signal design.
you're being too harsh imo.
the way i see it, we had a period of extrordinary advances (the cold war certainly played a role, as did "random" cirumstanses) so the natural thing is to slow down in order to absorb that knowledge.
I get what you say though and i 50% agree but not 100
As a former physicist I can tell you exactly the reason for physics crisis. Staying in or doing science is actually pretty dumb. The current society doesn't value at all new scientific ideas, scientific work or scientific achievements. The current society values business achievements/financial achievements or political achievements (hint: that's where the money and power is). Science doesn't attract public attention (and thus money) and that's why people are leaving science. It's a downward spiral: No money -> no people -> no new ideas -> no money -> no people -> no new ideas etc...
You know what happened with physics? There is probably some guy working at Risk modelling somewhere in Goldman Sachs who makes 6 figures a year who could have come up with some brilliant new physics theory that would turn the world of physics upside-down, but he concluded that he would be better off making 6 figures in Goldman Sachs than trying to look up for grants for his experiment (with unpredictable results). And you know what? For himself he made the best life-choice ever. That's the bottom line of the so-called physics crisis.
I agree that the financial pressures and the way grants are structured which give more weight for short term projects that emphasise practical results is what causes bad science. It also causes smart people to leave the field and enter more lucrative fields which align with their skills like quantitative finance.
This sounds to me more like a crisis of morality. If everyone is only making choices based on how much money they can earn, and no one is making a choice of how they can spend their life to create knowledge and improve humanity, then it feels like our whole society has lost its way.
I'm no hypocrite, mind you. I'm sitting here doing my boring day job instead of pursuing something more worthwhile for the simple fact that it pays all my bills and gives me a life of comfort.
Really??? is string theory really leading to money? Supersymetry? I don't see how the current people driving this crisis have any relation to monetary rewards. I think you hypothesis is flawed or at least only a part of the problem.
@@Seagaltalk String theory is a TOE. As weird as it sounds, claiming you're building towards a TOE does win you grants from science organizations in developed countries. The excitement behind supersymmetry is what funded the LHC.
What a load of bullshit. There's lots of people in academia or trying to get there, the problem is they don't get much results since 70. Real economy (I mean real economy and standards of living for middle class not money printing) also doesn't grow since 70 in the west, so clearly something bad happened back then I guess?
Your professional honesty earn you my subscription and I agree with you. One of my supervisors use to complain about academia like so: "One guy describes a fly and publish a paper about it's parts, then other removes a leg from that fly and publish a paper, then other removes a wing and so on and so forth". It was done like that cause in the University I was, they were required to publish yearly as part of their obligations or risk losing the job (imagine what would be for pure mathematics research). The consequence of this was that researchers published yearly regardless of the quality of the research or the impact it may have.
I enrolled in a phd program. There was an extreme lack of creativity in problem solving when it came to object detection and pattern recognition. The algorithms were brute force and were anything but “smart” and when they failed, they failed miserable. There was only one path and it was riddled with difficult esoteric math, not saying that makes it wrong… but if you proposed alternative ideas, you were ridiculed. Do what you’re told, basically. Grad students are cheap labor for an industrial complex system, where people at the top lack vision. This is the real problem.
I would love to see Sabina rank science/physicist TH-camrs on the S to F rank system used so much on TH-cam.
Oh no, she would be much too shy and modest to put herself on place one, there she belongs.
It's refreshing to see someone who calls out the problems. So many people today just throw up their hands and tell you "Thats just how things are, nothing we can do" Politics, homelessness, healthcare, etc. WE made this and WE can change it!
Yes!!
But she also doesn't talk about what to do
I saw, amd commented, on Daves hit piece on you
Im not a physicist. Neither is my wife. But, we have both worked in academia, and I see more reality in what you say than what Dave said.
Yeah but academics don’t mainly interact on TH-cam, anti science videos probably are mainly seen by right wing loonies, this type of content it’s important but is probably in the wrong medium
@@hi12235
Like you?
It wasn't a hit piece. This video is a hit piece at the scientific community.
@xyxwtz-p5k he is absolutely correct, these videos are food for conspiracy nutters.
@@paintspot1509 He's not going to fellate you.
science isn‘t failing, the scientific community is
Yes, I guess I would agree with this. But I am not sure what science is independent of the scientific community. (Long debates about this in philosophy books.)
Science is failng, because pure scientific endevor isn't sole reason to pursue scientific endevor. It have to do more and more with scientific institute internal politics.
@@SabineHossenfelder Well ig science is just an idea/method, so it cant fail. As much as the idea of honesty can fail. Moreso people can fail at being honest or properly doing science
It is just the academic part of
science. Companies still make progress and if not only private money is lost. The main reason to finance academic institutions is to get educated specialists.
@@SabineHossenfelder Science is a tool. If used wisely it benefits the user. If used foolishly, it harms the user. Like a chain saw.
I am not a physics person but I am a doctor. I have seen medical field really grow during my medical career. I also love other fields of science and Regularly look for new discoveries or any kind of breakthrough, I have seen non in field of physics for as long as I can remember
Sabine, your core audience understands and agrees with your points. There will always be people misrepresenting and distorting your views for monetary reasons.
As a biologist, I feel for you. Our questions are much easier to answer because our systems are so much more malleable. We can delete a gene and see the effect. I can't imagine how it is to work on such a non-malleable system.
OTOH your systems are extremely complex, e.g. the brain - which is also difficult to experiment on for ethical reasons.
Yet biologists don’t know anything about Life: what, where, when, why, how…
Unfortunately, the problem isn't limited to physics. See: Ioannidis JPA et al PLoS Med 2005 Aug;2(8):e124. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124. Epub 2005 Aug 30. Why most published research findings are false
@@pacman-x3m Consider reading a biology book?
I think the idea is physicists pose it as if it were very malleable.
The truth will prevail Sabine.
Eventually it must happen. But why not hurry a bit.
Yes but who's truth, it's been happening since the beginning!?!
As a biologist who's also worked in anthropology, I can say without reservation the same phenomena exists in those fields, specifically anthropology/history we write off every contradiction as an aborism and we don't fund research that explores hypothesis that don't jive with accepted theories. I'm not talking about aliens, just the multiple observations in anthropology and genetics that clearly show our history, specifically the history of society, is longer and more complex than is allowed to be truly explored at an academic level as based on grants and who receives them.
Don't get discouraged, Sabine! Keep up the good work. What you are doing is extremely important.
Don't your eyes see, your ears hear? Her wave function has collapsed. When people were there to see it happen. Now she shame-cast. And consumes 2 bottles of wine after breakfast.
I had a situation where there were doubts about an eminent professor's work....several decades later. I was told that we will have to wait till he dies until we can look at it again! That is politics, not science!
So Planck was right. "Science advances one funeral at a time"
@@bornach Hahaha!
I heard the exact same thing in the field on Archaeology. It takes a professor who specialises in something like; "Early Ottoman army composition and ideology" to die before any new research can be conducted in that field.
It is scary that we are getting to the point where things cost so much to test. How to fund it. The problem is we tend to listen to the most persuasive person rather than the person who is necessarily right.
History will remember you for being the canary in a cave of crows
Sabine the problem goes all the way to the bottom. I've seen several STEM students with a passion for their field reach university and be devastated and failed by the lack of teaching involved. It was basically you need to know this, you'll be tested next week. If you need help form a student group. Now go away. One student with all the current aids just couldn't get the subject. I loaned them my 50+ year old text book and they understood. The difference is that 50+ was written during a time when teaching was important because we had to beat those dang commies. And students had to get up to speed as fast as possible. Today a textbook is all about making money for someone, teaching is secondary. And instructors at the University level don't teach anymore. And that circles us back to what you said. Universities have found a cash cow and writing papers and sports makes more money that teaching.
I'm an undergrad engineering student coming close to graduating and running into a few teachers this semester with an attitude like "you should know this already, it's not my job to teach you", and to some degree they're right. Someone else should have taught me this before. Like, I did take a class on diff eq. with 200 other people during COVID, taught in English by someone who didn't speak English well, and I did get an A+ but did I learn anything? A year later am I able to do a single problem from the first test? None of us are.
@@jackgude3969No doubt. Engineering as well. I was always amazed at the female students in my dpt (with a notable exception) who received the highest academic accolades, but had serious trouble stringing together concepts for exams. They were learning to the test; anything beyond that was kinda foreign to them. Thus, the attitude fed itself from both sides. How can a professor be disappointed with excellent grades and time on task, even if the end result is not a particularly cohesive learner?
For me your channel has just the right balance of everything in the field of science; explanations, enthusiasm, skepticism, frankness, humour, etc. (particularly the sarcastic humour, which I always appreciate). I also really appreciate your no-nonsense approach.
As for the lack of nuance, I'm originally from the Industrial North of England. Us Northerners are not famous for our use of nuance.
Keep up the great work! There's a reason you have over 1.5 million followers (and we're not all anti-science nuts).
Indeed!
Sabine, this is actually a very good point. Despite all the advancements in computation over the last 50 years, Physics hasn't made any major foundational discoveries. There is definitely enough funding, and we have better tools, so the issue must be with the direction.
Thank you for your family remark, it is very kind of you :-)
But not every discovery has to be "foundational". And just because we make a "foundational" discovery it doesn't mean it will be practical or useful (of course many exceptions exist). However knowing that Quarks and Leptons exists has no impact in the real world outside of Universities and research labs. Fact!
Wrong. We've proven the existence of Higgs bosson, gravitational waves and have first image of a black hole taken. These are just examples to name a few examples.
She makes no mention of 50 years of climate models. . and paleontologist have had expeditions to find predicted specie's. And chemist have predicted Elements and done test to find them
The last great advance in theoretical physics was achieved with a note pad and pencil in a living room in Scotland in 1963 (or there abouts). Sure, the confirmation needed a billion Euro experiment
You assume that there's linear development, while it's not.
Looks the at the maximum height of building that can be construct from 1950 to today. The improvement isn't that obvious. Because there's hard limit of what we could do with bunch of atoms. The limit of material science. The development of computing power really clouded a lot of people judgement about science progress.
Frau Hossenfelder, ich mag Ihren Stil. Ich sitze in Deutschland aber finde im deutschsprachigen Raum fast nie genügend Informationen zu den Themen, die mich interessieren. Im Englischen gibt es viel und vieles ist auch gut produziert aber auch oft zu Hype-orientiert. Sie lassen den ganzen Mist weg und machen es authentisch, mit Humor und (am wichtigsten) mit Sorgfalt. Ich bin kein Wissenschaftler sondern Musiker und seit ein paar Jahren Altenpfleger aber ich lerne einfach gern und mit Ihnen macht es Spaß, vielen Dank! Habe gerade endlich auf "Subscribe" geklickt.
Habe sie letztes Jahr zweimal live gesehen in München und Witten. Sie ist das beste was Deutschland in den letzten Jahrzehnten exportiert hat.
Sabine, you could make an hour-long video on how to fix a flat tire, and I would watch it. You are pure fun to watch.
And some random TH-camr named Dave who happens to be a professor, will still complain: stop criticising the flatness of our tires! Such rhetoric helps the flat earthers.
@@bornach Hehe...
I was a scientist for many years(retired now). Inside of that world (data/proof is suppose to be the master). So then we look now and it is political forces(peer pressure,censorship, and money), that drives everything - if you are not part of the approved narritive you are anathema, a truth denyer, a charleton. This undermines everything that evidential, empirical science IS! Everytime I hear, "the Science is settled", I think - they don't have a clue what science is. Science is a process - I look at it like programmimg(a program is never 'done' lol). We have seen "settled science" proved incorrect innumerable times. Sorry for the rant.
where's your proof that light does not require a medium? null is not the same thing as negative. your basing all theory's on crap.
@@toymaker3474 you can go do your own research to answer that simple question.
@@toymaker3474 See 'Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Koerper', Annalen der Physik 1905
@@euanthomas3423 rubbish, i prefer people who actually solved the problems, see Elementary lectures on electric discharges, waves and impulses, and other transients
by Steinmetz, Charles Proteus, 1911. and wasnt it fraudstein that even admitted tesla was the smartest man alive at the time? if you think spacetime is a thing your in a cult bud.
@@paintspot1509 it doesn't take a genius to understand that waves are not things. so what is waving?
The same is true in pure mathematics. Dream up a bunch of definitions and axioms and start turning the paper crank. There is a reason why so few pure mathematics papers are retracted, viz., nobody cares if they're right or wrong. Over 100,000 theorems are proven each year in the pure mathematics journals. Are all the proofs valid? Highly unlikely.
Furthermore, a theorem in specialty A can be identical to a theorem in specialty B, with the only difference being that A's foo is B's bar. And then there's the issue of gratuitous generality. Does anybody care what goes on in a fossilated Jones space?
Adm. Grace Hopper used to say there's nothing new in computer science; we just rename the old stuff. The same is true about pure mathematics. To a first approximation, humans have proven all the theorems that humans can prove. All we're doing now is proving old theorems with new terminology.
AI recently found a way to multiply matrices and sort numbers more efficiently. AI just got two Nobel Prizes. The day is not too far away that AI will qualify for a Fields Medal or a Clay Millennium Prize.
Keep truckin', Sabine.
Curiously enough, someone else who used to work in pure mathematics told me exactly the same thing just recently. I actually thought that the field was doing well, so this is news for me. (Quite depressing.)
Pure mathematics faces a hugely different issue as several thousand humans spend the best years of their life grinding out the Langlands Program.
Noting that, pure mathematics has solved major open problems in the last 30 years. The Poincare Conjecture, Fermat's Last Theorem and the Fundamental lemma for Automorphic Forms. Are there paper mills? No doubt but it's not to the same degree as theoretical physics which has really seen a stagnation after not discovering SUSY at the LHC.
Amazing.
Oh look, someone else who doesn't understand "peer review".
Holy, impressive comment. To be able to say something so wrong in such a confident way. Incredible, really.
Dear Sabine,
My primary reason for actually commenting for once, is in a desperate hope to offset some of the ever building circle of hate that seems to surround otherwise constructive criticism.
The main thing that I would like to point out - and I'm sure you are aware - is that there is a difference between "Science deniers": those who would willfully dismiss genuine evidence derived from the scientific method, and those - like you - who are simply pointing out that there are potential issues related to the organization of scientific institutions that support science. I too grow weary of having genuine constructive criticism being written off in a fashion that feels a great deal like simple political rhetoric. Perhaps it is time to do some good science into the nature of the organizations that support that very science in the first place (a little meta I know :).
Given that all of our collective institutions, from government to private enterprise, are ultimately comprised of individuals. It is frustrating when people either dismiss the possibility of systemic failure with the "that cannot happen again" attitude, or believe that the system itself has some sort of malice. No, organizational systems by their nature are not malevolent (barring AI becoming sentient, after multitudes of rude humans have abused it). I'm sure the good people of Germany can attest to the fact that individuals within organizations - via corruption or misdirected passion - can quickly and drastically change entire governments...
We need to collectively question, maintain accountable, and constantly improve our institutions just as we do our homes, so as to prevent entropy from claiming, and rendering them susceptible to those who would abuse them.
I appreciate you for having the courage and consideration to speak honestly in a world that seems to prefer tearing things apart rather than building them up.
Cheers!
I feel your pain. As a retired physician I see similar things happening in medicine. It’s almost always due to outside influences and money. Pure science does not occur in a vacuum, unfortunately. And the worst part? People are involved.
And what was that pristine status quo. Where scientists were free to do all the science without worrying about money? I'm pretty sure that aside from brief periods where technological advancement gives many opportunities for scientific discoveries. Most of the time it's hard work without much remuneration.
Speaking the truth can upset some. Science is all about failing, admitting the error, and trying again only after rethinking and learning from what you got wrong.
I once heard a philosopher say: criticism is an act of love. You may not be a cheerleader of science, but you are a lover of it. Especially if you have the courage to stand up to unfair opposition.
Sabine, I can't tell you how much I enjoy your videos. Your blunt candor and straight forward approach to physics is delightful. May I suggest a new title for videos of this nature? "Sabine Goes Off on Physics" Much love!
Some TH-camr: "Sabine is making the same claims as science deniers."
In the comment section, hundreds of scientists respond: "Actually, she has a point."
Not surprised tbh. International PhD student here in the UK, to me it feels that nowadays science, or at least physics (my field) is just (very toxic) politics and networking, elititsm/nepotism and winning the game of publishing. Cannot wait to get out of this mess.
Yup. I left academia after 8 years of bullying by a professor gaming the system in a London university. I made up my mind to leave once I had realised I would be expected to pull the same tricks to get anywhere.
People who accuse you of lacking nuance don’t pick up your irony and sarcasm. And your phrasing always includes room for error. How much more nuance do people want?
Not using click bait titles for a start. Not generalising about all of science. Not taking your own opinion and calling it a fact.
Things like this.
People want her to relativate her inconvenient truth unto utter irrelevance
Yes!
@@paintspot1509 So don't talk about meta issues without doing a 6 hour video without going into excruciating detail that nobody will watch? Sounds like you just want to silence criticism.
@@costakeith9048that is a complete strawman. Quite typical that you reply with a fallacy to the criticism...
1850’s to 1950’s: subsistence farmers to traveling to the moon. 1950’s to 2020’s: we can’t figure out what male and female are.
I think almost everyone will agree: Incentives matter. The incentives in academics have become very dysfunctional. The incentives on youtube aren't much better, but I would argue they are much clearer, and when it comes to their impact on "scientific discourse" much less problematic... because its MEDIA not ACADEMIC SCIENCE. - a fellow Academic Science ex-pat.
The incentives on TH-cam are much worse. Science denial pays vastly more than genuine science content. For example Sabrina's most viewed videos are the ones which have the least scientific content and that appeal primarily to that audience.
As an RF engineer, I always admired Oliver Heaviside when in school.
Pushing the boundaries even though the work was considered trivial by serious scientists.
He explored the practical side and solutions to electromagnetic theory problems.
When you push the theory into the practical side far enough someone tends to notice strange things when they extend the practical performance.
Think of Claude Shannon. Later, when RF and signal theory was considered mature, it was noticed that there was something going on with signals and error when performance was pushed to its limit.
I'm sure a serious scientists would sigh, and say "Of course, Claude. This is trivial and boring." But the Shannon information Limit ended up making profound contributions to communication and information theory which pushed technology and science forward again.
Slightly OT but I once went to an HP event promoting their latest oscilloscope where it became very apparent that the sales people understood neither the Nyquist limit or the statistical limits of extracting informtion from noisy signals. I asked a couple of questions and was never asked back again.
@@EbenBransome If you want competent sales people, give money to the techies to buy there own equipement. If you give it to sourcing departments, you get sellers, specialized in sourcing department flirtation.
I am sure there is lots of good science to be found in pushing engineering limits.
A lot of people misunderstand some of Claude’s theorems or his work in general. Those people who sigh probably haven’t even thoroughly read them. They just know the conclusions about them they were taught.
Hi Sabine! I like your videos really much! And being a particle physicist by education (my life followed a path far from active research) I fully agree with your standpoint. A couple of years ago I had a lunch with a group of friends including a great theoretical physicist. In that private situation, he shared my concern toward such a way of doing physics (and science in general). Fundamental physics looks more and more magical thinking, with people seriously discussing how many angels dance on the tip of a pin. I'm also quite furious to read about the incredibile amount of money we are going to spend for a new accelerator (nobody knows for finding what) while we don't have a clear understanding (for lack of enough data) of the role of aerosols in the climate machine. So, please, go ahead in your struggle for a better science. Maybe it's useless, but it's worth trying
I have had many conversations like this. It's an interesting example you mention about the question of funding for particle physics vs climate physics. The issue is (for what I have heard) that climate physicists aren't remotely as organized or internationally united as particle physicists. Basically, particle physicists are much better at lobbying for their own cause. All comes down to politics in the end, sigh.
@@SabineHossenfelder Well, there are several reasons. First, climate science is a threat for big corporations. Second, when I entered University of Rome in 1974, many people were not able to see the difference between particle and nuclear physics; It is a sort of original sin, we are the heirs of the Manhattan Project. So, there is always a hidden thought that some breakthrough can give us some miracolous new energy source (do you know that there are people suggesting to tap the vacuum energy?) or some fancy new weapon
@@SabineHossenfelder Climate science has political implications for responses to climate change. Lot's of money is at stake. No one cares outside those doing the research what fields / particles are part of the standard model.
@@SabineHossenfelder We need another acerbic Wolfgang Pauli. I'm sure he would have backed you up.
Brilliantly put, and I couldn't imagine a more "Sabine" reply to that other youtuber.
In my own field, though progress is getting made, that progress is funded through a grant process that is increasingly "gamified" by over-stating potential benefits of new methods or materials, reinforced by university press-releases to "science journalists". Lots of wasted money on useless things that were over-hyped.
DON'T CHANGE, Sabine. ❤you as you ARE.
I feel like all parts of human society currently double down on concepts that have been proven to be wrong by experience, not just sience. Be it to a lack of good alternatives or a lack of willingness to accept the failure of the concepts. We truely live in strange times.
Experience itself, the first-person perspective, is suspect, it is not to be trusted.
Being honest, I think it's primarily due to money that everything stagnates and lies keep being prompted up even after proven over and over again... If capital is what governs the direction of society then lacking capital indicates you have no voice in society...
@@zloyboy8 Well, speaking of concepts that have been repeatedly proven wrong, all the suggested alternatives to the situation you describe so far would be included in that basket. More convincing ones may exist, but there's still no point considering the notion until we actually _find_ some.
Academia has gone from the pursuit of knowledge to an industrial complex. It's all about raising funding, and overcomplicated theories that don't do anything useful, but show off the researchers "brilliance" in creating (needless) complexity are the pinnacle of success in this new model.
Totally agree. The pursuit of knowledge and truth has largely been lost in the scientific community, partly due to many of these social forces at play
There are not enough thumbs up buttons, like buttons, claps and hoorays to give Sabine's tirades. Especially this one. And the last two like this, that she got raked over the coals for by supposed science communicators and fellow scientists, that she is now trying once again to explain here.
One thing i do not hear many people talk about is how some people that promote studying science never talk about the bad stuff in the career. If i knew that my primary choices for employment as a physicist were either high school/Collage teacher or a grant beggar in a University i would never have chosen this career. I was never prepared to search for grants or formulate a project. Not to mention the chances of getting grants which are scarce also usually depends on the amount of people with PhDs and their H index which further enhances the publish or perish culture. Publish or perish culture leads to a bunch or crap papers to be published to increase H index to get grants, is a vicious cycle.
Sabine vs Professor Dave round 2, fight !!
joke aside, I appreciate you both and consider that you are valuable communicator in your video most of the time.
The tragedy is, I actually appreciate him being frank with his opinions.
@@SabineHossenfelder A real-time discussion can resolve the confusion and the misunderstanding and will benefit the audience.
@@GottfriedLeibnizYT @SabineHossenfelder @ProfessorDaveExplains This would be a realy great debate to watch
@@GottfriedLeibnizYT He did not get in touch. And seeing that he deleted my comment, I don't think he will.
@@SabineHossenfelder did he really delete your comment?
You're not boring! You're the voice I never had when I was in academia for almost two decades. And you're not repeating yourself, you're making your arguments sharper and your game better. After all, you don't hear tennis players that what they do (hitting the ball with a racket over and over and over again) is repetition. You're growing and your arguments grow with you. Do you think Thomas Kuhn just came up with the Structure? No! He gave countless seminars, wrote much more than he published, talked to thousands of people... If you have the courage to stay true to yourself without closing yourself to the world, to stay on course and balance (just as you do!) the novelty with repetition, something undeniable, something that cannot be ignored will emerge one day. Thank you!
@@SABINE THANKYOU For making this video. I think some of his criticism was ok but i do think that he mis understands your POV and like you said about your viewers usually knowing how to take you. plus a lot of us have seen your seminars and i think he doesn't realize that this channel is more from your perspective rather than some formal educational thing. and we all get making videos about things that get more views that's just how it works. anyways stay true. LOVE YOU BROTHER! SIS
You're pretty much the only physicist/ science communicator that I can listen to these days. Everyone else is so full of it. Thank you for being sober and honest
I'm a lawyer, not a scientist. But even I can understand when Dr. Hossenfelder says that physicists are treading water rather than finding out new things about the universe. I suspect her greatest critics feel professionally threatened because they don't know how to break out of the status quo either. But I appreciate that she is brave enough to identify the problem even if she doesn't have a solution at hand.
Well, she HAS solutions, they are in her book.
Kaching!@@Thomas-gk42
Law isn't all that different from science (laws of nature, evidence, burden of proof, etc.). If you want a solution to cosmology involving no "dark" fudging stuff, try Eric Lerner's "The Big Bang Never Happened", also great on the history and sociology of science.
@@Thomas-gk42 If you are for real, I must get that book. I was already into that after this video, but now you made me really curious that she has solved at least bits of that.
@@pawegrzanka5494 Yes, she wrote two books, "Lost in Math" was pulished already in 2018. It´s not that easy to read, because she reasons her criticism in there very scientific. But I´m just a craftsman and came through, so you will. I have a lot of understanding for her anger, cause nothing changed since that.
I also recommend her new book from 2022, titeled "Existential Physicis". Easier to read, it´s a wonderful and hopeful overview on the borderline of physicis and philosophy. All the best.
It worries me how in high school I considered studying physics because I thought it was the pinnacle of science, and all the others were "lesser". Well I don't think that anymore. At least biologists do something useful (most of the time, like pharma research).
Must be a German with jokes like that
I have three questions, and would be honored if you answered one of them (super-honored if you answered all 3).
1. What methods should physicists be using that they're not currently using? I.e., what should they be doing instead, and how?
2. Are all physicists contributing to the problem? Or just some?
3. Should zero physicists be pursuing super symmetry, string theory, and multi-verse theories, or just fewer?
You’re the type of individual each one of us ought to strive to emulate Sabine. True to your core beliefs, that tough friend who will tell you that one thing you really don’t want to hear. The type of individual who actually, truly cares.
This is my favorite format of yours, it feels authentic and informative with out any stunts.
Thank you for sharing your experiences and intellect with all of us
It's just a video complaint. I like the actual scientific content better.
@@Anonymous247n meaningless statement. A complaint full of nuance, critical thought and passionate thought. Your lack of critical thought when posting your comment is the exact problem with the world today. People love handing out their opinions, and offer absolutely nothing to back up said opinion.
I disagree. While Dr. Sabine's criticisms are correct. Most scientists are well aware of them. What Dr. Sabine never even talks about is the root cause behind them. Many pointed out this in the comment. But academia today is more centered around grant collection with science being a secind priority. Also, there little carrier in science for young people. Sabine brought these issues very rarely.
@@Jack_Redview As meaningless as your "I'm a fanboy and i like this" statement. They are both just opinions, and opinions need not be backed up. Did i ask you for proof?.. I just said, i like the scientific content better. You put your comment into the public and you are obviously a fanboy of sorts. It's obvious from the baseless hostility you showed me. That's fine, be a fanboy all you want, do all the donos you want, but accept other people having different opinions. Oh, and don't demand proof or "backing up" for their "Well i like this better" opinion :P
Then again, this is your "favorite format", so i suppose you're in the right place... :P
These physicists are not disimilar to religious dogmatists. Pushing proof into the future and demanding blind faith while asking for financial contributions to further the cause.
It is such a religion. It makes me sick!
Human nature.
But to be fair our ability to push past so called logical thinking is a super power.
Also a serious weakness.
Thank you my 10 year younger sister (I actually have no siblings)! I left science 25 years ago - and I like your directness... allows me to understand what's (not) going on in science since I left without having to do all the reading.
Thank you for your work!
Sabine,
I love watching your videos on a wide range of science issues. I do not know enough about particle physics and the related fields discussed to be able to judge the options for progress. However, your argument is compelling in that even with my minimal knowledge, progress has been slow, although ongoing confirmations of relativity and quantum mechanics are stunningly impressive given the era in which they were established and their survival through trials unimaginable at the time.
I work a lot on how to bring science to transit (of all things...). I tend to use your approach - cut to the problem and show what is wrong. That has not been as successful as the approach I have been using in my very senior years; talking directly to opportunities ahead, instead of problems behind. It is the same question, but those who have surplus money to do good or create investment opportunities that have secondary effects of public benefit, don't want to invest in a negative. They want the joy juice of being the hero who saves the day. Optimism is just more fun.
Please forgive me if I have missed this in your online materials (I strongly suspect that I have), but how can this hoped for new direction be expressed through emphasizing the opportunities, be they scientific or economic, like a list of experiments that could pile up to the cost of a larger collider. There are probabilities of success among them all and the positives can be guestimated. It would be no contest, even though super-colliders are cool.
Brian
We don't need "Professor" Dave to point out the earth is round, and we certainly don't need anyone else jumping on that bandwagon. His criticism came off as tone policing because Sabine's perspective could be used by conspiracy theorists. His other points really were not substantiated. I think he's upset because Sabine is significantly more legitimate of an academic than he is, so he can't stand when conspiracy theorists use her as a higher appeal to authority than he can offer himself. Conspiracy theorists should be ignored. The popular part of "Professor" dave's channel could disappear, and nothing of value would be lost.
So you use the "if I'm criticized it's because they're jealous of me."?
@@crimson_comet I didn't say it's because they are jealous. I said it's because she is significantly more legitimate in academia, so she can be used as a higher authority against him. I'm sure he is jealous and maybe it is relevant but that wasn't my point.
@@crimson_comet "Professor" Dave appears to rely a lot on argumentation from authority for his defenses of various topics. When someone with "authority" in his system argues against (or could be construed to argue against) his belief, he loses his only real path to demonstrating his points.
The problem is, he shouldn't be arguing from authority in the first place, as that is a clear logical fallacy. While fallacies can, at times, be useful for convincing people or where a formal defense is not needed, they are never where the fundamentals of an argument should be stated. "Professor" Dave should either bone up on the actual physics Sabine is discussing or bow out of a conversation that he's not equipped to have. Theoretical physicists are (or should be) perfectly capable of defending their work without someone else trying to appeal to their authority.
1:22 and people claim Germans have no sense of humour !
she invented it!
I don't get it. All she did was read the wrong script.
They like puns and it doesn't translate.
@@aguspuig6615 she rediscovered it for "ze Germans". Hopefully it's here to stay
I'm half German, and I can confirm that I have half of a sense of humour.
This problem happens in The Arts too. it's all about ticking boxes for funding. No original art is encouraged to come out of academia without compromise. It's falling to bits. But people still love new music... I think.
Same with the Humanities, we learn about how the structures in place are resulting to stagnation to our development, and weve done nothing.
@@Katelizaj We give too much weight to bureucracies. Directors at all kinds of academia, presidents, prime ministers, they all dress and generally conduct themselves the same, and i think its strenghtened this subconcious idea of ''the person with the fitted suit has the authority'' and its literally ruining all sides of society, from government to any one area of academia.
Hell theres even uni courses to become a youtuber now, the one thing that was always meant as a self learn type of career
@@aguspuig6615 That needs to be way more creativity in every field in academia because everything is open source all information is available now I always proved to not be creative but very good at solving problems we give it this time to say we can educate ourselves. They just needs to be away of measuring it.
Most of the public don't like new music. Everyone over 50 in my town seems to love Motown, and the young think Taylor Swift strumming a guitar is new!
It's not just arts and science. It's literally everywhere. Humanity is stuck within a life simulation.
Hi Sabine,
I really enjoy these types of videos where you break down the current state of affairs within the scientific community.
For those of us on the outside, it’s eye-opening and something we’d never think to question. I’m humble enough to recognize that even the researchers behind these papers are on a whole different level! So please keep challenging the status quo from time to time-it’s truly inspiring to hear someone with your brilliance navigate these complex topics.
Cheers!