9 years of philosophy and I'm over platonic realism and reading contemporary philosophy of science.
The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions. Everyone knows about the copernican revolution. But when it first happened, the old models(earth at the center of the solar system) were more accurate at predicting where the plenets would be.
Scientists pragmatically spend their time doing best fits. (Typically)
But then the paradigm shifts and we are closer to reality than the current local minimum/maximum.
Before reading philosophy of science, I was into m theory and string theory. Now I'm nearly sure it's bunk that might be replaced in our lifetime.
> The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions
I understand where you're coming from but this is a very cynical take. String theory is a strawman compared to the empirical "discoveries" of items like black holes or the Higgs boson.
Aye, but we only sorta kinda "know" what things like black holes might be. We have models that make sense to us based on our understanding of science, and we think our instruments can faithfully report on what they can be with measurements we believe we are making correctly, but we have no clue what we don't know, and no real way to prove it, just theorize, and sort of bundle up what we believe is data supporting it.
The thing is we have a lot of models which make very accurate predictions most of the time, which are useful for doing some impressive science.
But we have no accepted theory of what is actually happening behind the math. What we have is that in 1925 most theoretical physicists decided that we have already uncovered the most fundamental structures of the universe and further investigation into how or why things are the way they are is fruitless. This view has dominated for the last 100 years. Physics has been focused only on modeling and testing, but nobody knows exactly what the models are telling us about the universe.
I agree with the above poster that this is wrong and we may yet learn that our models are only very close to reality, but the actual mechanics are different. At least I think more research should be pointed in this direction.
> in 1925 most theoretical physicists decided that we [are done]
No. Just... no. Even advancing that fifty years to 1975, the Standard Model reigns not because people want it to reign, but because no one can knock it off its throne. There is no better idea that can explain more than the Standard Model can. It's not a conspiracy.
(I did used to joke with my students that progress in physics stopped around 1975, which is around when LSD got banned, so there might well be a lack of ideas. But I'll leave that one to the reader!)
The framing that there is some unknown particle affecting the results is probably an understatement. Probably there are a LOT of unknown 'forces' affecting the results. Look at the size of the machine, the aging components, the number of components involved, the amount of software required, surely all of that is affecting the results.
Are humans even capable of building perfectly reliable systems?
You would probably be very surprised about just how much work is put in to characterizing these things. My graduate work was on another experiment (though our postdoc worked on one of the earlier g−2 experiments mentioned here!), but we literally had man-years of work sunk into measuring one thing about the experiment, one number, as accurately as possible and with valid error bars.
That was not the only thing about the apparatus, just one of the most important, but the point is: we cared, we cared a lot, and we cared a lot about a lot of things.
It's good for the world but terrible for the practitioners in academia. Imagine you are in your last year of your PhD and then something new comes out and completely invalidates/obsoletes your results. Cough natural language processing PhDs during COVID when GPT-3 came around..
Academic here. It's actually great for us. You're usually the first to see the implications for your niche area and have a chance to get a hot paper out rather than a moderately impactful one.
I think it depends on who has the hot paper and who has the outdated results. I was in academia for quite some time and when sometime cool comes out that renders other results less important, there are always winners and losers beccause the only thing that matters in academia is impact and the latest and greatest - not the blind alleys along the way.
There isn't really an "us" in academia like there is in a private company, who all have a common goal: in academia the goal is to get there before another does and be on top.
The perspective changes if you're in your last year of PhD as GP said. I'm sure the system is built in a way that you'll still graduate because your supervisor knows this is about learning how to conduct research and not about being right. But it's likely still soul crushing to come out with no published paper (unless you still publish knowing you're wrong, which in some cases might be valuable).
If your soul can bounce back, finding ways your previous research might help, or combine with the breakthrough (or not !) can help. I've used many previous formal/analytic SOTA algorithms and methods for dataset tagging automation, or as feedback for RL, or to speed-up post-training.
Three/four years of (honest) work is usually worth to publish.
The result might not be high impact (and thus end up in a lower tier journal, sadly) but knowing what didn't work is also a valid output.
PHDs will spend years mastering some intricate multi-day long procedure to do some thing and a new discovery will obviate the need for the procedure completely.
Preach. The way out is to find truly basic problems that you’re attacking at a fundamental level.
That rarely gets funded. And even more rarely handed off to grad students. In a sense the failure of a bunch of grad students is priced in to the way science is done.
Which makes it so perverse their lives and careers depend on success as newcomers.
I remember reading the Three Body Problem, and thinking to myself: this is implausible. If scientists started getting weird results, they'd be thrilled, not suicidal!
I believe the alien scientists were depressed by the guaranteed collapse of their civilization, not the difficulty of certain differential equations. So it's more like a doctor getting weird results while working on a cure for a pandemic.
Edit: oops, see the reply below... and my grumpy response. I seriously forgot about that entire plot point.
I'm pretty sure they're referring to scientists on Earth.
Edit: Though I agree that alien scientists of Tri-Solaris probably lead more depressing lives than their counterparts on earth
I don't know if this series is yet considered far enough in the past that we don't have to worry about spoiler warnings (I feel like the house rules about this apply differently to books than to movies), but I will just say that one of the most fascinating and mind-bending considerations in the book is the idea that some civilizations progress linearly and some progress exponentially, and how mind bending it is to have to plan ahead for exponential advances.
Hmm, fair enough - I checked Wikipedia. My mind completely erased the "sophon" bit or whatever it was called, it just got erased again. Not a fan of that particular fairy dust.
I thought they were referring to the inability of the aliens to make an accurate calendar.
No, I was referring to the human scientists' reaction to the sophons' interference.
But I thought that the Trisolarians' inability to predict their planets' path also seemed weird. Yes, the three-body problem isn't analytically solvable, but you can brute force it, and I would imagine that a species that is capable of creating sophons and starships with hulls made out of the Strong-force could calculate their planet's trajectory for the next thousand years without too many problems. (It would be academic, anyway - if you can build that kind of technology, why do you even need planets?)
The error grows exponentially. For example, for equal-mass triple with Earth sized orbit initially, the prediction limit is just a few hundreds years even if you know initial conditions up to the plank length (LLM estimate of ~135 Lyapunov times).
The uncertainty increases and predictions are reliable only up to a couple hundred years but those hundred years are good enough at any point in time, because you redo your predictions all the time.
This kind of iterative process might yield some insights on how uncertainty creeps into the system.
Trisolarans had advanced technology which means they knew about probability. Probability immediately implies Lying and the two types of scientific error we have. ie false positives and false negatives
That's actually a great example for what it is. If I were a scientist I probably wouldn't be reacting with "yay science" to every next failure that destroys civilization, even if notionally those are building up the body of data that could eventually lead to success.
I can’t imagine aliens better suited for space travel than the Trisolarans. For them, deep hibernation is a natural state and they could easily build space ships to explore other nearby systems and seed them. Even better - their metabolism made them perfect for deep space habitats.
How do you mean? I cannot remember any particular scientific revolution where scientists were suicidal, or even particularly crestfallen.
Quantum Mechanics is the closest thing I can think of, where Einstein famously refused to accept some of the implications, and where scientists had great disagreements about things like the Copenhagen interpretation and what it means for the actual nature of reality - but I don't think any of them were sad about it.
One of the boldest chapter one introductions I've ever seen comes to mind:
Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
A very interesting story that's worth reading up on. "Natural philosophers" of the day refused to accept the idea of a particle too small to directly observe on purely philosophical grounds. They essentially bullied him out of the field for championing the idea of the atom, despite his math yielding numerous correct results. They fruitlessly pursued the idea of energetics instead. (One of the many instances of die hard philosophers playing the villain in physics history. See also why Emmy Noether wasn't given a professorship despite a letter of recommendation from Albert Einstein.)
This makes it perhaps not a particularly good example of the phenomena being discussed, as he was suicidal not because of what he had discovered, but because no one believed what he had discovered.
I looked this up, and sure enough, Ernst Mach was the one who lead the charge (a self proclaimed positivist, which is a position that many scientists would gladly say they support).
Sure enough, it's what I thought - you don't mean that some evil boogeyman named Hegel lead a worldwide charge against physics. (I doubt Hegel even understood physics, lol. But you get my point.)
You mean that two physicists had a disagreement, one held institutional power, and ostracized the other.
Fine, but then why attack philosophy? Things are philosophy until they're not. Dogma happens in every field.
Is it really wrong to blame this one on philosophy? The source of the disagreement was inherently philosophical, lead by a philosopher, backed up by other mainstream philosophers, and undeniably held back physics. I don't mean to imply that philosophy is fundamentally evil or useless even when applied to physics; most early physicists also considered themselves philosophers. I'm just pointing out a mildly interesting pattern that I have noticed while reading about the history of physics. I recall that Einstein credited many of his insights to the field of philosophy. He also famously rejected quantum mechanics due to his philosophical beliefs, which many consider a slight stain on his legacy.
> He also famously rejected quantum mechanics due to his philosophical beliefs
What you accept or not is irrelevant. It’s the math that guides you. I too believe we only perceive randomness because we don’t see the complete picture, but that’s irrelevant until we have the means to explore what that whole picture could be.
It was indeed sexism, but it was not sexism from the math department, who very much wanted to hire her. In fact, the Chair of Mathematics David Hilbert (of Hilbert space fame) personally recruited her.
Those are definitely unfortunate examples and I can see how those environments pushed them to their limits. But if we're talking large-scale systematic thinking about what kind of data would be necessary to show that there's such a thing as a typical, characteristic civilization scale negative reaction to scientific revolutions, these don't demonstrate that this is the usual case. Obviously they're important in their own right.
But also the book doesn't suggest that scientists going missing was just a function of humanity's customary response to scientific progress. In the book, it's a very intentional sabotage campaign.
The point being made is about the general reaction to weird results. The original supposition was that it would be implausible for scientists at large to have an adverse reaction to results that defied their current worldview. Given that we have seen this play out, there is in fact nothing implausible about it at all.
The specifics (proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging scientific experiments by altering the outcomes into incoherent results, the adverse reaction being suicide) aren't important here, because that's obviously the realm of fiction -- we don't need an actual instance of scientists committing suicide to suggest that it's plausible, because we don't have an actual instance of proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging results[1]. We just need to acknowledge that adverse reactions to unexpected results do happen, so plausibly in a fictional story if you have very unexpected results then your scientists could have very adverse reactions as well.
We saw two examples, definitely unfortunate for what they were but well short of a built in civilization level reaction to scientific progress writ large. I don't think there's a single by and large way that people react to scientific revolutions, negative or otherwise. Feels like it depends on a combination of how it impacts most powerful stakeholders, things about culture, and things about the zeitgeist of a particular moment.
>we don't need an actual instance of scientists committing suicide to suggest that it's plausible, because we don't have an actual instance of proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging results
Right, the specifics of the science fiction don't matter here. And plausibility counts for something though it's a dramatically lower threshold. And the person above who is appealing to scientific revolutions writ large seem to be attempting a general level inference to human reaction to scientific revolutions, which is a huge inference to make on the back of a pair of one-off examples.
Possibility counts for something, but I would say it only goes as far as explaining contingencies of particular circumstances and doesn't explain trends, and what happens within the fiction of the book is a trend, and it's explained by a sabotage campaign rather than by an appeal to the stresses of day-to-day science.
> The original supposition was that it would be implausible for scientists at large to have an adverse reaction to results that defied their current worldview.
Indeed that is highly implausible. I daresay that anyone stating otherwise fundamentally lacks an understanding of the sort of people that are attracted to and work in the sciences. Paradigm shifts are a form of progress and progress is the raison d'etre.
Note that one or two outliers do not contradict a larger trend. Also that the examples given so far, in addition to being highly unusual, follow from social phenomena downstream of the new results rather than being a direct personal reaction to them.
That said, as noted by others that isn't what's going on in the book being discussed. So the plausibility of that plot point needs to be judged on its own merit as an entirely separate sort of thing.
> Note that one or two outliers do not contradict a larger trend.
The listed cases are not outliers in the scientific community. The individuals were outliers, but the scientific community, in a mode of behaviour that was not outlier-ish, shunned them. This tendency of scientists is well-established:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
At the end of the day, humans are largely egotistical, self-centred creatures, and scientists are no exception. When you say that scientists believe that progress is their raison d'etre, you may not be incorrect, but their belief in progress is grounded in a self-centred way. Perhaps the ideal is "progress for humanity", but the reality is more like "progress for my career" or "progress for my worldview", in which case results challenging everything you hold as a foundation are a threat to you, being regressive rather than progressive in matters important to one's ego. People really, really don't like being told they're wrong. Even scientists.
You're trying to shift the goalposts rather than concede the point. We weren't speaking of cliquish behavior or resistance to new ideas which are indeed (unfortunately) common enough even in the scientific world. Rather the point under dispute was individuals experiencing markedly adverse emotional reactions to the point of harm in direct response to results that challenge their understanding of how things work.
So there are two problems here. First, that the listed examples are social in nature as opposed to being directly due to scientific results thus they are irrelevant to the point being argued (but importantly not necessarily irrelevant to the plot point in the work of literature that led to this line of discussion). And second that they are very much outliers in that individuals came to direct physical harm which is not at all the expected outcome for the typical participant when a paradigm shift occurs in the sciences.
Despite the drama surrounding it, the way the discovery of quantum mechanics ultimately played out is a clear counterexample to the position you seem to be attempting to advance. Many participants expressed bitterness or frustration regarding some of their peers but there was not (at least in aggregate) a large scale negative reaction to the new results themselves. Physicists did not generally spiral into depression or develop drinking problems or whatever else upon being exposed to the new information. (Do note that disagreement and doubt are not a negative thing in the sciences but rather an essential part of the process.)
On a more personal note, your view of the sciences seems to me to be myopic and overly cynical. You are (to my eye) cherry picking only the worst behaviors you have witnessed and then painting the entire endeavor with those colors. No worthwhile scientist is overly bothered by being wrong because it is an almost daily occurrence when you are exploring topics at the edge of human understanding.
Yeah, I think we're agreeing. The breakdown of scientific progress in the book is due to an actively malicious campaign that scrambles data, intimidates researchers and worse.
> wound up in an insane asylum for suggesting surgeons should wash their hands.
Was rejected and mocked by the medical community for his idea, developed a drinking problem and eventually committed to an asylum by his colleagues after having a nervous breakdown. While in the asylum he was beaten by the guards and died from a wound infection ... yikes!!
I'm not sure about self harm or whatever, but Planck's Principle [1] was not stated without cause: 'Science progresses one funeral at a time.' And that was a quote from an outsized figure during the golden age of physics.
Yeah. In principal, scientists should be excited by weird results. In practice, though, humans are complex creatures with intellectual and emotional inertia. There's an understandable element of dread when you realize your life's work finds itself on shaky ground.
I'm a plasma physicist, and personally I love weird results - new mysteries to solve! That said, there are a wide range of personality types out there. And I would also be extremely surprised if the correct solution to some particular weird result was, for instance, that the Maxwell equations are broken for that regime (other than expected quantum corrections, e.g. the Schwinger limit).
Specially because only particle physics suddenly became inconsistent. I can see scientists fruitlessly obsessing with finding why the universe was toying with them, but suicide? OK, they were also seeing intent with individualized hallucinations, and computer interference, but IIRC those messages asked them to to stop particle physics, not to off themselves. They could change fields and live on.
I seem to remember something about the scientist being distraught because physics didn't make sense, not because she was having trouble getting clean data.
That also stuck with me as weird: there are any number of places you could sabotage a precision physics experiment by injecting tiny amounts of noise, which would drive the scientists to think they were bad scientists. Instead they thought science was broken.
As someone who has looked for inconsistencies with the Standard Model for a while now, and seen every measurement land bang-on the prediction, I can say that I would love any deviation that said our existing theories are broken.
And sure, crank up the detector noise and we'd be sad, but ask any grad student: having your apparatus suddenly spit out garbage data is just an average day. I've known plenty of scientists with psychological problems but it's never coming from their data.
>That also stuck with me as weird: there are any number of places you could sabotage a precision physics experiment by injecting tiny amounts of noise, which would drive the scientists to think they were bad scientists. Instead they thought science was broken.
I think in the context of the book, the specific means of sabotage was something close to impossible to figure out, so I can see the despair of checking every conceivable explanation, coming up empty, and making an inference about reality itself. And it wasn't a kind of peripheral, controllable amount of noise, it was a complete global sabotage of all particle physics, on a scale that amounted to a global catastrophe rather than just another blip in the daily grind.
I think one thing that really hooked me on the book series in the beginning was being able to appreciate the kind of cosmic despair one scientist was sharing during the pool table conversation, because thinking big about meaning and order in the universe, and how important the universes' intelligibility is to our relationship with it, informed by data, is a synthesis of things that really matter to me as a reader - taking the intersection of science and meaning seriously.
I don't think that would be enough for plausibly explaining particular scientists offing themselves, but the psychology of someone to whom that kind of question matters that much, which is very much the heart and soul of what drives my interest in non-fiction reading, seems tragically underrepresented as a driving motivation in fiction which I think is terribly unfortunate. But sci-fi sometimes cares about it, and sometimes a lot.
if objects you put on a table started falling through the floor it would be a bit stressful
lol
but Dr. Becky gets really excited about all the various "crisis in cosmology" because she knows new science/knowledge will emerge from solving those questions
and you remind me there's another season coming up in that series, can't wait
"Is he still in the grandmother’s house? We would like to speak to him."
Celebrating the mistakes is, as you're saying, perhaps a bit too far. But mistakes will happen, it's just the nature of the world. That makes developing a robust error correction mentality something that genuinely is worth celebrating.
I really dislike the writing style of being so "friendly" for people who don't know anything about the space that you obscure what the topic of the article is at all.
It's a third of the way through the article when "g-2", the problem at hand, is mentioned. Information that should have been shared in the title took a third of the article to figure out.
I dont particularly agree with this article, but there have been quanta articles i've read in the past that went so far trying to make the topic accessible that it became incomprehensible. Where they used so many metaphors and simplifications that it lost all meaning.
Science writing for a general audience is really challenging.
If you're writing an article about a man going to the store to buy a sandwich, the man, the store, and the sandwich should all make appearances by the end of the first paragraph.
These people are writing informative articles like novels and it's incredibly irritating and a disservice if you're actually trying to inform anybody about anything. If you're writing an article about the g-2 anomaly, "g-2 anomaly" belongs in the title not 1/3 the way in.
Yep. This would backfire spectacularly for people just want to know what's going on. They would just dump the article in the llm and ask, 'what problem is this article about'
Hmm... The Reality changed itself when guys in Siberia changed the sensor? Some years ago I was playing with the idea that the Reality might invent new laws when people look for them, and doesn't bother with laws when no one observes them. It would be in the style of Copenhagen interpretation, though even with regard to it, the idea seems too weird to be true. But now we have an experimental evidence.
In any case it gives me ideas how to check the hypothesis. If the Reality has a limited horizon for planning for new laws, scientists can trick it into inventing new laws that eventually (after some more research and even more laws observed) would start contradicting to each other, and at that point the Reality would snap into a different set of rules.
If it is true, then the plan is like this: we need to wipe all the scientific knowledge from this world and start again, and trick the the Reality into devising better laws of nature. Ah, wait, we have no evidence that the Reality can abandon laws that were introduced already. Pity, the plan is brilliant, but how to check if the Reality can abandon its laws? If laws are local... we can do something like Stephenson described in his Anathem: establish maths doing independent research and comparing their results once in 1000 years.
I love how the closer we get to “the edge of the Reality”, the more it sounds like the ramblings of someone that got their hands on some of that GOOD stuff
You might want to read Dan Simmons' Ilium and if you can stomach some weird post-9/11 shit, Olympos. One of the overarching themes is what you describe... or similar.
> Some years ago I was playing with the idea that the Reality might invent new laws when people look for them, and doesn't bother with laws when no one observes them
There are several books from Greg Egan with this idea in mind: Permutation City and Distress. The latter one is exactly about this idea.
9 years of philosophy and I'm over platonic realism and reading contemporary philosophy of science.
The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions. Everyone knows about the copernican revolution. But when it first happened, the old models(earth at the center of the solar system) were more accurate at predicting where the plenets would be.
Scientists pragmatically spend their time doing best fits. (Typically)
But then the paradigm shifts and we are closer to reality than the current local minimum/maximum.
Before reading philosophy of science, I was into m theory and string theory. Now I'm nearly sure it's bunk that might be replaced in our lifetime.
I thank scientists, but I do not envy them.
> The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions
I understand where you're coming from but this is a very cynical take. String theory is a strawman compared to the empirical "discoveries" of items like black holes or the Higgs boson.
Aye, but we only sorta kinda "know" what things like black holes might be. We have models that make sense to us based on our understanding of science, and we think our instruments can faithfully report on what they can be with measurements we believe we are making correctly, but we have no clue what we don't know, and no real way to prove it, just theorize, and sort of bundle up what we believe is data supporting it.
"The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know." — Aristotle
The thing is we have a lot of models which make very accurate predictions most of the time, which are useful for doing some impressive science.
But we have no accepted theory of what is actually happening behind the math. What we have is that in 1925 most theoretical physicists decided that we have already uncovered the most fundamental structures of the universe and further investigation into how or why things are the way they are is fruitless. This view has dominated for the last 100 years. Physics has been focused only on modeling and testing, but nobody knows exactly what the models are telling us about the universe.
I agree with the above poster that this is wrong and we may yet learn that our models are only very close to reality, but the actual mechanics are different. At least I think more research should be pointed in this direction.
> in 1925 most theoretical physicists decided that we [are done]
No. Just... no. Even advancing that fifty years to 1975, the Standard Model reigns not because people want it to reign, but because no one can knock it off its throne. There is no better idea that can explain more than the Standard Model can. It's not a conspiracy.
(I did used to joke with my students that progress in physics stopped around 1975, which is around when LSD got banned, so there might well be a lack of ideas. But I'll leave that one to the reader!)
Glad I didn’t spend the last ten years on that problem! As my CERN advisor suggested :)
All Alumni know that the best discoveries happen after hours of reflection on R1 tables during Summertime. :)
I bet you that old results still add up in the parallel universe in which the muon mystery has not yet been solved!
I was thinking someone must have fixed a bug in the simulation (in which we live) between when the old results were generated and now.
Only 1/2 :-)
The framing that there is some unknown particle affecting the results is probably an understatement. Probably there are a LOT of unknown 'forces' affecting the results. Look at the size of the machine, the aging components, the number of components involved, the amount of software required, surely all of that is affecting the results.
Are humans even capable of building perfectly reliable systems?
You would probably be very surprised about just how much work is put in to characterizing these things. My graduate work was on another experiment (though our postdoc worked on one of the earlier g−2 experiments mentioned here!), but we literally had man-years of work sunk into measuring one thing about the experiment, one number, as accurately as possible and with valid error bars.
That was not the only thing about the apparatus, just one of the most important, but the point is: we cared, we cared a lot, and we cared a lot about a lot of things.
Worst Feynman diagrams ever.
That's the best part about science.
It's good for the world but terrible for the practitioners in academia. Imagine you are in your last year of your PhD and then something new comes out and completely invalidates/obsoletes your results. Cough natural language processing PhDs during COVID when GPT-3 came around..
Academic here. It's actually great for us. You're usually the first to see the implications for your niche area and have a chance to get a hot paper out rather than a moderately impactful one.
I think it depends on who has the hot paper and who has the outdated results. I was in academia for quite some time and when sometime cool comes out that renders other results less important, there are always winners and losers beccause the only thing that matters in academia is impact and the latest and greatest - not the blind alleys along the way.
There isn't really an "us" in academia like there is in a private company, who all have a common goal: in academia the goal is to get there before another does and be on top.
The perspective changes if you're in your last year of PhD as GP said. I'm sure the system is built in a way that you'll still graduate because your supervisor knows this is about learning how to conduct research and not about being right. But it's likely still soul crushing to come out with no published paper (unless you still publish knowing you're wrong, which in some cases might be valuable).
If your soul can bounce back, finding ways your previous research might help, or combine with the breakthrough (or not !) can help. I've used many previous formal/analytic SOTA algorithms and methods for dataset tagging automation, or as feedback for RL, or to speed-up post-training.
Three/four years of (honest) work is usually worth to publish. The result might not be high impact (and thus end up in a lower tier journal, sadly) but knowing what didn't work is also a valid output.
This happens in biology all the time.
PHDs will spend years mastering some intricate multi-day long procedure to do some thing and a new discovery will obviate the need for the procedure completely.
Preach. The way out is to find truly basic problems that you’re attacking at a fundamental level.
That rarely gets funded. And even more rarely handed off to grad students. In a sense the failure of a bunch of grad students is priced in to the way science is done.
Which makes it so perverse their lives and careers depend on success as newcomers.
Einstein wanted to measure how fast Earth moves through ether as his research thesis.
For those unaware - the most famous experiment to measure this(both high school and university physics classes have drilled this into my brain): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper... a long history of experiments failing to find evidence of an ether https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_special_relativity
It's different when you invalidate your own research.
That’s life. Sometimes you see it coming and ride the wave, sometimes you’re late to the party.
I remember reading the Three Body Problem, and thinking to myself: this is implausible. If scientists started getting weird results, they'd be thrilled, not suicidal!
I believe the alien scientists were depressed by the guaranteed collapse of their civilization, not the difficulty of certain differential equations. So it's more like a doctor getting weird results while working on a cure for a pandemic.
Edit: oops, see the reply below... and my grumpy response. I seriously forgot about that entire plot point.
I'm pretty sure they're referring to scientists on Earth.
Edit: Though I agree that alien scientists of Tri-Solaris probably lead more depressing lives than their counterparts on earth
I don't know if this series is yet considered far enough in the past that we don't have to worry about spoiler warnings (I feel like the house rules about this apply differently to books than to movies), but I will just say that one of the most fascinating and mind-bending considerations in the book is the idea that some civilizations progress linearly and some progress exponentially, and how mind bending it is to have to plan ahead for exponential advances.
Hmm, fair enough - I checked Wikipedia. My mind completely erased the "sophon" bit or whatever it was called, it just got erased again. Not a fan of that particular fairy dust.
I thought they were referring to the inability of the aliens to make an accurate calendar.
No, I was referring to the human scientists' reaction to the sophons' interference.
But I thought that the Trisolarians' inability to predict their planets' path also seemed weird. Yes, the three-body problem isn't analytically solvable, but you can brute force it, and I would imagine that a species that is capable of creating sophons and starships with hulls made out of the Strong-force could calculate their planet's trajectory for the next thousand years without too many problems. (It would be academic, anyway - if you can build that kind of technology, why do you even need planets?)
And I also hated the sophons.
The error grows exponentially. For example, for equal-mass triple with Earth sized orbit initially, the prediction limit is just a few hundreds years even if you know initial conditions up to the plank length (LLM estimate of ~135 Lyapunov times).
The uncertainty increases and predictions are reliable only up to a couple hundred years but those hundred years are good enough at any point in time, because you redo your predictions all the time.
This kind of iterative process might yield some insights on how uncertainty creeps into the system.
Trisolarans had advanced technology which means they knew about probability. Probability immediately implies Lying and the two types of scientific error we have. ie false positives and false negatives
All we needed to do would be to introduce game theory to them. It doesn’t matter what we say. We deal with zero trust all the time.
That's actually a great example for what it is. If I were a scientist I probably wouldn't be reacting with "yay science" to every next failure that destroys civilization, even if notionally those are building up the body of data that could eventually lead to success.
I can’t imagine aliens better suited for space travel than the Trisolarans. For them, deep hibernation is a natural state and they could easily build space ships to explore other nearby systems and seed them. Even better - their metabolism made them perfect for deep space habitats.
The history of scientific revolutions does not support this view
How do you mean? I cannot remember any particular scientific revolution where scientists were suicidal, or even particularly crestfallen.
Quantum Mechanics is the closest thing I can think of, where Einstein famously refused to accept some of the implications, and where scientists had great disagreements about things like the Copenhagen interpretation and what it means for the actual nature of reality - but I don't think any of them were sad about it.
One of the boldest chapter one introductions I've ever seen comes to mind:
- "States of Matter", David L. Goodstein, https://archive.org/details/statesofmatter0000good_e2n5/page...A very interesting story that's worth reading up on. "Natural philosophers" of the day refused to accept the idea of a particle too small to directly observe on purely philosophical grounds. They essentially bullied him out of the field for championing the idea of the atom, despite his math yielding numerous correct results. They fruitlessly pursued the idea of energetics instead. (One of the many instances of die hard philosophers playing the villain in physics history. See also why Emmy Noether wasn't given a professorship despite a letter of recommendation from Albert Einstein.)
This makes it perhaps not a particularly good example of the phenomena being discussed, as he was suicidal not because of what he had discovered, but because no one believed what he had discovered.
I looked this up, and sure enough, Ernst Mach was the one who lead the charge (a self proclaimed positivist, which is a position that many scientists would gladly say they support).
Sure enough, it's what I thought - you don't mean that some evil boogeyman named Hegel lead a worldwide charge against physics. (I doubt Hegel even understood physics, lol. But you get my point.)
You mean that two physicists had a disagreement, one held institutional power, and ostracized the other.
Fine, but then why attack philosophy? Things are philosophy until they're not. Dogma happens in every field.
Is it really wrong to blame this one on philosophy? The source of the disagreement was inherently philosophical, lead by a philosopher, backed up by other mainstream philosophers, and undeniably held back physics. I don't mean to imply that philosophy is fundamentally evil or useless even when applied to physics; most early physicists also considered themselves philosophers. I'm just pointing out a mildly interesting pattern that I have noticed while reading about the history of physics. I recall that Einstein credited many of his insights to the field of philosophy. He also famously rejected quantum mechanics due to his philosophical beliefs, which many consider a slight stain on his legacy.
> He also famously rejected quantum mechanics due to his philosophical beliefs
What you accept or not is irrelevant. It’s the math that guides you. I too believe we only perceive randomness because we don’t see the complete picture, but that’s irrelevant until we have the means to explore what that whole picture could be.
> See also why Emmy Noether wasn't given a professorship despite a letter of recommendation from Albert Einstein
I thought that was sexism rather than philosophers? This was the same era and place that mostly ignored Bertha Benz.
(Or did you mean after moving to the USA?)
It was indeed sexism, but it was not sexism from the math department, who very much wanted to hire her. In fact, the Chair of Mathematics David Hilbert (of Hilbert space fame) personally recruited her.
It is, of course, meant to be taken in a humorous tone here, despite the morbid subject.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall had to drink a beaker of Helicobacter pylori because no one would believe it caused ulcers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis wound up in an insane asylum for suggesting surgeons should wash their hands.
Scientists get hidebound just like the rest of us, at times.
Those are definitely unfortunate examples and I can see how those environments pushed them to their limits. But if we're talking large-scale systematic thinking about what kind of data would be necessary to show that there's such a thing as a typical, characteristic civilization scale negative reaction to scientific revolutions, these don't demonstrate that this is the usual case. Obviously they're important in their own right.
But also the book doesn't suggest that scientists going missing was just a function of humanity's customary response to scientific progress. In the book, it's a very intentional sabotage campaign.
The point being made is about the general reaction to weird results. The original supposition was that it would be implausible for scientists at large to have an adverse reaction to results that defied their current worldview. Given that we have seen this play out, there is in fact nothing implausible about it at all.
The specifics (proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging scientific experiments by altering the outcomes into incoherent results, the adverse reaction being suicide) aren't important here, because that's obviously the realm of fiction -- we don't need an actual instance of scientists committing suicide to suggest that it's plausible, because we don't have an actual instance of proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging results[1]. We just need to acknowledge that adverse reactions to unexpected results do happen, so plausibly in a fictional story if you have very unexpected results then your scientists could have very adverse reactions as well.
[1] That we know of.
>Given that we have seen this play out
We saw two examples, definitely unfortunate for what they were but well short of a built in civilization level reaction to scientific progress writ large. I don't think there's a single by and large way that people react to scientific revolutions, negative or otherwise. Feels like it depends on a combination of how it impacts most powerful stakeholders, things about culture, and things about the zeitgeist of a particular moment.
>we don't need an actual instance of scientists committing suicide to suggest that it's plausible, because we don't have an actual instance of proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging results
Right, the specifics of the science fiction don't matter here. And plausibility counts for something though it's a dramatically lower threshold. And the person above who is appealing to scientific revolutions writ large seem to be attempting a general level inference to human reaction to scientific revolutions, which is a huge inference to make on the back of a pair of one-off examples.
Possibility counts for something, but I would say it only goes as far as explaining contingencies of particular circumstances and doesn't explain trends, and what happens within the fiction of the book is a trend, and it's explained by a sabotage campaign rather than by an appeal to the stresses of day-to-day science.
> The original supposition was that it would be implausible for scientists at large to have an adverse reaction to results that defied their current worldview.
Indeed that is highly implausible. I daresay that anyone stating otherwise fundamentally lacks an understanding of the sort of people that are attracted to and work in the sciences. Paradigm shifts are a form of progress and progress is the raison d'etre.
Note that one or two outliers do not contradict a larger trend. Also that the examples given so far, in addition to being highly unusual, follow from social phenomena downstream of the new results rather than being a direct personal reaction to them.
That said, as noted by others that isn't what's going on in the book being discussed. So the plausibility of that plot point needs to be judged on its own merit as an entirely separate sort of thing.
> Note that one or two outliers do not contradict a larger trend.
The listed cases are not outliers in the scientific community. The individuals were outliers, but the scientific community, in a mode of behaviour that was not outlier-ish, shunned them. This tendency of scientists is well-established: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
At the end of the day, humans are largely egotistical, self-centred creatures, and scientists are no exception. When you say that scientists believe that progress is their raison d'etre, you may not be incorrect, but their belief in progress is grounded in a self-centred way. Perhaps the ideal is "progress for humanity", but the reality is more like "progress for my career" or "progress for my worldview", in which case results challenging everything you hold as a foundation are a threat to you, being regressive rather than progressive in matters important to one's ego. People really, really don't like being told they're wrong. Even scientists.
You're trying to shift the goalposts rather than concede the point. We weren't speaking of cliquish behavior or resistance to new ideas which are indeed (unfortunately) common enough even in the scientific world. Rather the point under dispute was individuals experiencing markedly adverse emotional reactions to the point of harm in direct response to results that challenge their understanding of how things work.
So there are two problems here. First, that the listed examples are social in nature as opposed to being directly due to scientific results thus they are irrelevant to the point being argued (but importantly not necessarily irrelevant to the plot point in the work of literature that led to this line of discussion). And second that they are very much outliers in that individuals came to direct physical harm which is not at all the expected outcome for the typical participant when a paradigm shift occurs in the sciences.
Despite the drama surrounding it, the way the discovery of quantum mechanics ultimately played out is a clear counterexample to the position you seem to be attempting to advance. Many participants expressed bitterness or frustration regarding some of their peers but there was not (at least in aggregate) a large scale negative reaction to the new results themselves. Physicists did not generally spiral into depression or develop drinking problems or whatever else upon being exposed to the new information. (Do note that disagreement and doubt are not a negative thing in the sciences but rather an essential part of the process.)
On a more personal note, your view of the sciences seems to me to be myopic and overly cynical. You are (to my eye) cherry picking only the worst behaviors you have witnessed and then painting the entire endeavor with those colors. No worthwhile scientist is overly bothered by being wrong because it is an almost daily occurrence when you are exploring topics at the edge of human understanding.
> In the book, it's a very intentional sabotage campaign.
Active malice seems more likely to succeed, doesn't it?
They can gaslight people in their own heads, after all.
Yeah, I think we're agreeing. The breakdown of scientific progress in the book is due to an actively malicious campaign that scrambles data, intimidates researchers and worse.
> wound up in an insane asylum for suggesting surgeons should wash their hands.
Was rejected and mocked by the medical community for his idea, developed a drinking problem and eventually committed to an asylum by his colleagues after having a nervous breakdown. While in the asylum he was beaten by the guards and died from a wound infection ... yikes!!
Neither Richard Feynman nor the quantum-physics community in general reacted very well to the first efforts to test Bell's theorem experimentally, at first: https://web.archive.org/web/20250723224559/https://arxiv.org... .
Both examples from medicine rather than physics. Can you give an example from physics? Preferably from the last century or two?
The parent post said scientists; medicine is something I've more knowledge of. You can carry the goalposts yourself, if you wanna move them around!
(The parent post also already mentions Einstein on quantum physics.)
I'm not sure about self harm or whatever, but Planck's Principle [1] was not stated without cause: 'Science progresses one funeral at a time.' And that was a quote from an outsized figure during the golden age of physics.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_principle
Yeah. In principal, scientists should be excited by weird results. In practice, though, humans are complex creatures with intellectual and emotional inertia. There's an understandable element of dread when you realize your life's work finds itself on shaky ground.
I'm a plasma physicist, and personally I love weird results - new mysteries to solve! That said, there are a wide range of personality types out there. And I would also be extremely surprised if the correct solution to some particular weird result was, for instance, that the Maxwell equations are broken for that regime (other than expected quantum corrections, e.g. the Schwinger limit).
Specially because only particle physics suddenly became inconsistent. I can see scientists fruitlessly obsessing with finding why the universe was toying with them, but suicide? OK, they were also seeing intent with individualized hallucinations, and computer interference, but IIRC those messages asked them to to stop particle physics, not to off themselves. They could change fields and live on.
They were getting inconsistent results, not just weird ones. However I agree that suicide probably wouldn't be where they would end up.
I seem to remember something about the scientist being distraught because physics didn't make sense, not because she was having trouble getting clean data.
That also stuck with me as weird: there are any number of places you could sabotage a precision physics experiment by injecting tiny amounts of noise, which would drive the scientists to think they were bad scientists. Instead they thought science was broken.
As someone who has looked for inconsistencies with the Standard Model for a while now, and seen every measurement land bang-on the prediction, I can say that I would love any deviation that said our existing theories are broken.
And sure, crank up the detector noise and we'd be sad, but ask any grad student: having your apparatus suddenly spit out garbage data is just an average day. I've known plenty of scientists with psychological problems but it's never coming from their data.
>That also stuck with me as weird: there are any number of places you could sabotage a precision physics experiment by injecting tiny amounts of noise, which would drive the scientists to think they were bad scientists. Instead they thought science was broken.
I think in the context of the book, the specific means of sabotage was something close to impossible to figure out, so I can see the despair of checking every conceivable explanation, coming up empty, and making an inference about reality itself. And it wasn't a kind of peripheral, controllable amount of noise, it was a complete global sabotage of all particle physics, on a scale that amounted to a global catastrophe rather than just another blip in the daily grind.
I think one thing that really hooked me on the book series in the beginning was being able to appreciate the kind of cosmic despair one scientist was sharing during the pool table conversation, because thinking big about meaning and order in the universe, and how important the universes' intelligibility is to our relationship with it, informed by data, is a synthesis of things that really matter to me as a reader - taking the intersection of science and meaning seriously.
I don't think that would be enough for plausibly explaining particular scientists offing themselves, but the psychology of someone to whom that kind of question matters that much, which is very much the heart and soul of what drives my interest in non-fiction reading, seems tragically underrepresented as a driving motivation in fiction which I think is terribly unfortunate. But sci-fi sometimes cares about it, and sometimes a lot.
> I've known plenty of scientists with psychological problems but it's never coming from their data.
I want to read a spinoff of the Three-Body Problem with this premise.
In the book they get different results on all tests they run, consistency is gone, that is something else.
well maybe depends how fundamental
if objects you put on a table started falling through the floor it would be a bit stressful
lol
but Dr. Becky gets really excited about all the various "crisis in cosmology" because she knows new science/knowledge will emerge from solving those questions
and you remind me there's another season coming up in that series, can't wait
"Is he still in the grandmother’s house? We would like to speak to him."
I am a bit sick of this narrative. That science can make mistakes is in no shape or form, one of its strengths. It is a weakness of the process.
The lipstick putting can be exposed by simply asking if you would not prefer a version of the scientific method that is never wrong.
Mathematicians proof theorems so they are always correct. Physicists don't have that privilege.
>Physicists don't have that privilege.
Then don't claim it as a strength!
Celebrating the mistakes is, as you're saying, perhaps a bit too far. But mistakes will happen, it's just the nature of the world. That makes developing a robust error correction mentality something that genuinely is worth celebrating.
I really dislike the writing style of being so "friendly" for people who don't know anything about the space that you obscure what the topic of the article is at all.
It's a third of the way through the article when "g-2", the problem at hand, is mentioned. Information that should have been shared in the title took a third of the article to figure out.
You dislike that people write for audiences other than yourself.
I dont particularly agree with this article, but there have been quanta articles i've read in the past that went so far trying to make the topic accessible that it became incomprehensible. Where they used so many metaphors and simplifications that it lost all meaning.
Science writing for a general audience is really challenging.
Writing for an unfamiliar audience doesn't mean you should hide the name of the problem until after a huge pile of setup.
No.
If you're writing an article about a man going to the store to buy a sandwich, the man, the store, and the sandwich should all make appearances by the end of the first paragraph.
These people are writing informative articles like novels and it's incredibly irritating and a disservice if you're actually trying to inform anybody about anything. If you're writing an article about the g-2 anomaly, "g-2 anomaly" belongs in the title not 1/3 the way in.
Yeah, Quanta articles are way too long. They could get to the point in one quarter of the length.
Yep. This would backfire spectacularly for people just want to know what's going on. They would just dump the article in the llm and ask, 'what problem is this article about'
Hmm... The Reality changed itself when guys in Siberia changed the sensor? Some years ago I was playing with the idea that the Reality might invent new laws when people look for them, and doesn't bother with laws when no one observes them. It would be in the style of Copenhagen interpretation, though even with regard to it, the idea seems too weird to be true. But now we have an experimental evidence.
In any case it gives me ideas how to check the hypothesis. If the Reality has a limited horizon for planning for new laws, scientists can trick it into inventing new laws that eventually (after some more research and even more laws observed) would start contradicting to each other, and at that point the Reality would snap into a different set of rules.
If it is true, then the plan is like this: we need to wipe all the scientific knowledge from this world and start again, and trick the the Reality into devising better laws of nature. Ah, wait, we have no evidence that the Reality can abandon laws that were introduced already. Pity, the plan is brilliant, but how to check if the Reality can abandon its laws? If laws are local... we can do something like Stephenson described in his Anathem: establish maths doing independent research and comparing their results once in 1000 years.
I love how the closer we get to “the edge of the Reality”, the more it sounds like the ramblings of someone that got their hands on some of that GOOD stuff
I suspect the universe is very very strange.
You might want to read Dan Simmons' Ilium and if you can stomach some weird post-9/11 shit, Olympos. One of the overarching themes is what you describe... or similar.
Also read Greg Egan's short story Luminous :)
> Some years ago I was playing with the idea that the Reality might invent new laws when people look for them, and doesn't bother with laws when no one observes them
There are several books from Greg Egan with this idea in mind: Permutation City and Distress. The latter one is exactly about this idea.
Distress sounds like "Distributed Solipsism".