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You'd be surprised how much scientists hush and push dissenting voices which don't suite a particular theory which one cabal wants to be true. Sean Caroll has b

You'd be surprised how much scientists hush and push dissenting voices which don't suite a particular theory which one cabal wants to be true. Sean Caroll has been advocating strongly in public to go back and take a look at measurement problem but nobody wants to do it. He speaks more about this on his podcast (mindscape) and also on Joe Rogans podcast ( I mean the fact that he had to bring it up in Joe Rogans podcast to let the public know what's up) is pretty bizzare and in indicative of the kind of schemes that go on in academia.

knzhou 7y ago
This kind of conspiratorial thinking is precisely the problem. There is a constant avalanche of papers being published on interpretations of quantum mechanics, in my mind, too many. To believe that Sean Carroll is the only person thinking about this is frankly insulting. This is comparable to hearing one C++ developer speak, then getting the impression that they are the only programmer in the world who uses a strongly typed language, and that there's a conspiracy to cover up strong typing.
braythwayt 7y ago
I'm not saying anything about whether it is true or not. I'm saying there is a completely different class of reasoning between talking about how the two-slit experiment might not be mysterious, and describing the use of the scientific method to validate it, versus attributing the obscurity of a result to a systemic bias problem in science. I completely accept that science has human bias problems... The community is made of people, after all. I personally subscribe to the idea that it is systemically sexist. So I do not argue that there is a bias, I only state that the transition from one kind of discussion to the other was jarring in this post. I waled away from the article not sure if it was primarily about a theory I hadn't heard of, with a footnote about why I hadn't heard of it, or if it was primarily about a systemic coverup of a theory, with some introductory material about the theory presented to understand why it would be covered up by the establishment. One can say, "Why not both?" But truly, good writing has a focus, and an essay really doesn't have a lot of room to stray too far from a single, primary message. It could be that one good essay is about how the grand mystery isn't that mysterious, and another good essay is about how Science with a capital S is biased towards the mysterious and inscrutable. It wouldn't take much editing for this essay to be transformed into either of those. And perhaps this is a matter of taste, but I would prefer one of those essays to this one. But that being said, whatever else I might think about its focus, I'm glad it introduced me to something intriguing about the two-slit experiment!
ncmncm 7y ago
Scientists generally don't like to talk about things they can't say anything meaningful about. (String theorists are in another category.) "Of that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent." -- Wittgenstein; maybe the only useful thing he said. So, for example, plasma fluid dynamics is way, way harder than regular fluid dynamics, which is itself very hard. So, anything that takes understanding plasma fluid dynamics to talk about, most try not to discuss. If they can get an interpretation together that describes a phenomenon without reference to plasma fluid dynamics, but only, e.g. heat and gravity, they will prefer that, even if it doesn't account for everything. Then, they will prefer not to talk about the parts not accounted for. (Thus, the universe is full of "hot gas", not plasma. It's there, but it doesn't do anything.) If it needs dark matter and dark energy, or perfectly parabolic nozzles in the geysers of Enceladus, or volcanoes on Io that bob about like ducks in a bath, then so be it. They're only human, and used to being right. Solar physicists are awesome because they take on plasma fluid dynamics head-on, and get meaningful results. They are hot on the trail of the apparently-million-degree solar corona. So to speak.
gus_massa 7y ago
Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duane's_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duane's_hypothesis It's not hidden by a conspiracy, the problem is that a few (10?) year later the result of Duane was explained as an special case of the general theory that use quantum mechanics and/or the Fourier transform. So the result is now just an exercise, that is explained without naming the (or perhaps with the name of the author, but nobody remember him after the exercise has finished).

knzhou 7y ago

This kind of conspiratorial thinking is precisely the problem. There is a constant avalanche of papers being published on interpretations of quantum mechanics, in my mind, too many. To believe that Sean Carroll is the only person thinking about this is frankly insulting. This is comparable to hearing one C++ developer speak, then getting the impression that they are the only programmer in the world who uses a strongly typed language, and that there's a conspiracy to cover up strong typing.

braythwayt 7y ago

I'm not saying anything about whether it is true or not. I'm saying there is a completely different class of reasoning between talking about how the two-slit experiment might not be mysterious, and describing the use of the scientific method to validate it, versus attributing the obscurity of a result to a systemic bias problem in science. I completely accept that science has human bias problems... The community is made of people, after all. I personally subscribe to the idea that it is systemically sexist. So I do not argue that there is a bias, I only state that the transition from one kind of discussion to the other was jarring in this post. I waled away from the article not sure if it was primarily about a theory I hadn't heard of, with a footnote about why I hadn't heard of it, or if it was primarily about a systemic coverup of a theory, with some introductory material about the theory presented to understand why it would be covered up by the establishment. One can say, "Why not both?" But truly, good writing has a focus, and an essay really doesn't have a lot of room to stray too far from a single, primary message. It could be that one good essay is about how the grand mystery isn't that mysterious, and another good essay is about how Science with a capital S is biased towards the mysterious and inscrutable. It wouldn't take much editing for this essay to be transformed into either of those. And perhaps this is a matter of taste, but I would prefer one of those essays to this one. But that being said, whatever else I might think about its focus, I'm glad it introduced me to something intriguing about the two-slit experiment!

ncmncm 7y ago

Scientists generally don't like to talk about things they can't say anything meaningful about. (String theorists are in another category.) "Of that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent." -- Wittgenstein; maybe the only useful thing he said. So, for example, plasma fluid dynamics is way, way harder than regular fluid dynamics, which is itself very hard. So, anything that takes understanding plasma fluid dynamics to talk about, most try not to discuss. If they can get an interpretation together that describes a phenomenon without reference to plasma fluid dynamics, but only, e.g. heat and gravity, they will prefer that, even if it doesn't account for everything. Then, they will prefer not to talk about the parts not accounted for. (Thus, the universe is full of "hot gas", not plasma. It's there, but it doesn't do anything.) If it needs dark matter and dark energy, or perfectly parabolic nozzles in the geysers of Enceladus, or volcanoes on Io that bob about like ducks in a bath, then so be it. They're only human, and used to being right. Solar physicists are awesome because they take on plasma fluid dynamics head-on, and get meaningful results. They are hot on the trail of the apparently-million-degree solar corona. So to speak.

gus_massa 7y ago

Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duane's_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duane's_hypothesis It's not hidden by a conspiracy, the problem is that a few (10?) year later the result of Duane was explained as an special case of the general theory that use quantum mechanics and/or the Fourier transform. So the result is now just an exercise, that is explained without naming the (or perhaps with the name of the author, but nobody remember him after the exercise has finished).