Sabine Hossenfelder Can’t Stop Acting Like a Complete Fraud

hey everyone most of you saw my piece on Sabina hossenfelder a few months ago followed by another much clearer video after her childish response while her behavior has only gotten worse prompting yet another installment in this series so let's get to it if you're new to this Fiasco Sabina hossenfelder is a former physicist with a YouTube channel who has taken a turn towards promoting anti-science rhetoric as of late you know stuff like this most of academic research that your taxes pay for is almost certainly Bullit this is why I don't trust scientists these people sit

on cozy tax-paid positions with no other task than producing useless papers that no one understands and therefore no one dares criticize I made a very soft video elucidating some of her objectively fellacio and problematic narratives without trying to start too much direct conflict but I was not terribly surprised when she released a response arrogantly doubling down on all of her ridiculous statements insisting that science is failing you know like a disingenuous fraud so I did a followup about how science is absolutely not failing highlighting how she has zero capacity to speak as an authority on

the entire body of scientific knowledge and the communities surrounding every subfield within it as she now attempts to do I made it clear that she's just spewing anti-science rhetoric on the internet for cash something that is blatantly obvious when you look at the view counts for the videos where she does this and and I described with Clarity how she is one of many figures contributing to the Avalanche of science denial that is tearing our society apart in it I said this make a pointed and informed criticism about whatever you want just stop pretending that's all

you're doing because it isn't and you know it but do go ahead and make another response tripling down on your rhetoric ignoring everything I said just so you can drop another brilliant ad again I was not surprised at all when she did exactly this tripling down on her insane lies just so she could drop another brilliant ad here is science is in trouble and it worries me with a thumbnail that reads I call it [ __ ] research in it she spends about 15 minutes flashing graphs and exclaiming see science is telling us that science

sucks now she also references Trump Lackey Elon Musk since his Fanboys make up a big chunk of her audience as well as Peter teal the billionaire Bozo behind the rise of the Weinstein brothers and who funds A pseudo Journal whose sole purpose is to run articles dismissing climate change and evolution she even plays a sensationalist snippet from Fox News oh and because she's also insanely Petty she also decided to say this this isn't about me versus some guy who makes money from insulting others this is about the future of science Sabina that's what you you

do you make a living insulting the entire scientific Community I'm the one that promotes and cares about science I'm the one with a database of over 1500 tutorials in dozens of different subjects that help millions of students reach their academic and career goals you make dog [ __ ] clickbait content about how scientists shouldn't be trusted just wanted to clear that up for the record but in general this video is just another mot and Bailey from Sabina she got caught saying idiotic indefensible things like most academic research is [ __ ] so she retreats to

something slightly more defensible like claims that fewer breakthroughs are being made or how it's hard to get grants and there is some bureaucracy after 15 minutes of that she then turns around and just baselessly claims yet again that most research is [ __ ] most of it is [ __ ] the way Sabina talks it's as though there are only two categories of science amazing revolutionary Paradigm shifting breakthrough or totally useless [ __ ] from idiot frauds who are wasting taxpayer money nothing in between this is how the science illiterate public thinks and she is

deliberately feeding that misconception while posturing as an expert with valuable insight and experience this back and forth makes it abundantly clear that Sabina has zero interest in good faith discussion she has only one priority clicks and cash and her behavior has only gotten worse in this regard with persistent attacks on Academia and the scientific community in general leading to a recent video where she reads an alleged email from a physicist that seemingly corroborates everything she's been saying all along let's check that one out now it's called I was asked to keep this confidential and the

thumbnail says yes what we created is a bubble wow this sounds juicy like some real Edward Snowden whistleblowing type stuff and it must be good because it has about 2 and A2 million views in a week and a half much better than the view counts on the other videos put out around the same time I'm sure that wasn't anticipated at all or in any way a motivating factor for making this video let's have a listen I want to read you an email that I was asked to keep confidential I've been thinking about this for a

long time but I now believe that reading it to you will go some way to explain why I'm worried about the state of scientific research generally but especially in the foundations of physics I received this email about 7 years ago after I published a comment in nature physics titled science needs reason to be trusted in it I explained how I lost trust in scientific self-correction after I realized how much of what's published in the foundations of physics is nonsense and continues to be nonsense this email came from someone who I've met a few times but

don't know in any depth and who at the time worked at a top institution in the United States to honor the request of confidentiality I've removed some details hi zabina I'm if you remember me in the interest of keeping things brief I won't show her reading the full email I'll just include a series of screenshots so you can read all of the text and you can pause if you need more time let's go ahead and do that now and then talk about how ridiculous it is [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right now that everyone

has the gist of this I'm just going to go ahead and say it I don't believe this is a real email let's go over the reasons why this is the case first let's all agree that this email contains no new information it's saina's script verbatim in more or less her voice it's all the things she has already said dozens of times just supposedly written by someone else this is not a bombshell this is not something you sit on for years and then randomly make a big deal out of it we don't even see the actual

email just some scrolling text let's check out some particulars right off the top I'm not using my work email where do you work the Pentagon you think it is going to read this pointless email to some YouTuber and sound an alarm [ __ ] the next paragraph sounds like Sabina inflating her own editorial as though the entire scientific Community is waiting with baited breath for her angry rants this reeks of James tour pretending the origin of Life research Community cares about his blog post apologetics next is a long bit that sounds the most like it

was written by Saina this is not how physics operates this is a twisted caricature of the physics Community a narrative that Sabina pedals to science deniers for money and in just a moment we will hear from a few physicists to get some perspective on exactly how acious this is so I'm sorry but no actual physicist would ever write this particle physicists are not hiding inside particle accelerators they're doing physics and the idea that their children would die of hunger if they couldn't smash some more particles together is grotesque this next part is the most idiotic

an author of a model who knows which one of course admits it's all crap just some blows and whistles meant to trick morons into giving them grant money the next bid is more of the same for people who pay us all we do is just noise that's not even a sentence why would this person be explaining to Saina things she already says repeatedly as though it's new information this clearly is not for her to read but her viewers then more patting herself on the back and pretending that anything she said in her little opinion piece

would actually affect how grant money is distributed in Academia the next part is the real giveaway I understand that all what I wrote above might sound a bit harsh sorry for this this imaginary person is regurgitating the exact [ __ ] Saina has been spewing for years back to her in an email and then is apologizing for being harsh how does that make any sense it's like your coworker ranting to you for 5 hours straight about how awful your boss is and then you reply with hey our boss really sucks sorry for being harsh it's

stupid once again this is clearly for her viewers to read not her and then of course there is the convenient and totally baseless claim that this is not just how high energy physics works but all areas of Science and this person should know they're an expert in literally every area of science just like Sabina give me a break real scientists do not talk like this period forget the crappy grammar which wouldn't fly even if English wasn't their first language scientists do not pretend to know the intricacies of what's going on even in other subfields of

their own area let alone entirely different areas of Science in a moment you'll hear from some real scientists who demonstrate precisely this point but in general if your [ __ ] alarm doesn't go crazy while watching this text scroll I have some magic beans I'd like to sell you on top of everything in this email being objectively false and matching saina's script flawlessly the idea that a researcher would give her this ammunition someone who is famous for publicly disparaging Academia and just ask politely to keep it confidential knowing that she has no motive to keep

it private and that it would only cause further detriment is just too much to swallow nobody is that stupid I can't prove to you that this email is real so you'll have to take my word for it pretty convenient Sabina don't you think you know that you could have shown the actual email and just blocked out the sensitive information right oh would that have been too difficult to fabricate and of course if you didn't have this bit about being asked to keep it confidential you wouldn't have that juicy clickbait title now would you I don't

think that taxpayers are stupid we're not paying physicists for crazy new hype we want to see results and soon taxpayers will start asking some to questions no they won't lay people have absolutely no idea what scientists do this is just Sabina pumping up her delusional viewers who think they understand science better than scientists lay people can't read primary literature they can't summarize the first thing about literally any area of scientific research they have no idea what any potential applications of the research would be and in the rare instances in which it impacts their daily life

they fumble it left and right because of frauds like her who misrepresented to them on the Internet through false narratives that make them feel empowered and special the rest of the video is Sabina flashing Graphics about specific experiments and equipment and how much it costs and how stupid it all is how stupid these scientists think the public is that they are supposed to just shut up and believe their work is so important in actuality Sabina is the one who thinks the public is stupid enough to take her word for it that it's all bu [

__ ] because it's actually her paycheck that depends on this mischaracterization and then she piles on some fake outrage for dramatic effect but Jesus use your [ __ ] brain your problem isn't that I'm making noise your problem is that you're lying to the people who pay you your problem is that you're cowards without a shred of scientific Integrity cowards cowards I say does this sound familiar there are plenty of academics that have the intellectual chops of CS Lewis and dietr Bon Hofer but they have not the impact because they're cowards this is a rhetorical

tactic if she gets this worked up about what cowards all these physicists are then there must be something to it who would fake this kind of passion it's the same as James tour whining about origin of Life research he doesn't understand the more you watch Sabina the more you see how much she's just like him minus the Evangelical angle which actually makes it even worse James is hopelessly brainwashed he has convinced himself he's right Sabina knows exactly what she's doing it seems like some people are starting to catch on to what Saina has become in

fact the usual brilliant D is gone replaced with another sponsor maybe they decided it wasn't a good fit anymore bad Optics perhaps and more importantly a few physicists have finally decided it's worth their time and energy to start address this Avalanche of nonsense let's hear from them now first let's talk to Elan Ed Smith a particle physicist at MIT she uses rare Beauty decays to search for new fundamental particles at Mass scales above the Collision energy of the LHC for context here are a few quotes from Sabina that I will be referencing in the interview

I want you to note the stark contrast between the bitter cranky failed scientist spewing abject falsehoods and a real scientist who actually does science the more I saw of the foundations of physics the more I became convinced that most of the research there wasn't based on sound scientific principles I never intended it to be offensive I just explained why thinking of new particles isn't a good strategy for progress in physics and why that had gotten an entire discipline stuck and naive as I was I expected physicists to think about it I expected rational debate but

that never came no one was interested no one is interested but I knew it was [ __ ] just as most of the work in that area is currently [ __ ] and just as most of academic research that your taxes pay for is almost certainly [ __ ] is a foldable phone a breakthrough invention is gradually cramming more and more pixels and transistors into headsets a sign of progress aren't machines on the moon more of an engineering feed than a scientific Revelation is this the end of science Ellen Ed thanks so much for uh

for talking with me today so what do you do at MIT what kind of research yeah so I'm a particle physics researcher here at MIT so with my group we look at the data produced at the large hat and collider at CERN and we Analyze That to find out more about our universe that's fascinating uh so hopefully we can chat more about that another day today the priority is some of these comments from Sabina so just I I wanted to start with her first her video why I failed why Academia sucks so there's this uh

quote here the other thing that happened was that the more I saw of the foundations of physics the more I became convinced that most of the research there wasn't based on sound scientific principles so I don't know what do you think is physics research predominantly based on sound scientific principles yes so I think to like to give the benefit of the doubt to the speaker as a she is talking specifically about the theory of particle physics but this kind of highlights the danger of making these kind of claims on a platform for science communication and

Outreach because most people will see that statement and as you have correctly done kind of assumed it it's a statement about all of physics right kind of that physics pH generally broadly isn't built on scientific or pure scientific principles which is quite yeah um so I can say specifically from particle physics which is my area um I think it is built on sound scientific principles um you know we perform observations of the world around us so we know from like astronomical uh observations that we have to have something called Dark Matter so something which like

accounts for lots of mass but doesn't interact with visible light and we don't know what that is and nothing in our current theory can be dark matter um and we also to my research for example we really ask why is it that around us everything around you right now is made of matter right like all your atoms are made of protons and neutrons um but all the forces we know about all the like particles we make at the LC matter and antimatter are produced in more or less the same amounts so we don't understand where

the antimatter has gone um and these are examples of why we know there have got to be other fundamental forces out there beyond what we currently know about um and we also know that these new forces have to respect a lot of different symmetries because these symmetries correspond to the conservation of quantities that we also know from observation are conserved like energy and momentum um so you put all of this together you can come up with a hypothesis and then we kind of ask okay given all of this like we know there has to be

new fundamental forces you know what are the experiments that we can best build that will give us the most new information on the characteristics of these new forces and then we go ahead and we build these experiments and then we look at the data um so yeah I think that's a fairly sound yeah we have observations we have hypothesis and then we test it with data right yeah it's not a flight of fancy for grant money it's it's a rigid empirical approach to doing science I think so yeah okay uh so this next one here

um uh she's talking about why that had gotten an entire discipline stuck naive as I was I expected physicists to think about it I expected rational debate but that never came no one was interested no one is interested uh so um yeah is is particle physics stuck is there rational debate among the community about which directions to proceed in or is it just this Echo chamber of everybody making things up and perpetuating uh you know fantasies um yeah no I wouldn't agree with that characterization so firstly again it is really important here to highlight how

diverse particle physics is as a field um there is you know some of our colleagues in theory who sit down and do what we call model building so they will write down kind of potential new forces or fields that could explain these things we don't understand like dark matter or where the antimatter went um but you know again I talk about I can talk about my research specifically as an experimentalist like what we do with my group at the LHC we basically um you know we look for these signs of these new forces in a

very generic way we basically say um we are lucky that we live in a quantum mechanical universe so this means that like if you had some new Force even if it was like way heavier than the energy that we can currently create at the LHC um these new particles should still have some impact on these lower energy processes via their Quantum imprints basically and this is a very generic way of looking for science of new physics um yeah and we can simply look at the probability with which we think a process will happen we then

compare that to the prediction where the prediction is calculated assuming only the forces we know about and if we see deviations um then that implies there's got to be this new physics out there and if they agree even at that level of precision that also tells us a lot about the characteristics of these new forces so it is not like um you know it's not that we kind of one person comes up with one model and that's the only thing that's tested like it's a very blanket approach to probing um with what you know the

probing our current position and the current scale that we know the universe is at by taking more data we basically probe the universe at smaller and smaller scales in a pretty generic way um yeah right there's many researchers testing many ideas and so then obviously you are publishing in the literature you're going to conferences and things what what is the atmosphere like when you and your colleagues are discussing your ideas very constructive or combative or what's that like yeah so um there's always a lot of uh you know there's always a lot of discussion in

terms of um again it's very hard to characterize an entire field uh in one sentence because there's just this this field is very diverse so if I talk about from the experimentalist side of course a lot of what we will be discussing is you know have you understood have you calibrated everything correctly a lot of discussing on stuff like statistics Etc then you have the interpretation side so what is the interpretation of what we might have measured what does that apply for the characteristics of these new forces that people uh or these new hypothesis that

people might want to come up with um but there is certainly a lot of um you know debate and also amongst theorists I mean it is clear that everybody understands well in my experience um you know everybody else's papers and are very happy to uh criticize and discuss them openly um so I yeah I I absolutely think we still have rational debate yeah so yeah so it sounds like far from stuck you you have plenty a lot of people with plenty of ideas to be tested and there is healthy rational debate just as there is

in any other field of science yeah of course and people really you know people have strong opinions because this is their you know Liv's work and um we really try to come together as a field to figure out how we can best pull our resources to tackle these fundamental questions about the universe that ultimately do require really large collaborations amongst tens of thousands of people across the entire world right so you have to have a lot of discussion yeah it's the nature of particle physics it's not it's not botany unfortunately um okay so here's a

doozy but I knew it was [ __ ] just as most of the work in that area is currently [ __ ] and just as most of academic research that your taxes pay for is almost certainly [ __ ] okay so is most work in particle physics [ __ ] and to your knowledge is most academic research [ __ ] and does this claim offend you um well so I don't know what the exact definition of [ __ ] is here I will kind of interpret that to mean I guess like useless um put it

nicely yeah so um so firstly I mean there is plenty of research by like economists out there who just generically look at like how useful every tax dollar spent on academic research is in terms of the returns you get on that right and I mean the different models might come up with a slightly different number but they all agree that there is significant return on every dollar invested in academic research so if we're talking just about like is academic research um of use to society I think you know decas of research implies that yes if

you invest in R&D then you will get a lot of Returns on that money right um so yeah I don't think it's I don't think it's useless um particle physics in particular you know I think this um research again if we want to look at like specific tangible practical applications for example um a good example is you know the worldwide web which was invented at CERN um and the reason why the worldwide web was invented at CERN was basically because particle physics is like like the data we produced from particle collisions represents one of the

most like data intensive processes anywhere in the world so particle physics has always been really leading Edward when it comes to coming up with like data science techniques um and that's yeah why the worldwide web was invented at s but that also couldn't have been invented without all of the like fundamental C curiosity driven research before that in maths and physics Etc um yeah for my group for example we do uh a lot of work on like super super fast machine learning algorithms because again we have to be able to compress the data that we

get like hundreds of terabits of data a second at a very fast rate so that we can actually store it you know we don't have infinite amounts of money so we have to really compress it before we can store it so for example we develop a machine learning algorithms that run at like tens of nanoseconds um and these kind of techniques are also like useful for other data intensive Fields right so if we're taking this very literally not just as should we do science just for the sake of asking questions but also like as examples

of like technological benefits from doing a particle physics I think there's also plenty of examples yeah and it's not even the technology developed to allow you to do your research also you're uncovering a more fundamental understanding of the nature of the universe and of its constituent particles I mean the I the the example I always give I mean speaking about Electronics there was a point in history where JJ Thompson discovered the electron and contemporaries or you know lay people at the time might say who cares right it's just a bunch of uh nonsense okay well

it's important for everything we do today in this modern era no that's exactly right and you know with the data we can continue to take at the LHC we basically the more data we take the more we can probe the universe at a smaller scale and yeah one day and it may be in the far future but at one point you know we don't want our current ignorance of the universe to be the limitation of the future at some point for Humanity right we have to keep asking these questions there's no telling what our new

understandings May yield before the understandings arrive we have to learn and then see what we can do with what we've learned uh okay so just a couple more really quick or just one more I think or no two more um Saina is talking in this is science dying right this title is science dying she's talking about oh we got a foldable phone uh machines on the moon isn't this all engineering is this the end of science science is in big trouble indeed I'm paraphrasing her quote it's in the video um is this an accurate depiction

of the status of science is there well I think we just kind of talked about this is there nothing happening in science that stands to improve our understand yeah that's basically what we just discussed I mean is there anything you can point to well I think you just did though right most recently just in terms of our Improvement of electronics and things like that what what if you could summarize in the last 50 years of particle physics two or three things that have improve the quality of life that are yielded from from your field um

well I think the worldwide web is probably incidentally the reason we're all in this mess well um yeah and then I would say yeah I mean another example indeed like we really pushed the limits in terms of um kind of this very fast type of like machine learning algorithms there's also um for example uh proton um therapy for cancer um so this is when instead of using electrons you use protons to which really better Target the tumors so paration and that has come about because of the type of research we do in particle physics there

you go cancer treatment doesn't get any better than that I think uh okay last one this is from the video the the thumbnail reads still the same crap and Sabina is all Angry on the on the thumbnail um this this question basically just is physics dying right there's this um there's this narrative being pedal by figures like Sabina and Eric Weinstein and these people that nothing has happened since the quantum Revolution the field is stagnant there's nothing happening um is that a fair assessment they usually talk about String Theory dominating all of the funding is

string theory really the only thing happening in theoretical physics is physics dying is it hopeless what's what's going on yeah so the quantum Revolution here I assume they're talking about you know the earlier 20th century when foundations of quantum mechanics were laid down so since that I mean we have firstly developed um really the current model of particle physics as we understand it something called the standard model so since then we have understood um like the strong force so what holds you the neutrons and and protons together we've understood the weak force uh you which

for example is what allows a neutron to decate to a proton we've understood what gives all of us Mass so this is the hick oon in 2012 we've also made I mean just my experiment alone which is called lecb we have discovered uh I think around 65 new particles so these are things called hadrons a hadron is any particle which is um held together by the strong force and um I should like stress the strong force is still pretty poorly understood because it behaves in a really weird way so like most forces when you get

further apart they get weaker which you know so the lights really far away gets dimmer uh but the strong force when you get further apart it gets stronger which is not intuitive at all and this makes it mathematically pretty hard to deal with so there's still loads of stuff there we don't understand and these new particles we found they're like kind of new states of matter so we used to only have um uh particles like a proton or Neutron with three quarks inside them so quarks are these fundamental particles that interact with the strong force

and now just in the last 10 years we've discovered you can actually have particles made of five quarks like a different state of matter um and this is telling us a lot more about the strong force that we really don't still understand that well to be honest um so in terms of yeah pure fundamental physics like advancements particle physics advancements I think that's a good example and I think we do tend to not um kind of celebrate this as much right we we find these new particles quite often um and I don't think we can

make enough of a fanf for about it that these are you know like new exotic uh states that we did not know existed before we had the El why does the higs bosan get all the Fanfare what about all the other particles the other new particles yeah so I mean there is a difference there in terms of the Hig boson is is a fundament so this is a a fundamental new particle so it basically represents an entire new kind of field as opposed to the way that these um you know these new hyon different ways

in which the particles can interact to produce a different particle but it's still like you know like in astrophysics you might be like oh we found like a whole bunch of new exoplanets that's really cool it's like yeah we found a whole bunch of new hyons that's really cool it's a very similar you know we keep on finding these things these new things out but I think um we don't discuss it so much um and yeah so yeah I think I mean over the last hundred years yes there's been a lot of things happening um

yeah there's this the the the the rhetoric always centers around like in the quantum Revolution was this enormous Paradigm Shift where is the next paradigm shift but what I'm hearing from you is that we're still figuring out this Paradigm right we're still filling in all of the gaps of the standard model and making all these new discoveries it doesn't matter that a particle was hypothesized 50 years prior and then only discovered last decade right we're we're we're learning and figuring out how the universe works and it's odd to me that people would call that being

stuck when we're just doing the work you know it takes time a lot of my work is focused on so the fancy name for the strong force is called Quantum chromodynamics or qcd my work is focused on the fact that we still really don't understand qcd very well it's really hard to understand um and yeah it's it's tough like it's it takes a lot of work takes a lot of you know but it we are still fundamentally like chipping away our understanding of the universe and that's kind of cool yes and to all these detractors

I say where's your idea where's your work what are you doing to figure these things out uh I don't think they know what qcd is well saita does but um I don't know anyway uh thank you for that yeah I think that uh you know I I I really am um uh very interested in in in bringing my viewers the perspective of people who are working in the field who are putting in the time and the effort um rather than just the naysayers uh you know cashing in on YouTube so um yeah thanks very much

for your time thanks a lot for having me I appreciate being able to talk to you absolutely interesting Counterpoint no science looks a little bit different from someone who has actually accomplished no let's keep the ball rolling and have a chat with Aram Harrow another professor of physics at MIT his research focuses on Quantum information and Quantum Computing here are a few more quotes from her for context followed by some important Counterpoint from arum what happened instead is that everyone who works on this just repeats arguments that they all know to be wrong to keep

the money coming because let's be real these people sit on cozy tax paid positions with no other task than producing useless papers that no one understands and therefore no one dares criticize then about 10 years ago I wrote a book about what's going wrong in my own research area the foundations of physics but I'm afraid that the problem also befalls other disciplines it's a failure of science to self cor science is failing it's failing right in front of our eyes and no one's doing anything about it Aram thanks so much for joining us we're going

to talk a little bit about some of these uh some of these statements that Sabina has made uh did you initially I think we were you had some general comments was there something that you had off the top we can get in just get into it I think I I'm comfortable talking about her General attacks on science and physics categorically yeah the her specific I think that when she started her online communication career and and the content of her book was about things like naturalness super symmetry particle physics and I'm probably not the best expert

for that but I very happy to talk about physics theoretical physics in general yeah okay great then given that her attack has become as broad as imaginable I can respond broadly yeah so starting right off with the first question she says in in in her video I failed why Academia sucks the more she saw the foundations of physics the more she became convinced that most of the research there wasn't based on sound scientific principles is in your opinion is physics research predominantly based on sound scientific principles yeah no it's a very healthy robust field things

are falsified all the time it generates surprises it uh it works very well maybe maybe it's worth actually it is maybe it's worth getting into how Sabine started her science communication I think her book was the trouble with physics which I think attacked a narrow slice of ideas I think I do have to talk about this actually sure which could be argued to be less sound this is slightly outside of my specialty but I'll tell you my understanding of it there was a hope in high energy particle physics that something called super symmetry would hold

and throughout the 20th century we found a bunch of different particles they all seem different and then kind of like we unified the elements with the periodic table all these Masons and other weird particles turned out to be unified as collections of quirks and you know unified in in other ways often using principles of symmetry so symmetry was this great Touchstone this guiding principle that organized a lot of particle physics and based on that hope people hop that this would further extend to some a hypothetical form of symmetry called super Symmetry and there were a

few things in which that seems promising about this like the the this would predict a bunch of new particles most naturally at the energy scale that the LHC was about to explore and at a scale that could plausibly account for dark matter for which there's very strong evidence and so there was a really a hope that all these things would come together and people said well you don't have much evidence behind your hope and you could kind of argue either way about that and then the LHC pretty much ruled out a lot of the most

obvious super symmetric candidates there might be still some less Justified hope for super symmetry I think she had some good arguments about attacking super Symmetry and saying some of the arguments for that might have not been based on sound scientific principles I think as she's expanded her critique to physics more broadly she does is not so well Justified physics has been a very successful field um we haven't we haven't solved quantum gravity but there are lots and lots of other areas in which progress has been uh has been very exciting and has you know things

have been going well sure and that's just particle physics that's just the subfield of particle physics let alone the rest of theoretical physics which is right right many other subfields yeah for sure for sure So speaking of broadening here I mean this this I think the most inflammatory statement that she but I knew it was [ __ ] just as most of the work in that area is currently [ __ ] and just as most of academic research that your taxes pay for is almost certainly [ __ ] so is most work in particle physics

[ __ ] and to your knowledge is most academic research in general [ __ ] is this an offensive thing to say what do you think about that statement yeah it's totally totally off base I like to try to understand when someone's wrong where are they coming from you know what what would lead someone to say something like that and I guess there's something that maybe I think non-scientists should appre appreciate about research which is that most research is not [ __ ] but most research is trying to do things that are very hard and

it's trying to do it by making incremental progress so that's I think one one thing people should appreciate the other thing is that you we should be doing that that is the right way to do things and the way progress works is that if you try 50 things and 49 fail but one one succeeds and the field makes progress right and so this happens throughout science people try things that that are a little speculative that probably are going to fail and if you really said you know would You Bet Your Life that this is going

to work you should say no like it's probably not going to work um but that we should be trying that and something that happens all the time is sometimes people in Congress will look at some research study and make fun of it and you can probably make fun of a lot of things like why is that doctor just looking at Gila monster poison like obviously don't get bitten by a gila monster what more do you need why do we need millions of dollars to tell us this right and then then you study it and it

gives us OIC and and these things pay off so I think you can be cynical and you can say look this is probably going to fail that's probably going to fail and but if you zoom out a little bit that is what you should be doing as a researcher you should be you should be trying things that are hard right things where you're uncertain if it's going to succeed if you knew it's going to succeed you know be closer to engineering maybe than science yeah she's perpetuating like a naive lay person or like a legislator

congressperson view of science which is really uh unprofessional I think for someone like postering as as a as a researcher and a scientist you know right yeah not say that like all research being done is a good idea but I think another important thing is we don't know in advance always what's going to be a good idea correct yeah I in the interview with when I was speaking with Elan Ed just we don't know what our new understandings are going to bring until that understanding arrives right when you this new framework develops or new you

know information comes then you find application right application can't precede the understanding um right yeah so to to piggyback on that there's some other these just really uh hypercritical not just of research but of like the framework of Academia in general what happened instead is that everyone who works on this just repeats arguments that they all know to be wrong to keep the money coming because let's be real these people sit on cozy tax paid positions with no other task than producing useless papers that no one understands and therefore no one dares criticize are all

of you guys over there at MIT on uh inhabiting these cozy tax paid positions are you producing nothing of significance are all your papers useless and nobody understands them is that an accurate critique I I think I I I would say not I think I think there's there's been a lot of a lot of surprises a lot of new things that are being found all the time um you know again I think she's generalizing from you know maybe there might be some people every so often who you know some field might get stuck in a

rut and they're not being very Innovative and maybe they should figure it out faster but no overall even physics physics is discovering tons of things all the time don't right yeah I mean it's it's it's hard to like summarize in in an interview or or or in a video or anything like that but I I strive very much to try to convey to the public exactly how fruitful science is and and how Dynamic and how I mean but just this I you know the papers are useless and nobody understands them I mean she's pretending to

be a physicist and just saying well I don't get it so it's not true I mean like I just yeah I mean like I try to I try to steal man argument so you know what is what is the best version of what she's saying and you could say maybe most papers are not very useful but but again the field you know if you write a technical report that's only useful to the one person who follows up on that work right that's useful that produces that incremental but I mean so useless you could steal man

but no one understands first of all the idea that no one understands them any professional in that maybe she doesn't understand because it's a different subfield from the one she studied so she doesn't understand the field no one dares criticize I mean I get the impression that you guys conferences talking all the time right there's a lot of debate you know I would say the most important thing we do as a researcher is not just solve the problems but to try to figure out what the most important problems are to solve and there's constant debate

about what is the right approach what should we prioritize what's promising what what is a subfield that's stalled and we should stop investing in that it is uh it's very Dynamic you can't you cannot rest on your laurels yeah and if you yeah I guess it's also you know people do leave these jobs and go into industry where they make a lot more money and it's actually could be hard to get back in because the the field moves on quickly right so not on one thing and then to get back into this everchanging landscape Perhaps

Perhaps there are a handful of egos kind of Clinging On to an idea that's been somewhat become somewhat obsolete but to pretend that one figure like that could be representative of the entire field of physics is ridiculous yeah but also I don't think it's bad to do that so one one person I like to think about is cadalene Kiko who this mRNA Pioneer and she had an assistant professor job she was working on the idea of mRNA for Therapeutics and there were a lot of arguments why that was a bad idea because if you put

mRNA into your body your body has these proteins that will just destroy it immediately right and that's in every cell all the time right in the Cell It's okay if it's in if it's in the I'm not a biologist but my understanding is if it's outside the cell then the body will just like blast it they'll say no you should not have Mr there we're going to wipe it out okay um and so they had to they had to modify the U in you know the U base to to be some fake version of you

that would prevent it from being so she her Grant applications were rejected she didn't get tenure she was like she was the stubborn person obsessing over this thing right right right and the whole field was telling her that she was wrong you know it wasn't just like an outside like the whole field was telling you that she was an idiot this is a bad idea never G to work and she said she was a fanatic she's like well I believe in my vision I'm just G to go for it and there you know that is

the right thing it's good that people do that if if no one did that we would be worse off so we kind of need people to go for an idea I mean I guess the the the conclusion is her ideas did work obviously they they led to the MRNA vaccines and so on um but you know we need people to pursue ideas that seem like like they're probably not going to work that that is actually the correct thing for science to do so if you come as an outsider and you say look at all these

people pursuing ideas that are probably not going to work you know that's part of it yeah guilty is charged right I that's we should be doing that absolutely um here's another uh just two more really quick uh she's talking about a book that she wrote and she's afraid you know what's going wrong with the foundations of physics but I'm afraid that the problem also befalls other disciplines it's a failure of science to self-correct science is failing it's failing right in front of our eyes and no one's doing anything about it so this is the ultimate

uh you know speaking completely out of turn do you think that any physicist is qualified to comment on the status of the entire scientific community in every subfield and make this kind of a sweeping generalization yeah I don't think but qualified but I would say you know has she given evidence for that and I I think her book was pretty narrow in not even the foundations of all of physics but and not even all of particle physics but like a particular a a hope to go beyond the standard model good she had a decent critique

of that fine but yeah I don't think she's given the evidence to generalize Beyond it I think there are people who do study scientific productivity overall I think that's an interesting very interesting thing to discuss sure but I don't think yeah she's brought enough evidence to subject to all kinds of different ways of looking at that dat contextually and things like that right right not it's not a simple discussion no not at all as much as she would like to paint it as such I mean coming from more of a chemistry molecular biology background I'm

I'm absolutely fascinated by the incredible breakthroughs that have happened in in those fields in this uh Century so it's just like it's just insane I think to to hear somebody say that with authority right and I'm afraid that the problem also fals other disciplines based on what data right what were you talking about right I I bet it happens in every area of science um yeah this is my last question here um so she going on the same vein she's saying this is systemic problem C caused by the way we organize academic research this means

it can happen in other disciplines and probably does happen this is why I don't trust scientists what kind of a leap is this and do you think this is problematic rhetoric yeah I think you know it is it is jumping a little far without without much evidence um and yeah I think you know we can talk about we can talk about whether science is working overall um I don't know what she's bringing to the table as a critique I actually I do want to respond to something you didn't ask which I think illustrates something interesting

so she talks about in one of videos she does talk about a few uh advances that are not very impressive like the new the new iPhone sure is that much that much better than the old iPhone and I think there's actually something kind of deep there which is the first iPhone was a great Advance right and then the subsequent iPhones each one was kind of less than of an advance and now you know it's not so exciting in a new phone like how could it possibly be better like if it if it if it were

thinner like would that really matter you know there's things have kind of saturated there and that's actually how Innovation and progress what's that it's kind of How It's a good metaphor for scientific progress in a way yeah and and technological as well you know people would say things like where's my flying car right you know instead instead we got iPhones so there's a period when cars were getting better and then they kind of saturated and then what progress does progress does not look like cars keep on getting better it looks like there's something else you

know there's the internet and then again progress doesn't look like the internet gets better and better there's something else like advances in biology and so that you know I think that's sort of a natural that's sort of what we should expect of of scientific progress is that there'll be a subfield where there's initially like huge progress and then it kind of tails off so it could you know it could be that particle physics in the 20th century made great progress we just discovered all these new things and now the low hanging fruit is gone and

it's a little bit harder to make more progress and and in fact the ways we make progress are different like At first in particle physics we made a ton of progress with colliders and now maybe we make more progress from looking at at astrophysics and at cosmology and at nutrin no from reactors and so on so you know I think this is a this is another another thing to keep in mind like when we look at how Ive is science you can see a lot of subfields that are all stalling every single subfield could be

like oh that one's running out of ideas that one's running out of ideas you know should we be worried and the answer is if we keep on inventing new subfields and new topics and the new topics are productive and they create things that we were never thinking about before you know like my own field of quantum Computing didn't exist 50 years ago that I think I think that's how we should think about that's one of the ways we should think about is science progressing overall um and and and also because I I like to think

of like how can you how can you combine like the view of a cynic would say well that area is UN you know not looking promising and this subfield is stalling so maybe all of science is failing yeah and and it comes in waves and every subfield has waves crashing at different times right there are things that are booming right now and things that are right it's just I you know I Sabina strikes me as someone who in 1895 or you know 1898 would have said physics is done nothing is happening right that's right that's

right the most incredible 30 years of progress in the history of physics and it's just such uh but the thing that bothers me is that I I believe that she knows exactly what she's doing she knows exactly what her intentions are with this kind of rhetoric um and right is to it yeah the video might be less interesting if she said you know scientific establishment is making the right choices their judgment calls are the right ones I have nothing to add to their correct decisions you know the videos would be a lot shorter and less

interesting then maybe that's part of what's going on yeah and you can see from The View counts what what is being rewarded here um okay thanks very much yeah I really really appreciate that perspective that was that was very pleas do you have anything else to close with or no no thanks for uh yeah for putting this together and for working on this fantastic thanks so much yeah another excellent chat with someone who is actually contributing to science unlike Saina well let's do one more shall we everything is best in threes after all let's now

talk with Tracy Slater yet another professor of physics at MIT wow MIT represent Tracy does Dark Matter research yes that thing that science deniers love to make fun of thinking that an entire community of researchers who gather data about a thing that definitely exists can be discredited with nuh-uh because me think it sound funny let's hear what a real physicist sounds like when discussing this topic Tracy thanks so much for joining me uh what what do you do over there at MIT exactly oh well yeah thanks for inviting me I'm happy to be here uh

I work primarily on do mattera I'm a theorist so I try to figure out um what dark mattera might be how dark mattera might manifest in various experiments and how we would tell if it's stock matter of us as something else if we did see a signal now there's just before getting into the sabinaa stuff uh there's so so many people out there that just think oh dark matter is stupid it's a flight of fancy I think partially because it was named so whimsically um is there do you have a sound bite just a 20

second thing that you could say that can convince people like we're very very sure you know as sure as sure can be that dark matter exists we just don't know what it is uh I can attempt it so yeah I mean we all right let me let me see I'm really putting you on the plot here in indeed so when we say dark matter all we mean is that there appears to be some component of the universe that behaves like matter in that it has gravity but we don't know what it is like that that's

really what dark means in this context I in some sense dark matter is a parameterization of an in this regard there are lots of things that dark matter could be we don't we don't know what it is like but we do know that we have done a large number of really precise measurements that look extremely consistent with the statement that whatever this new component is it behaves very much like some new kind of matter that behaves just like ordinary matter gravitationally but doesn't have other interactions right it's nonionic it doesn't do like what we learned

in the Bor model in 10th Grade you know absorb the photon Photon and electron right it's uh it's not like that but I exactly and I mean when I say the the early studies of Dark Matter were really just at the level of oh look it seems like there's some extra mass here that we're not seeing in the Stars G it seems like it seems like stars and gas clouds are orbiting a bit faster around galaxies than we might have expected and at that point it was completely plausible to say oh you know maybe um

maybe our theory of gravity is wrong or maybe there's some additional Mass but since then the at this point I would say the main evidence for this kind of dark matter component is cosmological we've measured thousands of degrees of freedom in the cosmic microwave background and in observations of the large scale structure of the universe and that really all looks shockingly consistent with just this one new component that is really boring in some sense it just behaves totally like ordinary matter except that it doesn't really interact with radiation so to me the 's razor hypothesis

is there really is some numatic component that doesn't interact with radiation and then like once you know that there are a ton of open questions as to what is this stuff where did it come from you but but the but it's really hard to do much better than a one degree of Freedom model that explains thousands of data points yeah that's what I was looking for I think a lot of people are stuck on this like you know decades ago first becoming aware of this potentiality way of looking at it not realizing all the empirical

science that's been done over those decades to really confirm in many different ways that this matter is there we're just not sure of its exact nature so sometimes in public talks I there's a nice graph on Wikipedia actually about you know the scientific method is sort of a cycle where you you get some data and then you try to you know you come up with possible explanations for that data and then you do follow up experiments to try to test the possible explanation and this is exactly what happened in the context of the Dark Matter

Theory we had some initial data we had a bunch of competing hypotheses we came up with additional tests to do in cosmology and in observations of colliding clusters like the bullet like the bullet cluster and that those data mostly pointed in One Direction which is what we're looking at does appear to be an additional form of matter which is why most of the field has shifted in that direction you're lying you're part of the corrupt Ivory Tower you're lying to protect your grants in your funding and you know that dark matter is ridiculous I mean

at some as a theorist at some level I would have been much happier if the results of these experiments were that it looked like some kind of weird modification to gravity because from a theoretical perspective a uh a modification to the general theory of relativity in in fored would be much more surprising and much more startling than just saying oh it looks like maybe maybe there's some extra particle that we haven't found yet right I mean it took us quite a long time to find the neutrino and that's I mean the neutrino is part of

dark matter it's a stable particle they're abundant in our universe um but it took us a while to find them because they interact very weakly so I mean at some level just saying oh yeah there some other the particle it's stable but it doesn't interact very well so they haven't found it yet I mean at some level that is the most boring explanation yeah Universe shattering yeah but but it appears to I mean at the same time it I mean like obviously it's interesting you know it's it's pointing to something beyond the physics that we

understand which is always interesting to me but I mean at some point it's all it's also kind of the most boring explanation so when people say to me oh you know why do you need something like so exotic like a new particle like dark matter I'm like no no no this is this is the boring explanation some kind of fundamental modification of the structure of gravity would at some level be much more interesting but that's what kills me and I say this all my content about dark matter is that if it wasn't called dark matter

if it was called nonionic matter nobody would care there are so many new particles that have been theorized over the decades the lay people don't care at all it's just that physicists have whimsically selected the name dark matter that gets everyone freaking out they're just like this is ridiculous Dark Matter sounds like The Dark Crystal fantasy like it's just we we could try to make transparent matter work if you think it would be helpful I mean transparent matter is a more accurate term than dark matter this stuff doesn't absorb light let's start the petition because

I'm just so tired of letting people like not getting this anyway let's dive into this stuff so um Sabina piggybacking on basically what we were just talking about she says that uh she thinks that thinking up new particles isn't a good strategy for progress in physics the whole discipline is stuck um she thought physicist would think about it that there would be rational debate but that never came no one was interested so is particle physics currently stuck is there rational debate among the community about which directions to proceed in um so the short answer to

your question is yes I think there is a lot of debate I think you may have noticed when talking to physicists we're not actually usually very shy about getting into arguments um and uh having having fights over what we think is the right way to proceed so yeah I would not say that it's stuck in the sense that we have many ideas for directions to proceed in but I mean there is a kernel of Truth in this and that what is true is that we're a point where there are many possible directions there's not sort

of one obvious single path to follow we're not in a situation where the whole field is convinced that dark matter is one particular thing or that there's exactly one right strategy to follow to learn more about physics and so that's led to a very active ongoing discussion and debate about how best to proceed and in fact in the not distant past we spent two whole years between 2020 and 2022 uh talking about this and having discussions about the path forward as a community and what was called the Snowmass Community planning process and I was involved

in so many town halls and Grassroots meetings in the context of that process just with the goal of trying to hear from everybody in the field about what questions they thought were important and what ideas they had for um for proceeding and I mean there were hundreds of Pages written in the context of that so if people are interested in learning about what ideas people have for exploring particle physics into the future if you go to the physics archive and look for papers that white papers that have snow MK in the title you will find

a lot of them there there's also a snow Mass report that summarizes that Community discussion so and in some ways this in some ways like this is a bit different from where we were maybe 15 years ago so prior to the y of the higs boson we had a pretty solid argument that there had to be some kind of hitherto unknown physics at an energy scale that the Large Hadron Collider was going to be able to test in the sense that if there wasn't anything new our standard model of particle physics was not actually internally

consistent right so like there had to be something we didn't know what it was the higs bone was a hypothesis for what it was but like there had to be something going on or the theory was just going to break down um and that argument was correct it worked the new physics was the higs poison so now we're in a but now we don't have an argument quite like that in the present day we know that the standard model is not complete because it doesn't explain Dark Matter it doesn't explain Dark Energy it doesn't explain

even the mass of the neutrinos for example but what we don't have is like a guarantee that if we do one specific experiment that everyone agrees on it will tell us the answer to those things so that that means that we're in a situ so so that lends itself to a situation where there are lots of ideas for what experiments you might do but there's not a sort of like clear no lose theorem where like do this experiment and it will definitely tell you the answer to what dark matter is uh just because there are

there is such a wide range of possibilities for what it could be I appreciate that answer because from my perspective on the outside of the field it it appears to me to be the precise opposite of the way Sabina characterizes it because you guys have you working with dark matter you have many many candidates for what Dark Matter could be everybody's invest getting different things and that's just dark matter there's theoretical physicists that are working with pen and paper on Quantum field theories there are astrophysicists that are looking out to the universe and just looking

to see what they see and there's just like I am I'm I adore astrophysics and theoretical physics I I don't have too much experience with it but I'm utterly fascinated by it and I see all of these people doing all these different things and you know to I it's certainly possible that 90% of the research won't turn up anything terribly groundbreaking or useful but it's just so it's not just it goes so far beyond simple pessimism but it's just abject dishonesty to paint the field this way it just really it boils my blood you know

yeah yeah I mean you know I don't like I don't want to call anybody dishonest I think that you know most people in this field who care about this field are really like genuinely trying to find the truth and anybody who is trying to find the truth about the universe you know I welcome input from and I and I think how field generally does welcome that input again we spent a lot of time in snow Mass really trying to do really trying to do a Grassroots process I I also think I do think that there

is a sort of broad question about uh you could call them like top down versus bottom up approaches I think that you know partly with the success of the search for the higsbo on in that Epoch a lot of people sort of had the feeling that the right approach to theoretical physics is to say like you develop a theoretical understanding first that tells you what the right answer is from first principles and that guides your experimental program and tells you exactly what to do and like that's the top down approach and it was really successful

finding the higsbo on but that top down approach was also why you know many people were pretty hopeful that we were going to find super symmetry at the large hatron collider and so far we have not found evidence of super symmetry at the large hatron collider and that has spurred a lot of you know like reflection in the field and what I've seen over the last 15 years or so is that the field has actually made a big swing in response to that to more sort of bottomup approaches where the question is not like what

is our best candidate for what Dark Matter could be but instead the question is all right what's the space of possibilities for what Dark Matter could be and how do we make sure that we don't miss something super yes right like how how do we make sure that we really think about all right what's the range of possible answers to this question what kinds of experiments would allow us to test these different possible answers and you know how do we make sure that we don't miss something because of concerns that this top down approach might

be causing us to miss signals that are actually very detectable just because we haven't looked in the right place and one kind of like large scale question that the field is discussing and very openly I've had a lot of conversations with people about that about what is the right kind of balance between these top de between the sort of topown strategy and this bottom up strategy um at the moment I think we're in a regime where there's so much to do from the bottom up perspective that this isn't a very hard decision there there are

a bunch of directions where you can build really where you can especially like exploit recent advances in Quantum senses and our understanding of exotic materials to build experiments that are not very expensive and let you have sensitivity to Dark Matter scenarios that you just had no sensitivity to before so there's a lot of sort of relatively low hanging fruit to pick but you can ask the question like okay what if in you know like 10 or 15 years we pick all the low hanging fruit we do you know we really try to like build up

this bottom up program and search for search for this wide range of possibilities for dark matter and and what we have in you know 15 years is still like a bunch of null results it would be really nice at that point to have top- down principles that you can trust to some degree that will give you some guidance as to okay where where should you try to Pro more deeply where should try to search more deeply you know you mentioned people doing paper and pencil theoretical work a chunk of that is you just trying to

understand what could self-consistent theories of physics beyond the standard model look like what kind of guiding principles might we be able to use that would allow us to understand where to direct our experimental efforts and I mean I to me that's very complimentary to the approach that by part of the field is more focused on at the moment which is you're trying to make sure okay let's not let's not miss something stupid like let's not miss and obvious honing D matter signal because we just didn't know how to do the analysis yeah you you need

the Sherlock Holmes using deduction to try to figure out where to look but sometimes you need the 30 people arm in-arm sweeping the field exactly what are we gon to find maybe you find this key piece of evidence that changes the whole uh investigation but you know speaking of of the research that you guys do I mean this one I think is one of the most offensive statements that Sabina makes uh what she says here what happened instead is that everyone who works on this just repeats arguments that they all know to be wrong to

keep the money coming because let's be real these people sit on cozy tax paid positions with no other task than producing useless papers that no one understands and therefore no one dares criticize so contrary to everything that we've been talking about you you know you're wrong you and all your colleagues know you're wrong and you're lying to keep the funding coming in your papers are useless they're gibberish nobody understands them and it's all just to keep the money flowing is that is that how it works yeah I I I think you know if I wanted

to make a lot of money there would be much easier ways to do it than this like making YouTube videos I think would more money at least the way well I I I mean I I don't know that YouTube videos are that easy but but let me say one thing because I think this is actually important so I you know i' some sometimes people ask like what do you think is the most important trait of a scientist you people who are like oh you know am I smart enough to be a physicist like am I

you know do do I do I have the math skills needed for this and to me the most important trait of a scientist is integrity and like by by none I mean curiosity is really like curiosity I would say is probably the second most important and then like intelligence and willingness to work hard but the most important thing is integrity like in the ab of Integrity all of those good qualities can be useless or or actively detrimental in the case of like people who falsify data something like that the goal here is to understand the

truth I mean we're trying to understand how the universe works at a fundamental level to understand things that you know nobody in human history has ever been able to figure out and that is really hard and we only do it by working together and being and like being honest and candid about the things we understand and the things we don't understand and that's my goal so like if anybody thinks that I am repeating arguments that I know to be wrong I would really like them to tell me that directly and point out what it said

and explain like why it's wrong and why they and why they think I know that it's wrong right I mean I'm sure that yeah of course I'm sure that I have said things off hand that are not completely correct just by accident I really appreciate when people point that out so I can fix it and you know like these are eye statements but I actually I mean I do actually feel that this is generally the case in my field and that my colleagues are generally focused on on on getting on getting the right answer on

getting the truth I mean this is what we're motivated by we want to understand the Universe I mean and and you know you could say how Tracy you're being so naive but I mean let me tell you a story so when I was a young PhD student I was working on one of my first real research project and I was trying to reproduce in the literature from a paper that was pretty well known and uh I tried to reproduce and I got a different answer so I checked it several times and after checking it several

times I was still like still not getting the right answer and well one variation of my calculation had gotten the same answer but I was pretty sure that variation was wrong so I thought about this for a bit and then I you know got my nerve together and I emailed the authors to say hey um I think your paper is wrong now this was a pretty well-known paper it had been out for about six years the authors were extremely prominent people in the field and I was a second year grad student who was one paper

so I was pretty nervous about this you I have and also I was like oh the paper is 6 years old you know even if they're nice it's probably going to take them a long time to check up but what actually happened was that about 2 days after I sent that email they wrote back to me and said so I had suggested in my email maybe the error is X because I had gotten the same answer as then when I made this particular error about two days later they wrote back to me they said you're

right we checked it we went back to the paper uh we confirmed we agree that this is the the error we have fixed what we think is the error here is the modifi version of our result can you check it against what you're getting and tell us if you get the same answer wow and uh and and and I checked it and it agreed and I wrote back to them and said yes we're good and they said great um we'll correct the paper and acknowledge you and a day or two later my adviser called me

into his office and said hey look at this and there was an email from the senior person on that paper uh thanking my advisor for like saying you know like it's great that your student found this error and is she looking for a job wow like so you know like this was a really senior person in the field this was like a student with no reputation emailing them to say hey I think you made a mistake in a kind of prominent paper that lots of people had cited and his immediate reaction was ah great let's

fix the mistake and this student is great you know maybe I should see if they want a job yeah to me that is like both an example of how you should handle this situation like it's my example of try how I try to handle it when people uh tell me about problems and it reflects the fact that you know the the leaders of our field really do generally want to find the truth I mean similarly if somebody um if somebody tells me that there's something wrong in one of my papers my first reaction is first

like all right I should check that and if they're correct like great thank you so much I mean I spend I hope my papers are you know you said like are my papers useless well I mean I hope they're useful I spend a lot of time and effort on my papers in general the reason I write papers is because they answer a question where I'm personally interested in knowing the answer like if I was not personally interested in knowing the answer it would be very hard to motivate myself to do all that work um but

you know I mean like anybody else I can have bugs in code I can you know there could there can be some place where I've made a mistake if somebody else can like try to reproduce the work and point out to me where the bug is or where the problem is that's great like I mean because it allows me to make the paper actually correct yeah terms of yeah no go ahead and finish in terms of what my papers do I mean I've discovered new structures in our galaxy shining and gamma rays I've built software

that lets us predict how dark matter interactions with ordinary matter could have changed the history of the universe how we would know that it was happening if it was there I showed you know in like recent papers I've been trying to figure out how to resolve some apparent paradoxes that show up when you try to calculate the of certain processes using quantum mechanics I mean I did all of these because they were questions that I'm interested in I hope they're interesting to other people as well I don't feel like I'm entitled to receive funding to

answer these questions but you know the way the process works is I apply for Grants which are reviewed competitively I tell the you know funding agencies what I would like to work on and uh sometimes they give me the money and sometimes they don't if they do give me the money then then I proceed and I mean I'm very grateful that the US government and taxpayers have historic felt that it's worthwhile to fund people like me to answer questions like this that are more about figuring out what's going on in our universe and and less

about practical applications but yeah I mean that's history we have a rich history of that and and that that and that status is in Jeopardy in this current Administration um it's yeah I mean just everything you're describing uh if it's interesting to you presumably it's interesting to other people in the field you clearly understand each other's papers otherwise you could not be correcting each other and agree on the corrections and furthermore did the Avalanche of of of of gratuitous funding cease because the prominent researcher had made an error no they acknowledged an error corrected the

paper and then they continue along with their illustrious career I mean I just I I I really hope that anecdotes such as yours can help serve to I I want the public to understand how the scientific Community actually operates not the caricature that demagogues like Saina put put put out I want people to know what you guys do you know and I can only say so much since I'm not a scientist no I I and I really appreciate it I I'll also say that I mean at least in my field it actually gets you a

lot of social status and Kudos if you can prove that something is wrong that Pro people in the field had said was right like this is not this we we give a lot of credit to people who demonstrate that a widely held view was in fact incorrect it's the quickest way to get to get a paper or even a Nobel it's basically it can be yeah um yeah or or or a faculty job and and I guess maybe the last thing I'll say is you know regarding this uh cozy taxpayer funded jobs well you know

two two things first that that there is a practical reason why governments tend to fund basic research which is that if you get a lot of smart motiv people together and ask them to solve difficult problems the solutions they come up with very often have applications beyond the original questions I mean the reason I'm doing this is because I want to understand the universe not because of some spin-off technology but um as it turns out a sort of Fairly common trajectory is something like you give me money to figure out a new experimental design for

searching for a particular type of dark matter and my awesome experimentalist colleague looks at this and goes oh that's really cool I'll design a new type of quantum sensor so I can make that design work better and then that sensea ends up having applications outside Computing better propulsion better whatever um yeah what lawmakers and and you know all these people they they're just smart enough to know that let the smart people do their science and we get stuff from it we don't know what it's going to be even they don't know what it's going to

be yet yeah do the science but that's the rich historically seems to have mostly worked out yeah and the other aspect of this is you know what where does the funding go when taxpayers give me funding for my research it's not going to my salary my salary is being paid by MIT I mean I'm being taught to teach classes and to run a research group there right where almost all the funding so in experiment the funding can go to actually build the machines that we use to test these hypotheses um but in theory almost all

the funding goes to funding PhD students and funding post-doctoral researchers and those jobs are not uh particularly the typical trajectory for a researcher in my field is that you know you do your undergrad degree so you finish a very math heavy difficult challenging undergraduate degree if you're going to go into grad school you're typically somebody who has really excellent grades you could go get a job in finance or consulting or Tech and your friends who do that instead are going to be making significantly more than twice as much money as you from the very start

and instead you go off to do a PhD uh which is not very well paid like you're going to be living with roommates for the next five years while your friends are going in like buying houses starting their jobs and having kids you do that for five years then you graduate with your PhD then you do post-doctoral research for at least three years six to nine years are more common you have to apply for a new job and move to a new city or sometimes a new country every two to three years and you know

like the rate of pay for post talks is not terrible but it's also way way way less than people with comparable qualification another few years before you're getting even decent wages again you so I mean I was I I I did I did my PhD at Havard was you know it was a good school so I'm definitely not complaining about my own situation like I love my job I feel extremely privileged and extremely grateful to the people who support my work for allowing me to do what I do because it's fantastic but um you know

I'm not in this area because I'm motivated by money when I was a grad student in the final year of my PhD at Harvard like I had my dream post job lined up I was so happy I felt so fortunate my dream post job was at the institute for advanced study where Einstein also worked um it paid $660,000 a year that um that whole last year I was getting emails from Consulting and finance firms in New York City who were like come work for us starting salary is $200,000 a year plus bonuses right and I

remember kind of looking at this and being like Oh on one hand that's a lot of money but but you have these questions that you need answered I I mean it's the the the the the idea to me that you and your colleagues are sitting around popping champagne bottles hahahha those idiot are those idiots are sending us more money to do absolutely nothing what a great job we have I mean it's just like I I can't believe anybody could fall for this kind of characterization but yeah yeah you know again like I'm you know I

I definitely don't want to be to be like complaining about I mean I have I have been super fortunate I am really really lucky to be able to work at a place like MIT with the awesome postdocs and students that I work with and I am very grateful that our community as a whole is willing to fund people like me to explore these questions about how the universe works um and and and to support the amazing students and postdocs who do a lot of the who who really do a huge amount of the Hands-On research

such but like I mean this is this is not the easy pathway and this is not the pathway that you follow if you're primarily motivated by making money correct yeah very true well thank you so much for your perspective you and your colleagues I think that you know we've we this you know this is only only uh three researchers but it's it's enough and even enough of a diverse perspective from the three of you to to I think hopefully help the viewer get a better sense of what's going on with physicists in Academia so thank

you very much again well you know thanks for doing this but at the same time you know I want to emphasize we are I I do think like there are big questions to be answered about you know like what is the appropriate balance between top down and bottom up procedures how do we proceed if we're in an environment where we don't really have like great top- down principles guiding where we should go next you what what is what are the best approaches that we can come up with to try to understand the microphysics of dark

matter because that this is one of the best keys that one it seems like one of the biggest clues that we have at the moment to what might be there in fundamental physics that we don't yet understand so I mean these are like I mean there's there's not there's nothing wrong with asking these questions and it's good questions that everybody in my field I think is is thinking about at the moment and if you have a better answer than what we've come up with you know we we want to hear it right don't just naysay

with nothing to contribute yeah and in fact that's how we've been doing science for quite some time now at least a century so yeah but uh yeah thanks again yeah really appreciate it okay well thanks Dave thanks for chatting this is something I really had hoped to drive home with these interviews these researchers are excited to be investigating the fundamental nature of the universe they are invigorated by it the idea that they are motivated exclusively by money let alone lying to get more money is the most most ludicrous and barbarically offensive notion conceivable apart from

the blatant projection from Saina the money hungry internet grifter she really should be profoundly ashamed of this repeated accusation fortunately I think that many scientists are waking up to the seriousness of the situation for years I've been trying to get more scientists to speak out against charlatans and generalized science denial but I would rarely get any traction with James tour everyone I spoke to by email acknowledged what a miserable fraud he is but I could only get Cronin and Benner to actually show their faces and say something nobody else would do it and given how

much James dragged both of their names through the mud I totally understand why but we need more researchers to be courageous in this manner now under this current Administration with funding for science being slashed in an unprecedented manner I think everyone in the scientific Community finally sees how dire things really are hostility towards science and Academia among the public which is actively being molded by internet-based Propaganda from well-funded conservative think tanks as well as isolated bad faith actors like Saina has created an environment that is receptive to figures like Trump who are then voted into

office in part based on a platform of science denial which then has enormous repercussions for scientists the war on science is very real and the silver lining of this threat is that I believe more and more researchers will begin speaking out the internet needs to hear from the people doing the actual work they need to hear very specifically how Sabina and dozens of others like her maliciously misrepresent them and their research for financial or political gain at this point the idea that Sabina is anything but a grifter for cash is absolutely laughable her descent down

the conservative science denial pipeline is undeniable self-censorship is rising just whining about pronouns and Dei the quintessential conservative dog whistle web falsifies Dark Matter prediction and no one cares to be interpreted as dark matter is stupid and made up and climate change is stupid and made up and trans ideology is stupid and made up because as I've said many times before it's all related to the lay person crisis in cosmology got so much worse crisis you guys then to demonstrate her complete lack of integrity she sometimes throws in new physics breakthrough could change everything Sabina

I thought physics had been totally stagnant for 50 years the case for string theory just got stronger really I thought they were a bunch of idiots soaking up all the grant money to do absolutely nothing there is zero consistency that's the nature of clickbait and to reiterate a point I made in my first video about her if she only did these vacuous little hype pieces I would never have said anything her pops videos are not worth much but they're not specifically harmful these other ones are she keeps doing them because of the view counts and

I believe the ones that aren't like this are just put out to give the illusion of balance and also the authority to speak on current research no matter how far outside of her expertise but however you slice it over time she has slowly drifted down the right-wing Rabbit Hole like fixtures in the antiva community who flaunt a degree and minimal practical experience to lend credibility to their script of Lies disparaging real scientists Saina does the same she wants her viewers to think that she was just too good of a physicist to be Tethered to this

sinking ship in actuality whether it's due to a lack of ability her insufferable attitude or a combination there of Sabina is nothing but a bitter failure who didn't get the illustrious career she wanted so like a scorned ex-girlfriend she tries to set the whole thing Ablaze and cash in from afar what's next I wouldn't be surprised if she starts promoting intelligent design and conducting interviews with Steven Meyer that seems to be the next notch on the pipeline anything to keep her science denying fans satiated the ones who are already hostile towards Academia and are looking

for anyone and anything to reinforce their hatred and boy are they transparent with their biases one trip into any of her comment sections is a harrowing experience endless comments about how this isn't just physics it's climate science too and whatever other science they've been trained to deny by the other propaganda they consume good thing we have such a super awesome whistleblower and Beacon of Truth to trust blindly Sabina Embraces the support of these buffoons so much that she has even taken to retweeting literal Nazis take a look at this guy this is his pinned comment

so you absolutely can't miss it even if you look at his account for 5 seconds now see saina's reaction you'd think a German would be a little more eager to distance herself from Nazis but here we are so that's it for today we can all see that Sabina will never disengage from what she's doing so all I can do is shine a spotlight on how ridiculous she is while also amplifying voices from within the scientific Community the people who are actually putting in the work to help us understand the universe will Sabina issue yet another

childish response whining about how science is a big dumb poopy head probably until next time