The Amazing Lack of Self Awareness by Physicist

[Dennis P Brown]

Here is a rather good rant by Dr. Hossenfeldar (see - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlHvW6k2bcM&t=414s ).

Loop gravity has been shown to be wrong and she is correct to criticize those physicist that continue to waste their time on something that failed its critical experimental test. Does this stop those in the field? No, because the system is broken. They publish on this nonsense and it still counts as - how can I say this with a straight face - "acceptable for the field!" Through it is just math and pseudoscience that has no bases in reality.

Then we have string theory; again, the good doctor considers it a waste because it cannot be falsified - i.e. can't make any testable predictions. Worse still, it so-called most important reason to exist is to eliminate the singularity in a Black Hole. Again, a made up issue which has never been proven* to exist - the famous Dr. Hawking's was wrong in that 'proof' he had done nearly thirty years ago and no one caught the error till recently!

Which leads back to Sir Roger Penrose - the worse example of totally useless writer of published papers that create a false belief in a concept that is, frankly, total BS (He has done good work at times but this is the bases of all his most important papers). That his 100% make believe work about the interior of Black Holes gets publish is damning to the field. Why? Because it is absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to make any testable predictions on any theory on that subject! Dr. Hossenfeldar knows this through she has not addressed Penrose's work, to date.

There is one absolute requirement in science and that is all theory's/models MUST be based on the amazingly powerful concept of empiricism: a methodology that has created all modern technology and deep knowledge that actually works. Any physical theory using mathematical models MUST be based on real data, otherwise, it is just make believe.

That these fields continue at all and that these scientist are considered top of their respective fields and actually, many people consider them the most intelligent people, is damning to anyone that respects the scientific method. They sell fake charms to ward off the evils of the unproven singularity and exploit ignorance by most people to create an impression that their work is relevant. Its not and proves that the emperor has no clothes; a problem far too many physicist should know better. For reasons I can't fathom, all this fake science is considered "acceptable".

This charade has gone on now for far too long and proves that the entire peer review system in physic's needs revision and a actual commitment to proper empirical science, rather then this make believe speculation not based on reality.


*The equations of General Relativity 'fail' under these conditions because the model develops a singularity - i.e. division by zero. This says the model fails, rather then the singularity really occurs.

[David Kunkle]

Looks like Stephen Hawking made an arithmetic error on page two himself.

To quote Hawking: "It was quite a boner."

[Daniel Harrer]

The true problem isn't the peer review, which works fine as it isn't there to judge "realism"; only if the paper is sound and properly shows what it claims to do. Instead the entire issue is the encroaching capitalism, intertwined with science "communication". Shouting the awesomeness of strings and loops from the roof gets simply more attention from the public, politicians, and even investors. This will continue as s long as the most basic sciences such as theoretical physics are subject to pure capitalist competition for grants from the public/companies, because there will never be any in- or external pressure towards realism over abstract nonsense.

The more "practical" fields with lots of money in it (medicine being probably the worst) had those problems even longer and at much higher rates. Faking results or them at least being impossible to reproduce is so common it is almost the norm now. One simply gets more money with such dishonesty, and is easier to ask for forgiveness later. Worst case some titles are revoked after a decade or two, yet the money they farmed stays with them. Often they even keep making a living in the same field, somehow.

However, (public) funding of abstract nonsense still has value. All those examples of math later becoming fundamental to entire industries (computers, cryptography, ...) demonstrate that pretty well. And those fundamentals are often extremely cheap, a mathematician doesn't need a lab or a billion dollar particle accelerator/fusion reactor. It's pennies, that very likely pay their interest many times over; but as it might be decades down the line, there is rarely incentive for companies.

[Dennis P Brown]

Daniel, good insight on the issue. There really does need to be push back on these ridiculous misleading approaches to science - it undermines the very basic foundation of what science is supposed to practice. At least medicine created the double blind test procedure to improve drug testing and reduce the number of phony test results.

That these physicist are made "star's" by both media and fellow physicist is dreadful. This just proves that the field has gotten so far from its roots that it now considers "100% make believe" as valid papers playing the part of real science. Which it definitely is not. People like Greene, Penrose and others in those fields became pathetic "Tik Tok" stars long before that dreadful site existed.

I will say this in defense of particle physicist - they admit where their field theories become laughably wrong - like when the best theory also tells us that there is 10^119 J/m3 average energy for the universe; even they call that result either an embarrassment or the worse prediction in the history of physics*. That they and others point these problems out as an area that needs to be addressed certainly is a good thing and indicates they still follow empirical thinking.

*While this number is the result of following the standard field theory approch for determining the energy density of the Universe, that calculation does use a series solution that diverges. So this result isn't too surprising nor a reason to very much doubt its accuracy on finite term solutions. That is because it does, in other problems, match experimental data extremely well.