Another example is the state of communication about fusion power right now, which is deplorable. The media has been full of claims about how they finally achieved "net energy gain." Except "net energy gain" is a narrow scientific description that does not, in fact, mean what we would normally consider net energy gain for viable fusion power.
If we look at the actual total power input to the experiment in question, and the power output, we see a 99% energy loss: the total output power was only 1% of the total input power. That means we're 100 times, two orders of magnitude, away from achieving an actual energy gain.
On HN there is probably a good amount of awareness of this, but I bet there are some people reading this comment who were not aware of it, and were misled by the reporting. Here's an article for the unfamiliar: https://whyy.org/segments/why-the-nuclear-fusion-net-energy-...
So I think the headline could be generalized: science communication has a high degree of dishonesty in general, and that makes good science communication hard.
Most people fundamentally misunderstand the issues around fission and its economic viability even though there’s hundreds of nuclear reactors. No base load power isn’t inherently a good thing, it was actually coined to describe a downside. Clarifying just that misunderstanding gets info market forces, investments, and engendering to a non trivial level but you essentially need to condense it down to an infographic or people will lose interest. I have no idea how you could pull that off in an interesting manner.
IMO, the trick is to narrowly address the common misconceptions. Flat paper airplane wings provide lift, therefore Bernoulli’s principle isn’t why wings work. However that doesn’t extend to actually explaining complex topics.
It’s very easy to tell people that the latest experiment only produced 1% of the power that was put into it. Instead, they were told that the “net energy gain” was positive, and that this was a major breakthrough that brings viable commercial fusion power significantly closer.
I suppose, when you have experiments costing tens of billions of dollars being funded by the public, that this kind of corruption of the truth is inevitable. But that quite understandably undermines public trust in science communication.
Australia has a related problem, where anti-climate-change-action forces on the Right have pivoted to supporting nuclear fission as the solution - Australia has no nuclear fuel industry and no existing nuclear power reactors, and so pushing that has the effect of delaying any actual climate action for decades.
That’s why the Fusion Energy Sciences program within the Department of Energy’s Office of Science was allocated three quarters of a billion dollars in the 2023 appropriations bill.
Here’s a list of institutions involved in fusion research in the US alone:
https://science.osti.gov/fes/Research/Fusion-Institutions
There are similar lists for all the countries involved in the $40+ billion ITER experiment.
Of course, there’s serious engineering involved in these projects as well, just as there is for the LHC, for example. But presumably you wouldn’t call the research being done at the LHC “particle engineering”.
The crux of the video is that string theory isn't really a theory since it's untestable, and that string physicists/authors have overrepresented its utility for decades. She goes through a brief history, and the broken promises (each decade: a new revolution from string theory is just a decade away).
But the arguments around the public erosion of trust in physics involve a few cherry-picked examples that and ignore the wider context around academic research and issues communicating science to the public, especially scientific sensationalism from media outlets (eg God Particle). She argues that the string theorists have played into this and should have been more media savvy in the past, but is relatively unscathing of other non-string theory physicists.
It just gets ranty at the end, "the string theorists lied to us for 30 years" gets repeated a lot.
You can run the YT subtitles an LLM to get a summary if you don't have the time.
I'm gonna say it's worth the hour, and I think you might be falling into the trap of media communication about science. If something is worth communicating to a lay-person, it's worth going into detail about to avoid the exact pitfalls that you might fall into if you were to digest a 10m version of it. If you don't want to watch the 60m version of it, I would say "stay out of the discussion on it."
Beyond that it's expanding on some history and being more detailed than the single sentence.
It’s eroding rational sciences as a whole.
Research papers are about scientists communicating with one another. It doesn't matter if it is a preprint like arxiv, Nature, CVPR, or a fucking blog, these are all scientists communicating with one another. I can't wait to be out to just take my time with research, post to OpenReview and my blog, and move on not wasting my time explaining to a reviewer why metric we reproduced is different from the one in the original paper despite already including references of other works who also could not reproduce the original number and getting rejected because I had a broken link to my appendix. It's a fucking waste of time and it is a complete embarrassment that we call this process science.
The crisis in the sciences is very much a political one. Within a capitalist system, the sciences are actively hindered from being in the position to solve humanity's big problems, because bourgeois values so often dictate how and what is researched, funded, developed. (Profit oriented)
In this book was also the fist time I heard critical analysis of the big bang theory (aside from creationists in my youth), which I actually thought had a wide consensus. It really makes no sense when thinking about it materialistically. All the laws and known processes involving matter are supposed to have come from nothing? Helped me see how the big bang theory is nothing more than naked idealism. No wonder catholic popes got on board with it so quickly.
Another interesting thesis presented is that medicine in its form today is not actually a real science - infected by positivism and pragmatism, the way it's practiced is like a constant race to cover up symptoms rather than aiming to understand the human body in its entire complexity to heal issues at the root instead.
Anyway, highly recommended read. Covers several scientific fields and how they are being plagued by regressive ideology.
I really hate these lines. Not because capitalism doesn't have loads of problems but rather that it is missing underlying principles and incentives that exist to create these structures and incentives. They are coupled with the economic systems but not strictly dependent on them. These issues aren't fundamentally broken because the privatization nor nationalization of capital resources. Many of these issues exist because of metric hacking which exist due to bureaucratization and politicization. So in that sense it doesn't matter if your society is capitalist, socialist, feudal, monarchistic, anarchistic, or whatever. It has to do with how humans fundamentally organize structures, delegate, and evaluate. It is a crisis of the 21st century because only now have we had such scale and such specialization. But as complexity has been increasing at an exponential rate we are simplifying our metrics and decreasing trust.
Solutions to problems involve trade offs. Trade offs come down to questions about values. This is not he purview of Science. That's politics.
I don't know much about the crisis the OP is talking about, but I do know a bit about how our Australian Government gutted environment sciences because it was telling them things it didn't want to hear.
I wonder if the CSIRO needs to be an independent body like the ABC. (Not that the ABC is immune to pressure. )
Anyway she's a great communicator and has the right kind of sass (this is probably her sassiest). Give the rest of her catalogue a look.
I would have cut the video to 10 minutes though.
the most important material in science
The most important material in science is glass. This is a video about the history of glass. Glass is important. Glass is complicated. Professional scientific glass blowers are the coolest people in the world. And a little discussion on art versus science.
If not, I don't think I'll bother with the rest. I watched ~10 mins and found the game a stressful distraction that impeded her communication (was that the point?). If it's just a random shtick I'll leave it for those that enjoy it.
Recommend listening to the video instead, I did awhile ago and I thought it was interesting and well done.
Collier is hard-line Karl Popper - theories must make testable predictions which are later confirmed by experiment. It's good to hear that.
Around minute 34, she's covered the background and gets to the political point. "String theorists are liars". This has caused public hostility to physics. Which translates to funding cuts for particle physics.
With physics in particular there’s a perception that science should progress fast in spectacular breakthroughs. But the 1900s was a very unique time. It’s not like that anymore. We’ve figured out the “easy” things (relatively speaking), most things left to discover are probably far harder.
So we need to get used to paying scientists and researchers to just play around with whatever they feel like, over long stretches of time. There’s no guarantee that a breakthrough will come from someone strongly embedded in the science mainstream writing lots of articles with tons of citation. And there’s no guarantee that breakthroughs will happen in any reasonable time.
I think we also need a shift from documenting/publishing the results, to documenting/publishing the process. YouTube is interesting in that regard. A lot of creators there doing very interesting and unique work.. and even if they don’t get great results, people still watch it if the process is interesting, and/or if the creator teaches their techniques, what they’re learning, how they failed, etc.
The more I read, the more I went “what the heck, this theory can’t possibly be true, it’s so ad hoc with rules made up just to make it pass tests that otherwise would prove it conclusively wrong”
It made me disillusioned and I eventually ended up working as a developer instead.
I guess my instincts were right, because there has been extremely little real progress the last 25(!) years in the field…..
Don't believe me?
Okay, Einstein said gravity is caused by the curvature of space, right? Wrong! Einstein never said any such thing, he merely said you can think of gravity as curved spacetime - in fact he later pointed out to others that was a crutch, not the reality. Gravity is a force. Yet the science popularizers continue to lie and display their stupid rubber sheet model to explain why things orbit the earth. Which is not only wrong, but very misleading - earth orbit are easily explained by time dilation, you don't even need to model earth gravity with all this spacetime-as-a-rubber sheet nonsense!
Still don't believe me? Look how science popularizers explain voodoo mechanics, erm, I mean quantum mechanics. They still pretend that Copenhagen and the science of 100 years ago still reign supreme and completely ignore quantum field theory, which is the foundation of the standard model.
When it comes to string theory they never point out that string theory, brane theory, and the standard model all yield the same results and that physicists now use the model that makes their calculations easier.
No, science popularizers prefer to spout nonsense in an attempt to make science seem cool. You know what's cool? Actual, factual science!