In the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Kagan Kans takes aim at theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder and others as conspiracy theorists about physics:
Huh?
In recent years, a group of YouTubers and podcasters have attracted millions of viewers by proclaiming that physics is in crisis. The field, they argue, has discovered little of importance in the last 50 years, because it is dominated by groupthink and silences anyone who dares to dissent from mainstream ideas, like string theory.
“The Rise of ‘Conspiracy Physics,’” September 11, 2025
At one time, a conspiracy theorist was a tinfoil hat guy. Not a gadfly on the Establishment whom we turn to when we need a fresh perspective.
Hossenfelder is right. String theory has not in fact gone anywhere, a fact that Kans admits below the fold: “String theory has not fulfilled physicists’ early dreams that it would become the ultimate explanation of all forces and matter in our universe.” Dissenting physicists are bound to notice how much time, energy, and money so grand a theory sucks up while it flounders.
If physicists are starting to “worry about the consequences” of discussing long-term theory failure, it is reasonable to think that there are even more serious problems within the discipline. But first…
How Did This Even Get Started?
Late last month, as we reported, there was a nasty exchange between Johns Hopkins University cosmologist Sean Carroll and mathematical physicist Eric Weinstein.
Piers framed his segment as “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?” He pointed to Einstein and quantum physics, implying that a deep discussion would follow.
But Carroll trashed Weinstein’s theory as “a dog-ate-my-homework kind of thing.”
It wasn’t a display that would cause viewers (nearly a million of them) to have much confidence in the theoretical physics establishment. Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg seem like distant memories here…
Hossenfelder — a theoretical physicist herself — picked up on that and offered some candid assessments on her own YouTube:
… [6:34] 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 knows 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.
Sabine Hossenfelder, “Physicists are afraid of Eric Weinstein — and they should be,” July 16, 2025, transcribed here.
Concerns about “Conspiracy Physics”
Hossenfelder’s accusations are consistent with a situation in physics where the star theory, string theory, has gone nowhere for decades. As Kans himself reports,
For a while, few professional physicists paid attention to their online critics or to calls for cleansing scientific corruption. But that’s changed as the Trump administration has cut billions of dollars from the budget of the National Science Foundation and plans to cut more. Career paths for physicists are vanishing or leading overseas. There’s a dawning awareness, Carroll says, of how much the field depends on public legitimacy.
Leonard Susskind, director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, says physicists need to be both more sober and more forceful when addressing the public. The limits of string theory should be acknowledged, he says, but the idea that progress has slowed isn’t right. In the last few decades, he and other physicists have figured out how to make progress on the vast project of integrating general relativity and quantum mechanics, the century-old pillars of physics, into a single explanation of the universe.
“Worry about the consequences.”
If the physics establishment is only just now becoming aware that public funding depends on public legitimacy, well, no time like the present. And carrying on about conspiracy theories will not stand in for actual achievements.
Respect for Sabine and Eric
I asked experimental physicist Rob Sheldon what he makes of all this. His reply:
To begin with, I respect Sabine and Eric, though I don’t often agree with them. They are sincere physicists, searching for truth, albeit in places I have dismissed already. Sean Carroll is another story. He’s a funded academic, who got his position by never disagreeing with his funding sources. His treatment of Eric was disingenuous and self-serving.
But that brings up the accusations made by “Prof” Dave and Prof Carroll — conspiracy. Now there are both good and bad conspiracies. When it’s your side that wins, it isn’t a conspiracy of course, but rather savvy messaging or suchlike.
The one point we can be agreed on, is that one lunatic does not make a conspiracy, it takes at least 2. So Eric’s theoretical physics paper — which only he understands — cannot be conspiracy physics. On the other hand, Sean’s papers have enough authors and sponsors to easily pass the number threshold.
So how can we tell truth from conspiracy?
As every physicist will explain, we don’t work with truth, we work with data, hypotheses, models, mathematical approximations.
So, as scientists struggle to make sense of the physical world, governments struggle over how to apportion taxpayers’ money — which no one enjoys as a personal right. It’s too bad if the Wall Street Journal chooses to platform an attack on dissenting physicists instead of discussing these matters in a more straightforward way.