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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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I once randomly found Hossenfelder's YT channel, it had a video about climate change and someone linked it somewhere, I didn't know who she was. That video seemed fine, it correctly pointed out the urgency of the matter, and while I don't know enough climate science to say much about the veracity of all its content, nothing stuck out as particularly weird to me. So I looked at some other videos from the channel... and boooooy did I quickly discover some serious conspiracy-style nonsense stuff. Real "the cabal of physicists are suppressing the truth" vibes, including "I got this email which I will read to you but I can't tell you who it's from, but it's the ultimate proof" (both not quotes, just how I'd summarize the content...)
Longtime friends of the pod will recognize the trick of turning molehills into mountains. Creationists take a legitimate debate over a detail, like how many millions of years ago did species A and species B diverge, and they blow it up into "evolution is wrong". Hossenfelder and her ilk do the same thing. They start with "pre-publication peer review has limited effectiveness" or "the allocation of funding is sometimes susceptible to fads", and they blow it up into "physicists are a cabal out to suppress The Truth".
One nugget of fact that Hossenfelder in particular exploits is that the specific way we have been investigating the corner of physics we like to call "fundamental" is, possibly, arguably, maybe tapped out. The same poster of sub-sub-atomic particles that you'd have put on your wall 30 or 40 years ago is still good today, with an edit or two in the corner. We found the top quark, we found the Higgs, and so, possibly, arguably, maybe, building an even bigger CERN machine isn't a worthwhile priority right now. Does this spell doom for physics? No, having to reorganize how we do things in one corner of our subject after decades of astonishing success is not "doom".