A curiously nasty exchange between physicists on Piers Morgan Uncensored — and a response by theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder — raises some disturbing questions:
Here’s how Morgan framed the debate:
For centuries, scientists have grappled with the most fundamental question of them all — what is reality?
Is it a matter of common sense? Or can God or some higher being only know? And what was there before the Big Bang created the world we live in?
Einstein revolutionised our way of thinking — and then came along the wild world of quantum physics, where nothing plays by the rules — even Einstein’s — and things seemed to exist in two places at once.
Today, the biggest brains on the planet are at loggerheads over what all this means — and for this special Uncensored debate, Piers Morgan is joined by two scientists with very different answers to the big questions — Dr. Eric Weinstein and Professor Sean Carroll.
A Deep Discussion to Follow?
We might have expected a deep discussion to follow… Eric Weinstein is a mathematical physicist and Sean Carroll is a Johns Hopkins University cosmologist.
But what happened next got Piers Morgan nearly a million views:
Weinstein: Sean and I probably aren’t that divided even on the mathematics of string theory. What we where we are bitterly divided is that I believe that Sean thinks that the system works pretty well. I would say he’s part of the “two cheers for the institutions” — meaning that he has a … paragraph saying that the institutions undoubtedly have their problems. He wishes things could be done better.
Whereas I see an absolute collapse in the ethics, efficacy, productivity of this at our deepest levels.
Carroll, more of an Establishment figure, lost no time putting Weinstein down:
Carroll: Look, the story Eric just told is a kind of wacky and wildly misleading history of physics in the last 50 or 60 years.
He went on to attack his professional work:
The good news is I have read Eric’s paper. Here it is. I actually have it here, right here. And uh it’s worse than you would think. It’s not serious. It’s a dog-ate-my-homework kind of thing.
Oh.
We Hear from Another Physicist
Some weeks later, theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, a gifted communicator, offered some thoughts — which are, in some ways, more revealing than the Morgan fight itself.
She makes clear that she does not share Carroll’s derision for Weinstein:
If you take away one thing from this video, let it be that Sabine said Eric’s a good and fairly normal person. In contrast to a lot of others who think it’s okay to sh*t on people they know nothing about.
I have seen an enormous amount of hate thrown at Eric that he doesn’t deserve. In case you managed to miss Carrollgate, I don’t want you to get away with it, so let me fill you in:
Eric has a theory of everything, like all other people I know. His is called “geometric unity.” He’s been talking about this already 20 years ago, it’s his life’s work, basically. In 2021 he wrote up some notes about it. Physicists were not particularly impressed. I never looked into this in any detail because I’m not interested in unification ideas and think it’s a waste of time. I don’t see why the fundamental forces of nature have to be unified, and I have no idea why so many people are obsessed with this. But I want to try and give you a brief idea what this is all about.
Harsh Words for Her Discipline
But she has harsh words for her discipline in general (language warning):
… Eric is only one person who wrote up some notes. If he had wasted some millions of tax money on hiring postdocs and writing papers about it then he could have easily papered over these shortcomings, just like everyone else in that area.
And this is why this p*sses me off so much. Sean totally knows that most of his colleagues work on similarly flaky stuff, it’s just been covered up by more working hours.
The literature is full of papers without proper predictions, without Lagrangians, ill-defined operators, or problems that will be solved in some “future work” that never comes.
Sean knows that. Everyone in the damned field know that. But normally, no one’s saying anything about it. Because they’re all tied up in the same scam.
Unless the person who comes up with the idea is Eric Weinstein, in which case it’s suddenly hugely offensive and everyone starts yelling.
Well Sean why don’t you talk for a little bit about all those supposed AdS/CFT “predictions” for condensed matter this or that which were supposed to revolutionize superconductivity. Whatever happened to that? And just exactly how is string theory defined anyway? Did they actually ever solve the problem of quantum gravity, like did they ever prove it’s finite? …
And these are areas in which thousands of people have spent decades and billions of dollars. Why aren’t you talking about this, rather than cr*pping on Eric who is one single person and at least trying to do something new?
They say they want people to “think outside the box.” But if someone actually does it, they’re like “Nah, not this way.” You don’t talk like us, you don’t walk like us, we don’t like the people you play with. Therefore, we will not look at your ideas. This is the sorry state of theoretical physics now.
And then you get all these people piling onto each hate parade. The groupthink is SO thick. Like, they all think it’s fine to hate on Eric because they expect their colleagues to cheer them on for doing so. And those who think that maybe Eric’s idea isn’t so bad keep their mouth shut.
Fighting words coming from a woman who is a theoretical physicist herself.
This episode is worth keeping in mind when we hear pundits complain that the public doesn’t trust science or that government doesn’t support it enough. More fundamental questions loom.