from Hacker News

String theory lied to us and now science communication is hard [video]

by damiankennedy on 11/13/23, 3:01 AM with 95 comments

  • by antonvs on 11/13/23, 5:48 AM

    It's not just string theory.

    Another example is the state of communication about fusion power right now, which is deplorable. The media has been full of claims about how they finally achieved "net energy gain." Except "net energy gain" is a narrow scientific description that does not, in fact, mean what we would normally consider net energy gain for viable fusion power.

    If we look at the actual total power input to the experiment in question, and the power output, we see a 99% energy loss: the total output power was only 1% of the total input power. That means we're 100 times, two orders of magnitude, away from achieving an actual energy gain.

    On HN there is probably a good amount of awareness of this, but I bet there are some people reading this comment who were not aware of it, and were misled by the reporting. Here's an article for the unfamiliar: https://whyy.org/segments/why-the-nuclear-fusion-net-energy-...

    So I think the headline could be generalized: science communication has a high degree of dishonesty in general, and that makes good science communication hard.

  • by Animats on 11/13/23, 8:23 AM

    I didn't know string theory was dead. I'd read Smolin's critique, "The Trouble with Physics" (2006) when it came out. He wrote as if he's out of the mainstream back then. Apparently his is now the mainstream opinion.

    Collier is hard-line Karl Popper - theories must make testable predictions which are later confirmed by experiment. It's good to hear that.

    Around minute 34, she's covered the background and gets to the political point. "String theorists are liars". This has caused public hostility to physics. Which translates to funding cuts for particle physics.

  • by Arainach on 11/13/23, 5:14 AM

    Is there a good summary of the content? This sounds like a presenter who knows what they are talking about, and I'm preinclined to be interested in this since for a long time as an interested amateur I disliked how significant parts of string theory seemed untestable (and thus in my opinion unscientific), but hourlong videos are the least efficient way to communicate information out there.

  • by ketralnis on 11/13/23, 5:15 AM

    She has several other good videos too. Her channel is fairly young but this one is probably her best so far. I do fear it runs afoul of being catnip to the kind of person that comments on every dark matter article with "well I've always been skeptical of dark matter" or "particle physics needs to think outside the box". And if you are, well, watch her dark matter video too but you won't like it for the opposite reason that you'll like this one. Don't say I didn't warn you.

    Anyway she's a great communicator and has the right kind of sass (this is probably her sassiest). Give the rest of her catalogue a look.

  • by tsunamifury on 11/13/23, 6:39 AM

    There is a bigger and much broader crisis in science right now that academics refuse to face head on. From physics to social sciences to economics famous academics have promoted totally bumpkis theories as facts in order to justify PR and publication. Academics are more and more regularly taking data or exaggerating results and the public is starting to catch on.

    It’s eroding rational sciences as a whole.

  • by ivolimmen on 11/13/23, 8:07 AM

    For me the video is a total distraction; I can't follow it mainly because she is playing a video game. I also don't understand String theory... and I don't really care... but who plays video games while explaining something???

  • by dilyevsky on 11/13/23, 6:21 AM

    There’s a recent Veritasium video on the same subject - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=czjisEGe5Cw

  • by audunw on 11/13/23, 8:29 AM

    I think the problem is that science today, in many fields, is slower and requires more work than it used to.

    With physics in particular there’s a perception that science should progress fast in spectacular breakthroughs. But the 1900s was a very unique time. It’s not like that anymore. We’ve figured out the “easy” things (relatively speaking), most things left to discover are probably far harder.

    So we need to get used to paying scientists and researchers to just play around with whatever they feel like, over long stretches of time. There’s no guarantee that a breakthrough will come from someone strongly embedded in the science mainstream writing lots of articles with tons of citation. And there’s no guarantee that breakthroughs will happen in any reasonable time.

    I think we also need a shift from documenting/publishing the results, to documenting/publishing the process. YouTube is interesting in that regard. A lot of creators there doing very interesting and unique work.. and even if they don’t get great results, people still watch it if the process is interesting, and/or if the creator teaches their techniques, what they’re learning, how they failed, etc.

  • by javitron on 11/13/23, 8:18 AM

    Well, maybe she should try communicating science while NOT playing a video game. That may be the issue making it hard?

  • by lerno on 11/17/23, 7:29 AM

    I was originally pursuing a career in theoretical physics. My master thesis was going to be a literature study on string theory.

    The more I read, the more I went “what the heck, this theory can’t possibly be true, it’s so ad hoc with rules made up just to make it pass tests that otherwise would prove it conclusively wrong”

    It made me disillusioned and I eventually ended up working as a developer instead.

    I guess my instincts were right, because there has been extremely little real progress the last 25(!) years in the field…..

  • by totetsu on 11/13/23, 7:14 AM

    Still playing the Binding of Isaac in 2023. That's career suicide.

  • by fyokdrigd on 11/13/23, 10:11 AM

    her description of physicists being asked about string theory out of nowhere is what feel like being a comp sci being asked about cryptomoney or AI all the time.

  • by omnicognate on 11/13/23, 6:28 AM

    Has anybody watched the whole thing and know if the video game she's playing ended up having some relevance or helping her make some point?

    If not, I don't think I'll bother with the rest. I watched ~10 mins and found the game a stressful distraction that impeded her communication (was that the point?). If it's just a random shtick I'll leave it for those that enjoy it.

  • by taylodl on 11/13/23, 8:54 PM

    Excuse me? String Theory didn't lie to us - it's the science popularizes who lied, and continue to lie.

    Don't believe me?

    Okay, Einstein said gravity is caused by the curvature of space, right? Wrong! Einstein never said any such thing, he merely said you can think of gravity as curved spacetime - in fact he later pointed out to others that was a crutch, not the reality. Gravity is a force. Yet the science popularizers continue to lie and display their stupid rubber sheet model to explain why things orbit the earth. Which is not only wrong, but very misleading - earth orbit are easily explained by time dilation, you don't even need to model earth gravity with all this spacetime-as-a-rubber sheet nonsense!

    Still don't believe me? Look how science popularizers explain voodoo mechanics, erm, I mean quantum mechanics. They still pretend that Copenhagen and the science of 100 years ago still reign supreme and completely ignore quantum field theory, which is the foundation of the standard model.

    When it comes to string theory they never point out that string theory, brane theory, and the standard model all yield the same results and that physicists now use the model that makes their calculations easier.

    No, science popularizers prefer to spout nonsense in an attempt to make science seem cool. You know what's cool? Actual, factual science!