For a long time now fundamental theoretical physics has been suffering not just from a slowdown in progress, but from a sort of intellectual collapse (I wrote about this here a while back in the context of “epistemic collapse”: the collapse of a shared reality, caused by the loss of reliable sources for distinguishing what is true from what is false.). The Wall Street Journal has a new article entitled The Rise of ‘Conspiracy Physics’ with summary:
Streamers are building huge audiences by attacking academic physics as just another corrupt establishment. Scientists are starting to worry about the consequences.
If you replaced “Streamers” by “Sabine Hossenfelder” this would be reasonably accurate, and a serious discussion of this would have been interesting and worthwhile. Instead, the article is an excellent example of the sort of epistemic collapse we’re now living in. There’s zero intelligent content about the underlying scientific issues (is fundamental theoretical physics in trouble?), just a random collection of material about podcasts, written by someone who clearly knows nothing about the topic he’s writing about. The epistemic collapse is total when traditional high-quality information sources like the Wall Street Journal are turned over to uninformed writers getting their information from Joe Rogan podcasts. Any hope of figuring out what is true and what is false is now completely gone.
I was planning on writing something explaining what exactly the WSJ story gets wrong, but now realize this is hopeless (and I’m trying to improve my mental health this week, not make it worse). Sorting through a pile of misinformation, trying to rebuild something true out of a collapsed mess of some truth buried in a mixture of nonsense and misunderstandings is a losing battle.
Maybe some day our information environment will become healthy again, but for now I’m not sure what to do about this. Be aware that if you’re trying to understand the state of fundamental theoretical physics, watching Joe Rogan, Piers Morgan, Professor Dave, etc. podcasts is just going to fill your mind with crap. Reading articles about these podcasts is worse. If a podcaster (e.g. Sabine Hossenfelder) has a book, read the book (Lost in Math is pretty good) rather than watching the podcasts. In general, reading books is a good idea (I can also recommend this one).
Update: John Baez comments here:
This quagmire is getting bigger. It’s another part of what William Gibson recently called the Singularity of Stupid.
