Posted on 09/28/2022 2:06:48 AM PDT by zeestephen
In private, many physicists admit they do not believe the particles they are paid to search for exist – they do it because their colleagues are doing it..."As a former particle physicist, it saddens me to see that the field has become a factory for useless academic papers."
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Never thought that i would see a music video based on Schrödinger’s Cat.
“The cat is dead”
LOL
She has some very good stuff posted on YouTube.
“The whole field of academic science research is dominated by the need to get grant money. “
It’s a good article, except that she, for some reason, fails to mention that elephant in the room.
they need to turn their brain power to something useful like Climate Science!
It’s past time that REAL scientists expose the kooks calling themselves climate scientists, for the 3rd rate hacks that they are with real science!
Schools get funding from governmenrts (in the US it seems the Chinese are giving grants;)) and others to perform research. When I took college courses and night and on weekends for 20-years, it seemed to me that politicians had more to do with a state college getting government funding than the paper itself. No longer were research projects or the basis for the research important, but rather each state getting their share of the USG funding available, and this required women and minorities being put as the lead researchers. Gone are the days when competent and dedicated researchers perform scientific experiments.
Lots of gender and woke “perfessors” will become gardeners.
/\
I used to wonder where they would all work,,,,
,, till I saw them get jobs with every gov agency, and states like ca insisting there be gender political commisars on every company board of directors ECT.
What do you believe the “elephant in the room” to be?
That’s why private companies and schools and public agencies come out with their policies nowadays....but when the fountain of wokeness is cut off...there will be less of that delusion to go around. The delusion has pretty well destroyed my alma mater.
Most “REAL scientists” have interests other than climatology ... I’ll thank you not to draft me into it. I would probably not be very good at it ...
(Except that at this point, I’m more of an engineer than a scientist, so I probably don’t count ...)
The whole scientific research world seems broken. The pressure to get grants, publish papers, review peers, etc. creates an environment disconnected from theoretical goal of actually advancing science, especially on certain topics (climate change) that are politically charged.
The pressure leads to ‘back scratching’, you positively review my paper and I’ll do the same for you, leads to 50% of published ‘peer reviewed’ papers being wrong.
...not that I have a solution ;p
Not unlike what goes on in theoretical physics.
The same is true for these Climate Change hoaxers as well, it is all about the Grant money.
Sabine is excellent, check out her Youtube channel: Science without all the Gobbledygook.
The Guardian newspaper is a pleasant surprise every month or two.
Unlike NYT and WaPo, the Guardian actually prints compelling rebuttals to many of the political opinions they routinely support.
The problem in all of academia is how do you evaluate performance. And this is true for all disciplines. For example
1. To get a PhD, you need to do ‘publishable’ research even if all it is, is grinding out a couple of more decimal places in a measurement and it’s published by the school.
2. What separates the academic performance of associate, assistant, & full professor so the get P&T (promotion and tenure)?
a. Time in the seat? School gets no benefit!
b. Papers published? (It can be gamed! See the early AGW papers and who did the evaluations.) Benefits the school’s reputation so an indirect benefit.
c. Grant money? Still can be gamed but the school’s infrastructure directly benefits from the R\D overhead!
d. Teaching? Definitely can be gamed and is! School gets no benefit!
So, 2b. & 2c. are the metrics used. It’s hard to come up with anything else that could be used.
For item 1 a PhD is supposed to say you know how to do the craft of ‘research’. How are you supposed to learn to do it if you are not required to do it? Even if in reality the R\D mentoring is poor to nonexistent, and it’s done badly as long as 5-7 PhD’s bless it, it’s fine. (It’s kind of like the old saying what’s the guy\gal who graduates last in medical school called? — Doctor!)
The system is still very much a medieval craft guild system.
Typo
“..the get P&T.. “= “they get P&T”
Could also apply to climate "science", transgender "health care", "green" energy research, etc.
“What do you believe the “elephant in the room” to be?”
The same that’s in the room of all the climate “scientists” - $$$$.
Experimental particle physicists know of the problem, and try to distance themselves from what their colleagues in theory development do. At the same time, they profit from it, because all those hypothetical particles are used in grant proposals to justify experiments. And so the experimentalists keep their mouths shut, too. This leaves people like me, who have left the field – I now work in astrophysics – as the only ones able and willing to criticise the situation....
This procedure of inventing particles and then ruling them out has been going on so long that there are thousands of tenured professors with research groups who make a living from this. It has become generally accepted practice in the physics community. No one even questions whether it makes sense. At least not in public.
And that's a valid point: grantsmanship is replacing scientific rigor (and even scientific "common sense") in too many fields.
Yes I saw that, but to me that is THE key driver of all this useless research.
And though she mentioned it, it just didn’t come across strong enough.
Starting with the headline...
“No one in physics dares say so, but the race to invent new particles is pointless”
She should have replaced pointless with “for money”.
Also in the first sentence...
“In private, many physicists admit they do not believe the particles they are paid to search for exist – they do it because their colleagues are doing it”
Again, the key reason they’re doing is not because the colleagues are doing is for the money.
I just thought she could have been more forceful in highlighting that as the principal reason up front.
But I may be a bit too critical. I applaud her for writing such a gutsy and honest article. I’m sure her “colleagues” don’t appreciate it.
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