For a long time now fundamental theoretical physics has been suffering not just from a slowdown in progress, but from a sort of intellectual collapse (I wrote about this here a while back in the context of “epistemic collapse”: the collapse of a shared reality, caused by the loss of reliable sources for distinguishing what is true from what is false.). The Wall Street Journal has a new article entitled The Rise of ‘Conspiracy Physics’ with summary:
Streamers are building huge audiences by attacking academic physics as just another corrupt establishment. Scientists are starting to worry about the consequences.
If you replaced “Streamers” by “Sabine Hossenfelder” this would be reasonably accurate, and a serious discussion of this would have been interesting and worthwhile. Instead, the article is an excellent example of the sort of epistemic collapse we’re now living in. There’s zero intelligent content about the underlying scientific issues (is fundamental theoretical physics in trouble?), just a random collection of material about podcasts, written by someone who clearly knows nothing about the topic he’s writing about. The epistemic collapse is total when traditional high-quality information sources like the Wall Street Journal are turned over to uninformed writers getting their information from Joe Rogan podcasts. Any hope of figuring out what is true and what is false is now completely gone.
I was planning on writing something explaining what exactly the WSJ story gets wrong, but now realize this is hopeless (and I’m trying to improve my mental health this week, not make it worse). Sorting through a pile of misinformation, trying to rebuild something true out of a collapsed mess of some truth buried in a mixture of nonsense and misunderstandings is a losing battle.
Maybe some day our information environment will become healthy again, but for now I’m not sure what to do about this. Be aware that if you’re trying to understand the state of fundamental theoretical physics, watching Joe Rogan, Piers Morgan, Professor Dave, etc. podcasts is just going to fill your mind with crap. Reading articles about these podcasts is worse. If a podcaster (e.g. Sabine Hossenfelder) has a book, read the book (Lost in Math is pretty good) rather than watching the podcasts. In general, reading books is a good idea (I can also recommend this one).
Update: John Baez comments here:
This quagmire is getting bigger. It’s another part of what William Gibson recently called the Singularity of Stupid.
Update: If you want more drama, Sabine Hossenfelder here explains how, after she described someone’s research as “bullshit”, that person went to one place where she has an official (but unpaid) affiliation (the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy) and convinced them to fire her. Anyway, that’s her story, maybe there’s more to it, but it’s highly plausible. Knowing Sabine and the sort of work she criticizes, I have no doubt that the research really was bullshit. If there really was someone going to the Munich Center to do this, it would be interesting to know who it was.
I (unusually) watched the whole video, and everything she said seemed to me completely sensible. Those who have swallowed the story that she’s an unethical deranged conspiracy theorist might want to instead look into the ethics of those who disagree with her.
Reading that WSJ essay, one might think there’s nothing worth discussing in either theoretical condensed matter physics or biophysics (dubbed “nanophysics”). I don’t think I know experts in either subfield who feel like their research is “in crisis” beyond what the present administration has threatened to do. The real problem facing these subfields is outreach. Unlike string theory, nanophysics lacks passionate spokespeople. Perhaps because of string theory spokespeople (or our lack of speaking up), it is now partially the responsibility of nanophysicists to defend the legitimacy of these disciplines from singular accusations of corruption and termination (To be fair, this might also be due to the somewhat common misconception that experts are uniformly well-rounded and are coupled in multiple ways: a particle physicist is a biophysicist is an astrophysicist is a nuclear physicist).
Sabine can defend herself pretty well and doesn’t need me to do it, but here we go.
Her critiques are quite accurate if you know what she’s talking about. If you don’t, her tone and humor can certainly lead to some viewers to missinterpret it as some sort of yet another anti-establishment rant, “burn ’em all” populist take of the ones we see today in politics. But that’s obviously not her point, and she can back that claim by the book she wrote before all of this.
This take that she is somehow helping the dismantling of science by people of the likes of **ump is a psychopathic maneuver by the people who are the targets of her critiques to avoid having to engage with them and confront failure. We know who they are, just go to X and you will see some of the accounts and what they work on in physics (there will be no surprise there). Her german sense of humor and direct approach certainly may not help with some (it’s fine by me, since I’m kind of like that too, I hate hypocrisy), so be it. And if she is making money with her youtube with that, it’s way more honest, since it is a private enterprise rather than tax funded like the useless research she criticizes.
I’m so tired of this hypocrisy that you need to tip-toe in order to say something bad about some people. It happens to me too, in other different domains of life, and is tiring, because it is their problem, not yours. Direct people are a blessing in a world of passive agressives, gaslighters, and in general hypocritical people.
Difficult to understand how Sean Caroll and Eric Weinstein agreed to debate wth a tabloid journalist Piers Morgan as moderator.
“Any hope of figuring out what is true and what is false is now completely gone.
…
I was planning on writing something explaining what exactly the WSJ story gets wrong, but now realize this is hopeless ”
Peter, it is not hopeless. It will help others. Do not hesitate. Do it, please.
Rama,
Sean and Eric both want to reach a large audience with their views, so these days this is the way to go.
Ark,
This needs to be crowd-sourced. Others should be contributing.
I’ll start with one thing:
About “Streamers are building huge audiences by attacking academic physics as just another corrupt establishment.”. The biggest “streamer” discussed is Joe Rogan. For a list of physicists he has had on his show, see here
https://jrelibrary.com/guests/physicists/
The people he has had on multiple times include Sean Carroll, Brian Cox, Brian Greene, Michio Kaku and Neil deGrasse Tyson, so the physics establishment has a much bigger presence on that show than its critics. For some reason no one in the physics community is upset that Michio Kaku has been on multiple times spouting utter nonsense about physics.
“Sabine Hossenfelder is building huge audience by attacking academic physics as just another corrupt establishment. Scientists are starting to worry about the consequences.” Would be strongly inaccurate in my estimation. I belive she built her audience by explaining Physics and its problems in a well-informed, enjoyable and generally reliable way
I’m more bothered that some physicists have stopped blogging real, educating, physics. I refer to Matt Strassler. He was in the process of explaining “quantum fundamentals” quite correctly (especially entanglement); and then he stopped. He also, unlike some explainers, was quite willing to listen to complaints when what he said was, if you misread the meaning of words, wrong. He explained the words and became clearly very right (which he intended all along.) He just stopped.
“[Sabine]’s critiques are quite accurate if you know what she’s talking about.” You’re so close. Her critiques are adequate when she’s in her field (physics). The moment she takes on other topics, it’s hot nonsense.
Peter, FYI
Your site now seems to be blocked in the Firefox browser. Now using Chrome for this.
I think the warning is bogus (NOT Firefox) but can’t bypass. Page text reads:
Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead
Firefox detected a potential security threat and did not continue to http://www.math.columbia.edu. If you visit this site, attackers could try to steal information like your passwords, emails, or credit card details.
What can you do about it?
Probably nothing, since it’s likely there’s a problem with the site itself.
Learn more…
Regards jaco, 9/12/25
I@Doug McDonald
“I’m more bothered that some physicists have stopped blogging real, educating, physics.”
I am doing it for a long time. Though it is more mathematical physics than physics as such. It is close in content to what Peter is interested in. See my last post here.
Oh come on. Matt Strassler can spend his time how he likes. He has no obligation to write blogs for anyone.
Peter, I don’t think it’s just Sabine. I’ve heard that anti-establishment physics videos are popular. Someone told me one of the most popular recent physics videos was one that QFT & renormalisation in particular was a conspiracy.
Maybe a good starting point would be stopping conflating high energy theoretical physics with physics as a whole or even theoretical physics at large (which is pretty alive and well, and it is not just “nanophysics”.).
It is always amazing to see the general public invested in subjects (such as quantum gravity, the Higgs boson or cosmic inflation) which have near zero chances to impact their life and largely ignoring the wide range of topics that could dramatically change the world we are living in. Things like high temperature superconductivity, climate physics, biophysics, neurosciences, understanding AI…
@Quasiparticular, you are bang on. I’ve been blogging about condensed matter and nanoscale physics for 20 years, but somehow I have not risen to the level of passionate spokesperson in the sense of appearing on Joe Rogan or the Discovery Channel along side Michio Kaku. I will probably write something this weekend about this WSJ article; I hadn’t gotten to it because I was too busy this week actually blogging about real condensed matter physics.
Sabine Hossenfelder, dubbed as conspiracy youtuber by the WSJ is in the Stanford bibliometric list of top 2% scientists (see https://topresearcherslist.com/Home/Profile/836803), unlike most of the professional physicists who attack her criticism as unqualified.
With all respect to “scientific authority”, this objectively makes the field look bad, as if it were managed by mediocrities who cannot debate some criticism.
Peter, I am the author of the WSJ piece, and I’m honestly confused by the hostility. The article reported on a media phenomenon around physics, not a verdict on the state of the field. If you believe it contains factual errors, please quote the exact sentences and provide sources so I can correct them. Without specific claims I can check, a blanket dismissal replaces analysis with assertion and leaves readers no clearer about what is true.
jaco,
Evidently a couple days ago someone accidentally got a http://www.math.columbia.edu SSL certificate revoked, causing some browsers (e.g. Firefox) to not allow connections. Trying to get this fixed…
Doug McDonald/Andrew,
I agree that it’s a shame that there are fewer scientists blogging substantively in this area. The short format of social media posts is useless for anything intelligent. Personally I hate watching videos, but that seems to be the main way information is communicated now. There are worthwhile ones, but also a huge number of worthless ones.
Daniel Kagan Kans,
My problem is with the whole conception of the WSJ piece. I don’t think the WSJ should turn itself into yet another place recycling meaningless internet drama for clicks. If it is going to do this, it should be adding some serious understanding of what is going on to make sense of the drama. I’m sorry, but there’s no evidence you have the expertise needed to do this.
For a specific and crucial example of what you get wrong, see my comments about the Joe Rogan piece of this above. Yes, Rogan has brought Eric Weinstein on several times. But he has even more often hosted the opposite, people like Michio Kaku making absurd hyped claims about things like string theory.
In your piece you are mixing together all sorts of things, trying to fit them into an internet drama story, which, honestly, is just worthless in terms of giving anyone any real understanding of what is going on. The story of Sabine Hossenfelder, her critique and the effect it is having is something real that would be worth writing about. It’s a complicated and arguably important subject. On the other hand, Eric Weinstein and Sean Carroll arguing on Piers Morgan is the worst king of dumb internet drama, great for getting clicks, lots of heat, zero light. The WSJ should be staying far away from this kind of thing.
Peter, the core point where we disagree is news value: the media ecosystem around physics is not “meaningless internet drama,” it is now a major driver of public trust, which in turn shapes funding, policy, philanthropy, student pipelines, and careers, and that is exactly the kind of institutional dynamic WSJ readers care about. When tens of millions encounter physics through shows and channels that mix legitimate critique with suspicion of expertise, it affects how voters, donors, and legislators think about paying for colliders, theory groups, and basic research; documenting that shift is journalism, not gawking. Your Rogan example does not undercut this; whether he books more mainstream guests or not, the format and audience norms he helped normalize are copied widely, and the downstream reception is the story. Treating Hossenfelder’s critique as serious while also reporting the spectacle that actually reaches the public is necessary to describe the real information environment; pretending the spectacle is irrelevant would mislead readers about why “physics is in crisis” narratives spread. If there are factual errors, I will correct them, but it is unfair to say the WSJ should avoid this topic when the health of the field depends on the very perception machinery the article examined.
Daniel Kagan Kans,
I read the piece again, and I’m sorry, but it still seems to me that you’re just gathering together a lot of stupidity you found on the internet and now arguing that the WSJ should be seriously covering it because it’s what the public is seeing.
I’ve spent a lot of my life looking at the media coverage of fundamental theoretical physics and writing about it on my blog. There’s been a huge amount of stupid hype promoting bad ideas, see
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?cat=8
Theorists rarely complain about this figuring good publicity is helpful. There’s been a much lesser amount of accurate criticism of what has gone wrong in this area of research. Lee Smolin and I got some attention for this 20 years ago, Sabine Hossenfelder has gotten even more in recent years. Theorists don’t like this, figuring bad publicity is unhelpful. You’re helping them out by ignoring the serious scientific issues here (which I suspect you understand nothing about) and raising the alarm that there’s stupid stuff on the internet criticizing scientists.
There’s nothing new about the actual physics issues: the problems discussed 20 years ago have just gotten worse. There’s always been a long list of physicists going to the public claiming that things are great (or at least not so bad), you should respect us and give us more money. On the other side, there’s Sabine Hossenfelder and Eric Weinstein getting attention, that’s about it. Each of those two is an interesting story and there’s a lot to say, both positive and negative. Instead you choose to write about stupid irrelevant crap involving Jeffrey Epstein.
Hi Daniel,
To maybe clarify with the notion of mixing things up, here is what I would say. I work in an adjacent field in pure math, this is what it looks like from my POV.
1)Science deniers and conspiracy theorist. They are their own different category, no one else you mentioned deserve to be grouped in with them.
2)Eric Weinstein. The physics (and economics) papers he wrote are dubious in their value, but he is not a crank. What he describes as the sociology of the community is very real and felt by pretty much everyone in the academic community. You may not like his papers, but that is not a reason to dismiss what he says about the (toxic) sociology of parts of the academic community.
3)Sabine Hossenfelder (also including others like Lee Smolin and Peter Woit). They are serious scientists, they point out serious scientific and sociological issues in the high energy physics community. After 20 years it doesn’t seem like the academic community is going to self correct, and some of them are using more public platforms to voice their concerns.
What I have seen on the internet concerning Sabine Hossenfelder is this (for example concerning Professor Dave’s channel). Some parts of science is healthier than theoretical high energy physics, and people in other fields are giving Sabine push back because “we are not in as bad shape as you say we are.” As far as I can tell these other communities are equally vulnerable to the systemic effects Sabine alludes to, but for independent reasons have not yet suffered the same fate as high energy physics. As for the criticisms Sabine voiced about high energy physics, I’ve yet to see anyone give a direct serious rebuttal (unless you count the recent event where recent top string theorists openly acknowledge String theory is not a theory of this universe – it’s at least a decade overdue, and if you know about the life cycle of theoretical physicists, at least 3-4 generations of grad students have gone by without hearing this acknowledgement).
Particle physics is in “collapse”? It’s “suffering”? Is that the common consensus? That’s not quite how I’d describe the last few decades. The W and Z bosons were discovered right where theory said they would be. Precision electroweak experiments (my thesis work included) combined with theory led to predictions of the top mass which were right on the money. Then those same methods constrained the Higgs mass, which was also later confirmed pretty much in line with predictions.
The Standard Model isn’t just a success story, it’s arguably the most precise scientific framework humans have ever built. It has worked so well that we’ve now reached the point where experiments are pushing beyond what it can predict. But that’s not failure, that’s progress.
So before we rush to declare crisis, maybe it’s worth pausing to celebrate the extraordinary track record of the field. We’re standing at the edge of the map not because we’ve been lost, but because we’ve traveled so far.
Stop being so depressed, people!
Daniel Kagan Kans, it would be great if pieces like yours at least acknowledged that these “conspiracy” conversations are about one niche part of physics, that of high energy theory. The discipline is much larger than that, and it’s a disservice to both scientists and the public to act like high energy theory = all of physics. Your own publication enlists gifted writers like Helen Czerski who make the point regularly that physics as a whole is about much more than whatever happens to be bothering Eric Weinstein and Sabine Hossenfelder. Likewise, your news reporters like Nidda Subbaraman are keenly aware of this. Please don’t act like “high energy theory” = all of physics.
Well, I find myself in a strange position. Having written an article about conspiracy physics, there’s now a conspiracy of a kind about it unfolding in your comments. The person writing as Daniel Kagan Kans is not me. For one thing, I hadn’t seen this post until now. For another, the comments have obviously been written by ChatGPT. For a third, my byline is Dan Kagan-Kans, not Daniel Kagan Kans.
Even more strangely, I agree with my AI impersonator, though they expressed certain things in a way I wouldn’t have. (Call for help if I ever use the phrase “perception machinery.”)
What do I agree about? I am indeed quite confused by the hostility. The story is not primarily about the underlying scientific issues, though it does of course touch on them, especially toward the end. The story is primarily about media. It is about epistemic collapse. That we are living through epistemic collapse, that it is spreading to physics, that Joe Rogan is not a useful source of information on physics — that is the point of the essay. I am highly puzzled at the idea that making that point makes the person making it part of the collapse. (I am tempted to make a joke about somebody having spent too much time thinking about quantum observation.) In fact, if that argument made any sense, a form of it could be made of you now. Luckily for you, it does not.
I also — obviously, since I wrote the essay — agree with “Daniel Kagan Kans” about its news value. If it seems to you that I am “arguing that the WSJ should be seriously covering it because it’s what the public is seeing,” that is because I am. Covering things that the public sees is what a newspaper is for. It is a very large part of everything that a newspaper does. Especially when, suddenly, the subject leaps from the internet into national politics, policy, culture war, research budgets, and the Jeffrey Epstein phenomenon, which may be stupid but is very much not irrelevant. As for adding serious understanding, that is my hope and goal. Obviously, you think I haven’t done that. What can I say — sorry to disappoint.
I suppose in order to believe me I’ll have to post some sort of proof of identity. See x.com/kagankans. I will say “Hi, Peter.”
— Dan Kagan-Kans
Dan Kagan-Kans,
As a long-time reader of Peter’s blog who has also read your amusing WSJ article, I would like to thank you for reaching out to engage with Peter. Unfortunately, you’ve reached him at an inopportune time, as Peter has been exercised by the events involving his home institution over the past few months. Perhaps I can offer a slightly more generous critique of the article.
Two paragraphs there gave me pause. Firstly:
“In fact, cutting-edge ideas in physics can themselves sound a bit like conspiracy theories. The holographic principle, an idea first proposed by Susskind and Gerard ‘t Hooft in the early 1990s, implies that our reality might function sort of like a hologram, which is projected into three dimensions from a two-dimensional film. Ironically, the holographic principle is a favorite target of online conspiracy physicists, who attack it as not real science—untestable, impractical and simply too out there.”
In fact, the holographic principle is a subject of criticism of theoretical physicists working in academia as well, especially in its guise as the AdS/CFT correspondence, which is perhaps why the “online conspiracy physicists” would latch onto that.
Peter has made such criticisms, particularly when it comes to the hype generated by the application of the AdS/CFT correspondence to condensed matter physics and quantum computing. Here’s Peter discussing one such piece of hype in 2022, in which the headline was ostensibly about “wormholes”, but the science is actually about quantum computing:
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13181
Incidentally, one of the critics of the hype, cited in Peter’s above post, is the quantum computing scientist Scott Aaronson, whom you cited approvingly in your article.
Now, immediately after that paragraph:
“Dismissing difficult ideas as too wild is a core part of the appeal of conspiracy physics, allowing the audience to ignore how strange and unsettling the physical world really is. A similar kind of denial is the basis of many modern conspiracies: The moon landing was faked because humans can’t actually travel into space; 9/11 was an inside job because a plane can’t actually bring down a skyscraper. Don’t worry, these theories proclaim, crazy things aren’t possible (except for the massive cover-ups needed to conceal the truth).”
I think that’s an inaccurate characterisation of much of Sabine Hossenfelder’s content, and I would certainly not say this of Peter’s blog.
The situations could not be more diametrically opposite. The modern conspiracies you’ve cited still persist despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. The opposite is true with string theory, which is the target of Eric Weinstein and Sabine Hossenfelder, as well as of Peter’s blog. There is no substantial evidence to support string theory, even after almost 20 years since Peter came out with his book, and yet we’re told that if we don’t give it some credence, we’re somehow in denial.
One last thing:
“Eric Weinstein has taken to expounding additional theories about physics. Peer review was created by the government, working with Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, to control science, he said on ‘Diary of a CEO'[…]”
While Eric Weinstein may have his reasons for theorising this, he has also embedded a kernel of truthful history, which is what makes conspiracy theories like this hard to untangle. It is true that Robert Maxwell has had an outsized influence on academic publishing, possibly to its detriment. This has been covered in some detail in a 2017 Guardian report:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
Dan Kagan-Kans,
It is interesting you say this about AI, because my reaction to your piece was it sounded like AI to me. I am sympathetic to the idea that there is a big problem here, but I didn’t get the sense it is being reported on in a coherent way.
In my opinion the problem isn’t all that complicated, but it is extremely hard to see a solution to:
1.It is a bad thing that we have people like Sabine with a huge YouTube following. This has little to do with her credentials and much more to do both with the message and the audience. First, a blog is a reasonable forum to discuss science and, say, criticize certain branches of it. Why? Because you can go into some depth, and there is an (imaginary) intellectual barrier to entry. People who come to, say, this blog generally have some level of physics understanding and familiarity. Second people can *discuss* the issues with the blogger. Thus, the traffic is lower, no money is made, but there is some sense of a real standard. On YouTube when you have millions of subscribers it is guaranteed you are mostly attracting people who simple cannot judge-and things become like X. Not to be elitist but science is a profession with a very large barrier to understanding because it takes a lot of time to learn. YouTube=many more totally uneducated viewers and no real forum to discuss. That is a recipe for disaster.
2.So then take Sabine. I do think obviously she has the training to intelligently discuss issues in what Peter calls “fundamental” physics, whether or not you agree with her. But she is completely ignorant of many other areas of science and even physics-and many of these areas are actually doing well. She draws sweeping conclusions about science as a whole from her views of fundamental physics-which as I’ll mention below-is actually a very small field and also very unique in its problems. In doing so she essentially calls for the whole structure of how we do science and how we fund it to be torn down. And now she has the backing of millions of largely scientifically uneducated followers cheering her on and listening.
3.If you think that doesn’t matter-it does. Just look at our current administration. It is the most science negative in many decades-we actually have a crank lawyer running the CDC. It is also the most directly on-line administration ever. There are numerous examples of them literally farming policy ideas from X. Just this week we had influencers on X saying that due to the Kirk shooting we should shut down left-wing foundations-and the Trump went on Fox and said the identical thing. Now why is this so dangerous? Well, fields like biology and the translational benefits of basic research in it, are thriving like never before. In recent years we have had massive breakthroughs like CRISPR/gene editing, immunotherapy for hard to cure cancers, GLP-1 therapy, etc. All came from basic research, and all are absolute gamechangers unlike what we have seen in the field in decades with massive health implications. There are many other examples in other fields, including physics *outside* of “fundamental” physics. But you take anti-establishment types with massive audiences that know very little, and you combine it with this political moment, and you can have real tragedy.
4.This is not to say there are not issues in other fields-there have always been and in some cases these issues are worse than they were previously. But this is not solved by the “tear it down” mentality, unless some positive (as opposed to nihilistic) detailed ideas are also put forward on how to do better. I have seen none from YouTubers and the like.
5.As for fundamental physics-there is no new experimental data-this is not an excuse for string domination and lying, but I have never seen an area of science stay healthy without experimental data to move the field. Maybe the field would be healthier without people all pursuing the same approach and exaggerating its benefits, but I seriously doubt we’d be in a vastly different place if so-and that is a topic for another time.
Hi Dan,
Still trying to process the extra, different AI level of epistemic collapse that has been going on here. In any case very glad to be hearing from the real person, not the AI version that someone had been fooling me with.
The real Dan’s comment is more interesting, especially to hear that you also see this from a (different) epistemic collapse point of view. A few more comments about this:
1. I hadn’t focused on the title of the piece and its framing of this as “conspiracy physics”. This is really completely off-base. The only person going on about secret conspiracies is Eric Weinstein, and I think literally no one (including Eric) takes things like “Jeffrey Epstein was sent by an intelligence agency to throw physics off track” seriously. Eric likes to act as provocateur and I suspect this is a provocation on his part, not a seriously held belief. Sabine Hossenfelder’s critique is not that there’s a conspiracy, but that a lot of theoretical physicists are not understanding that there’s a problem because of the usual “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it” phenomenon.
2. If you want to understand why I’m being rather hostile, I note that at X you write “Last year I started noticing a stream of videos on YouTube proclaiming “the crisis in physics” and so on. Crisis? What was that? The results are here” advertising your article arguing about “conspiracy physics”. Several of the recent such youtube videos have been conversations with me (e.g. ones with Curt Jaimungal and Robinson Erhardt) which have had nothing about “conspiracies” but tried to give a serious explanation of a complicated situation. So, your painting of youtube discussions of “crisis in physics” as mindless conspiracy stupidity is personally offensive.
3. As for the idea that Eric Weinstein’s weird speculations and Sabine Hossenfelder’s rants are what is behind the extremely damaging attacks on federally funded scientific research from the Trump administration, that’s complete nonsense. For one thing, these attacks haven’t really hit theoretical physics research much, the main target actually has been the NIH and biomedical research (see the article in today’s NYT for example). If you want to find out what media figures are responsible for this, you should be looking not at Eric and Sabine, but at the owner of the WSJ.
For one thing, these attacks haven’t really hit theoretical physics research much, the main target actually has been the NIH and biomedical research (see the article in today’s NYT for example).
The NIH has a proposed 40% cut, NSF 56%, DOE 26%. These are all historically large in the first place. Second the biggest is NSF-which funds plenty of “theoretical” physics (mostly outside of HEP which is DOE largely), as well as math. Same for the overall overhead cuts-these impact all fields. Given that people like Sabine simply talk about the “science crisis” and have legions of people following, I absolutely do believe this has an impact with a very establishment-negative, unknowledgeable administration and is a part-maybe a small part-of chipping away the barriers to very bad science policy.
Dave,
The proposed huge cuts from the White House are one thing, but what is happening where it matters (Congressional appropriations)? Some numbers I’ve seen implied just small cuts. Also, the ICR cuts were stopped in court, and same question: what is the Congress doing with these? I’m really curious to see real numbers for what is going to happen to science funding in the coming year, not just the extreme proposals.
Focusing very specifically on theoretical physics funding (DOE and NSF), will this really be dramatically different in the future? From what I can tell, there has been a long-term trend of this funding being flat and not keeping up with inflation, so slowly going down in real terms. On the other hand, recent years have also seen significant new non-governmental funding sources (e.g. Simons, and now the Leinweber institutes). So, on the very narrow issue of funding of fundamental theoretical physics, my impression has been that the size of this funding hasn’t dramatically changed, and reduction in that funding is not a significant source of the problems in that field.
A comment about my perspective on Sabine Hossenfelder. I pretty much can’t stand watching youtube videos, and, outside my specific scientific interests, would rather read about different topics than science and technology. So, I know nothing about her videos on topics she isn’t expert in. Where she is expert, what I have seen is a defensible point of view I sometimes disagree with, sometimes going into over the top rants, coming from a frustration which I can easily identify with.
Hi Peter,
it is very unclear what will be approved. But this time unlike in 2017 there is less defense against the cut and overhead proposals. If in the end these are largely walked back-then sure it will be superficially similar but a bit worse than during the last administration. However, this does not take into account the issues with the overall $ drag on universities which mean very small classes of graduate students, perhaps many fewer foreign students, etc. This is happening anyway. If these things are approved at even have of what the administrations wants, then it is an extremely large perturbation. Funnily, I don’t necessarily think something good couldn’t come from the ashes of all of this-I do think there was a lot of pork funding, etc. But I don’t think the administrations’ actions are nuanced to care-it is more of a “own the universities” thing with little forethought.
I think we have grown numb to the deleterious effects of things like social media and various internet platforms. Always some real grains of truth exist in these spaces-ones that frustratingly are not address by the status quo. But the bigger effect is one of a dissident counter-elite pushing nihilistic views which radicalized and get absorbed into the mainstream, with the danger of tearing down hard-won institutional successes. That may be a bit harsh on Sabine, but as I said if you compared books and blogs to YouTube and X you can see how this happens. She could be more careful in her videos, but then would it attract the $ and the viewers?
I will add my voice to others who wish many of the largely or entirely defunct HEP blogs I used to frequent were as active as they were even a few years ago. A few on the NEW blogroll are still putting out great content, which I deeply appreciate, but many I used to read all the time are now dead links or seemingly abandoned. I especially miss Résonaances.
I can sort of understand why. Favored odds the LHC would reveal new physics have dwindled from “I’d bet serious money” to “this is a problem for a machine I will not live to see…” Maybe there’s only so much interest out there in evidence of the latest exotic hadron.
There’s loads of excitement in astrophysics these days, though, and plenty of high-caliber streaming content (deeply appreciative of folks like Dr. Becky). I’m grateful for Kurzgesagt and Spacetime for high-quality general content. If I want to be really challenged on the foundational stuff, I’ll check out Physics Explained, which is astonishingly good. I contribute to all of these.
I’m now officially “old”, and do crave the serenity a good read. Sadly, much of “old media” is circling the drain, and/or churning out content such as is featured in the subject of this post.
The future belongs to the vlogosphere, seemingly, though it’s far from clear whether trash will triumph over treasures. If we want to at least slow our descent into idiocracy, I’ll implore those who crave good science content to chip in a few bucks a month to support it. It does exist out there, though who knows for how much longer.
Peter,
I’m chuckling — usually writers get criticized unfairly by people who have only read the headline (which we don’t write anyway, not that I have any issue with this one). This is the first case I’ve heard of in which someone misinterpreted an article by *not* reading the headline.
1) Provocation, not provocation — it’s not my place, nor is it helpful, to speculate about what somebody sincerely believes inside their head, especially if it contradicts what they say in public. What matters is just that, what people say and the effects they have. Tens of millions of people in high and low places take everything about Epstein seriously.
Hossenfelder’s critique, framed in the way you’ve done — “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it” — is perfectly reasonable. In fact, I make a version of it of her in my essay: she is responding to incentives on YouTube and social media in the direction of drama, flair, fury, resentment. (The same incentives are there for those on the other side, like Dave Explains, as I wrote.) Increasingly, she makes her critique not in those terms but in terms of physicists scamming taxpayer money intentionally. “What’s it good for? You’re not supposed to ask. You’re supposed to believe that you’re too stupid to understand what it’s good for. But let me fill you in. It’s good for keeping particle physicists employed.”
There are many quotes like this. You excuse it as frustration. People with very large audiences should not be succumbing to frustration into things they know better about. (I acknowledge that dealing with a very large audience is surely a difficult and distorting task that I have never had to deal with.) And they should certainly not be dipping their toes into connecting things they know better about with Epstein.
2) As for why you’re being hostile — come on, you were hostile before you read my thread on X or understood the central point of the essay, as you just admitted. I do not say you are a conspiracist — I said nothing about you in any of this — or all discussions of crises in physics are conspiracies. I say that many of them lead in the direction I’ve outlined. I don’t use the word conspiracy lightly and thought hard about it before I did. The entrance of Epstein into the subject is what clinched it for me.
3) I have a short Twitter thread scheduled about this for tomorrow, but I’ll say a version of it here: I do not actively believe that this stuff is directly responsible for the budget cuts. Nor did I say so, by the way. I am not certain about it. If I had to guess, it’s more likely that both conspiracy physics and cuts to scientific research come out of the same underlying incentives to distrust and anti-intellectualism — as well, of course, as backlash to mistakes made by intellectuals and academic elites, not that this means academia deserves it.
However, I do note that last year, long before anyone had any inkling cuts this massive were coming, Weinstein called for cleansing the organs of science of corruption: “We need hearings. We need to basically rid the National Academy of Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the national Science Board, the National Research Council, the journals, Lancet, Nature, Science, publishing houses, of all of The Science. We’ve got to get rid of The Science. The Science is infecting us. We need Lawyers, Guns, and Money.” He is not an unconnected man.
To Einekleine’s point about a kernel of truthful history to Weinstein’s claims, sure. All conspiracy theories have a core of truth to them. It is a failure of judgment to waffle about them because of that. Maxwell had an outsize effect on publishing, possibly to its detriment. He was not working with the government to neuter physics.
Dave’s mild criticism of me aside, you should take what he is saying in the comments here seriously. (Dave, I could and would have gone into this in much greater and hopefully more coherent-to-you detail, but there wasn’t space for the WSJ.)
Douglas, I understand your point. This is why I referred to fundamental or theoretical physics as many times as I could, to signal that this is not about condensed matter and so on.
—Dan
Dan,
Dave is someone I know personally, whose comments are always sensible, well-informed and worth taking seriously.
I’ve known Sabine for nearly twenty years, Eric longer, and have discussed things in person with them over a long period. We share a deep concern about what happened in theoretical fundamental physics starting now decades ago, and a deep interest in the question of what can be done to improve the situation. I personally basically don’t believe at all in conspiracy theories. In my discussions with both of them conspiracy theories haven’t ever come up, instead the main question has always been what can be done to change dysfunctional reward structures.
Each of us has kept on pursuing these questions in our own different ways. My main effort has been this blog, competing with working on some specific ideas about how to make progress that I’m recently very enthusiastic about. People can decide for themselves what they think of this.
Sabine has taken a fascinating route, turning her interests into a distinctive sort of science communication business. Yes, the reward structure of her business model encourages not sober, measured discussion but something else.
Eric has taken an equally interesting route of a different sort. Like Sabine, he’s trying to get public attention for the ideas that he cares about, and sober, measured discussion is not the way to do this, so he’s often doing something else. He’s the only one in this story sometimes promoting conspiracy theories. They’re a good way to get attention, but I find it hard to believe he takes them seriously (when I talk to him privately, they’re not a topic that comes up).
The stuff about Jeffrey Epstein having something to do with the problems in theoretical physics you make the centerpiece of your article is complete and utter bullshit, that, again, no one in the world takes seriously. The idea that this is being successfully used to discredit and defund serious science is absurd.
One of the few significant connections between Epstein and fundamental theoretical physics is that in March 2006 he paid for and hosted a workshop organized by Lawrence Krauss that was held on his private island and brought together a lot of very prominent theorists. I wrote about this on the blog back then
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=428
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=440
The second posting was based on this gossip piece
https://dealbreaker.com/2006/08/epstein-update-nobel-prize-wide-shut
which tried to get some fun out of bringing together Epstein’s hanging out with Nobel Prize winners and (in other venues) with young women. I wrote the second blog posting thinking it was a fun joke, but then added an update and shut down comments when, after learning more about Epstein and what he was accused of, realized it was not funny at all. Epstein is for some reason now a central figure in the Singularity of Stupidity, so somehow becomes an explanation for everything. This is great for getting clicks for the WSJ, but of zero help in understanding either the problems of theoretical fundamental physics or why our new clownish but dangerous dictatorship (largely brought to power by the owner of the WSJ) hates funding scientific research.
Peter, I’m going to leave my side this debate here for now. Your venue, your final word. Someone who wants to know can figure out what I would say to your last reply.
I have a somewhat separate question:
A lot of the people friendly to your view of fundamental physics as a field seem to be mathematical physicists by background and/or work on the mathematical side of things. Yourself, Weinstein, Gregory Chaitin, etc. In your mind, is that just coincidence? Is there a reason for it? A deeper divide not really known to the outside?
No agenda here, just curious.
—DKK
Dan, In my nearly 42 years in the field, I have steadily watched theoretical physics descend into plain bullshit. The “leaders” of the field are out there claiming that entanglement causes wormholes and that computations performed in some random toy model leads to deep statements about quantum gravity. All this from the Princeton area. If you go north to Harvard, you will hear conjectures that rule out the existence of the actual world. The only optimistic aspect of this is that if you go outside the “elite” institutions, it is not too hard to find people who will openly laugh at all this. There is thus the possibility (but not the guarantee) of change.
Dan,
Eric is a weird special case, and as far as I know there is zero overlap between my views about anything and Chaitin’s.
I wrote the “Not Even Wrong” book to try and tell the complex story of the relation of math and physics as I see it (or saw it 20 years ago). A historical figure who is a hero for me of that story is Hermann Weyl, for reasons explained in the book.
I don’t think my view that, at the deepest level, our best physical theories are based on deep mathematical ideas, especially ones about symmetry (representation theory to mathematicians) is at all unusual among theoretical physicists. Picking a central figure in physics, Edward Witten, our perspectives on this are not far apart. Starting with the same perspective, Witten and others have worked on a lot of things I think are great, but have also emphasized one speculative technical direction that never seemed promising to me. I’m now working on a speculative idea about getting something new out of a well-known technical issue about spinors and Wick rotation. Likely they don’t think this is promising. It’s a misconception to think that my point of view, which puts the Standard Model and the effort to improve it at the center, is something outside the mainstream of the subject.
@Dan
“What’s it good for? You’re not supposed to ask. You’re supposed to believe that you’re too stupid to understand what it’s good for. But let me fill you in. It’s good for keeping particle physicists employed.”
There is something very specific hiding behind this rant, and I think it’s not very visible to someone outside academia. How math research is organized is as follows, I can’t imagine theoretical physics is too different. Fancy people at the top decide what subject is important, usually this is what they and their friends are working on. Topics outside these fancy or fashionable topics are dismissed as less central and less important, have more trouble getting published in good journals (which is the currency of the field). (What’s worse, people outside these fancy institutions have a harder time gaining access to these fancy/fashionable topics because they don’t have direct access to the fancy people).
The fancy people sends their students to do postdocs with their fancy friends at other fancy institutions. Why aren’t other people considered? “Oh their research is less interesting to me, hence I will not hire them.” Is that assessment correct? Here’s the rub: nobody really knows – the field has grown so vast yet so specialized at the same time it’s genuinely impossible to give a comparison of work for two different disciplines. People hence rely on other markers – what are other fancy people saying is interesting these days? Is this candidate backed by other fancy people at the top?
And that is part of the sentiment behind “You’re not supposed to ask. You’re supposed to believe that you’re too stupid to understand what it’s good for.”
This is a very simplified (and cynical) description, and makes many people involved look bad. In most cases they are good honest people involved in this process who are also trying their best to be fair. This suggests then it’s not necessarily the people in the system that are broken, but something inherent in the system itself.
For most healthy fields, despite this process good work eventually gets produced. Work good enough, of wide enough general interest, such that the above gets dismissed as a necessary vice, or “what else can you do.” However, when a field gets stuck and no good work gets produced, people will tend to raise their eyebrows.
Clueless postdoc:
There is a difference between math and physics here, and it’s very relevant here. The difference is that when a top mathematician publishes an incorrect paper, eventually nearly everybody realizes that there is something wrong, and they continue doing mathematics, while avoiding citing his results (consider Mochizuki, inter-universal Teichmüller theory, and the ABC conjecture).Whereas when a top physicist makes a wrong turn, junior people are afraid to speak up, for fear of damaging their careers. (Consider Maldacena and Susskind’s paper ER=EPR. I’ve heard people asking behind Susskind’s back “could he really believe that?” And people make excuses for him — “he didn’t mean it literally, it’s a metaphor”; “it’s a Zen koan.”)
There are lots of less blatant examples where papers in string theory, black hole quantum information theory, and related fields contain very doubtful results, and everybody takes these as set in stone, and builds on them in their papers, while very few people question these results. So pretty soon we get a whole subfield based on very dubious foundations, which is likely to turn out to be completely worthless.
There are cases in mathematics that I’ve heard of where the foundational papers in the field weren’t rigorous enough. Here, however, if the results are correct, it doesn’t make that much difference to research that uses them, and if the results are incorrect, this would probably be discovered quite soon.
Hello real Dan,
Here is a perspective on your article from an AI researchers who did a PhD and postdoc in fundamental physics. I’ve been a regular reader for almost fifteen years of Peter’s blog because it provides a reality check to the hype of fundamental physics.
I found your article interesting and it is good that WSJ readers are aware of the issues you raised. That said, the problems in my view (informed by a very broad academic career), as commentators like Dave have said, are particularly bad in few unhealthy fields like fundamental physics. Unhealthy because there are almost no experiments to quantify whether theories are correct and even rigorous mathematical analysis is difficult — lack of quantification leads to fashions making for cynical viewpoints about how to get funding and difficult for any researcher (postdoc or otherwise) to buck the fashions and trends established by a few powerful senior faculty who set the research agendas. Also, to some extent, some of the senior fundamental physicists have brought this problem on their own heads by publicly making wildly overoptimistic and unrealistic claims about their work in books in news articles. This is where Peter’s blog is very useful as a reality check. I’m worried that others — Weinstein and Sabine — are not so responsible. They are making criticisms which may be reasonable for fundamental physics, but apply far less to other areas of science (which they seem to know little about). But, in turn, some of the people you interviewed to defend the status quo against conspiracies have been who are partly to blame for this situation.
Why does this matter? There are currently big funding cuts in the US with the possibility of even bigger ones (we should know more in a month or so). The exact motivations for these cuts are unclear. So public perception of science, particularly among people like WSJ readers, is important.
Grants are being cut on research in healthy areas like cancer research, engineering, and even AI. Basic research in these areas is extremely important. It is argued that AI research can be left to companies — but this is a fallacy because companies depend too much on the bottom line. The breakthroughs are made by academic researchers exploring unfashionable topics and sometime striking gold — which companies can then exploit. The success of deep networks was largely due to two large five year grants from Canada which took a chance on an area which was highly unfashionable at the time.
Alan
Hi Peter,
I didn’t mean to imply that you share belief in specific theories with Weinstein, or don’t share them with the likes of Witten (though I’m a little surprised to hear the latter). I’m talking about your differing senses of the health of the field. That’s what the question is about.
I’ll take another look at your book — it’s been a bit since I’ve read it.
Thanks,
Dan
Dan,
I know nothing about Chaitin’s views on the health of particle theory, just that from what I do know, there’s no reason to believe he knows anything about it, or any reason to pay attention to his views on this.
That there is a problem with what has happened to research in particle theory, or more generally fundamental theoretical physics, is not some outlier point of view pushed by conspiracy theorists, but actually a mainstream point of view of those with Ph.Ds in the field. Many such people have voted with their feet and left the field because of this and are doing other things. Most people however are not going to go public seemingly badmouthing their own field.
If you want an example, go read what Steve Weinberg wrote to me in an email way back in 2002, see here
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=12413
You’re getting enthusiastic support from people who aren’t experts and know nothing other than that they don’t like seeing science criticized. A good example is Sam Gregson, the “science entertainer” and “Bad boy of physics”. Experimentalists rarely have expertise in the current situation theory experts are facing.
Peter,
Your latest point crystallized something important. Criticism of troubled areas of science is an important thing. I think that is what this blog has been devoted to. Another good example is Andrew Gelman’s excellent blog which often convincingly points out massive problems related to the “reproducibility crisis” in the social sciences. I think where things get dangerous is when we are not careful in distinguishing between this and fields that this either doesn’t pertain to, or more importantly, fields like the sprawling biomedical ones where fraud and great breakthroughs are happening side by side. We also need to be cognizant of the fact that some aspects of these problems have always existed. I think in my mind the problem I have with those we have discussed is the complete absence of this care which can in the end do much more damage than good.
@Peter Shor
I agree with your assessment: as a whole that is how mathematics reacts to incorrect papers.
“There are cases in mathematics that I’ve heard of where the foundational papers in the field weren’t rigorous enough.”
We may be thinking of the same field. From a global point of view you may see this as a healthy process. On an individual level, because of disputes between people at the top, and issues with fundamental papers, several grad students across different generations working in these areas had ended their (academic) careers and left academia**.
**It’s always hard to tell whether someone had to leave voluntarily or were forced out, esp. the attrition rate in academia is so high already. But I think for a few people I know this most likely played a role in their decision.
OT
Very sadly, Professor Carlo Maria Becchi, the B in BRST, passed away this morning. An exceptional scientist and teacher.
RIP
Interestingly John Baez is supporting the WSJ article, and his reaction to be mentioned here is that he’s glad to be quotable … while it’s clearly William Gibson that is quotable.
As a physicist who’s always spoken up against the pseudophysics crap in professional settings, I wouldn’t know where to even start if I had the patience to debunk this article. The only good thing: The discontents are finally making waves.
Minor correction if I may: “Experimentalists rarely have expertise in the current situation theory experts are facing” — I’ll beg to differ, they (we) are normally quite capable to grasp what is needed in order to assess the situation. Many will still care more about fashion than physics, but many others just go on working on sensible stuff without losing time on going public against the BS.
@Dan Kagan-Kans
Like Peter, I am not 100% sure it is actually true that people who share his (and my) assessment of HEP-theory tend to come from the more mathematical side. But it happens to be true of me as well (my PhD is in cold atom theory, but focused on mathematically thorny issues involving self-adjoint extension and asymptotic analysis with a tiny splash of conformal field theory), so I’m willing to assume it arguendo to give my thoughts. All I can do is give a roughly autobiographical account with no claim that represents any larger structure.
As a student, I found that there were lots of critics of HEP-theory within physics departments among the faculty, but they overwhelmingly choose to engage in other areas of physics rather than go deeper on areas that overlap with HEP-theory. As such, they mostly do not get into the weeds of even QFT, much less quantum gravity formalisms. Mostly the weed-y mathematical details are irrelevant to the most serious criticisms, BUT if you get into a discussion with someone who is deep into SUSY or LQG or something, *eventually* some technical point about Calabi-Yaus or spin foams will come up. Scoring rhetorical points then becomes easy just by out-pacing the interlocutor by talking about minor mathematical details.
The only people on campus who high-energy theorists would not try to get into a mathematical genital-measuring contest with are the folks on the math side. In my experience, the people with training from math departments understand the building blocks of the theories MUCH better than those with only physics training. We physicists try to cram a bunch of group theory, representation theory, differential topology, etc. into small “need to know” chunks which we force-feed to grad students. In math, they get a much more comprehensive foundation on these topics.
When I was a student and I was trying to apply some tools from QFT to problems in cold atom physics, I naturally ran into a bunch of confusions. And the more I talked to the physics people about it, the more I got the sense that they were doing a LOT more reasoning by analogy than actually deriving things. It was very hard for me to find someone who could do an asymptotic calculation without skipping a bunch of steps or citing a “theorem” (like the operator product expansion) which they could not prove. But as I drifted into the math department, suddenly it seemed like people were talking sense again and I got a lot less confused.
So to me there were parallel processes. I was already skeptical of the direction of HEP-theory for reasons that overlap with many of the philosophical and epistemological details that Peter has covered here, but have nothing to do with the mathematical details. And then I tried to get more into the mathematical details for my research and found all kinds of confusion and hand-waving about the basics of these theories such that I couldn’t confidently apply them and became convinced that a lot of my peers were just kind of taking it on faith. The only people who were able to clear any of this up for me were the much more mathematically inclined folks.
Peter wrote: The only person going on about secret conspiracies is Eric Weinstein, and I think literally no one (including Eric) takes things like “Jeffrey Epstein was sent by an intelligence agency to throw physics off track” seriously.
I’ve watched a few interviews of Eric Weinstein. You may have noticed that he sometimes talks about UFOs. In my opinion, the more or less implicit conspiracy theory is this.
1. UFOs are real, alien crafts were recovered at Roswell and elsewhere.
2. Backengineering has established that these crafts use some kind of “antigravity” for propulsion.
3. As part of the coverup, anything related to UFOs or antigravity was branded as “irrational” or “pseudoscience”.
4. Academic research was nudged towards safer topics like quantum gravity and string theory. As the readers of your blog know, this has not resulted in a lot of scientific progress.
The role of Epstein in this is marginal at best. He may have been aware of the above story thanks to his connections in the intelligence community. There is actually some evidence that he was an intelligence asset, as you can check on his wikipedia page.
Pascal,
I haven’t paid any attention to Eric’s comments on UFOs and never talked with him about this. Again, this is something no one in the theoretical physics community takes seriously (probably including Eric…), and in addition has zero connection to Jeffrey Epstein.
Another thing to say about this UFO nonsense is that it isn’t even slightly new and has nothing to do with the new internet media environment. People have been going on about UFOs and their supposed advanced technologies since before I was born, and I don’t remember a time when there weren’t lots of TV “science programs” about UFOs. There’s nothing new here, no new “conspiracy physics” as advertised in the WSJ.
@ Kevin, this is very helpful, thank you.
@ whomever was impersonating me here with ChatGPT, if you see this, send me an email? I’m curious to hear the story of why and how, etc. I promise anonymity.
Hi Dan,
> People with very large audiences should not be succumbing to frustration into things they know better about. […] And they should certainly not be dipping their toes into connecting things they know better about with Epstein.
> The entrance of Epstein into the subject is what clinched it for me.
I think it’s disingenuous to lump Hossenfelder together with Weinstein in your “dipping their toes” statement to chide the former for retweeting something that’s an established fact, as Peter has now shown in a comment above. I don’t think Hossenfelder has ever speculated about Epstein before in her videos, and retweets are certainly not endorsements: I thought this was made very clear in the past decade.
As for Weinstein, this is a talking point that he’s been making for years now, and it’s only now that it seemed to have gained traction. He first mentioned meeting Epstein in his 3rd podcast with Lex Fridman in 2020 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0Lf8eP41vs), which seemed to have been prompted by the resignation of the MIT Media Lab director late in 2019 in light of accepting donations from Epstein, and again in his 4th Lex Fridman podcast (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj1D9KAYV1E). This came up again in the Chris Williamson podcast last year, which I’ll cite below.
> All conspiracy theories have a core of truth to them. It is a failure of judgment to waffle about them because of that.
In Weinstein’s case, the conspiratorial waffle is surrounding quite a bit of truth. Why he kept going on about it, I don’t know, but it seems that he was baffled by how Epstein captivated Harvard, specifically the mathematics department, but now we have a more detailed report from 2023 about that: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/jeffrey-epstein-harvard-summers/.
> However, I do note that last year, long before anyone had any inkling cuts this massive were coming,
People had been told about the implications of Project 2025 for science funding before the 2024 Chris Williamson podcast with Weinstein came out in September (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYRYXhU4kxM). Look no further than this July 2024 piece in Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/project-2025-plan-for-trump-presidency-has-far-reaching-threats-to-science/. You could argue about the massiveness of the cuts, but cuts were definitely on the agenda.
> Weinstein called for cleansing the organs of science of corruption: “We need hearings. We need to basically rid the National Academy of Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the national Science Board, the National Research Council, the journals, Lancet, Nature, Science, publishing houses, of all of The Science. We’ve got to get rid of The Science. The Science is infecting us. […]”
It’s nice that you’ve capitalised “The Science”, so let me quote the relevant bit Weinstein said before this, which distinguishes between “science” and “The Science” (@1:04:15): “Look, science is fine. What we have now learned to call ‘The Science (TM)’ is an abomination. […Y]ou have to hunt out ‘The Science (TM)’, which lives inside of the journals, lives inside of the funding agencies, […] all of these sorts of blob related agencies that get their paws into science.”
So this process that Weinstein was proposing is both milder and more thorough than what has happened so far. For instance, there hasn’t been one single hearing yet!
> Increasingly, she makes her critique not in those terms but in terms of physicists scamming taxpayer money intentionally.
> If I had to guess, it’s more likely that both conspiracy physics and cuts to scientific research come out of the same underlying incentives to distrust and anti-intellectualism — as well, of course, as backlash to mistakes made by intellectuals and academic elites […]
50 years ago in 1975, a hearing led to cuts being made to federal research funding, precisely because of a backlash to mistakes made and anti-intellectualism amongst some members in Congress, including Congressman John Conlan (R-AZ) with his attack on MACOS and Senator William Proxmire (D-WI) with his Golden Fleece Awards that called out what he deemed to be wasteful uses of taxpayer money, for which one scientist later sued him for libel in Hutchinson v. Proxmire.
This is chronicled by Melinda Baldwin in a 2017 Physics Today article (https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/70/2/44/660191/In-referees-we-trust-The-imprimatur-bestowed-by) and a follow-up paper in 2018 (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/700070), who also noted that this process gave rise to the widespread use of the refereeing process (I’d call it “pre-publication review”, or “prepub review”, as opposed to the “post-publication review”, or “postpub review”, that we’re doing here for your WSJ article) that is popularly called “peer review” today.
Weinstein’s proposal, which you’ve quoted above, is to do a re-run of the 1975 hearing to reform the existing funding and gatekeeping apparatus, because he believes that the prepub review process instituted by the 1975 hearing is harmful to innovation in science because of its tendency towards conservatism. This is not a fringe view, by the way, as Baldwin pointed out in her 2018 paper: the British House of Commons had published a report in 2011 on peer review in scientific publications that lists “stifles innovation” as one of the common criticisms (https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmsctech/856/85602.htm).
I have also heard it being lamented that many scientists who had established their careers before the 1980s would not have been able to survive today, e.g. the Nobel-winning biologist Sydney Brenner argued that in his 2013 obituary for the Nobel-winning biochemist Fred Sanger (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1249912). In a 2014 interview with Elizabeth Dzeng (https://www.kingsreview.co.uk/interviews/how-academia-and-publishing-are-destroying-scientific-innovation-a-conversation-with-sydney-brenner), he went on to say pretty much the same things Hossenfelder and Weinstein have been saying. So, contrary to what Dave has claimed, there are scientists outside of particle physics who also feel that these aspects of the current system in academic research need serious reform.
> Maxwell had an outsize effect on publishing, possibly to its detriment. He was not working with the government to neuter physics.
I wouldn’t claim Maxwell was collaborating with the government to “neuter” physics, but the academic publishing business did boom after 1975, because the “peer review” process and the funding process that uses it had converted publishers into purveyors of credentials that are indispensable for advancing academic careers.
I’ll also remark on your question to Peter:
> A lot of the people friendly to your view of fundamental physics as a field seem to be mathematical physicists by background and/or work on the mathematical side of things. Yourself, Weinstein, Gregory Chaitin, etc.
For the benefit of Peter and others, here’s a sample of what Chaitin has said about scientific progress: https://mindmatters.ai/2021/03/gregory-chaitin-on-how-bureaucracy-chokes-off-science/. Chaitin has also gone on Curt Jaimungal’s podcast twice.
> In your mind, is that just coincidence? Is there a reason for it?
There is a real problem with how research is being organised in academia, and plenty of intelligent people have caught glimpses of it. It’s also not just people with certain backgrounds: the cofounder of Pixar, Ed Catmull, has written about the problem in his 2014 book, “Creativity, Inc” (here’s a good commentary: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/05/02/creativity-inc-ed-catmull-book/), and so has the economist Paula Stephan in her 2015 book, “How Economics Shapes Science”.