Wall Street Journal Decries 'The Rise of Conspiracy Physics' (msn.com)
- Reference: 0179574564
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/09/28/2356244/wall-street-journal-decries-the-rise-of-conspiracy-physics
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-rise-of-conspiracy-physics/ar-AA1MlQLJ
"Now an unlikely new villain has been added to the list: theoretical physicists," they write, saygin resentment of scientific authority figures "is the major attraction of what might be called 'conspiracy physics'."
> In recent years, a group of YouTubers and podcasters have attracted millions of viewers by proclaiming that physics is in crisis. The field, they argue, has discovered little of importance in the last 50 years, because it is dominated by groupthink and silences anyone who dares to dissent from mainstream ideas, like string theory... Most fringe theories are too arcane for listeners to understand, but anyone can grasp the idea that academic physics is just one more corrupt and self-serving establishment... In this corner of the internet, the scientist Scott Aaronson has written, "Anyone perceived as the 'mainstream establishment' faces a near-insurmountable burden of proof, while anyone perceived as 'renegade' wins by default if they identify any hole whatsoever in mainstream understanding...
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> As with other kinds of authorities, there are reasonable criticisms to be made of academic physics. By some metrics, scientific productivity has slowed since the 1970s. String theory has not fulfilled physicists' early dreams that it would become the ultimate explanation of all forces and matter in our universe. The Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, has delivered fewer breakthroughs than scientists expected when it turned on in 2010. But even reasonable points become hard to recognize when expressed in the ways YouTube incentivizes. Conspiracy physics videos with titles like "They Just Keep Lying" are full of sour sarcasm, outraged facial expressions and spooky music...
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> Leonard Susskind, director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, says physicists need to be both more sober and more forceful when addressing the public. The limits of string theory should be acknowledged, he says, but the idea that progress has slowed isn't right. In the last few decades, he and other physicists have figured out how to make progress on the vast project of integrating general relativity and quantum mechanics, the century-old pillars of physics, into a single explanation of the universe.
The bitter attacks on leading physicists get a succinct summary in the article from Chris Williamson, a "Love Island" contestant turned podcast host. "This is like 'The Kardashians' for physicists — I love it."
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-rise-of-conspiracy-physics/ar-AA1MlQLJ
Part of the problem (Score:1)
Is academics don't wish, or don't have the social chops to engage with the public at large - and it's not constrained to just physics, but scientific fields in general. There's very few people that are able to do this - Neil Tyson or Michio Kaku are able to present semi-complex ideas to a general audience and are willing to get in front of a camera. They come off as personable.
On the opposite end, you have people like Bill Nye or Hitchens or Dawkins that come off as very angry, combative, condescending
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TFA isn't very good about describing the problem in detail. I watched Sabine Hossenfelder's ( [1]https://www.youtube.com/@Sabin... [youtube.com] ) for a while over the past 2 years and her critique is very "inside baseball". She's a bona fide physicist herself and she's not critiquing established physics, she's complaining that THEORETICAL physics stalled out about 50 years ago and that professional theoretical physicists (which basically is ALL in academia and government jobs) are just publishing about hypotheti
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@SabineHossenfelder
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I hadn't watched her videos for a few months and this one from two weeks ago is quite a good review of what she's on about:
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
which ... tbh is not much different than what her 2017 book "Lost in Math" was about
this is a review from around its release [2]https://www.math.columbia.edu/... [columbia.edu]
i remember being quite against her POV originally, but after many examples ... i'm mostly won over that there's a lot of wasted brainpower in the space.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO5u3V6LJuM
[2] https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=10314
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> I hadn't watched her videos for a few months and this one from two weeks ago is quite a good review of what she's on about: [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I don't know what happened with my post but that was the link I wanted to include, thanks.
Mod parent up, etc.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO5u3V6LJuM
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I've heard the other side of her too which is guys like Brian Greene defend why string theory hasn't predicted anything that came true in the way Relativity has. It does feel like we should be farther along, but I'm not a physicist and I don't want to get lumped in with conspiracy nutters. At the end of the day there's nothing anyone can do about the pace of physics. Well that's not even true, I suppose Trump can always make it slower.
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I would add that the academic community writ large is suffering from self-imposed wounds around the 'publish or perish' model of the past. The 'Sciences' both physical and social need to get their house in order. Not because they are inherently wrong, or not useful, etc, but because the world has changed and they have not.
IMHO they need to revisit peer-review...not throw it out, but double down. Make the peer review process more legitimate, involve more people as a regular part of their academic jobs.
Medical Science has been pretty corrupted (Score:2)
by Big Pharma.
I recall a Dutch research team which found that baking powder could be helpful for treating certain types of cancer.
They abandoned the research because they could not find any way to patent backing powder anymore.
It is this kind of corruption of science that is blinding us from real breakthroughs.
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Baking soda cancer cures !== theoretical physics
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> I recall a Dutch research team which found that baking powder could be helpful for treating certain types of cancer. They abandoned the research because they could not find any way to patent backing powder anymore.
Maybe there were also other reasons they abandoned it, I don't know when that was but I found a lot of recent studies on sodium bicarbonate, here are a few from 2024 and one from 2023:
Sodium bicarbonate potentiates the antitumor effects of Olaparib in ovarian cancer via cGMP/PKG-mediated ROS
Re: (Score:2)
Fenbendazole is a broad-spectrum de-wormer that is used to treat many of the intestinal parasites that affect pet animals.
According to much literature it is also a broad-spectrum cancer cure, so claims [1]this article backed up with a long list of scientific papers. [rifttv.com]
Is it safe for humans? Seems to be as a variation of it, Mebendazole, is already widely used for intestinal parasites in humans and some cancer patients have already tried it with success.
Big Pharma, and industrialists as a whole, are the ones who a
[1] https://www.rifttv.com/the-overlooked-miracle-drug-for-cancer-why-big-pharma-fears-fenbendazole/
Like to see each area publish its top 25 list (Score:4, Interesting)
So that the general public can see, side by side, what each major research area has contributed in the last 25 years.
A top 25 list with the benefits of each research discovery in terms of how it makes the daily life/health of citizens better.
It can be followed by a relative amount of money spent on research, think tanks, construction projects for each area.
Each area's researchers can rank and rate their own area.
Point being (Score:2)
The point being that the way research is discussed is that each research area has largely a siloed discussion and media coverage.
This could be physics to chemistry silos or newborn baby diseases to middle-aged women silos.
A simple question of did one research area contribute more than another research area?
Or did a $1 billion spent on specialized research facilities for research area contribute more than $1 billion spent on research in another area.
We want science research to result in improvements to avera
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Why?
How would you determine the weight of some minor piece of math or physics that ended up being the final part of a technology? What about all the other parts that are legacy, or that already had uses... do they count in this new context?
Every time someone tries this, we quickly learn they imagine that there's some kind of videogame-esque pipeline that just fills a bar to 100% and then a usable technology pops out the other end. It just doesn't work in any way that would make this kind of value based revi
Related article in arstech... (Score:5, Interesting)
[1]https://arstechnica.com/scienc... [arstechnica.com] :"They’ve helpfully characterized “the five principal forces of antiscience “ into alliterative groups: (1) plutocrats and their political action committees, (2) petrostates and their politicians and polluters, (3) fake and venal professionals—physicians and professors, (4) propagandists, especially those with podcasts, and (5) the press. The general tactic is that (1) and (2) hire (3) to generate deceitful and inflammatory talking points, which are then disseminated by all-too-willing members of (4) and (5)."
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/09/who-should-we-blame-for-the-current-war-on-science/
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Unfortunately it is all mixed together thanks to Dr. Trump and people who displace their anger where it does not belong.
Wall Street Journal (Score:1)
Should anyone really care?
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I don't. I give far more credence to what Sabine Hossenfelder (one of the people shouting "bullshit") [1]has to say [youtube.com] about the issue. To her credit, she doesn't go crying to reddit when people publicly disagree with her.
tl;dw - far too much time and effort is spent studying mathematical models that are intellectually satisfying but have no physical basis in reality. This is good for securing grant money but doesn't expand our knowledge of the Universe in any meaningful way. It's somewhat telling that string the
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO5u3V6LJuM
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> Should anyone really care?
Their opinion pieces are purchased by the MIC, so maybe.
They must be afraid somebody is sniffing around in "their" physics.
We've had government physicists say plainly that MIC R&D has fundamental breakthroughs in topological physics that the public is not privy to.
JWST is discarding "established" cosmological physics theories by the week. This should be celebrated by scientists!
I recently listened to a retired Lockheed guy talking about light propagation theory and in tha
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> Should anyone really care?
That's what I don't get. Are there any of these theoretical physicists throwing around conspiracy theories? Or this is "bruhaha" about what a bunch of people on Youtube think? Isn't the real story that some supposedly sane people care what a bunch of non-experts are saying about the experts. Or more like how a few journalists need to find a story to boost their careers, so this is the best they can do?
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You holding out for Fox News?
Physics versus Next Generation Physics (Score:3, Interesting)
I think, based on the recent testimony from first hand whistleblowers, and the 700 first hand whistleblowers in The Disclosure Project from Steven Greer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2hk8Qp8dd0), there is the typical physics you learn in school, versus the next generation physics you learn when you work at Lockheed Martin Skunkworks where they have been making their own gravitic propulsion systems since at least 1954 after they reverse engineered downed alien space craft in the 1930's.... So, to say there is nothing new in physics is really hiding the facts that national security protects the math that was written 90 years ago that explains the truth of next generation physics. Even if you were to figure it out on your own, you'd be silenced by various government entities that consider this math to be a national security issue to begin with. I think there needs to be a sea change in the release of this science in order for humanity to progress. It should not be in the hands of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and others that use it for human trafficking operations, i.e. the one in 2009 in Indonesia as told by Michael Herrera (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zm4nh3S66I)
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This post is evidence that YouTube is a great place to find brain damaging bloviation: a diaspora of persecution complexes and paranoia.
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They can barely hold the government together, you're telling me they have alien tech? Get real.
Physics IS full of waste and fraud (Score:2)
One need not see very many current science papers to see how much nonsense is being peddled as science. Aside from the fakes, from both AI and paper mills, most of it contributes nothing to knowledge. Too much has the appearance of being "publish or perish" trivia that will never be referenced or even read beyond its title.
The problem is politicians who think the way to advance their careers is to shovel money at "science", and that scientific knowledge is measured in dollars and euros and yen and every o
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
Ever read Eisenhower's Farewell Address?
In the part after the one everyone quotes where he warns about the dangers of the Military-Industrial Complex, he warns about the dangers of the Science-Politics Complex where The Science would be largely funded by taxes handed out by self-serving politicians.
And here we are.
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Yes, I wish more people would pay attention to what he said about them.
I don't think anything better illustrates the corruption of free money than the climate alarmists simultaneously wanting trillions more funding for science that is settled, which is an oxymoron to start with; if it's settled, it ain't science, and if it's science, it ain't settled. So shut up and give us your money. After a while, along with a few fiascos like Fauci, the public begins to notice they're being plucked.
The art of taxation
Where's flying cars and faster than light travel? (Score:2)
Figure out how to do anti-gravity and faster than light travel, then physics will become cool again. Rest of the stuff is stupid. Or at least figure out minor shit like 10x cheaper energy generation, 10x better energy density batteries, and super conductors.
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Wow lucky you, [1]your wish is being granted [westcheste...energy.com].
[1] https://www.westchestercleanenergy.com/post/lithium-battery-energy-density
"saygin"? (Score:2)
Is that Carl Saygin?
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Just read "Contact" for the first time. Really pretty good. That guy was way more than the "billions and billions" character PBS made him seem to be. Jodie Foster movie was entertaining but never laid out the most interesting part about transcendental numbers.
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> That guy was way more than the "billions and billions" character PBS made him seem to be.
Really? I thought that was enough; as far as I'm concerned Cosmos put Sagan up there with David Attenborough.
Who Cares? (Score:2)
This is pure clickbait. The simple truth is a bunch of people podcasting about advance physics theories has zero importance. Knowledgeable people will ignore them and for the rest of us it makes no difference whether we are misinformed or not.
Perhaps what should concern us is the exaggerated importance attached to having an audience.That having a lot of clicks makes something important by definition.
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If you like being taxed to support bullshit artists, why not donate a little extra all on your own?
Sabine Hossenfelder Canceled. A Physicist Responds (Score:1)
[1]https://mindmatters.ai/2025/09... [mindmatters.ai]
"I was recently contacted by a physicist who was very upset that I judge their research to be 100% bullshit."
"He demanded that I remove my video and when I politely declined, complained about me to some people he must have thought were my supervisors in a very deliberate attempt to exert pressure on me.”
“A lot of research in the foundations of physics is now pseudocience. It hasn’t followed the scientific m
[1] https://mindmatters.ai/2025/09/sabine-hossenfelder-gets-canceled-a-physicist-responds/
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It's on YouTube as well. She makes a good point and has been consistent about it too.
There is an end to physics somewhere. Sorting out quantum gravity and those screwy neutrinos is about all that is left and neither of those are going to put dinner on the table. If a billionaire wants to keep looking for a warp drive that's fine, but with his or her money.
Look at chemistry for another example, probably the easiest one to see. Are there any holes in the periodic table? No. Very determined researchers with mo
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yes and
the amount of very obvious bad faith agents with their own completely unrelated motivations is... unsurprising but... I wonder if they really buy into their own ideas that science is just a series of decisions, or at least is just one of the entries in the global popularity contest.
Some of the folks in the comments today have been... trying to get themselves dogpiled to prove they're victims.
Too much of Quantum/Modern Phsics is unprovable BS (Score:2)
A lot of the physics coming out has been impossible to prove rubbish. Ideas that can't be tested with/verified by experiments. It's a pretty simple bar: If it can be reproduced/matched with lab results it's science. If it can't it's bunkum.
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A great example of this is the theory that the universe is a 4-Dimensional particle falling into a black hole in a 4-Dimensional Universe. As it falls it's undergoing spaghettification. This neatly explains the Inflation at the start of the universe, and even explains the heat death/giant rip theory of universe death as it suggests the entire universe will convert into Hawking radiation and evaporate off over time. It's a neat idea. But it's not science. There's no way to prove that this is what's happening
Simple but provocative (Score:2)
The low hanging fruit has been found. I know that sounds simplistic, but the big stuff which was predicted/suggested 50+ years ago is now being corroborated/refuted. Whether gavitational waves or the Higgs boson, it took how many decades for us to fully develop the idea and then come up with a way to test for it? One of the big things being looked at now is neutrinos. How long has it taken from the time they were conceived for us to design ways to find them let alone study them?
There will always be cons
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Right. The standard model is so comprehensive and successful that it's very, very difficult to make further progress. They're working on it...
Peter thiel wants to fundamentally break (Score:2)
People's trust and experts so that they will be willing to come to him and only him for truth. He's the one that's funding most of these pieces of shit. There's a YouTuber named professor Dave explains it goes after one of Thiel's jackals.
Of course you won't be going directly to Thiel you will be going to one of his media apparatuses but it's the same thing basically. He gets to control your access to knowledge and information so he gets the control what you do.
These are tech Bros that made all thei
People Hate Science (Score:3, Interesting)
Despite doubling their expected livespan, making it so they'll never have to worry about starving to death, and infact making life an endless feast, giving them the ability to do and enjoy things not even the greatest emperors of the world could dream of 400 years ago, giving them objects that would have been considered magic, preforming all the greatest feats and wonders of humanity in their lifetime, from walking on the moon, to taking photos of pluto, to measuring gravitational waves - people really hate scientists, science, academia and everything adjacent to it.
Why? My only guess is that people are stupid jerks and aren't capable of appreciating science becaue they're mostly just sad, stunted apes.
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Plus many of those great new scientific inventions legitimately turned out to be a bad idea. But yes, much of The Science today is spent telling us that past The Science was a bad idea (e.g. 'climate change' now telling us we shouldn't have figured out how to use oil or uranium as fuel rather than wood and should have continued living in caves).
No-one should be surprised that people see that kind of radical flip and decide to just give up on The Science in general.
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> But yes, much of The Science today is spent telling us that past The Science was a bad idea (e.g. 'climate change' now telling us we shouldn't have figured out how to use oil or uranium as fuel rather than wood and should have continued living in caves ).
That is some wild hyperbole, my man. The big deal with climate change is emitting less CO2. Nuclear power (uranium) is great for this—it emits no CO2 other than that used for mining, building the plants, etc. Burning oil emits a lot of CO2. Burning wood emits CO2 unless it is done sustainably.
No one is saying we should all live in caves. There aren't that many caves.
Re:People Hate Science (Score:5, Insightful)
> Every new imposition on personal freedom is justified by The Science
Please provide specific examples.
Impositions on our freedoms these days seem to come by way of executive order. The justifications vary, but they don't tend to use science.
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> Politicians made people "follow the science" during COVID - masks, inject un-trialed vaccines into your body, stay inside, Many more .
Masks and social distancing are effective public health interventions to prevent the spread of an airborne virus. The vaccines were tested and are yet another effective public health intervention to prevent the spread of a virus...
I guess you did help me understand where someone making the claim "Every new imposition on personal freedom is justified by The Science" might be coming from. Do you have any other examples?
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Please humor me. If another global pandemic like COVID occurs again, what should we do and why? What is your alternative to scientifically based publich health interventions?
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Huh. Didn't think I would see a pro-infant mortality post today. Truly conservatives just want to go back to the middle ages.
Re:People Hate Science (Score:5, Insightful)
> The Science is the religion of the Left,
You have it backwards: attacks on science is the religion of the Right. This is part of the general attack on intellectuals from the right; they perceive any scholar endeavour as snobbery, and colleges and universities as breeding grounds for liberal thinking.
Re: People Hate Science (Score:1)
You just sound like a complete moron. First off, why are you on a technology and science website if you believe they are tools of the left as you literally use a number of scientific advancements to write your horribly ignorant opinion on a computer connected to the internet hooked to a power source. Obviously lower infant mortality has lead to a longer average life but how exactly do you think that happened. Hmmmm perhaps science with the myriad of vaccines and improved availability of foods are but a coup
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What if "the left" don't have a religion like that? What if it's a projection, not just an aid to understanding?
What if the idea that they need to have that kind of belief system is genuinely part of a fundamental misunderstanding about how people who aren't religious see the world, not just a translation of terms...?
There is some serious cognitive dissonance in your perspective, and your attempt to shield yourself with claims about your education come across as... defensive. You don't seem like you're look
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I don't think people hate science but they should and do hate when scientists abuse their position for personal gain. Perfect example: Michio Kaku. This guy's background is in Theoretical physics yet he goes on and talks out of his ass about AI, Computers and the techno-rapture. It's ridiculous. You wouldn't ask a mechanic about your house's electrical work what the hell would a theoretical physicist know about microchip design/trends in computing? There has been zero evidence that AGI is about to exist and
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How about Peter Thiel and his gem about AI, bots and Revelations? I used to think he was sane and Musk was the nutty one. Now I am so confused as to what happens to tech billionaires.
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He's featured on more than a few grifter lists. You should ask some scientists whether they consider him to be good at his old job, you'll get some interesting opinions that aren't too different to what you're saying here... most of them wouldn't pay him any attention or think of him as someone who was active in science education, most think of him as a relic at best.
There are a few other people who no longer have jobs in science or who have been discredited who continue to use the term 'scientist' to claim
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"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
Isaac Asimov
Newsweek editorial 1980