@dm__ hi, lol one of my all-time favorites, sounds like... one hand clapping...? :) elsewhere, the great poem that puts all others to shame :P en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky
@EmilioPisanty I can't see a more recent paper from Alpha on gravitational behaviour of antihydrogen in their list of publications. There's a 2015 summary paper but I don't think it quotes any new results.
Thank you for your interest in our group and my work; it is indeed possible that I will take a further student this year. A lot of the general information regarding PhDs here is to be found at https://www.york.ac.uk/maths/postgraduate/ -- please note in particular the information regarding funding, because we have more limited funding available for overseas students, even in the case of EU citizens. (However, sometimes students are able to obtain studentships from their home country or have their own finance.)
So far all my non-negative answers are from the GR people
Which is nice but also I hope I can actually get funding from it
BTW, @DavidZ / @dmckee / @Qmechanic / @ACuriousMind (whoever handled the flag), regarding my flag on this answer - obviously a single post shouldn't be a trigger. But it's a pattern even from publicly-visible posts, and I'll put some money down that there's additional deleted posts in there with similar content that I can't see but you can.
If there isn't and that's the single oddball post where that user's quality-control system bugged out, then fair.
I'll try to make future flags clearer in that regard.
@Slereah nowadays all PhD positions in UK I see only provide funding to EU students, but after UK becomes a non-EU country, it will further limit its funding to UK students?
I used to live in a suburb for my graduate school; that place is pastoral and everyhing is cheap and people are more friendly; I find that's really a better place than the concrete jungle hometown.
my MSc advisor said he can't tolerate the suffocating city atmosphere for 10 minutes in my hometown.
I told him I also hate the suffocating atmosphere, but he argued that's not justified because I was brought up here.
but after inhabiting in the suburb, I really feel the city air suffocating .
@CaptainBohemian Not to worry; London is rich, but the rest of the country is poorer than the Western Europe average (this is a claim you hear often, and it's more nuanced, as explained here fullfact.org/economy/…) and the Gini coefficient of the UK is relatively high.
@alarge I wonder if those poorer regions have interesting research groups.
actually I think low-end is different from poor; low-end just means the living expense is lower than the average but the living condition wouldn't necessarily worse while poor means the living condition is worse.
@CaptainBohemian Well, I doubt the poorest regions of all will have universities, but I bet Scotland has good research groups (and the biggest name universities, Oxbridge, are not in London either so I would guess they're considerably cheaper)
(also I guess the Russell Group is spread all over the country and I bet there must be strong teams all over)
@Slereah would getting funding and an advisor separately be a possibility? I think I've heard of PhD students applying for their own funding, but don't know what kind of situations those were
What? Please prove your claim, and explain in which sense the relations $E=p_0 $and $p^2=m^2$ for 4-momentum in the $+---$ metric, always assumed in the relativistic case, are invariant under shifting energies. You cannot shift, you need to Lorentz transform! And this preserves the sign of $E$. — Arnold Neumaier9 mins ago
anyone knows what Arnold is talking about?
I refuse to believe he really thinks the origin of energies in relativistic mechanics is not arbitrary...
@danielunderwood Are you Bernardo? Why did you change your name?
@Slereah Which funding did you try applying for? I guess the obvious one that you probably must have already tried is Marie Curie as it's meant to encourage mobility across different countries (at least my understanding of it was such)
Something like ' For IELTS an overall score of 7.0 with at least 6.5 in each component. For TOEFL an overall score of 600 with a Test of Written English (TWE) of 4.5. For internet based TOEFL a score of 100. Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English (CPE) Grade C' should be a joke to pass hopefully
I know a bunch of people who lost out on application opportunities because there weren't exam-sitting slots open for them to have the results in time
heck, I came pretty close to that, I only managed to squeeze in because there was a booking slot at a site 10,000km away from where I was living, and I was interviewing at a university there on those dates and managed to combine the two
but if I hadn't found that then I would've needed to book a flight from Mexico City to San Antonio or something like that, in order to sit the test in time.
I'm getting dozens (literally) of e-mails from Amazon, eBay, etc, etc telling me how great their Black Friday deals are. But ... well ... I don't want anything.
@vzn if the correct way of progressing is being ignored so badly, the field is wide open for people like her to do the right thing and achieve so much, but for some reason...
I really don't know how people can put in so much effort to write things like this for so long which are so obviously flawed from the get go
oh (plz forgive me) seems she rarely mentions that shes married. ps implying that shes a grinch is also in dubious taste. guess theres politically in correct ways to question her integrity. etc
@vzn No one has implied that. You implied that having a relationship is necessary. The negation of that is not that no relationship can be beneficial, but simply that it's not a necessity.
One's mind going to relationships immediately as an explanation of anything when talking about women in the workplace is a very pernicious example of implicit bias
I think we can evaluate her claims as though she was a physicist thanks
@bolbteppa That's a bit of a flawed argument, too: One single theorist can't do all that much, regardless of how much we like to tell tales of the larger-than-life theorists who revolutionize a field single-handedly. You need a bit of a critical mass to get completely new avenues of investigations going at a sustainable rate. But to get that going, you need journals and reviewers open to these avenues
I do think the diagnosis of stagnation is correct with respect to explaining experimental results, but the crux is as she writes:
> We have data in abundance. But all the data are well explained by the existing theories—the standard model of particle physics and the cosmological concordance model.
@bolbteppa I don't think Hossenfelder's blog represents a large part of her time. Her work is on the phenomenology of quantum gravity and as far as I can tell she seems to be as sane as everyone else in the QG field (arguably not that sane :-)
"All the data" is not entirely correct (cf. e.g. dark matter), but there's very little specific data that's unexplained that you could test specific models against
@ACuriousMind it's all part of the ongoing argument about what theorists should do in the absence of experiment for them to test their theories. My view would be whatever they want because I think it will be interesting even if it's never physically applicable. Hossenfelder and Woit disagree. Shrug.
So is all this discussion (such as the blog post above) still in the spirit of scientific discourse or has it reached the point of personal drama? I have no idea where that line is
Theorists seems today largely driven by aesthetics and a belief that a theory of everything is both needed and possible. But to take a point from Wigner's essay on the effectiveness of mathematics, physical theories have hitherto always relied on empirical motivation, and all natural laws are subject to "limitations of scope". As currently pursued,a theory of everything would be no such thing - not limited in scope and not motivated by particular empirial findings
So it is not clear that we should reasonably - or even unreasonably - expect such a theory to rise from the theories we have. Nor is it clear to me, on an epistemological level, that such a theory even needs to exist.
But I am saying that the field as a whole could use a little more philosophical self-reflection, and a little more humility when talking about things that are, strictly speaking, entirely speculative.
@ACuriousMind I might be eligible for my pension in two years.
2
I can't remember if it comes in at age 60 or 65.
(old age does that to your memory)
@ACuriousMind I think it takes a certain arrogance to believe you can solve these deep questions. I would guess (on the basis of no evidence) that anyone mad enough to pursue a career at the outer edges of HEP isn't given to humility and self-reflection. And I don't think that matters.
@ACuriousMind it's not a flawed argument, one single person can (Einstein, Newton, Maxwell, Maldacena, Witten) change the foundations of areas of physics - if the stagnation is due, as she claims, to physicists not seeing the errors of their ways, ("Crisis is so optimistic. It raises the impression that theorists realized the error of their ways, that change is on the way, that they are waking up now and will abandon their flawed methodology. But I see no awakening.
The self-reflection in the community is zero, zilch, nada, nichts, null") it literally implies the 'proper' way to look at the foundations is lying there for the taking by the clairvoyants (like her, though it doesn't matter if she contributes) who see how wrong everybody else is, but for some reason no progress is made in the directions she wants to go in by anybody, apparently everybody is just ignoring 'the truth'...
Of course if anybody tries to ask what are the foundations she sees, one sees she was giving even a moments credence to laughable theories like LQG, that alone invalidates the whole argument when you take it seriously, so of course she doesn't ever tell us what the right foundations to be looking at are
@bolbteppa If Einstein had done it single-handedly, then why's there a primacy debate with Poincaré et al.? Maxwell ingeniously reorganized equations others had discovered. And Witten wouldn't have had the impact he had had there not been others to then take his results and run with them. These "one person changes physics" stories are that - stories. Not only are we standing on the shoulders of giants, but we also need others willing to climb on ours.
@ACuriousMind But the actual issue is that most of the people publicly pushing a stagnation narrative think that they are the one person who is going to fix it. It's pure self-promotion.
There's Lisi with E8 theory, Weinstein with geometric unity, Duetsch with constructor theory, and that recent RCHO thing, and many more that have faded into obscurity.
@ACuriousMind The primacy argument is irrelevant to Einstein doing it all by himself, like Newton did, and Witten and Maldacena etc did of course build on existing work more heavily, but of course there was work they were building on, just like she or the clairvoyants she imagines would be building on work that exists now which has flaws which need correcting, otherwise there'd be no problem to fix
She's trying to sound like she's saying we need a critical mass working on the non-backwards foundations, as though she is claiming to know the correct way to go with the foundations, but of course she never argues in favor of the correct approach in that article, which makes it a particularly negative article
Of course the real goal is to vent with statements like: "How long can they go on with this, you ask? How long can they keep on spinning theory-tales?
I am afraid there is nothing that can stop them. They review each other’s papers. They review each other’s grant proposals. And they constantly tell each other that what they are doing is good science. Why should they stop? For them, all is going well. They hold conferences, they publish papers, they discuss their great new ideas. From the inside, it looks like business as usual, just that nothing comes out of it.
I don't want to debate the personal motivations of anyone in this debate. Once we start believing that people don't mean what they say, but in fact are pursuing hidden motives, the very idea of debate becomes useless.
But that's an example where this narrative doesn't work. It is true that dark matter gets more attention than modified gravity, but there's still a lot of modified gravity out there. Over 25 completely distinct theories, if I recall.
Experimentally, both are being tested equally well, i.e. they're both being tested as rapidly as possible by every experiment that could possibly help.
Not that that is not sometimes the case - but if I believed that, I would just walk away instead of wasting my breath arguing about things no one believes.
Imagine believing that science was being held back because a cabal of 'the establishment' was working in cahoots with one another to hold up said establishment, and that it was in a cyclic loop because they are the ones judging each other's work, going to each other's conferences etc... claiming that science as it stands is a "problem that will not go away by itself", this is bat**** crazy tbh
@bolbteppa The passage you quote is not suggesting there's any malice ala "cabals" in it, the crucial part being "From the inside, it looks like business as usual"
@ACuriousMind so there's no malice in saying "Crisis is so optimistic. It raises the impression that theorists realized the error of their ways, that change is on the way, that they are waking up now and will abandon their flawed methodology. But I see no awakening. The self-reflection in the community is zero, zilch, nada, nichts, null”
i.e. that the community is will not wake up, and even worse they are ignoring her clairvoyant siren calls to go in the right direction because "I have spelled out many times, very clearly, what theoretical physicists should do differently. It’s just that they don’t like my answer.... Developing new methodologies is harder than inventing new particles in the dozens, which is why they don’t like to hear my conclusions.
Any change will reduce the paper output, and they don’t want this. It’s not institutional pressure that creates this resistance, it’s that scientists themselves don’t want to move their butts", no malice in saying the "scientists themselves don’t want to move their butts", there is no malice in claiming they would prefer to stay in their self-referential bubble where everything looks fine,
a bubble they prop up by judging each others works like a 'cabal' ("a clique (often secret) that seeks power usually through intrigue") so that they never lose power, because "They review each other’s papers. They review each other’s grant proposals. And they constantly tell each other that what they are doing is good science. Why should they stop?" You know this is beyond the pale...
If one takes the most 'positive' claims she makes seriously:
"Second, it’s not true. I have spelled out many times, very clearly, what theoretical physicists should do differently. It’s just that they don’t like my answer. They should stop trying to solve problems that don’t exist. That a theory isn’t pretty is not a problem. Focus on mathematically well-defined problems, that’s what I am saying. And, for heaven’s sake, stop rewarding scientists for working on what is popular with their colleagues."
It would basically be the end of theoretical physics, lets just all become experimentalist's or be theorists working on getting things like the three body problem better etc, it's simply nuts, the fact there are even interesting questions to be asking is shocking and we are lucky to be in a place where there are credible reasons for thinking said theories could end up being right
@bolbteppa I was saying that she's not suggesting that the people she criticizes are doing that because of malicious intent (as a 'cabal' with nefarious goals to hinder the progress of science), but more because of inertia - it's working just fine right now.
@bolbteppa The text does not support that. It's what you're reading into it. And who knows, might be that that's what she's really thinking. But it's not what she's saying. All the actively negative interpretations here - 'cahoots', 'cabals', that it's about 'power' (and not about comfort/inertia), ending theoretical physics - are not in the text.
Note also that you're using much more harsh and personal attacks ("crazy", "beyond the pale", "simply nuts") than appear anywhere in her entire article.
Either there's a scientific issue here that we can discuss, or it's all social posturing. If it's the former, why the need for personal attacks? If it's the latter, why even play "debate" at all?
@ACuriousMind She's not just saying it's because of inertia, that would be one thing, she actually says things such as - "they don’t like to hear my conclusions", "scientists themselves don’t want to move their butts", "They should stop trying to solve problems that don’t exist", "I see no awakening. The self-reflection in the community is zero, zilch, nada, nichts, null”
couple the fact they are actually ignoring her siren calls to go in the right direction with the claim they are also propping up this 'flawed methodological' system because "They review each other’s papers. They review each other’s grant proposals. And they constantly tell each other that what they are doing is good science. Why should they stop?" and you enter the realm of conspiracy theories...
Why are you pretending she isn't implying it's a big cabal of 'theory-spinners' (who "keep on spinning theory-tales") whose "flawed methodology" is buttressed by the fact the system is buttressed by the fact they judge each others works so they keep holding onto the power (like a cabal) to go down these 'flawed methodological' paths, that's what the post is all about, and her one 'solution' is basically the end of theoretical physics, this is crazy stuff
@knzhou Oh, I didn't mean to imply it doesn't matter. But I feel the correct answer then is to point out it's just posturing, not to reply with posturing in turn like bolbteppa is doing.
@bolbteppa Look, I'm not pretending that. I really do not interpret the article like you do. For heaven's sake, I was a string theorist. I still like it. I'm not your enemy.
So bolbteppa is not replying, but reacting, and I think it's a perfectly reasonable reaction.
I do my part for physics (doing a lot of public high school talks) but my reach is not even 0.01% of Sabine's. It's not actually a "debate" here, there aren't two sides with pulpits.
Real debates in science never happen in public. A scientific controversy that appears to be happening in public is just one side (usually the loser) unilaterally using their public reach to speak without opposition.
@ACuriousMind Ah come on... Why is it posturing to call out this anti-scientific nonsense - when I use the actual words of the text you say I'm reading into it and the text doesn't support what I read into, even when I use literal quotes from the post to make my argument, and you're not addressing any of the actual quotes of hers I've produced...
You can't say she's simply objectively claiming it's just a systemic problem when she also says everybody is ignoring her calls to go in the right direction - even worse when someone both says everyone else is ignoring calls to go in the right direction and that they are self-referentially propping up a 'methodologically flawed' system - that's literally when the word cabal becomes appropriate :p
oo fail, after much sweat and tears finally installed cuda-10.0 and upgraded to cudnn7.4...found out neither tensorflow nor pytorch support cuda10 yet...
@knzhou I guess my fundamental issue here is that the best reasonable dismissal of her concerns I've heard here is your "HEP is not all string theory", and the rest was a lot of attacks on her motivations and mental sanity. I have no problem with calling people wrong when they're wrong. I have no problem with defending the orthodoxy (as you once noted ;) ). And yet I feel rather uneasy with this.
@knzhou it's a shame the most public rebuttal to stuff like this is laced with it's own insane nonsense motls.blogspot.com/2018/11/…
@taritgoswami maybe after finishing past chapter 3 things would start to make some sense, 6 to 9 would probably be used a good bit too, but it's an advanced and relatively new subject so a lot of work would be required
particularly given the oodles of theory that get produced every week but which self-proclaimed Theoretical Physicists refuse to recognize as "theoretical physics" because it isn't high-energy physics
I'm sorry, I must have misread: "I have spelled out many times, very clearly, what theoretical physicists should do differently. It’s just that they don’t like my answer. They should stop trying to solve problems that don’t exist. That a theory isn’t pretty is not a problem. Focus on mathematically well-defined problems, that’s what I am saying. And, for heaven’s sake, stop rewarding scientists for working on what is popular with their colleagues." to mean we should stop trying to ask speculative questions if we can't define it within the bounds these outsider potential overlords want
@EmilioPisanty Obviously I'm joking about how absurd the claims are, relax
@bolbteppa the quote you just posted is perfectly reasonable.
If you want any of your arguments about it to be taken seriously, I would advise you to cut out language like "outsider potential overlords" immediately.
@EmilioPisanty How is it reasonable in a democracy to tell theoretical physicists to stop working on incredibly hard problems like string theory, supersymmetry, supergravity, AdS/CFT, M theory, conformal field theory, all the rest of it, where we don't even know how to define the problems properly, we're discovering things, and to instead work on "well-defined problems", that's beyond absurd, especially from someone who worked on LQG to boot
And how is it reasonable to imply that things like string theory are solving problems that don't exist when the whole point is to discover whether they do apply to the real world or not?
That is really authoritarian, joking about this as a wannabe potential ruler is a joking way to call out the crazy authoritarian claims you apparently think are reasonable, to tell scientists in a Democracy not to work on things like string theory because we can't 'well-define' things
Alright lets just drop it, this is clearly too much
@DavidZ - please, could you remove the "on hold" tag, I would like to start a bounty to get some advices, suggestions or tracks about these questions. I would really appreciate if you could.
Anonymous
@youpilat13 Homework-type questions are off-topic on Physics SE. Also, there are way too many sub-questions in that. I'd recommend extracting the conceptual part(s) from each subquestion and then editing/asking.
Anonymous
You really expect someone to go through that huge wall of text and answer all your homework-y subquestions? :/
What is the policy on asking homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?
What kinds of questions are considered homework questions?
Are homework questions allowed?
What should I include in a homework question?
Why don't you provide a complete answer to homework questions?
@EmilioPisanty On that, I'd say it's generally better to make flags describe what the problem is, rather than suggesting a specific course of action. Anyway, it hasn't escaped our notice that there is a pattern. We're keeping an eye on that one.
What is the policy on asking homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?
What kinds of questions are considered homework questions?
Are homework questions allowed?
What should I include in a homework question?
Why don't you provide a complete answer to homework questions?
