"I know she worked very hard on it, it had some very nice pictures in it." Is the single most devastating sentence one could use to review a physics adjacent book, I laughed out loud
Angela is such a badass. My new favorite science communicator on the internet. She's unapologetically her and some times that means she is savage as fuck and I'm just like oh damn she went there!
@@Hat_With_A_Hat_On I condensed it a bit. The full quote goes: “But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
@@DerekHise For setting back the human species generations; ending our nation's space colonization efforts; literally lying to people about "nuclear radiation" with respect to interstellar propulsion. I mean.. seriously. I one could write a pretty long list of grievances that don't include "promoting healthy skepticism" which he didn't do. I guess the problem is that millennials don't really know what this country was like before. NASA used to be run by engineers, not planetary scientists. Every time NASA lands an autonomous vehicle on Mars, they put planetary scientists up in a press conference. Those scientists have zero idea how to build a robot, or a space ship, or how to launch a rocket, or how to make the transit to Mars, or really anything they are actually claiming to speak about. All they know is the science experiment they have loaded on the robot that engineers built for them. This power transfer began in the age of Sagan. There was a kind of alliance between the Sagan types and the likes of Proxmire in the 1970s. These are people who take credit for things they don't do and have no idea how to do. Sagan never published anything of note that I ever heard of. He never built anything other than the television set of a spaceship. He was a science entertainer. That's it. Vastly inflated persona who inflicted great damage on our nation's space colonization efforts. Did you know we had intersteller propulsion since the 1960s? We can't use it. We can't build the ships to send to nearby star systems. We'd be getting data back from Alpha Centauri in about ten years if planetary scientists and the Proxmire types had not taken over our space program.
@@pingukutepro you are mixing up science and engineering. Mammoth cloning is not something that is supposed to prove anything, it is a (dubiously) practical application of existing, well established, science.
@mipmipmipmipmip true, but we already have successful cloning (of non-exctinct animals) and genetic theory of inheritance is very successful theory that is not really under any threat. Comparing string theory as a whole to a particular engineering project resting on genetic theory is completely dishonest and ignorant. Mammoth cloning is a niche project that is not nearly as impactful on the field of biology as string theory pretends to be for the field of physics. Success or failure of that particular project may hinge on some scientific breakthroughs, but its ultimate results will not change the field of biology. It is an engineering and not a science problem, regardless of science for it being here or not.
A string theorist was in his office, kissing one of his students, when his wife walked in. She gasped and turned to leave. He called out, "Wait! Give me time, and I can explain everything"! (Physics joke #6)
@@garrettbenedek1036lol OP said that in reference to another of angela’s videos, “physicists only have 5 jokes”. so if you want the other 5, you should watch that! :)
This reminds me of the recent "proof" of the ABC Conjecture in maths. Shinichi Mochizuki published a huge, incredibly dense series of papers which he claims proves this long standing conjecture, most mathematicians who try to understand give up because of how dense it is, Fields medallist Peter Scholz spends some time trying and finds what he believes in a hole in the proof, Mochizuki responds with something very close to "nuhuh, you're dumb, there's no gap". We've now reached a stage where most mathematicians have given up trying to understand it, most either believe it contains at least one significant error, or if it's right Mochizuki's not done his job of actually communicating his ideas well enough, but there's a small group of true believers who insist the proof's right and they understand it (though they can't manage to explain it to the rest of the mathematical community).
Second this. It's really a bizzare situation. I rememember several serious attempts to get to the bottom of Mochizuki's ideas, like a workshop at Oxford and even before Scholze's paper several attempts by mathematicians. It doesn't help that Mochiuzuki refused to travel (before the pandemic) at times and he got hos PhD in Princeton under Faltings, the fields medalist.
@@acollierastro Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong blog has several good posts about it if you're interested (which is rather fitting given the subject of this video).
@@primzahler8377 honestly a sad situation, from what I gather Mochizuki was a well respected mathematician for many years before this strange turn into seeming crankery.
@@dayvancowboi9135 I think so too. My impression is also that he was well respected although working a lot on his own and I think his work was mostly known in Japan, except some of his papers from the 90s and early 2000s. But I could be wromg
What I learned from this video: #1: The true test of a science communicator is how well they can communicate complicated topics to the general public while playing a video game. #2: The true test of a gamer is how well they can play a video game while communicating complicated science to the general public.
He's called a UA-camr. It really doesn't take a genius to explain the basics of any science.. what you don't realize is all the gaps he's missing because your not educated enough to know.
I'm reading The Biggest Ideas in the Universe by Sean Carroll and it's awesome. His idea was that while solving equations is the domain of professional mathematicians and physicists, being able to understand what an equation is telling you rather than relying on imperfect metaphors _is_ something most people are capable of. So he wrote a series of books dedicated to helping people understand the reality of modern physics rather than popsci metaphors. Within the first few pages of the book it's clarified in no uncertain terms that energy is NOT stuff, it's a mathematical construct we use to represent the way forces are converted, and the misunderstanding mostly comes from a misunderstanding of what _mass_ is when we say that mass and energy are convertable (it's not matter). That was _hugely_ validating because it's something I see seemingly smart people get wrong all the time, to the point where I was starting to think _I_ had something wrong and was missing something huge.
@@RockBrentwood "a bit of 20th century physics that someone dropped into the 21st century". Like aa long strip of toilet paper stuck on your shoe as you exit the public restroom.
This is perhaps only true if you restrict attention to only the world of physics. In the world of mathematics, entire subdisciplines have been revitalised or brought into existence from the interaction with string theory. The most well-known instance of such progress is Pereleman's solution to one of the Milennium Prize problems. So, as with many other things in life, string theory may not have served its intended purpose but it has certainly been and will continue to be extremely fruitful for mathematicians.
What I'm learning about this is that not only is the "public" is ten years behind the physics departments but that popular culture is ten years behind the public.
@@SaltNBattery lmao, how are you or someone like you on every comment section I ever see? You are doing the same thing as the string theory people, and you are defending the string theory like people in all fields and you dont get it. What you just did was hyper political, not logical. I have seen that defense for every laughable, uneducated and unsupportable take getting called out. What are we really talking about hear is your shot at medicine about masks and covid? maybe im wrong and its about systemic problems in for profit healthcare systems, is it? Are your other social sciences complaints about things like critical race theory or trans issues, things political media has gotten on board with a tiny minority of college faculty lying about? I see all the buzz words and distortions and no issues you actually want to talk about because like string theory your bs will get blown to smithereens and you just dont like it. So test it, what are we talking about? Jordan Peterson?
this video is like when you're a kid and can't buy books so you just read what the school library has and never know how 99% of series end, then 15 years later you watch a summary of the entire series on youtube and go, whoa, that's not what I expected but at least I finally know what happens
I've always felt like String Theory was a bunch of imaginative nonsense. I feel the same way about entanglement and the interpretation that observing one particle induces a change in the other -- is it magic or did we make a subtle but fundamental mistake in the experiment and the statistics? I felt the same about Dark Matter -- why can't this missing matter be baryonic? I now think that WIMPs are probably a real thing but I don't recall why MACHOs was dismissed -- space is big and maybe there's a huge amount of rogue planetoids in interstellar space.
Now Michio Kaku talks about aliens eating Planck Energy for breakfast, and still gets introduced as a legitimate scientist by the new anchor. It’s really easy to spot an honest physicist, they drive a Honda and say “I don’t know” a lot.
Science is the process we follow to find true knowledge we all learn this at school....how to construct, run and publish the results of an experiment, you do that then you are a scientist there are no other rules.
yes! Even if you propose a thousand hypotheses, and test them fairly, and they all come out to be incorrect you are still a scientist if you followed the formula of Propose falsifiable hypothesis Test it to attempt to falsify it Publish result
When is that last time Michio did any of that? How much of that did he do when he DID do it decades ago? He is a clown, not a scientist - he has contradicted himself NUMEROUS times in interviews. He is, at best, a former scientists who is now a joke.
I'm reminded what the late great Sidney Coleman said about string theorists: "They promised us a theory of everything but gave us a theory of anything."
This is honestly an incredibly unique format I've never seen before, of professionals talking about science while playing video games. Honestly incredible imo
I cannot imagine the UA-cam algorithm ever again getting so perfect of a bullseye on my interests as an hour-long informal monologue about popular science with extremely clean Binding of Isaac gameplay in the background. I think this video format worked well, you explained the problem, the context, and how we got here in a really understandable way, and your obvious passion for the topic made your frustration very relatable, even as someone that wasn't really all that familiar with string theory's controversial impact. Thank you for making this.
Don't get me wrong I'm sure she was distracted by what she was saying, and the script she was reading, but this was not "extremely clean" gameplay. In the cathedral she literally got lost and went in a circle about 4 times.
Your stream of consciousness narration is magnificent. And so very appropriate to narrate in a stream of consciousness manner, especially as that narrative strategy was all the rage back when Einstein was doing his thing.
I'm guessing the YT algorithm presented this to me since I watch a Sabine video every 2 weeks or so. I hate the game she was playing so i was just watching and listening to her and didn't get too distracted. I think she did a couple of times. Does she always play a game when doing videos like this? And are they always as bad as Bind-of-Isac? 🙂
The history of AI: 1980 We will have General AI in ten years! 1990 We will have General AI in ten years! 2000 We will have General AI in ten years! 2024 Large Language Models are as good as General AI! What is the difference anyway? Do not you dare to answer! You do not even work in LLMs!
@@merusalem In other words, you do not yearn for progress in these fields. You are a neo-Luddite that doesn't understand the concept of research taking time.
I never knew I needed a video of a physicist ranting about their field while playing Binding of Isaac. But now I know, and have a whole UA-cam channel to catch up on 😊
@@richardhouseplantagenet6004 she didn't lie. She was simply describing the phenomenon of pop science and how it can run away from reality. The outrageous claims in pop science articles, to use a quote from the video "it's not even wrong." She of course knows what the most serious model of string theory is, but this video isn't about taking down string theory, it's about the history and relationship between string theory and popular science.
@@acollierastro accept my thanks, too. it was great to get a nice clean summary of the situation because I'd heard murmurings of this sentiment here and there the past few years.
@@acollierastro I still have love for the particle physicists, as "The Public" (who happens to be a laser engineer by trade). I was fortunate to get 'vaccinated' around 1992, when I read Sheldon Glashow's 1988 book _Interactions: A Journey Through the Mind of a Particle Physicist and the Matter of This World_ (which I highly recommend). Toward the end, he airs his gripe against the stampede he was seeing towards String Theory. He likened it to Einstein's later years, when he turned so hard into untestable 'thought experiments', that virtually none of his ideas from that period survive today. So, at least one Sheldon got it right.
So, particle physicist here, this was SO good. I think there are a couple of places were you got things wrong. Like the whole SSC happened in the 90s. But overall really good. Also the comment about all string theorists getting faculty positions in the 80s explains so much of my lecturers during uni.
Yeah it was excellent. The chronology was a bit off but that didn't detract and anyway I only know that because I'm old. String Theory was still hegemonic until well past 2010.
This is bs...if you want a good explanation about why the USA super collider project failed I recomend watching bobby broccoli vids...bc she just pulled that crap out of her butt.
PhD phys student here, I enjoyed this too - I remember reading Brian Greene's book back as a teenager. I definitely believed the universe was made of strings back when I was 15. Then I did undergrad, and realized string theory didn't even explain the physical underpinnings of quantum physics, just tacked on the math of canonical quantization sort of as an afterthought (I'm just a layperson when it comes to string theory, but that's my understanding). There are things I like about string theory and would like to learn more about, like AdS-CFT, but I realized a while ago it's more of a conglomeration of math, with a few specialized applications, than a theory of everything. I've been following walking droplet research for a long time, modern pilot-wave theory stuff, and am studying (basically on my own, as no one has expertise in it where I am) vortex molecules in multi-component Bose-Einstein condensates. I have a lot of faith in this area, built up over time from the things I've learned, to actually explain particle physics and cosmology - the walking droplet system is a pretty good analog of the electron-positron field and certain optical/photon phenomena (see e.g. the 2020 review paper by Bush), and the vortex molecules I'm studying display confinement among other things similarly to quark-based particles (and BECs have many other analogs mostly in cosmology) - but I'm not an experimentalist and I have no idea when these ideas might yield testable predictions. (Maybe pilot-wave theory in general has some, I'd have to check...) My hope is that a clear understanding of particle interactions, dark matter and dark energy will arise from hydrodynamic analog models, which would be pretty good evidence in favour of them. I believe there are connections between MOND and superfluids (like BECs), for instance. Anyway, I think this video made me understand something, about why science communication feels so all-over-the-place now. Walking droplets were covered for a bit, then they seem to have gone out of fashion, and I see plenty of articles pop up about the multiverse and other random things. Maybe people just want to hear scientific-sounding stuff, but don't really want to believe anything anymore. It's obvious to me how much more sense hydrodynamic analogs make than pseudoscience like multiverse "theory", and I've wondered why walking droplets/etc weren't big news. I thought it was just that the field is still somewhat in its infancy, with its first international conference a few years ago. I thought the idea that the universe is a fluid-based chaotic-dynamical system (with non-Markovian dynamics) was too complicated or boring for some people, and so science communication lost interest. But maybe it's also that people have become skeptical.
16:40 « if you had no experimental confirmation, can you have two revolutions » Absolutely. A wheel that has no traction can have many more revolutions than a wheel that does.
lucky run i really don't know, except the win streak before this game is -212 (1:05). my theory is she plays better while explaining stuff, or this particular stuff
@@biggiesmartypants I don't know how BoIR works, but could it be that she was experimenting with different builds, or mods or something? I really don't think she's shit at the game but then miraculously wins while talking about a complex subject lol.
Amazing video! And as a request/suggestion: PLEASE do one on Quantum Physics. Not the field of QP itself because of course this is legitimate field of physics etc but how (bad) science communication/journalism/pop culture have completely turned the public's understanding of QP into a mystical, esoteric magical clowncar (if not an actual circus with elephants and the peanut gallery and all that)
i hate the marvel universe so much for what they have done to quantum physics...what the everloving fuck is the quantum world why are there aliens ????
A lot of people think that quantum mechanics is garbage because it doesn't correspond to their naive preconceptions of how things should work. If you're studying quantum mechanics at any sort of realistic level that's a threshold that you have to overcome. Most people who study it seriously don't really try to understand it. It's like we've got this set of rules, and we can use it to do calculations, and the calculations give us the right answers. So whatever it is, it works.
@@peterwilson8039I think it’s a type of person thing. To me quantum mechanics makes more sense then traditional mechanics but my background is in pure math so the idea of abstracting photons into waves and calculating off that just… idk, it makes more sense then the abstractions we’ve been doing to this point by counting individual atoms. My brain likes the quantum rules haha
She uses the word "lie" very loosely throughout the video. It just comes off as a delusional rant that is ultimately more about the importance of dressing claims up in such a way that they aren't perceived as misleading.
@@godofmath1039 "Intense research over the past decade by physicists and mathematicians around the world has revealed that [superstring theory] *resolves the tension between general relativity and quantum mechanics* " Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe Is that the statement of a man who "never believed" in string theory? She's not delusional. She's accurate.
For regular people associating every physicist with a string theorist, I think you have to blame science channels such as Nat Geo and Discovery. I used to watch their documentaries a lot as a kid, and every documentary presented string theory as a fact that every scientist agreed with.
This! I knew 20 ago when I heard Greene bloviating about string theory that it was pure horseshit, and I am a layman. I can’t believe we’ve wasted decades on this nonsense.
I’m a sixteen year old girl, and I just adore physics. I’m in AP phys 2 right now and I’m having so much fun. Videos like these and people like you are my biggest inspiration to keep learning and expanding my knowledge; not because I necessarily want to do it professionally, but because I love the subject. Thank you so much for posting this it was so well made and you’re so eloquent. I appreciate the work you’re doing so incredibly much ❤
I often claim that my recent Foundations of Physics paper (published January 23, 2023) can be understood by talented high school physics students. The title is "Ground state quantum vortex proton model."
To me, this looks like a long-time Isaac player going on auto-pilot to keep her eyes and hands busy while her brain and voice do some work. It's amazing how, once you get a couple hundred hours into the game, a standard run can be pretty much unconscious. Enemy patterns become engrained, and you move automatically to react to them. Throughout the game, you can she she's not always having the optimal reactions, but her trained instincts are so good that she gets through anyway. Plus, she got solid offense and health generation early on, which lightened the load. The lack of focus saps her health in the later floors, as the stronger enemies require more careful reactions. TL;DR: with a lot of experience in the game, her autopilot is just that good
People who support Sabine should watch Angela. This is how you give a measured take on the state of academia and topics within. Angela doesn't give the impression that science itself is dying, rather that those who do not adhere to the scientific method are failing. Can you tell I just watched Dave Farina's two videos on Sabine recently? 😂
Maybe if Scientists, or excuse me, “Science/Physics Adjacents”, focused more on integrating Ethics and Philosophy with Science and stopped shitting on people for being “behind”, maybe if Scientists spent time directing these discoveries in a way that benefitted all Life on Earth instead of getting lost in ego-feeding math contests with each other…Science wouldn’t be in its current death-roll. Which it is. Sorry.
A girl in my high school class did a book report on string theory probably around 2002 (I just looked it up and it was Polchinski's from 1998). I thought it was really interesting until I asked her what it would mean, practically and experimentally, if it was true. Her answer was basically that the book didn't say, so I filed it under stuff like Simulation Hypothesis and Last Thursdayism. Just neat ideas to think about for fun.
You're the first person who I've heard point out Simulation theory doesn't have much real-world practical implication. I hear people talking about 'we're in a simulation', usually without much knowledge behind it so they can't explain it well to me. But I also never really feel too compelled or scared of the idea because it doesn't change anything of my experience. I should look into it as it's probably interesting but the whole 'woohh scary' vibe some laymen go with Simulation theory is off-putting. I like psychology, and I've seen that same behaviour with some misunderstood concepts of psychology that don't seem remotely scary or like they change our experience at all; like how there's thought before you actively word thoughts in your head; some people internalise that as something 'other than you' controlling you. I see that as your natural way of thinking pre-language. We translate our thoughts into our mother tongue, which takes some time, so that's the delay. What is scary about a translation delay, and why would that split 'us' from our pre-language cognition? lol It seems like a misuse of the theory for spooky points and no real practical implication.
I once read that simulation theory spreading across the net was some form of psyop to make people even more nihilist. Sounds about as plausible as simulation theory.
@@qwandary Well, this singular concept of us performing an action or movement before knowingly thinking about or processing it, has been disproven as nonsense for decades now. The idea is based on a couple of experiments where it turns out, or is heavily implied, that someone fiddled with the numbers, most probably to make sure the book written about that shit sells well. This happens practically every fucking time when someone claims to have stumbled upon something that "revolutionises" the way we see any perception of reality based on well-prooven standard models. These ideas are disingenuous at best, and at worst, they bring a cult following of basement-dwelling idiots to the table who pollute the Internet with their beliefs or want to make a quick buck from gullible simpletons.
okay I was randomly recommended this video and never leave UA-cam comments but just had to say something because WOW. being in academia myself (grad student in biochemistry/biophysics) I feel like we seriously don't talk enough about how academic politics or like, money, or book deals, play into how we communicate science. you knocked it out of the park. instant subscriber. thank you.
Not exactly the same science, as it's data and behavioral science, but you should look into this one famous lady in the field of behavioral science (I forgot her name) that is under heavy scrutiny right now for falsifying/fabricating data in her studies and research. It's a great current events topic that exemplifies the dangers of sacrifice morality honesty, and ethics for increased chance at fame and getting more accolades.
@@OscarASevillaI’m a psychology student. Psychology, not being hard science, is one of those fields where it’s suuuuuper easy to go to pseudoscience-land or plain old letstweakthesenumbersabit-land, and it’s baffling to me how no one took the time to teach us how science is supposed to work and simply started teaching concepts we’re supposed to take at face value. No surprise we’re seen as the dumb inbred cousins of the scientific field (there’s a book I’m reading by Keith Stanovich called How to think straight about psychology that talks about how the whole field is full of bad scientist and really stresses on how it should basically all be neuropsychology - I highly recommend it). I think we should teach a bit less of scientific facts and a little more of scientific culture, as much in school as in popular science: if a teenager doesn’t know about Krebs cycle (something we spent like a month of in high school, but that might just be Italy’s education system’s love for wasting time on random things lol) but knows what falsification principle is, that’s more good than harm done for me. The fact that it’s not even taught in university though, that’s worrisome.
You have demonstrated that your resentment towards the string theory community can function autonomously while you do other stuff, like play videogames for fun. Impressive and excellent use of your time, thanks for the video :)
Man, as someone who dropped out of college and can barely do algebra , this felt like the college conversation I never had with that one friend I’d force to teach me on that subject I don’t understand. So casual and yet well spoken and all while playing video games too. All that’s missing is some Tostitos pizza rolls
That sounds kind of like when the smart pot addict friend in the movie "Road Trip" tutors the main character for his philosophy final by relating it to WWE.
One of my favorite parts about the Red Mars trilogy is that its like 2080 and the string theorists are still trying to make the jump from math to reality.
"I'm not very good at this game" > Obliterates a game I've tried to beat 250 times and only succeeded once while explaining theoretical physics over 40 years
As a fan of both The Binding of Isaac and being a fan of physics, I have to say that you've blown me away with this video. I can explain physics things or play the binding of Isaac, but doing both at the same time while maintaining a coherent train of thought... is absolutely insane to me. Great work! Thanks for creating such great content.
I had the same exact thought hahaha. I came here purely because of isaac in the thumbnail. Did not expect some whole unscripted off the cuff dissertation as well.
This isn't really a String Theory problem, it's a symptom of popular science media. The publishers know there's a market for people who want to pick up a science book at an airport, as you put it, and it's the same audience buying Popular Science, which for years has been more like Popular Science Fiction. So they have to do two things: (1) find someone with science knowledge who's willing to take time writing books instead of writing papers and experimental setups and grant proposals and (2) find a topic that promises to be revolutionary to the average person. String Theory talks about multiple dimensions, and multiple dimensions has this kind of mystique in the popular psyche. In the west, shows like Doctor Who and Twilight Zone and Star Trek have brought us this idea of multiple dimensions as frontiers of discovery. In Asia, there's an entire genre of popular fiction that involves moving between worlds or dimensions. The popular promise of String Theory wasn't even something that the String Theorists said, and therein was the deception made. They didn't have to lie as much as people heard "big breakthrough in physics" along with "multiple dimensions" and their imaginations spun out a bunch of nonsense fantasies. The publishers knew that this would happen, too, because those promises of a better immediate future are a large part of what sells their stuff. Add in a bunch of frustrated physicists who aren't making headway in their String Theory research, and the publishers can pump out a bunch of books. If you look at other popular science stuff, there's publications that will gladly talk about how the Higgs Boson discovery will "let us unravel the mysteries of gravity". To a physicist, that means things like figuring out how gravity interacts with other forces and understanding gravity at the quantum scale. To the populace, that conjures up thoughts of anti-gravity hoverboards and cheap space travel and artificial gravity in orbital habitats. It's a bunch of cool imaginings, but realistically finding the Higgs Boson in 2012 puts us no closer to a hoverboard from Back to the Future II than we were when the movie came out in 1989. If you pay attention, you'll see this in popular science media outside physics too: Chemistry talks about making current batteries obsolete with Graphene, Materials Science promises us better and cheaper houses through some novel material and process, Biology promises worms that digest plastics to fix landfills, Medicine together with Biology promises us abundant rejection-free organ replacements, etc. It's all hogwash pulled out of extrapolating from ideas that admittedly are present in modern science, but there's huge strings of unlikely possibilities attached to get us to any of those futures. The science media will gladly spout it like it's the truth and you'll definitely see it in your lifetime, though.
Ridiculously true. It's why I find political progressives so hilarious. They're existing as a movement solely off of hype for technologies and science that either doesn't exist yet (and won't for another century) or that is being kept firmly under lock down by governments with no intentions to release it ever (gotta keep problems around to control the masses). History is not and has never been a straight line of progress tracking upward. It's always been a cycle. That's why I'm a traditionalist and not a progressive, we're about to end this cycle with a bang and enter a new one starting from bottom. All this time and energy wasted on "science" will evaporate and only people like me will be left, teaching our kids how to build houses and grow crops, not complex theoretical math. Stop doing equations, start having a family.
Graphene is physicsts, not chemists. The only reason graphene shows up all the damn time is because it's a 2D system that physicists actually know how to make. It's not actually particularly special which is why the condensed matter guys are finally starting to move on and bite the bullet and actually learn synthesis. Pop chem is basically nonexistent because the dirty little secret with chemistry and materials science is that we don't need pop sci to get funding. Astronomy and a lot of the more fundamental fields of physics do because it being neat and training people who incidentally are highly skilled in other useful things is more or less the entire justification for it. Even physical chemistry, the subfield that has the least practicality, does work with a lot of applications in remote sensing, general analytical chemistry, semiconductors, and drug discovery. Don't get me wrong, we also have navel gazers who take pride in doing stuff that's worthless, but it's not nearly as bad because we're grounded enough that it's uncommon. Like, my actual research interest is open shell systems and low temperature kinetics. In practice this means I study combustion and occasionally atmospheric chemistry because combustion has a ton of hard to study open shell systems and atmospheric chemistry occasionally runs into reactions with non arrhenius behavior which our technique is uniquely good at probing. Also, material scientists *definitely* make things that make us better and cheaper houses. That was a really weird comment. Who do you think makes high performance alloys in the first place? For an example that we will almost assuredly see within the decade, they've also developed passively cooling paints. It's still a bit expensive at the moment, but they work, the chemistry required for the paints isn't particular uncommon, and while it's a bit hard to wrap your head around why/how it works, it doesn't actually break thermodynamics even though it sounds like it should. In a nutshell it reflects sunlight extremely well, but it absorbs really strongly at wavelengths slightly longer than sunlight for really efficient radiative cooling. The end result is the thing you paint is several degrees colder than the environment. Or for an example that you can buy right now, ocean compostable plastic straws. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if those don't catch on, we can't convince people that your stomach isn't a store shelf and that preservatives are just a benign way to reduce food spoilage after all, but they completely fix the problem that caused us to go to paper straws in the first place.
On the one hand, yes, it is a science communication problem. But, scientists have a responsibility to recognize this and take that into account when they interact with media or write books or whatever
> (1) find someone with science knowledge who's willing to take time writing books instead of writing papers and experimental setups and grant proposals *THAT* is where it is a problem of science. Too many scientists are convinced that the general public can be disposed of in the process of funding and directing science, leaving the field to the charlatans and carnival hucksters. Then, when (and not if!) the charlatans are caught, it costs all of science. Scientists: Learn to communicate science. Develop a taste for communicating science. The alternative is, well, what we have now: a general public who doesn't trust scientists.
Idk what I did to the algorithm to end up on "Science Jenny Nicholson" but I will take the W and stay. This might be the best channel I've stumbled across in the past decade.
I'm so impressed by this. Not that she can explain all of this but that she can put together coherent sentences and play games at the same time. I cannot do this.
Don't worry man, she put in a lot of work, but there are lots of types of minds. Some need distractions, some need hyperfocus. It's not just a matter of skill.
@@armandoff91 Don't fall for this. Humans are humans. She's able to do this with qualitative phrases. If you add some calculations or equation analisys it falls off. I really don't like this concept of playing a game while talking "complex" stuff as it's just for show and she portrais the same results on people as she is complaining about, people like you believing "smart people" are way over they capabilities when in reality, the process of understanding is always time consuming and mostly not straightfoward.
This video was my introduction to your channel, and I found it very clear, helpful and well reasoned. I'm not sure I could explain anything half as well while also playing a game.
Boy regular physicists must’ve hated The Big Bang Theory when it came out. Sheldon was like, 20 years behind, but he and his group of misfits were supposed to represent the smartest guys in the room.
Everyone who is in any way similar to or in the realm of the MCs of Big Bang Theory hates that show. Physicists hate it, geeks hate it, people with autism hate it. It pitches itself as a show about geeks and 90% of the humor is at their expense. The jokes range from “isn’t it funny how much of a dick this autistic guy is?” to “wow, isn’t it stupid that these adults have passions and hobbies?” It’s SO annoying and I hate that it called itself the peak of nerd culture for so long. It’s bad representation for everything it touched.
Regular Physicist here! Yes we fucking hate it. An episode was played once in university as an exercise in pointing out inaccuracies - even people who enjoyed that style of comedy couldn't move past how unbelievably outdated at best or flat out bullshit at worst the science was
I grew up reading all those Brian Greene & Michio Kaku books as a kid, wanting to become a string theorist, and then got disillusioned with it in undergrad. Ended up going into soft matter theory instead, right now I'm working on a project studying polymer statistical physics; I like to think of it as studying string theory, except my strings actually exist lol
Well, as I recall, many physicists sort of rolled their eyes when string theorists started doing pop sci, but others argued that it was for the best, that they'd capture the imagination of children and encourage more people to study physics. And perhaps there is something to that.
@@mikicerise6250 I agree! Even though they were overly optimistic at best (and downright dishonest at worst) about string theory, their books are still one of the primary factors that really hooked me into physics as a whole. They had a perspective about the natural world that I wasn't really being exposed to anywhere else in my life. So I am grateful to them for that.
@@mikicerise6250 Hindsight is definitely 20/20 here, but the problem with that logic is that you just produce a lot of mathematical physicists who refuse to look into anything else when what we really need more of is "lab scale" experimentalists (so condensed matter and AMO primarily). I'm definitely biased being a chemical physicist here/only knowing a small subset of what actual mathematical physicists work on, but the work I see from there is more or less worthless. A lot of justifying why physically obvious things are true (say, why energy must be bounded from below) and not a lot of finding non obvious things that must be true because of the math (for an old example, say, that the rotational ground state isn't no angular momentum for certain molecules due to the nuclear spin quantum numbers).
You did better than me. Finished The Elegant Universe the summer before 8th grade. I got disillusioned with academia at 13 when I realized that my school district genuinely couldn’t recognize that I wasn’t doing any of the work because I had already taught myself the entire high school curriculum and was bored. Fought them all throughout high school, trying to be let into the classes that were actually appropriate for me. Always got hit with “bUt YuO dOnT dO tHe WoRk” after getting between a 90 and a 100 on every test while sleeping through most of my classes. After that it just got worse. The further you go in academia the more offended people get by someone who requires no concerted effort to learn and finds modern physics and medicine to be equally as pedestrian as an intro literature course. Of course being depressed all the time doesn’t really help my productivity. But when the general state of the world and other factors out of your control are the primary thing depressing you, fixing the depression isn’t usually the most cost-effective use of resources
As someone who grew up in Fermilab's backyard and first wanted to do physics because of Nova's Elegant Universe, this hit WAY too hard. I got all the way up through undergraduate physics and realized that I had basically been sold a pipe dream. Thankfully my last course ever was a radio astronomy course right before they imaged the black hole, which made that paper so much more intelligible. I got my degree and left physics altogether because I just lost my love for it. And I kinda blame Brian Greene for a lot of it.
@@theranchokid He is an out-and-out charlatan who has taken money to lend his voice and supposed expertise to lead the public down a sparkling dead-end. A true $cienti$t.
@@theranchokid No joke. This is the guy went goofy (a real short trip) over the Higgs Boson and said, "This is the origin of the Big-Bang!!" Physicists the world over were universally, "Just shut up, dude. Enough already." I've typically liked his radio show, Science Fantastic (at least I did when it was on the radio in my area 10-15 years ago). He is (or at least was) very good with talking about conventional well-established science. When he starts talking about new theories and discoveries, he goes off the reservation real easy.
I have never seen a single video from this channel, and she just pulled up The Binding of Isaac in the first minute of a video essay about physics I'm dying this is great
Your multitasking abilities are next level! I'm impressed! I would love to see anyone else talk science and do something else that demands your attention!
Yeah it's awesome! I hope she doesn't get discouraged from all the people ragging on her playing a game. I liked the format. I think there's still a stigma against video games in academia and learning circles sadly.
I'm only a couple minutes in, but hearing you talk about the Higgs boson made me smile. At the time people were trying to find it, I was a young kid. My dad told me about them trying to find it and I didn't really know what a boson was so in 2012 I claimed I'd found it under my bed (it was dark and my brain was seeing things moving that weren't there, I assumed that was the boson). A few months later the Higgs boson was actually found, but now it's a household joke that I found it first.
i love this format, its exactly how it is to be on a discord call with a friend who is extremely knowledgeable about a subject and is streaming their gameplay whilst forming a coherent history
This may be the most based video I've ever seen. I've never seen a physics rant before with a video game being played. When I saw it was The Binding of Isaac, I knew this was going to be a legendary watch.
Watching you play the Binding of Isaac while talking about the downfall of String Theory really brings me back. My roommate in undergrad when I was studying Physics played that game a lot, and that's when I was just transitioning from being in "the general public" to being on the "inside" of Physics. I actually had a professor, my favorite Physics professor, a really great guy, who made this entire career shooting down theories of quantum gravity by finding the subtle ways current experimental evidence already rules them out. Great times.
"I'm a dark matter guy, but like I'm not anymore, because I'm in industry-- where the cash is" "Sir, did she just" "Yea she just" like a 90s mic drop moment lol
Same, but computational condensed matter. For me, it was gallium arsenide which, similar to string theory, was the material of the future. The joke about it is that it always will be the material of the future. Kinda like string theory being the theory of the future. Once they figure out how (if at all) to test it.
@@plaguedfrost1753 It's two things. Academia is totally down to study dark matter, but nobody else really cares about it, so for PhDs who study dark matter, it's either get a tenure-track job or live in a box on the side of the road. But if you've got a PhD in a complex topic like studying dark matter, industry will throw gobs of money at you so you can make a better rocket/semiconductor/data farm/computer program. Might be something you don't care a lick about, but honestly, those jobs are way less drama and way more straightforward than holding the hand out for grant money every few months.
I am a mathematician i think a lot of the tools developed in am and in string theory are useful in mathematics, i recall that string theorists worked out the dimensionality of a path space that was important in the Lapland’s program. So i would say its probably a mathematical tool rather than a physics tool at this point in history. I do like your coverage - thanks so much for doing it.
This is the thing though, mathematicians have a tendency to force their newest toys into physics, so they can say it has applications. But most of them have no physical insights whatsoever.
@@michaelpieters1844Physical insight is shaped by mathematical insight and vice versa. Having an awareness of the nature of the tools in a mathematicians repertoire allows one to abstract away and get at the core of a physical reasoning or construction and adapt to new situations with new mathematical perspectives. Where would physics today without Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics? These don’t contain any new information beyond Newtonian mechanics but rather provides a useful mathematical framework and a lamplight that allowed physicists to navigate developing the foundations of quantum theory. Just like how understanding the nature of a classical physical theory in the abstract leads to a wealth of understanding of physics in general even though there is nothing immediately physically intuitive about, say, a Poisson bracket, so too does studying the nature of n-dimensional qft’s in the abstract.
I have always thought it should be called string toolkit. To be a theory, it needs to predict something specific that can be tested. String 'theory' can be made to predict nearly anything at all just by adjusting the free parameters, so nothing is testable.
"...and we have to earn their trust back and that suuucks, man." Is such a great statement to end on. Ties a neat little bow on all the vibes throughout the video in a way that's easy to just nod along to, and be like, "Yeah, man. That's rough." :(
I can't believe I just spent an hour listening to a random physicist rant about string theory, and I was so entertained I couldn't stop it. Brilliant video istg this is so unique it's amazing. also, your passion for physics flows through the screen it's so beautiful
Only problem is a lot if her rants are very disingenuous, super biased and misleading. She herself appears to be at the forefront of what she complains about!
@@seren3797 From my experience, while *most* multitasking is task switching, there are also rare cases where it's "actual" multitasking, where you really are "thinking in the cartesian product of both problem spaces".
This is a message that needs to get out more. When I was a babby science enthusiast, I read "The Universe in a Nutshell" by Stephen Hawking, and watched lots of stuff on the discovery channel and stuff, and I came out of it with the impression that string theory was not just a valid theory, but pretty much established fact, just with some details yet to be worked out. So imagine my surprise when I started getting a physics degree and realized that it's, famously, Not Even Wrong. Also, big fan of BoI, very surprised to see that as an accompaniment lmao
This has been exactly my experience. Except I'm not quite as far along, I'm not involved in the physics community but I'm interested to hear about developments, and my understanding was that String Theory was just sort of "Basically fact" except for the fact that I couldn't understand why nobody was explaining how it worked to me. This video makes that make sense
Same here - went from studying about Relativity and its high-level maths, to the basically math-free string theory. The math leading to the numerous dimensions were somewhat hidden from the science-reading crowd, lest we be scared away - this combined with the analogy of violins & cellos felt like a fantasy. ST overshadowed QFT for decades, and drove my decision to study business & computers in college instead of physics. And now, on the far side, it feels like physicists stopped doing math in the 1960s, and have been following an ideological drive not because the math made sense, but because they thought the ideas were pretty. Culturally, this feels as though it's "liberal mathematics", and undergoing the same anti-left push back as in other areas of contemporary culture, with a return to traditional values. DJs gotta dance more - mathematicians gotta write computer simulations and play these as video games.
String theory is a framework for learning more about quantum field theory. It is very successful at that which is why it plays a role in the majority of papers today that call themselves "high energy theory". People who didn't understand their own theory well enough (in particular the fact that "compactifications" don't necessarily have to be geometric and introduce new dimensions) overstated what it would do. But the tradition of lending ideas to mathematicians and particle physicists (which could've been thought of without string theory if humans were smarter) was just getting started when the SUSY standard model stuff described in the video happened.
@@dinobotpwnz Hi yes, as a mathematician I would like to return this that was lent to me *slides string theory in library return slot* A joke, of course, but I had to make it. I am automatically skeptical of any theory that seems like it does/solves too much, but problems arise when the theory is so complex that it is not easily understandable even by those in the field. It gets worse when it’s unfalsifiable. The idea of a grand but (as I understand) ultimately unfalsifiable theory being widely accepted as fact makes me uncomfortable. To me it’s weird to accept a new axiom unless it provides some necessary quantifiable benefit to the system/space it’s a part of, and it’s not clear to me how ST is such, though I have been out of the physics loop for quite some time.
I think it's fine, I do think the playing a game while explaining is kind of weird and distracting (which I believe is what you're referring to) but it's not the worst thing in the world.
I remember those NOVA documentaries, they left me very confused for many years about why I had seen such positive talk about string theory and then never heard about it again... This explains a lot.
Well, everybody was excited because the LHC was about to start operation with new particles from supersymmetry expected to be discovered. Once nothing was found in that direction, the theory just started dying.
This is a video combination I never anticipated. Your brain being able to explain all that while owning binding of isaac is amazing and beautiful. Loved it, Angela.
I have to say, I am super impressed that you were able to record this in one take and without reading a script, while playing Binding of Isaac. I certainly would not have been able to accomplish that.
She has notes, which honestly is a better idea than trying to read a script aloud while distracted. Still wildly impressive to play a videogame while talking, without making any lethal errors.
@@lokanoda you don't have to watch. I think she just puts the game play up so people can see what she's looking at. The point of her playing the video game is to distract herself from talking which calms her down. It makes a single take, surprisingly, more relaxing.
As someone else who was "the public" in the same time frame and grew up reading the same pop sci string theory books, and ended up in astrobiology suffering through occasional Loeb papers, I was pleased to have this video recommended to me. We have some very similar ideas on the topics you covered!
God I am so sorry Loeb ended up in your academic rotation. I am currently on my own spree against the man for grifting astrophysics with crypto funded magnet treasure hunting. God fucking damn this man is intolerable.
What Collier leaves out is just how complicated the math of string theory is. Even with assistance from computers, solvable equations are only approximations. With recent advancements in AI, I expect new breakthroughs in String Theory... should take about ten years.
Yes, I thought the suggestion to "just pick up a textbook" was a little optimistic. So, eh, string theory's results are ten years in the future, and always will be ;-)
You make learning easy and fun. You could easily add a bunch of complexity and nuance to these subjects but you choose to make it digestible. I didn’t know I needed this. Thank you.
Ok I'm a female soft matter physicist who grew up in the 90s and I obsessively play hades and this video is like looking in an alternate-universe mirror
New to your channel and it’s quickly becoming a favorite. In 2007, as an undergrad majoring in math and taking a quantum physics class which I absolutely loved, I would consider myself an adoring member of the “public” you described. I learned the basics of the standard model, but it seemed messy compared to string theory and I just wanted to believe. I remember talking to my friend’s dad about it, another pop science enthusiast, and how I thought string theory was right. He just shook his head sadly and said “String Theory is crap. There’s no way they can prove it.” And I was just like “You’ll see!” Now after watching this video I realize he was probably one of those who got excited about string theory in the 80’s and then was let down over the decades, and I was still the sweet naive summer child who wanted to believe in fairy tales.
@@huntera123 Not necessarily a science thing liike string theory, but another severe lack of communication has to do with nuclear power in general. The public is still insanely afraid of nuclear power, some with genuine concerns, but if you ask most they'll just be like: "But Chernobyl." Most of the public does not at all understand anything about nuclear power nor how dangerous/safe it is compared to other sources of power, yet they still vehemently reject it.
@@huntera123 But there's the thing - string theory was never a physics consensus. It was a fad, but at the same time the public was enamored with that fad, the standard model embraced by most of the physics community was still the one generating the particle physics results. So what other fad that captures the public imagination will turn out to be lies? Probably a lot of them. Science is pretty good at catching those fads early, but once the fad is in bed with politics and business, it's a bigger challenge. We've had "nine-out-of-ten doctors" agreeing you should smoke Marlboro cigarettes, and whether we'll ever disentangle climate models and covid from politics is a trillion-dollar question. Add in the politics and it hardly matters what scientists know or believe; the public will judge them liars or honest depending on what the public has decided to believe.
@@dddaaa6965 I don't even knopw what you're talking about lol, I was just offering information in response to a genuine question. "little man" is a wild insult when you're quite obviously projecting your own fears onto others lol
I matched up this video with another video of the same length, a video outlining season 1 if gilligans island. They are connected in more ways tgan just length. Everytime they almost get off the island syncs up with every new invention of the spring theory. The time stamps are exact. This proves what we all knew the whole time. It was the skipper's fault. He screwed the castiways because hes a creeper
This young woman is a fantastic scientific communicator. I'm instantly a big fan of anyone who casually, but respectfully, shits on Michio Kaku's entire career while playing Binding of Isaac like its so easy a toddler could crush it. P.S. that looks like a really fun seed and i wish you had saved it.
Michio Kaku's media presentations in a nutshell: "I'm going to show you how we can build a time machine. All we need is exotic matter that we haven't discovered yet, Dark energy that we haven't verified as being real, a power source 10 times more powerful than our sun and a way of mapping out time to avoid paradoxes. See? Thanks for watching."
Holy shit i can barely form a coherent thought while playing a game. Holding a convo with my friends while trying to do well in the game is so difficult, this is really impressive
"And that suuuuucks man" I feel that. Despite having a degree in physics, I have random people who've never studied science tell me the things I say are wrong and they know better.
@@jimmymaracas6442 If you don't think things like thermodynamics are real and backed by mountains of scientific research then you're helpless. Stick to cleaning toilets.
@@jimmymaracas6442don't do that. Your smartphone relies on countless modern physics discoveries and theories. You're using someone else's work to bash them. There's also very little chance you understand these theories and the evidence behind them to say whether the ideas make sense or not. Science is not a fixed body of knowledge, which you should know if you watched this video. It is a process of generating and testing ideas. Scientists _shouldn't_ be afraid to test theories that sound like nonsense to laypeople if that's where the data leads. There is no amount of discomfort with theory that should rationally lead you to write off science as an institution. It is a much more grounded environment than you are imagining when you make statements like this.
I went to a talk a few years ago by a woman who studies science communication. One of the ideas developed in the talk was that the biggest problem in science communication is that the writers of headlines change the meaning of everything. The people who write science articles very often have more science background than the people who write the headlines. The people who write the headlines often do it on a tight deadline and only think about how to make an article more salacious, so that they can get more eyes on their advertising. As a result, everything a scientist says to reporters gets twisted before it gets to the public. But the people who write the headlines are also exercising and developing the skill of reaching the public where it is at on issues. Part of that problem is that there is a continuum of degrees of understanding of any one issue by different members of the public. At best, simplifications which seem necessary to give people with no understanding at all of the issue some understanding look like over-simplifications to those with more sophistication, or, at worst, they begin to look like lies. At the root of it all, of course, scientists are human, and though nearly all of them are strongly motivated by a dedication to the truth, some of them will, in the long run, find a way to justify to themselves lying to the public.
It was enlightening to attend one of the top journalism schools in the country for a couple of years before leaving in disgust. The vast majority of the students were academically bottom of the barrel, completely uneducated in anything of substance. Half were there dreaming of becoming talking heads reading "news" scripts, the other half wanted to get rich in advertising. I didn't meet anyone with any interest in what I grew up calling journalism. I have a question I always ask people, "have you ever been personally involved in anything that was covered by the media?" Usually they say yes and I ask, "and how accurately did you think they covered it?" The answer is always "they got it completely wrong", and then I ask, "so why do you believe them on anything else?"
The problem is the scientists' money and reputation depends on hype, not on truth The other problem is that science has a reputation for authority similar to the Catholic Church / various monarchies' authority, except it's even worse because "science" as an institution is supposed to find out / approximate truth, so people naturally believe people with "PhD" or "Physics AB, Harvard" in their job title
@@bobaloo2012 unfortunately one can't even believe some scientists' portrayal of science and facts, apparently. Gotta try your best to think for yourself Everyone's got an agenda
I think part of the problem is how science history is taught (or not) to students. The history of science is littered with hypotheses and "theories" that turned out to not be true. Some of them were very popular for their time. That doesn't mean that the scientists who worked on them were wrong to do so. They were usually one of a number of competing theories, each of which COULD have proven itself. That's where the whole testing part of science comes in.
to me the death knell of string theory was when I learned that it applies to anti-DeSitter space, which is not the universe we live in... Ironically that was pointed out by Avi Loeb. I hadn't realized the public perception had flipped on physics generally, that's a damned shame. Also, I don't think I can give a talk like that playing video games 😯
That reminds me of an Alpha Centauri quote "A brave little theory, and actually quite coherent for a system of five or seven dimensions -- if only we lived in one." - Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "Now We Are Alone"
@PositronicTofu You seem to be missing the significance of AdS/CFT correspondence. Any theory which applies to AdS should have a corresponding representation in Minkowski space. Just because string theory operates in AdS doesn't immediately disqualify it. To be clear, I'm not saying that string theory is a good theory, just that your particular justification for dismissing it (according to your post, since it's entirely possible that you've got a more nuanced position on this than the text of your post implies) is not good. There are better reasons to consider looking elsewhere for a useful theory.
@@Bobbias thanks for pointing that out. Im not sure if that correspondance is speculative or straightforward, in the case of the present formulation of string theory. Many commentators such as Sabine Hodenfelder suggest that it's a stretch, but I'm out of my depth. Still, we're left with it being utterly unfalsifiable
@@positronictofu6505 I'm not a string theory advocate, but I feel the need to point out that Sabine Hossenfelder has somewhat of a negative reputation when it comes to her polemics. I would be wary of using her as a sole source of physics information.
@@keldencowan I've never actually watched her, but the videos of hers that pop up in my feed from time to time, tend to have titles like "this is why I don't believe in science anymore", which is not something that inspires faith in someone as a communicator of science. Having not watched the videos, I can't say anything about the actual information in them, but the titles alone come off as a sort of conspiracy theory "here's what scientists WON'T tell you" kind of thing that they've always turned me off from watching them. That's why I'm watching this video instead.
Someone mentioned this "A. Collier" to me recently as a real up and comer - watch her UA-cam stuff! Very happy to see such an energetic new member of the physics community tell it like it is. For someone occasionally asked at cocktails what's the latest on strings, and having to almost hold the person still while I try to answer in less than 60 seconds, this video is a bit of a God send. Your link will be shared! thanks and great adventures in your career Angela!
4:48 "im not good at this game" 26:37 proceeds to crush the game by literally being all the way into the womb and you can't pick up soul heart meaning you're literally at full health 😂
The fun of Isaac isn't that it's hard. It's the enormous variance in difficulty and specific skillset for each run. Got Technology, Brimstone or Dr. Fetus? Ez game. Got all health and speed boosts? You're going to have a bad time. There are 719 items in Isaac. You're, statistically, never going to have the same run - even if you play it every day for the rest of your life.
Absolutely floored by your ability to speak coherently while playing what looks like a difficult game? You sold me on both the game (looks dope) and the fact that string theory is not still a cutting edge going concern. I am definitely The Public, Susskind wrote my favourite popular physics book ever, so this was as much for me as it was for my husband (an astrophysicist who agrees with all your Opinions)
What is your favorite book of his? I do think it's amazing how good these guys are at communicating science. They real have a knack for getting at what the public want from a popsci book. If only they had used their powers for good instead of evil haha.
@@acollierastro The Black Hole War! It blew my mind, it was the first time somebody was able to get my brain to conceptualise a lot of these esoteric-sounding concepts. My formal physics background ended at 1st-year physics for life sciences so I can't really grok anything other than well-crafted analogies. I can see why the public (read: me) finds string theory so cool and wild to think about, but I also want to read about what the Other Physicists are doing! It's all neat! I'm sure I'm not alone! Like, what are soft condensed matter people doing? I have no idea. I'd like to know!
Just last week I taught an astro 101 lab class about pseudoscience. In response to someone's question I said something along the lines of "string theory doesn't make any testable predictions" and everyone was shook, they reacted as if a biologist told them evolution was bullshit. I have always cringed so hard at string theory, thank you for this video I needed it.
How is this still a thing? Like, i enjoy string theory as a concept, but I've never thought that it was a primary or main physics theory. I feel like every article I've ever read about it, at some point within the article mentions that it has not made testable predictions, that it has no experimental verification, and/or that it is not considered "accepted". Do other people just get so wrapped up in the rest of the article that they ignore that critical sentence in it?
The critical point being the quantum physicist don't have a theory no more...and they will not even consider consciousness is a seperate enitity....how can they...its will became metaphysical and religious? ........so yeah string theory it is....a compromise
"Indoctrinate them young, so they don't ask questions later." There are pseudoscience classes in college? That's pretty sweet. I'm 33 and never went to college but I've been really interested in going to night classes, now that I'm financially stable, but I want to learn about cool stuff. Even if it's bullshit, I just find early scientific theories interesting, like aether and things like that. BTW you sound like a cool professor.
@@l.-._.-._.-._.-._.-.l string theory is almost “righter” than other theories if you believe QFT is somewhat correct. It is basically string theory but instead of using 0 dimensional objects (points) you study objects with dimensions (strings which are lines or higher dimensional surfaces). You need this because having infinitesimal things in reality is un physical and leads to having to “renormalise” theories as these give infinities everywhere. In this sense if you didn’t know about gravity and Yang mills (electromagnetism, strong force…) but knew about how to do field theory with these objects you would arrive to the conclusion that you’d have particles that behave like gravity and Yang mills. If the timeline was the other way round string theory would have predicted these. Btw string theory gets rid of many unphysical infinities without having to use maths that seems at the very least questionable the first time you see it. Not saying string theory will be the theory that will be final, but definitely looks more right than what we have now
Very nice video! Ironically, some concepts deriving from string theory, like AsD-CFT are sometimes used in some areas of condensed matter theory (which is funny because that's probably one of the branches that is mostly forgotten by science communication) and some people that have ST formation converted to stat mech/ cond mat theory.
17:56 "They spent the 1990s lying to this small child specifically" LMAO me too 😆😆😆. I'm glad you went so hard and called them out for *lying* , not just "exaggerating" or "being mistaken". I'm especially angry at Michio Kaku who I think deliberately used stuff from science fiction to manipulate young people who don't quite know the difference between science *fiction* and *actual* science. I went to grad school and had a crisis of faith when I realized I didn't exactly know why I was there, whether this was actually a useful field or if I was just going because of dumb lies I absorbed as a child. Eventually I dropped out and (like everyone else I know) went to "industry," which is to say, stuff totally unrelated to physics.
As a graduate student in the early 80s I was at a high-energy physics conference. Andrei Linde was there, talking about cosmology before it was sexy, and there were talks by several early string theorists. Apparently - so they said - there is only one mathematically possible string theory, unlike QFT where you can have any number of consistent ones. I was enchanted. I was blown away. I wanted to do string theory. A year or two later, there were a dozen string theories, none of which looked anything like reality. Soon after that, I left the field.
@@mertanos Maybe my BS detector was fine-tuned back in my undergrad. Or maybe I developed a critical posture about all the hype of the 90s, from fractals to high-temperature superconductivity (I did honors thesis on that subject), passing through nanomaterials, all high energy physics (do you really need 14k PhDs in physics for just that?), the femtosecond universe (religious) explanations by Hawking, and the self-fulfilled prophecies of particle physics. During my PhD, I attended a lecture by the great Lisa Randall, and she explained how they needed at least 8 dimensions but really 11 to explain gravity and how the next year they would have definite proof. It has been 13 years since that lecture, and still no proof. But she has the #6 book in Particle Physics at Amazon ("Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs").
@@DJVARAO Funny, I was just a few years behind you from the sounds of it; and I never bothered learning beyond a surface level of string theory because I got that same impression at first blush. But then, there were already enough clues by that point to warrant skepticism... I honestly can't say for certain I wouldn't have been swept away were I studying in the '80s.
@@lokanodaADHD is not necessarily an attention deficit disorder but rather an issue with dopamine and sensory stimulus, a person with ADHD requires a higher baseline of noise to be engaged; imagine a computer that works best when all of its RAM is being used and also overheats when it goes too far beyond that threshold. Its a balance between overstimulation and understimulation and hitting the right areas can allow you too nonchalantly focus on your topic while keeping your mind stimulated where most neurotypical people would be overstimulated
It’s a testament to your teaching ability that you covered so much, but still really emphasize the biggest point: string theory isn’t valid because it can’t be tested. A small simplified nugget I will actually remember and carry forward if I wind up having any conversations about it, which is rare when I normally watch these kinds of videos!
@@ocoolwowwhy shame someone for having enthusiasm about learning something. It's not even mistaken attrubution of causation either. She is a good teacher
Content aside (which was great), I actually really like this video format. At first I thought it was a bit weird, that having a narrator being distracted by a game would distract the overall content and delivery, but it didn't. It was all very coherent. And the best part is that it's one continuous, live discussion. I've been getting more and more annoyed by the jump-cut editing style of so many UA-camrs (to the point where sentences are cut off to start the next one). I've really been enjoying these one-take style videos like this (also done by people like Tom Scott and Adam Savage). It's so much more natural and easy to follow when there are pauses between sentences, giving time to digest the message. Great work!
I soaked up the popular-science hype in the 1980s, but since that was slightly earlier and string theory wasn't as dominant, I wasn't so much into string theory as into GUTs, and I ended up working on phenomenological field theory with some of the people who had worked on that stuff (and were very skeptical of string theory). And that didn't really pan out either. The cancellation of the SSC dumped a lot of people on the job market and made it hard. Ended up getting out with a PhD, not getting on the postdoc treadmill. I sometimes think about how I might have been able to continue in academia if I'd just gone into astrophysics instead--I was offered that chance. But I dropped out and cashed in instead, got into software which was absolutely booming in the late 1990s. So I guess the thing I'd add is that it wasn't just string theory that kind of crapped out--it was this whole universe of beyond-the-Standard-Model ideas. Supersymmetry, as you said. Elaborate GUTs, technicolor, all sorts of sub-quark-component theories, all these field-theory models with large numbers of moving parts. The frustrating thing is that it seemed like there were all these tantalizing indications, from some apparent numerical coincidence or other, that some of these might be the real deal but they didn't really bear fruit. We've got this situation in fundamental physics where the Standard Model kind of works *too well* to explain the stuff that's feasible to test, but it's obviously incomplete, and there are other things it doesn't make contact with at all but the way forward requires data that is impossible to get. A weird impasse.
(one difference from string theory is that most of these ideas WERE real theories in the sense that they were testable--it's just that we tested them and they were wrong.)
I am tired of untestable and therefore unfalsifiable theories that pop up in perpetuity. it's obviously not a new phenomenon but it's worsened by the existence of the internet/social media. if I was a physicist, I'd be so irritated
The fact that you were able to give a cogent talk while playing Binding of Isaac very competently is amazing. I can't even get to the end without dying, so the fact that you beat it is just icing on the cake.
i wish you would do this more you would be just the most insane twitch streamer. hot physics takes and isaac gameplay has an audience you could never believe
Holy moly, this was a satisfying video to watch. I'm glad you brought up Dan Olson because this video scratched a very similar itch for me that his videos do. Something about the intersection of nuance and passion when discussing over-hyped ideas. Loved the format too. Great stuff!
I didn't notice it about string theory, but I noticed it about multi-verse. It sells books and speaking engagements. I was quite interested to see Roger Penrose's lack of response (perhaps a polite dismissal) during a panel when a certain book writer kept including "multi-verse" in practically every other sentence.
But Penrose himself has a theory which implies the existence of something quite similar to the multiverse and which is equally difficult to test. "In god we trust, the others need data"
"I know she worked very hard on it, it had some very nice pictures in it." Is the single most devastating sentence one could use to review a physics adjacent book, I laughed out loud
I love nice pictures.
@@poppers7317 who doesn't
Angela is such a badass. My new favorite science communicator on the internet. She's unapologetically her and some times that means she is savage as fuck and I'm just like oh damn she went there!
I love the font...
She just murdered that woman in broad daylight.
It's like Carl Sagan said: yeah, they laughed at the visionaries, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Bozo the Clown was immensely skilled and talented at his profession. These guys were just delusional.
@@Hat_With_A_Hat_On I condensed it a bit. The full quote goes: “But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
If only we had laughed at the likes of Sagan.
@@noosphericaltarzanfor promoting healthy skepticism?
@@DerekHise For setting back the human species generations; ending our nation's space colonization efforts; literally lying to people about "nuclear radiation" with respect to interstellar propulsion. I mean.. seriously. I one could write a pretty long list of grievances that don't include "promoting healthy skepticism" which he didn't do. I guess the problem is that millennials don't really know what this country was like before. NASA used to be run by engineers, not planetary scientists. Every time NASA lands an autonomous vehicle on Mars, they put planetary scientists up in a press conference. Those scientists have zero idea how to build a robot, or a space ship, or how to launch a rocket, or how to make the transit to Mars, or really anything they are actually claiming to speak about. All they know is the science experiment they have loaded on the robot that engineers built for them. This power transfer began in the age of Sagan. There was a kind of alliance between the Sagan types and the likes of Proxmire in the 1970s. These are people who take credit for things they don't do and have no idea how to do. Sagan never published anything of note that I ever heard of. He never built anything other than the television set of a spaceship. He was a science entertainer. That's it. Vastly inflated persona who inflicted great damage on our nation's space colonization efforts. Did you know we had intersteller propulsion since the 1960s? We can't use it. We can't build the ships to send to nearby star systems. We'd be getting data back from Alpha Centauri in about ten years if planetary scientists and the Proxmire types had not taken over our space program.
I can finally sleep peacefully knowing the string theorists are only a decade from a huge breakthrough
Same for biologist gonna make real Mammoth from their DNA
You'll be sleeping for more than 10 years...
They never said *which* decade they are away from.
@@pingukutepro you are mixing up science and engineering. Mammoth cloning is not something that is supposed to prove anything, it is a (dubiously) practical application of existing, well established, science.
@mipmipmipmipmip true, but we already have successful cloning (of non-exctinct animals) and genetic theory of inheritance is very successful theory that is not really under any threat. Comparing string theory as a whole to a particular engineering project resting on genetic theory is completely dishonest and ignorant.
Mammoth cloning is a niche project that is not nearly as impactful on the field of biology as string theory pretends to be for the field of physics. Success or failure of that particular project may hinge on some scientific breakthroughs, but its ultimate results will not change the field of biology. It is an engineering and not a science problem, regardless of science for it being here or not.
A string theorist was in his office, kissing one of his students, when his wife walked in. She gasped and turned to leave. He called out, "Wait! Give me time, and I can explain everything"!
(Physics joke #6)
💀💀
WTF man I need those other 5
@@garrettbenedek1036lol OP said that in reference to another of angela’s videos, “physicists only have 5 jokes”. so if you want the other 5, you should watch that! :)
LOL - I was going to comment that it's great that now I don't have to feel inferior because I don't understand string theory - this is better.
@@garrettbenedek1036she had a video for the big five
This reminds me of the recent "proof" of the ABC Conjecture in maths. Shinichi Mochizuki published a huge, incredibly dense series of papers which he claims proves this long standing conjecture, most mathematicians who try to understand give up because of how dense it is, Fields medallist Peter Scholz spends some time trying and finds what he believes in a hole in the proof, Mochizuki responds with something very close to "nuhuh, you're dumb, there's no gap". We've now reached a stage where most mathematicians have given up trying to understand it, most either believe it contains at least one significant error, or if it's right Mochizuki's not done his job of actually communicating his ideas well enough, but there's a small group of true believers who insist the proof's right and they understand it (though they can't manage to explain it to the rest of the mathematical community).
This sounds great going to read up on this.
Second this. It's really a bizzare situation. I rememember several serious attempts to get to the bottom of Mochizuki's ideas, like a workshop at Oxford and even before Scholze's paper several attempts by mathematicians. It doesn't help that Mochiuzuki refused to travel (before the pandemic) at times and he got hos PhD in Princeton under Faltings, the fields medalist.
@@acollierastro Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong blog has several good posts about it if you're interested (which is rather fitting given the subject of this video).
@@primzahler8377 honestly a sad situation, from what I gather Mochizuki was a well respected mathematician for many years before this strange turn into seeming crankery.
@@dayvancowboi9135 I think so too. My impression is also that he was well respected although working a lot on his own and I think his work was mostly known in Japan, except some of his papers from the 90s and early 2000s. But I could be wromg
What I learned from this video:
#1: The true test of a science communicator is how well they can communicate complicated topics to the general public while playing a video game.
#2: The true test of a gamer is how well they can play a video game while communicating complicated science to the general public.
He's called a UA-camr. It really doesn't take a genius to explain the basics of any science.. what you don't realize is all the gaps he's missing because your not educated enough to know.
I'm reading The Biggest Ideas in the Universe by Sean Carroll and it's awesome.
His idea was that while solving equations is the domain of professional mathematicians and physicists, being able to understand what an equation is telling you rather than relying on imperfect metaphors _is_ something most people are capable of. So he wrote a series of books dedicated to helping people understand the reality of modern physics rather than popsci metaphors.
Within the first few pages of the book it's clarified in no uncertain terms that energy is NOT stuff, it's a mathematical construct we use to represent the way forces are converted, and the misunderstanding mostly comes from a misunderstanding of what _mass_ is when we say that mass and energy are convertable (it's not matter). That was _hugely_ validating because it's something I see seemingly smart people get wrong all the time, to the point where I was starting to think _I_ had something wrong and was missing something huge.
@@maxwellblackwell5045you sound insane right now
@@99loolill that's a comment copying bot.
@@frankmckenneth9254 WHY though
I've followed physics casually for ages and I always wondered why string theory went quiet. Thanks for the excellent summary.
@@RockBrentwood
"a bit of 20th century physics that someone dropped into the 21st century".
Like aa long strip of toilet paper stuck on your shoe as you exit the public restroom.
I thought you were Tay Zonday
This is perhaps only true if you restrict attention to only the world of physics. In the world of mathematics, entire subdisciplines have been revitalised or brought into existence from the interaction with string theory. The most well-known instance of such progress is Pereleman's solution to one of the Milennium Prize problems. So, as with many other things in life, string theory may not have served its intended purpose but it has certainly been and will continue to be extremely fruitful for mathematicians.
@@SpaghettiFusillade No offense, but "fruitful for mathematicians" sounds like a euphemism for "incomprehensible to anyone who is not a mathmatician."
In 30 years there is going to be a younger version of this girl blasting her antiquated beliefs...
Left screen: String theory as an example of miscommunication of science
Right screen: Binding of Isaac speedrun
What I'm learning about this is that not only is the "public" is ten years behind the physics departments but that popular culture is ten years behind the public.
Dark matter girlies know whats up though
sam in the wild 🤯🤯🤯
popular culture is still in the Schroedinger's cat era
@@SaltNBattery What are you even talking about, did a lab make a policy that you can't call black employees slurs or something ?
@@SaltNBattery lmao, how are you or someone like you on every comment section I ever see? You are doing the same thing as the string theory people, and you are defending the string theory like people in all fields and you dont get it. What you just did was hyper political, not logical. I have seen that defense for every laughable, uneducated and unsupportable take getting called out.
What are we really talking about hear is your shot at medicine about masks and covid? maybe im wrong and its about systemic problems in for profit healthcare systems, is it?
Are your other social sciences complaints about things like critical race theory or trans issues, things political media has gotten on board with a tiny minority of college faculty lying about? I see all the buzz words and distortions and no issues you actually want to talk about because like string theory your bs will get blown to smithereens and you just dont like it. So test it, what are we talking about? Jordan Peterson?
this video is like when you're a kid and can't buy books so you just read what the school library has and never know how 99% of series end, then 15 years later you watch a summary of the entire series on youtube and go, whoa, that's not what I expected but at least I finally know what happens
I've always felt like String Theory was a bunch of imaginative nonsense.
I feel the same way about entanglement and the interpretation that observing one particle induces a change in the other -- is it magic or did we make a subtle but fundamental mistake in the experiment and the statistics?
I felt the same about Dark Matter -- why can't this missing matter be baryonic? I now think that WIMPs are probably a real thing but I don't recall why MACHOs was dismissed -- space is big and maybe there's a huge amount of rogue planetoids in interstellar space.
Although I haven't done that myself that still sounds very relatable.
This comment might be the most hyper-relatable simile I have ever read
ahh poor buddy. where did the bad string theory touch you
Too bad that half of what she said isn't true. So you're still better off reading the history of string theory on your own.
Now Michio Kaku talks about aliens eating Planck Energy for breakfast, and still gets introduced as a legitimate scientist by the new anchor. It’s really easy to spot an honest physicist, they drive a Honda and say “I don’t know” a lot.
Science is the process we follow to find true knowledge we all learn this at school....how to construct, run and publish the results of an experiment, you do that then you are a scientist there are no other rules.
@@backgammonbaconyeah for real, no one said every scientist has to have the same opinion lmao, the gatekeeping in science is kinda insane
yes! Even if you propose a thousand hypotheses, and test them fairly, and they all come out to be incorrect you are still a scientist if you followed the formula of
Propose falsifiable hypothesis
Test it to attempt to falsify it
Publish result
When is that last time Michio did any of that? How much of that did he do when he DID do it decades ago? He is a clown, not a scientist - he has contradicted himself NUMEROUS times in interviews. He is, at best, a former scientists who is now a joke.
🎯
I'm reminded what the late great Sidney Coleman said about string theorists: "They promised us a theory of everything but gave us a theory of anything."
sidney coleman quote in the wild. YT can be great sometimes
Thank you for picking up the mantle where Northernlion left off for going on huge tangents while still being able to win a game of Isaac 🙏
Thank you for making me giggle a little
many people are saying this
isek is dead
CEREAL
She's like 10000% better at science than NL too. I'm so glad I stumbled upon this channel!😆
@@AileTheAlien Biology major btw
This is honestly an incredibly unique format I've never seen before, of professionals talking about science while playing video games. Honestly incredible imo
For some reason this helped me. Calmed my mind maybe? Loved it!
I'm hooked. 👍
Cool that people liked it. I'm about one of the few that actually found distracting and a bit annoying.
@@isaquelucas8791 You can just listen to it like a podcast if that's the case!
Yeah, didn't make any sense for the format.
I cannot imagine the UA-cam algorithm ever again getting so perfect of a bullseye on my interests as an hour-long informal monologue about popular science with extremely clean Binding of Isaac gameplay in the background.
I think this video format worked well, you explained the problem, the context, and how we got here in a really understandable way, and your obvious passion for the topic made your frustration very relatable, even as someone that wasn't really all that familiar with string theory's controversial impact. Thank you for making this.
Don't get me wrong I'm sure she was distracted by what she was saying, and the script she was reading, but this was not "extremely clean" gameplay. In the cathedral she literally got lost and went in a circle about 4 times.
@@Anything_Random I don't think there was a script. Maybe a few rough notes -- but eg not enough to include why it was that Pauli got a Nobel Prize
Your stream of consciousness narration is magnificent. And so very appropriate to narrate in a stream of consciousness manner, especially as that narrative strategy was all the rage back when Einstein was doing his thing.
Agree. Hopefully there's been an algo tweak. Does seem to be different recommendations the last few days.
I'm guessing the YT algorithm presented this to me since I watch a Sabine video every 2 weeks or so. I hate the game she was playing so i was just watching and listening to her and didn't get too distracted. I think she did a couple of times.
Does she always play a game when doing videos like this? And are they always as bad as Bind-of-Isac? 🙂
The history of AI:
1980 We will have General AI in ten years!
1990 We will have General AI in ten years!
2000 We will have General AI in ten years!
2024 Large Language Models are as good as General AI! What is the difference anyway? Do not you dare to answer! You do not even work in LLMs!
same for Fusion power...
But but Sam's 5 Giga Watt plan will be AGI.
@@merusalem In other words, you do not yearn for progress in these fields. You are a neo-Luddite that doesn't understand the concept of research taking time.
@@christophersmith8316 don't worry, fusion power is just 10 years away
So all the fusion developers have to do is say "Yay! We did it!"
I never knew I needed a video of a physicist ranting about their field while playing Binding of Isaac. But now I know, and have a whole UA-cam channel to catch up on 😊
I think it's not distracting enough 😕
She needs to also be eating pizza 🍕
@@richardhouseplantagenet6004 she didn't lie. She was simply describing the phenomenon of pop science and how it can run away from reality. The outrageous claims in pop science articles, to use a quote from the video "it's not even wrong." She of course knows what the most serious model of string theory is, but this video isn't about taking down string theory, it's about the history and relationship between string theory and popular science.
I love this. Great job.
Hi there.
Sometimes I forget you're not just the best meme sharer around, but also a smart science guy too aha
Thank you so much!
@@acollierastro accept my thanks, too. it was great to get a nice clean summary of the situation because I'd heard murmurings of this sentiment here and there the past few years.
@@acollierastro I still have love for the particle physicists, as "The Public" (who happens to be a laser engineer by trade). I was fortunate to get 'vaccinated' around 1992, when I read Sheldon Glashow's 1988 book _Interactions: A Journey Through the Mind of a Particle Physicist and the Matter of This World_ (which I highly recommend). Toward the end, he airs his gripe against the stampede he was seeing towards String Theory. He likened it to Einstein's later years, when he turned so hard into untestable 'thought experiments', that virtually none of his ideas from that period survive today.
So, at least one Sheldon got it right.
So, particle physicist here, this was SO good. I think there are a couple of places were you got things wrong. Like the whole SSC happened in the 90s. But overall really good.
Also the comment about all string theorists getting faculty positions in the 80s explains so much of my lecturers during uni.
Yeah it was excellent. The chronology was a bit off but that didn't detract and anyway I only know that because I'm old. String Theory was still hegemonic until well past 2010.
This is bs...if you want a good explanation about why the USA super collider project failed I recomend watching bobby broccoli vids...bc she just pulled that crap out of her butt.
@@peterdonnelly1074 Maybe old but clearly still rigorous.
She is very well on a narrative that is presentable as representative
PhD phys student here, I enjoyed this too - I remember reading Brian Greene's book back as a teenager. I definitely believed the universe was made of strings back when I was 15. Then I did undergrad, and realized string theory didn't even explain the physical underpinnings of quantum physics, just tacked on the math of canonical quantization sort of as an afterthought (I'm just a layperson when it comes to string theory, but that's my understanding). There are things I like about string theory and would like to learn more about, like AdS-CFT, but I realized a while ago it's more of a conglomeration of math, with a few specialized applications, than a theory of everything.
I've been following walking droplet research for a long time, modern pilot-wave theory stuff, and am studying (basically on my own, as no one has expertise in it where I am) vortex molecules in multi-component Bose-Einstein condensates. I have a lot of faith in this area, built up over time from the things I've learned, to actually explain particle physics and cosmology - the walking droplet system is a pretty good analog of the electron-positron field and certain optical/photon phenomena (see e.g. the 2020 review paper by Bush), and the vortex molecules I'm studying display confinement among other things similarly to quark-based particles (and BECs have many other analogs mostly in cosmology) - but I'm not an experimentalist and I have no idea when these ideas might yield testable predictions. (Maybe pilot-wave theory in general has some, I'd have to check...) My hope is that a clear understanding of particle interactions, dark matter and dark energy will arise from hydrodynamic analog models, which would be pretty good evidence in favour of them. I believe there are connections between MOND and superfluids (like BECs), for instance.
Anyway, I think this video made me understand something, about why science communication feels so all-over-the-place now. Walking droplets were covered for a bit, then they seem to have gone out of fashion, and I see plenty of articles pop up about the multiverse and other random things. Maybe people just want to hear scientific-sounding stuff, but don't really want to believe anything anymore. It's obvious to me how much more sense hydrodynamic analogs make than pseudoscience like multiverse "theory", and I've wondered why walking droplets/etc weren't big news. I thought it was just that the field is still somewhat in its infancy, with its first international conference a few years ago. I thought the idea that the universe is a fluid-based chaotic-dynamical system (with non-Markovian dynamics) was too complicated or boring for some people, and so science communication lost interest. But maybe it's also that people have become skeptical.
16:40 « if you had no experimental confirmation, can you have two revolutions »
Absolutely. A wheel that has no traction can have many more revolutions than a wheel that does.
YEOUCH! 🔥
okay i had no idea that traction had an alternate meaning or that thing had a name
I am infinitely impressed that you were able to explain string theory and it's underlying flaws so coherently while also dominating BoIR.
I came here looking for someone to comment on this - I agree she's giving a powerful dissertation and playing a video game at the same time - dang.
lucky run
i really don't know, except the win streak before this game is -212 (1:05).
my theory is she plays better while explaining stuff, or this particular stuff
It was def interesting but she didn’t explain it
Multitasking Chick.
She’s so cool.
@@biggiesmartypants I don't know how BoIR works, but could it be that she was experimenting with different builds, or mods or something? I really don't think she's shit at the game but then miraculously wins while talking about a complex subject lol.
Amazing video! And as a request/suggestion: PLEASE do one on Quantum Physics. Not the field of QP itself because of course this is legitimate field of physics etc but how (bad) science communication/journalism/pop culture have completely turned the public's understanding of QP into a mystical, esoteric magical clowncar (if not an actual circus with elephants and the peanut gallery and all that)
@@Horvath_Gabor "Tantric Quantum Intercourse" is going to be the name of my debut album lmao Thank you, gonna check them out
@@Horvath_Gabor Babe I'm gonna *ANKH* !!! 😩
i hate the marvel universe so much for what they have done to quantum physics...what the everloving fuck is the quantum world why are there aliens ????
A lot of people think that quantum mechanics is garbage because it doesn't correspond to their naive preconceptions of how things should work. If you're studying quantum mechanics at any sort of realistic level that's a threshold that you have to overcome. Most people who study it seriously don't really try to understand it. It's like we've got this set of rules, and we can use it to do calculations, and the calculations give us the right answers. So whatever it is, it works.
@@peterwilson8039I think it’s a type of person thing. To me quantum mechanics makes more sense then traditional mechanics but my background is in pure math so the idea of abstracting photons into waves and calculating off that just… idk, it makes more sense then the abstractions we’ve been doing to this point by counting individual atoms. My brain likes the quantum rules haha
I love that you made this personal. "They lied to this specific small child (me)"
ua-cam.com/video/uCGD9dT12C0/v-deo.html
She uses the word "lie" very loosely throughout the video. It just comes off as a delusional rant that is ultimately more about the importance of dressing claims up in such a way that they aren't perceived as misleading.
@@godofmath1039 "Intense research over the past decade by physicists and mathematicians around the world has revealed that [superstring theory] *resolves the tension between general relativity and quantum mechanics* " Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe
Is that the statement of a man who "never believed" in string theory?
She's not delusional. She's accurate.
@@mallninja9805 What does that have to do with anything?
@@godofmath1039 Looool. "Godofmath" you are a gullible little fanboy. Funny.
For regular people associating every physicist with a string theorist, I think you have to blame science channels such as Nat Geo and Discovery. I used to watch their documentaries a lot as a kid, and every documentary presented string theory as a fact that every scientist agreed with.
I’m grateful for this channel for validating all of my decade-old gripes, except argued by a phd rather than a lowbie bs.
Nothing wrong with a bs in physics!! Just...maybe don't write books comparing physics to crackpots and we will be fine haha.
This! I knew 20 ago when I heard Greene bloviating about string theory that it was pure horseshit, and I am a layman. I can’t believe we’ve wasted decades on this nonsense.
Maybe only shitty ideas need to go on press tours rather than producing results. And then the work that gets results goes unnoticed
Nothing wrong with BS in Physics, given how much of it is there already...
@@acollierastro it's crazy that someone really did that tho, like whoa
I’m a sixteen year old girl, and I just adore physics. I’m in AP phys 2 right now and I’m having so much fun. Videos like these and people like you are my biggest inspiration to keep learning and expanding my knowledge; not because I necessarily want to do it professionally, but because I love the subject. Thank you so much for posting this it was so well made and you’re so eloquent. I appreciate the work you’re doing so incredibly much ❤
Yo badass man
same here too!!!
So great! Keep sharpening your mathematics - a fundamental tool of your trade. It will make everything easier for you and unlock your potential.
I often claim that my recent Foundations of Physics paper (published January 23, 2023) can be understood by talented high school physics students. The title is "Ground state quantum vortex proton model."
personal projects will be your biggest source of academia! have fun and keep at it!
I can't beat that game when I'm hyper focused, how the hell did you beat it while telling an hour long scientific story!? I am thoroughly impressed
I'm guessing it's "because when this is your PHD, this shit is second nature you can explain in your sleep"
Adderall
when you occupy both the monkey mind and the thinking mind, they do not work against each other
She practiced!
To me, this looks like a long-time Isaac player going on auto-pilot to keep her eyes and hands busy while her brain and voice do some work. It's amazing how, once you get a couple hundred hours into the game, a standard run can be pretty much unconscious. Enemy patterns become engrained, and you move automatically to react to them.
Throughout the game, you can she she's not always having the optimal reactions, but her trained instincts are so good that she gets through anyway. Plus, she got solid offense and health generation early on, which lightened the load. The lack of focus saps her health in the later floors, as the stronger enemies require more careful reactions.
TL;DR: with a lot of experience in the game, her autopilot is just that good
People who support Sabine should watch Angela. This is how you give a measured take on the state of academia and topics within. Angela doesn't give the impression that science itself is dying, rather that those who do not adhere to the scientific method are failing.
Can you tell I just watched Dave Farina's two videos on Sabine recently? 😂
Maybe if Scientists, or excuse me, “Science/Physics Adjacents”, focused more on integrating Ethics and Philosophy with Science and stopped shitting on people for being “behind”, maybe if Scientists spent time directing these discoveries in a way that benefitted all Life on Earth instead of getting lost in ego-feeding math contests with each other…Science wouldn’t be in its current death-roll. Which it is. Sorry.
A girl in my high school class did a book report on string theory probably around 2002 (I just looked it up and it was Polchinski's from 1998). I thought it was really interesting until I asked her what it would mean, practically and experimentally, if it was true. Her answer was basically that the book didn't say, so I filed it under stuff like Simulation Hypothesis and Last Thursdayism. Just neat ideas to think about for fun.
You're the first person who I've heard point out Simulation theory doesn't have much real-world practical implication.
I hear people talking about 'we're in a simulation', usually without much knowledge behind it so they can't explain it well to me. But I also never really feel too compelled or scared of the idea because it doesn't change anything of my experience.
I should look into it as it's probably interesting but the whole 'woohh scary' vibe some laymen go with Simulation theory is off-putting. I like psychology, and I've seen that same behaviour with some misunderstood concepts of psychology that don't seem remotely scary or like they change our experience at all; like how there's thought before you actively word thoughts in your head; some people internalise that as something 'other than you' controlling you. I see that as your natural way of thinking pre-language. We translate our thoughts into our mother tongue, which takes some time, so that's the delay. What is scary about a translation delay, and why would that split 'us' from our pre-language cognition? lol It seems like a misuse of the theory for spooky points and no real practical implication.
I once read that simulation theory spreading across the net was some form of psyop to make people even more nihilist.
Sounds about as plausible as simulation theory.
@@qwandary Well, this singular concept of us performing an action or movement before knowingly thinking about or processing it, has been disproven as nonsense for decades now.
The idea is based on a couple of experiments where it turns out, or is heavily implied, that someone fiddled with the numbers, most probably to make sure the book written about that shit sells well. This happens practically every fucking time when someone claims to have stumbled upon something that "revolutionises" the way we see any perception of reality based on well-prooven standard models. These ideas are disingenuous at best, and at worst, they bring a cult following of basement-dwelling idiots to the table who pollute the Internet with their beliefs or want to make a quick buck from gullible simpletons.
The simulation hypothesis, if correct, would at least suggest an entirely new avenue of research: bug/glitch hunting.
@@InfiniteAnvil lol now I'm imagining speedrunners becoming the new vanguard of experimental physics
Sounds like they've been... Stringing us along
Badum-tish
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAH 😎
get out
Now I'd be wishing there were some invisible dimensions I could disappear into.
okay I was randomly recommended this video and never leave UA-cam comments but just had to say something because WOW. being in academia myself (grad student in biochemistry/biophysics) I feel like we seriously don't talk enough about how academic politics or like, money, or book deals, play into how we communicate science. you knocked it out of the park. instant subscriber. thank you.
Not exactly the same science, as it's data and behavioral science, but you should look into this one famous lady in the field of behavioral science (I forgot her name) that is under heavy scrutiny right now for falsifying/fabricating data in her studies and research. It's a great current events topic that exemplifies the dangers of sacrifice morality honesty, and ethics for increased chance at fame and getting more accolades.
Wait till we scratch the "covid vaccine" topic in the next 20/30 years
@@OscarASevillaI’m a psychology student. Psychology, not being hard science, is one of those fields where it’s suuuuuper easy to go to pseudoscience-land or plain old letstweakthesenumbersabit-land, and it’s baffling to me how no one took the time to teach us how science is supposed to work and simply started teaching concepts we’re supposed to take at face value. No surprise we’re seen as the dumb inbred cousins of the scientific field (there’s a book I’m reading by Keith Stanovich called How to think straight about psychology that talks about how the whole field is full of bad scientist and really stresses on how it should basically all be neuropsychology - I highly recommend it).
I think we should teach a bit less of scientific facts and a little more of scientific culture, as much in school as in popular science: if a teenager doesn’t know about Krebs cycle (something we spent like a month of in high school, but that might just be Italy’s education system’s love for wasting time on random things lol) but knows what falsification principle is, that’s more good than harm done for me. The fact that it’s not even taught in university though, that’s worrisome.
Cosmology, abiogenesis, climatology - all driven by endless untestable theories that are endless gravy trains.
@@OscarASevilla Francesca Gino?
The more I look at this game Angela's playing the more deeply bizarre it appears to be.
The Binding of Isaac is a VERY bizzare game paticularly out of context so I dont blame you lol
You have demonstrated that your resentment towards the string theory community can function autonomously while you do other stuff, like play videogames for fun. Impressive and excellent use of your time, thanks for the video :)
I would be really pissed off if I'd devoted years to studying String Theory only to discover that it was crap, and in some cases, bad faith crap
Man, as someone who dropped out of college and can barely do algebra , this felt like the college conversation I never had with that one friend I’d force to teach me on that subject I don’t understand. So casual and yet well spoken and all while playing video games too. All that’s missing is some Tostitos pizza rolls
Tostitos makes pizza rolls?
i have literally no idea what they make other than pizza rolls how did you not know this lol @@jameslove-vani797
@@jameslove-vani797we all know he meant tostinos’
That sounds kind of like when the smart pot addict friend in the movie "Road Trip" tutors the main character for his philosophy final by relating it to WWE.
@@Kitzooni Totinos
One of my favorite parts about the Red Mars trilogy is that its like 2080 and the string theorists are still trying to make the jump from math to reality.
"It had some nice pictures in it." has to be the best backhanded compliment for a book about science ever. 😂
The fact that she shit on string theory and beat Isaac in one run is absolutely insane to me.
I can't do either one. Am I stupid?
@@spraynardkruger6426practice makes perfect, gotta keep trying 👍
Built different.
"I'm not very good at this game"
> Obliterates a game I've tried to beat 250 times and only succeeded once while explaining theoretical physics over 40 years
Normal isaac easy
As a fan of both The Binding of Isaac and being a fan of physics, I have to say that you've blown me away with this video. I can explain physics things or play the binding of Isaac, but doing both at the same time while maintaining a coherent train of thought... is absolutely insane to me. Great work! Thanks for creating such great content.
I had the same exact thought hahaha. I came here purely because of isaac in the thumbnail. Did not expect some whole unscripted off the cuff dissertation as well.
I was amazed at the ability to both beat Issac and String Theory (relatively) at the same time. Incredible! Great video.
@@heartboy0 she can read the comments homie its still creepy
@@sujiiiiiiiii i doubt she will read it in a reply but it is a fair point. i will delete my post. 1 less problem.
This isn't really a String Theory problem, it's a symptom of popular science media. The publishers know there's a market for people who want to pick up a science book at an airport, as you put it, and it's the same audience buying Popular Science, which for years has been more like Popular Science Fiction. So they have to do two things: (1) find someone with science knowledge who's willing to take time writing books instead of writing papers and experimental setups and grant proposals and (2) find a topic that promises to be revolutionary to the average person. String Theory talks about multiple dimensions, and multiple dimensions has this kind of mystique in the popular psyche. In the west, shows like Doctor Who and Twilight Zone and Star Trek have brought us this idea of multiple dimensions as frontiers of discovery. In Asia, there's an entire genre of popular fiction that involves moving between worlds or dimensions. The popular promise of String Theory wasn't even something that the String Theorists said, and therein was the deception made. They didn't have to lie as much as people heard "big breakthrough in physics" along with "multiple dimensions" and their imaginations spun out a bunch of nonsense fantasies. The publishers knew that this would happen, too, because those promises of a better immediate future are a large part of what sells their stuff. Add in a bunch of frustrated physicists who aren't making headway in their String Theory research, and the publishers can pump out a bunch of books.
If you look at other popular science stuff, there's publications that will gladly talk about how the Higgs Boson discovery will "let us unravel the mysteries of gravity". To a physicist, that means things like figuring out how gravity interacts with other forces and understanding gravity at the quantum scale. To the populace, that conjures up thoughts of anti-gravity hoverboards and cheap space travel and artificial gravity in orbital habitats. It's a bunch of cool imaginings, but realistically finding the Higgs Boson in 2012 puts us no closer to a hoverboard from Back to the Future II than we were when the movie came out in 1989.
If you pay attention, you'll see this in popular science media outside physics too: Chemistry talks about making current batteries obsolete with Graphene, Materials Science promises us better and cheaper houses through some novel material and process, Biology promises worms that digest plastics to fix landfills, Medicine together with Biology promises us abundant rejection-free organ replacements, etc. It's all hogwash pulled out of extrapolating from ideas that admittedly are present in modern science, but there's huge strings of unlikely possibilities attached to get us to any of those futures. The science media will gladly spout it like it's the truth and you'll definitely see it in your lifetime, though.
Damn preach complicated username person!
Ridiculously true. It's why I find political progressives so hilarious. They're existing as a movement solely off of hype for technologies and science that either doesn't exist yet (and won't for another century) or that is being kept firmly under lock down by governments with no intentions to release it ever (gotta keep problems around to control the masses).
History is not and has never been a straight line of progress tracking upward. It's always been a cycle. That's why I'm a traditionalist and not a progressive, we're about to end this cycle with a bang and enter a new one starting from bottom. All this time and energy wasted on "science" will evaporate and only people like me will be left, teaching our kids how to build houses and grow crops, not complex theoretical math.
Stop doing equations, start having a family.
Graphene is physicsts, not chemists. The only reason graphene shows up all the damn time is because it's a 2D system that physicists actually know how to make. It's not actually particularly special which is why the condensed matter guys are finally starting to move on and bite the bullet and actually learn synthesis. Pop chem is basically nonexistent because the dirty little secret with chemistry and materials science is that we don't need pop sci to get funding. Astronomy and a lot of the more fundamental fields of physics do because it being neat and training people who incidentally are highly skilled in other useful things is more or less the entire justification for it. Even physical chemistry, the subfield that has the least practicality, does work with a lot of applications in remote sensing, general analytical chemistry, semiconductors, and drug discovery. Don't get me wrong, we also have navel gazers who take pride in doing stuff that's worthless, but it's not nearly as bad because we're grounded enough that it's uncommon. Like, my actual research interest is open shell systems and low temperature kinetics. In practice this means I study combustion and occasionally atmospheric chemistry because combustion has a ton of hard to study open shell systems and atmospheric chemistry occasionally runs into reactions with non arrhenius behavior which our technique is uniquely good at probing.
Also, material scientists *definitely* make things that make us better and cheaper houses. That was a really weird comment. Who do you think makes high performance alloys in the first place? For an example that we will almost assuredly see within the decade, they've also developed passively cooling paints. It's still a bit expensive at the moment, but they work, the chemistry required for the paints isn't particular uncommon, and while it's a bit hard to wrap your head around why/how it works, it doesn't actually break thermodynamics even though it sounds like it should. In a nutshell it reflects sunlight extremely well, but it absorbs really strongly at wavelengths slightly longer than sunlight for really efficient radiative cooling. The end result is the thing you paint is several degrees colder than the environment. Or for an example that you can buy right now, ocean compostable plastic straws. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if those don't catch on, we can't convince people that your stomach isn't a store shelf and that preservatives are just a benign way to reduce food spoilage after all, but they completely fix the problem that caused us to go to paper straws in the first place.
On the one hand, yes, it is a science communication problem. But, scientists have a responsibility to recognize this and take that into account when they interact with media or write books or whatever
> (1) find someone with science knowledge who's willing to take time writing books instead of writing papers and experimental setups and grant proposals
*THAT* is where it is a problem of science. Too many scientists are convinced that the general public can be disposed of in the process of funding and directing science, leaving the field to the charlatans and carnival hucksters. Then, when (and not if!) the charlatans are caught, it costs all of science.
Scientists: Learn to communicate science. Develop a taste for communicating science. The alternative is, well, what we have now: a general public who doesn't trust scientists.
Idk what I did to the algorithm to end up on "Science Jenny Nicholson" but I will take the W and stay. This might be the best channel I've stumbled across in the past decade.
I'm so impressed by this. Not that she can explain all of this but that she can put together coherent sentences and play games at the same time. I cannot do this.
Don't worry man, she put in a lot of work, but there are lots of types of minds. Some need distractions, some need hyperfocus. It's not just a matter of skill.
It is quite distracting though
@@will1603 I agree. It's impressive that she's able to do these things simultaneously but they do not complement each other at all
she is probably playing the game to slow her mind down
@@armandoff91 Don't fall for this. Humans are humans. She's able to do this with qualitative phrases. If you add some calculations or equation analisys it falls off.
I really don't like this concept of playing a game while talking "complex" stuff as it's just for show and she portrais the same results on people as she is complaining about, people like you believing "smart people" are way over they capabilities when in reality, the process of understanding is always time consuming and mostly not straightfoward.
This video was my introduction to your channel, and I found it very clear, helpful and well reasoned. I'm not sure I could explain anything half as well while also playing a game.
"I'm playing as normal don't judge me"- Too late, you've already been judged as having great taste for being into Isaac.
Agreed.
Boy regular physicists must’ve hated The Big Bang Theory when it came out. Sheldon was like, 20 years behind, but he and his group of misfits were supposed to represent the smartest guys in the room.
Everyone who is in any way similar to or in the realm of the MCs of Big Bang Theory hates that show. Physicists hate it, geeks hate it, people with autism hate it. It pitches itself as a show about geeks and 90% of the humor is at their expense.
The jokes range from “isn’t it funny how much of a dick this autistic guy is?” to “wow, isn’t it stupid that these adults have passions and hobbies?”
It’s SO annoying and I hate that it called itself the peak of nerd culture for so long. It’s bad representation for everything it touched.
Regular Physicist here! Yes we fucking hate it. An episode was played once in university as an exercise in pointing out inaccuracies - even people who enjoyed that style of comedy couldn't move past how unbelievably outdated at best or flat out bullshit at worst the science was
People watch it for the misogyny.
@@Red-in-Greeni’ll never forgive wil wheaton for going on it
I grew up reading all those Brian Greene & Michio Kaku books as a kid, wanting to become a string theorist, and then got disillusioned with it in undergrad. Ended up going into soft matter theory instead, right now I'm working on a project studying polymer statistical physics; I like to think of it as studying string theory, except my strings actually exist lol
Well, as I recall, many physicists sort of rolled their eyes when string theorists started doing pop sci, but others argued that it was for the best, that they'd capture the imagination of children and encourage more people to study physics. And perhaps there is something to that.
@@mikicerise6250 I agree! Even though they were overly optimistic at best (and downright dishonest at worst) about string theory, their books are still one of the primary factors that really hooked me into physics as a whole. They had a perspective about the natural world that I wasn't really being exposed to anywhere else in my life. So I am grateful to them for that.
@@mikicerise6250 Hindsight is definitely 20/20 here, but the problem with that logic is that you just produce a lot of mathematical physicists who refuse to look into anything else when what we really need more of is "lab scale" experimentalists (so condensed matter and AMO primarily). I'm definitely biased being a chemical physicist here/only knowing a small subset of what actual mathematical physicists work on, but the work I see from there is more or less worthless. A lot of justifying why physically obvious things are true (say, why energy must be bounded from below) and not a lot of finding non obvious things that must be true because of the math (for an old example, say, that the rotational ground state isn't no angular momentum for certain molecules due to the nuclear spin quantum numbers).
Bound magnetic monopoles exist in solids ;-)
You did better than me. Finished The Elegant Universe the summer before 8th grade. I got disillusioned with academia at 13 when I realized that my school district genuinely couldn’t recognize that I wasn’t doing any of the work because I had already taught myself the entire high school curriculum and was bored. Fought them all throughout high school, trying to be let into the classes that were actually appropriate for me. Always got hit with “bUt YuO dOnT dO tHe WoRk” after getting between a 90 and a 100 on every test while sleeping through most of my classes.
After that it just got worse. The further you go in academia the more offended people get by someone who requires no concerted effort to learn and finds modern physics and medicine to be equally as pedestrian as an intro literature course.
Of course being depressed all the time doesn’t really help my productivity. But when the general state of the world and other factors out of your control are the primary thing depressing you, fixing the depression isn’t usually the most cost-effective use of resources
As someone who grew up in Fermilab's backyard and first wanted to do physics because of Nova's Elegant Universe, this hit WAY too hard. I got all the way up through undergraduate physics and realized that I had basically been sold a pipe dream. Thankfully my last course ever was a radio astronomy course right before they imaged the black hole, which made that paper so much more intelligible. I got my degree and left physics altogether because I just lost my love for it. And I kinda blame Brian Greene for a lot of it.
Equal if not more blame should also be placed at the feet of Michio Kaku.
I'm in the same boat. switched to art where being a wacko is encouraged. a lot more fun for me!
@@theranchokid yeah, it makes me wonder if the charismatic scientist trope should be a red flag 😅
@@theranchokid He is an out-and-out charlatan who has taken money to lend his voice and supposed expertise to lead the public down a sparkling dead-end. A true $cienti$t.
@@theranchokid
No joke. This is the guy went goofy (a real short trip) over the Higgs Boson and said, "This is the origin of the Big-Bang!!" Physicists the world over were universally, "Just shut up, dude. Enough already." I've typically liked his radio show, Science Fantastic (at least I did when it was on the radio in my area 10-15 years ago). He is (or at least was) very good with talking about conventional well-established science. When he starts talking about new theories and discoveries, he goes off the reservation real easy.
I have never seen a single video from this channel, and she just pulled up The Binding of Isaac in the first minute of a video essay about physics
I'm dying this is great
Your multitasking abilities are next level! I'm impressed! I would love to see anyone else talk science and do something else that demands your attention!
Girl I feel your passion here so hard. Love these videos.
Yeah it's awesome! I hope she doesn't get discouraged from all the people ragging on her playing a game. I liked the format. I think there's still a stigma against video games in academia and learning circles sadly.
I'm only a couple minutes in, but hearing you talk about the Higgs boson made me smile. At the time people were trying to find it, I was a young kid. My dad told me about them trying to find it and I didn't really know what a boson was so in 2012 I claimed I'd found it under my bed (it was dark and my brain was seeing things moving that weren't there, I assumed that was the boson). A few months later the Higgs boson was actually found, but now it's a household joke that I found it first.
mom said it's my turn on the particle accelerator
This is adorable
i love this format, its exactly how it is to be on a discord call with a friend who is extremely knowledgeable about a subject and is streaming their gameplay whilst forming a coherent history
Can't really relate
@@kalma5003 dont know anyone this smart and skilled.
@Gabriel huhu what does your friend talk about??
i love parasocial relationships
@@mercster …no to? elaborate?
This may be the most based video I've ever seen. I've never seen a physics rant before with a video game being played. When I saw it was The Binding of Isaac, I knew this was going to be a legendary watch.
Watching you play the Binding of Isaac while talking about the downfall of String Theory really brings me back. My roommate in undergrad when I was studying Physics played that game a lot, and that's when I was just transitioning from being in "the general public" to being on the "inside" of Physics. I actually had a professor, my favorite Physics professor, a really great guy, who made this entire career shooting down theories of quantum gravity by finding the subtle ways current experimental evidence already rules them out. Great times.
"I'm a dark matter guy, but like I'm not anymore, because I'm in industry-- where the cash is"
"Sir, did she just"
"Yea she just" like a 90s mic drop moment lol
Same, but computational condensed matter. For me, it was gallium arsenide which, similar to string theory, was the material of the future. The joke about it is that it always will be the material of the future. Kinda like string theory being the theory of the future. Once they figure out how (if at all) to test it.
@@joelandman3721 *laughing and caughing in arsenic poisoning*
Black Sabbath - MASTER OF REALITY
I don’t get it…
Does that mean that the industry doesn’t put funds into dark matter or is the joke something else?
@@plaguedfrost1753 It's two things. Academia is totally down to study dark matter, but nobody else really cares about it, so for PhDs who study dark matter, it's either get a tenure-track job or live in a box on the side of the road. But if you've got a PhD in a complex topic like studying dark matter, industry will throw gobs of money at you so you can make a better rocket/semiconductor/data farm/computer program. Might be something you don't care a lick about, but honestly, those jobs are way less drama and way more straightforward than holding the hand out for grant money every few months.
I am a mathematician i think a lot of the tools developed in am and in string theory are useful in mathematics, i recall that string theorists worked out the dimensionality of a path space that was important in the Lapland’s program. So i would say its probably a mathematical tool rather than a physics tool at this point in history. I do like your coverage - thanks so much for doing it.
This is the thing though, mathematicians have a tendency to force their newest toys into physics, so they can say it has applications. But most of them have no physical insights whatsoever.
@@michaelpieters1844 this exactly OP has no clue what they are talking about, and really should refrain from ever commenting on anything ever again.
@@ocoolwow that's a bit rude for a comment that adds nothing to the conversation don't you think?
@@michaelpieters1844Physical insight is shaped by mathematical insight and vice versa. Having an awareness of the nature of the tools in a mathematicians repertoire allows one to abstract away and get at the core of a physical reasoning or construction and adapt to new situations with new mathematical perspectives.
Where would physics today without Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics? These don’t contain any new information beyond Newtonian mechanics but rather provides a useful mathematical framework and a lamplight that allowed physicists to navigate developing the foundations of quantum theory.
Just like how understanding the nature of a classical physical theory in the abstract leads to a wealth of understanding of physics in general even though there is nothing immediately physically intuitive about, say, a Poisson bracket, so too does studying the nature of n-dimensional qft’s in the abstract.
I have always thought it should be called string toolkit. To be a theory, it needs to predict something specific that can be tested. String 'theory' can be made to predict nearly anything at all just by adjusting the free parameters, so nothing is testable.
99% of string theorists quit before making a massive breakthrough.
"...and we have to earn their trust back and that suuucks, man." Is such a great statement to end on. Ties a neat little bow on all the vibes throughout the video in a way that's easy to just nod along to, and be like,
"Yeah, man. That's rough." :(
I can't believe I just spent an hour listening to a random physicist rant about string theory, and I was so entertained I couldn't stop it.
Brilliant video
istg this is so unique it's amazing.
also, your passion for physics flows through the screen it's so beautiful
Only problem is a lot if her rants are very disingenuous, super biased and misleading. She herself appears to be at the forefront of what she complains about!
Much respect for being able to multitask! I've been waiting patiently since last week for this video!
@@seren3797 From my experience, while *most* multitasking is task switching, there are also rare cases where it's "actual" multitasking, where you really are "thinking in the cartesian product of both problem spaces".
Full credit to Lee Smolin and Peter Voit, for shouting out loudly that the String Theory emperor had no clothes.
Yeah but then they turn around and say that theirs does
This is a message that needs to get out more.
When I was a babby science enthusiast, I read "The Universe in a Nutshell" by Stephen Hawking, and watched lots of stuff on the discovery channel and stuff, and I came out of it with the impression that string theory was not just a valid theory, but pretty much established fact, just with some details yet to be worked out. So imagine my surprise when I started getting a physics degree and realized that it's, famously, Not Even Wrong.
Also, big fan of BoI, very surprised to see that as an accompaniment lmao
This has been exactly my experience. Except I'm not quite as far along, I'm not involved in the physics community but I'm interested to hear about developments, and my understanding was that String Theory was just sort of "Basically fact" except for the fact that I couldn't understand why nobody was explaining how it worked to me. This video makes that make sense
It doesn’t require a physics degree to figure out that an unfalsifiable theory that plays on its „beauty“ is treading on dodgy ground.
Same here - went from studying about Relativity and its high-level maths, to the basically math-free string theory. The math leading to the numerous dimensions were somewhat hidden from the science-reading crowd, lest we be scared away - this combined with the analogy of violins & cellos felt like a fantasy. ST overshadowed QFT for decades, and drove my decision to study business & computers in college instead of physics. And now, on the far side, it feels like physicists stopped doing math in the 1960s, and have been following an ideological drive not because the math made sense, but because they thought the ideas were pretty. Culturally, this feels as though it's "liberal mathematics", and undergoing the same anti-left push back as in other areas of contemporary culture, with a return to traditional values. DJs gotta dance more - mathematicians gotta write computer simulations and play these as video games.
String theory is a framework for learning more about quantum field theory. It is very successful at that which is why it plays a role in the majority of papers today that call themselves "high energy theory". People who didn't understand their own theory well enough (in particular the fact that "compactifications" don't necessarily have to be geometric and introduce new dimensions) overstated what it would do. But the tradition of lending ideas to mathematicians and particle physicists (which could've been thought of without string theory if humans were smarter) was just getting started when the SUSY standard model stuff described in the video happened.
@@dinobotpwnz Hi yes, as a mathematician I would like to return this that was lent to me *slides string theory in library return slot*
A joke, of course, but I had to make it. I am automatically skeptical of any theory that seems like it does/solves too much, but problems arise when the theory is so complex that it is not easily understandable even by those in the field. It gets worse when it’s unfalsifiable. The idea of a grand but (as I understand) ultimately unfalsifiable theory being widely accepted as fact makes me uncomfortable. To me it’s weird to accept a new axiom unless it provides some necessary quantifiable benefit to the system/space it’s a part of, and it’s not clear to me how ST is such, though I have been out of the physics loop for quite some time.
this is what the internet will look like after all the subway surfer tik tok kids get PHDs
and I like it.
Instead of arguing with people who do not understand the math, I can just point them to these videos ! I'm very happy about this.
@@avibhagan These videos make me want to understand physics and actually get past learning the maths XD
@@gloriousblobber9647
You have no idea how difficult it is to explain to people who watched big bang theory, that string theory is a dead end.
I'd guess so.. lol@@avibhagan
I think it's fine, I do think the playing a game while explaining is kind of weird and distracting (which I believe is what you're referring to) but it's not the worst thing in the world.
I remember those NOVA documentaries, they left me very confused for many years about why I had seen such positive talk about string theory and then never heard about it again... This explains a lot.
Well, everybody was excited because the LHC was about to start operation with new particles from supersymmetry expected to be discovered. Once nothing was found in that direction, the theory just started dying.
This is a video combination I never anticipated. Your brain being able to explain all that while owning binding of isaac is amazing and beautiful. Loved it, Angela.
I have to say, I am super impressed that you were able to record this in one take and without reading a script, while playing Binding of Isaac. I certainly would not have been able to accomplish that.
For real
She has notes, which honestly is a better idea than trying to read a script aloud while distracted. Still wildly impressive to play a videogame while talking, without making any lethal errors.
I'm not tbh. I find it very distracting to the point I have to just listen and not watch.
@@lokanoda you don't have to watch. I think she just puts the game play up so people can see what she's looking at. The point of her playing the video game is to distract herself from talking which calms her down. It makes a single take, surprisingly, more relaxing.
As someone else who was "the public" in the same time frame and grew up reading the same pop sci string theory books, and ended up in astrobiology suffering through occasional Loeb papers, I was pleased to have this video recommended to me. We have some very similar ideas on the topics you covered!
Oh gosh astrobiology must be one of the hardest things to communicate... How do people react when you tell them what you do?
God I am so sorry Loeb ended up in your academic rotation. I am currently on my own spree against the man for grifting astrophysics with crypto funded magnet treasure hunting. God fucking damn this man is intolerable.
What Collier leaves out is just how complicated the math of string theory is. Even with assistance from computers, solvable equations are only approximations. With recent advancements in AI, I expect new breakthroughs in String Theory... should take about ten years.
Yes, I thought the suggestion to "just pick up a textbook" was a little optimistic. So, eh, string theory's results are ten years in the future, and always will be ;-)
@@victotronics Be careful. So was useable AI and now it's here.
@@ianedmonds9191 ELIZA was doing the same thing in 1965. Gullibility is all powerful.
@@ianedmonds9191 can you elaborate?
@@williambranch4283 what is ELIZA?
You make learning easy and fun. You could easily add a bunch of complexity and nuance to these subjects but you choose to make it digestible.
I didn’t know I needed this. Thank you.
Ok I'm a female soft matter physicist who grew up in the 90s and I obsessively play hades and this video is like looking in an alternate-universe mirror
Oh no. Oh no you don't. A soft matter physicist? Of which physics I may have been exposed to is this a splinter?
Strings?
The men are having trouble forming coherent or even full sentences…
On review, my question was completely coherent, as was the response. Try again.
@@asmrtpop2676 how is this relevant to the original comment at all
New to your channel and it’s quickly becoming a favorite.
In 2007, as an undergrad majoring in math and taking a quantum physics class which I absolutely loved, I would consider myself an adoring member of the “public” you described. I learned the basics of the standard model, but it seemed messy compared to string theory and I just wanted to believe. I remember talking to my friend’s dad about it, another pop science enthusiast, and how I thought string theory was right. He just shook his head sadly and said “String Theory is crap. There’s no way they can prove it.” And I was just like “You’ll see!” Now after watching this video I realize he was probably one of those who got excited about string theory in the 80’s and then was let down over the decades, and I was still the sweet naive summer child who wanted to believe in fairy tales.
So what other science consensus, well marketed, is going to turn out to be lies.
@@huntera123 Not necessarily a science thing liike string theory, but another severe lack of communication has to do with nuclear power in general. The public is still insanely afraid of nuclear power, some with genuine concerns, but if you ask most they'll just be like: "But Chernobyl." Most of the public does not at all understand anything about nuclear power nor how dangerous/safe it is compared to other sources of power, yet they still vehemently reject it.
@@huntera123 But there's the thing - string theory was never a physics consensus. It was a fad, but at the same time the public was enamored with that fad, the standard model embraced by most of the physics community was still the one generating the particle physics results.
So what other fad that captures the public imagination will turn out to be lies? Probably a lot of them. Science is pretty good at catching those fads early, but once the fad is in bed with politics and business, it's a bigger challenge. We've had "nine-out-of-ten doctors" agreeing you should smoke Marlboro cigarettes, and whether we'll ever disentangle climate models and covid from politics is a trillion-dollar question. Add in the politics and it hardly matters what scientists know or believe; the public will judge them liars or honest depending on what the public has decided to believe.
shes not going to date you little man
@@dddaaa6965 I don't even knopw what you're talking about lol, I was just offering information in response to a genuine question. "little man" is a wild insult when you're quite obviously projecting your own fears onto others lol
discovered this from the "Best video essays of 2023" list published by BFI and this one might be my favorite of all of them, amazing work!
@@DinisF97 Half this comment is the source, what do you mean
I matched up this video with another video of the same length, a video outlining season 1 if gilligans island. They are connected in more ways tgan just length. Everytime they almost get off the island syncs up with every new invention of the spring theory. The time stamps are exact. This proves what we all knew the whole time. It was the skipper's fault. He screwed the castiways because hes a creeper
This young woman is a fantastic scientific communicator.
I'm instantly a big fan of anyone who casually, but respectfully, shits on Michio Kaku's entire career while playing Binding of Isaac like its so easy a toddler could crush it.
P.S. that looks like a really fun seed and i wish you had saved it.
You can see the seed at 22:20 when she pauses, it's L1TV 707A
@@INRamos13 u da real MVP bro
"Michio Kaku is out of control" - Eric Weinstein
Damn I actually know someone who would be so mad at this video but I'm not gonna send it cause I don't need the headache
Michio Kaku's media presentations in a nutshell: "I'm going to show you how we can build a time machine. All we need is exotic matter that we haven't discovered yet, Dark energy that we haven't verified as being real, a power source 10 times more powerful than our sun and a way of mapping out time to avoid paradoxes. See? Thanks for watching."
Holy shit i can barely form a coherent thought while playing a game. Holding a convo with my friends while trying to do well in the game is so difficult, this is really impressive
I find it easier because of my ADD. Otherwise too many intrusive thoughts disrupt my thought process.
I was gonna say! This is harder than it looks.
Most people have Intel Core i3 inside. She has an Intel Core i9.
@@oldi184 I''m stuck with a 286. =:o(
@@therealpbristow
You are not alone. I have something similar.
"We're a decade away from something amazing" had me dying everytime 😂
We are 30 years from a breakthrough in nuclear fission 🤣🤣🤣
You died? Do you need help? Are you ok?
@@JanWnogu lol funny and true, though Oppenheimer already covered fission, I think you meant fusion.
@@rayneweber5904 Lmao If I am indeed dead then worry not, that precludes all assistance apart from funeral expenses.
@@_Woo I meant using fusion for energy production. For several decades we've been "30 years from breakthrough" all the time and we still are 🤣🤣🤣
1:24 does she really just randomly started playing?? that's hilarious
"And that suuuuucks man" I feel that. Despite having a degree in physics, I have random people who've never studied science tell me the things I say are wrong and they know better.
I don't think you really felt that because I read on Facebook... 😉😁
You mean flat earthers?
@@3seven5seven1nine9 Your "education" has been compromised.
@@sunrazor2622 Quantum quackery is a thing. A kind of big thing.
As a computer scientist living in the AI boom. I feel this immensely
I worked for a quantum computing startup that failed and I feel this video deeply. Thanks for making it.
So pseudoscience is your bread and butter huh?
@@ocoolwow pseudoscience and buzzwords lmao
Propaganda machine is a pseudoscience e.e
@@jimmymaracas6442 If you don't think things like thermodynamics are real and backed by mountains of scientific research then you're helpless. Stick to cleaning toilets.
@@jimmymaracas6442don't do that. Your smartphone relies on countless modern physics discoveries and theories. You're using someone else's work to bash them. There's also very little chance you understand these theories and the evidence behind them to say whether the ideas make sense or not.
Science is not a fixed body of knowledge, which you should know if you watched this video. It is a process of generating and testing ideas. Scientists _shouldn't_ be afraid to test theories that sound like nonsense to laypeople if that's where the data leads. There is no amount of discomfort with theory that should rationally lead you to write off science as an institution. It is a much more grounded environment than you are imagining when you make statements like this.
I went to a talk a few years ago by a woman who studies science communication. One of the ideas developed in the talk was that the biggest problem in science communication is that the writers of headlines change the meaning of everything. The people who write science articles very often have more science background than the people who write the headlines. The people who write the headlines often do it on a tight deadline and only think about how to make an article more salacious, so that they can get more eyes on their advertising. As a result, everything a scientist says to reporters gets twisted before it gets to the public. But the people who write the headlines are also exercising and developing the skill of reaching the public where it is at on issues. Part of that problem is that there is a continuum of degrees of understanding of any one issue by different members of the public. At best, simplifications which seem necessary to give people with no understanding at all of the issue some understanding look like over-simplifications to those with more sophistication, or, at worst, they begin to look like lies. At the root of it all, of course, scientists are human, and though nearly all of them are strongly motivated by a dedication to the truth, some of them will, in the long run, find a way to justify to themselves lying to the public.
It was enlightening to attend one of the top journalism schools in the country for a couple of years before leaving in disgust. The vast majority of the students were academically bottom of the barrel, completely uneducated in anything of substance. Half were there dreaming of becoming talking heads reading "news" scripts, the other half wanted to get rich in advertising. I didn't meet anyone with any interest in what I grew up calling journalism.
I have a question I always ask people, "have you ever been personally involved in anything that was covered by the media?" Usually they say yes and I ask, "and how accurately did you think they covered it?" The answer is always "they got it completely wrong", and then I ask, "so why do you believe them on anything else?"
The problem is the scientists' money and reputation depends on hype, not on truth
The other problem is that science has a reputation for authority similar to the Catholic Church / various monarchies' authority, except it's even worse because "science" as an institution is supposed to find out / approximate truth, so people naturally believe people with "PhD" or "Physics AB, Harvard" in their job title
@@bobaloo2012 unfortunately one can't even believe some scientists' portrayal of science and facts, apparently. Gotta try your best to think for yourself
Everyone's got an agenda
I think part of the problem is how science history is taught (or not) to students. The history of science is littered with hypotheses and "theories" that turned out to not be true. Some of them were very popular for their time. That doesn't mean that the scientists who worked on them were wrong to do so. They were usually one of a number of competing theories, each of which COULD have proven itself. That's where the whole testing part of science comes in.
to me the death knell of string theory was when I learned that it applies to anti-DeSitter space, which is not the universe we live in... Ironically that was pointed out by Avi Loeb. I hadn't realized the public perception had flipped on physics generally, that's a damned shame. Also, I don't think I can give a talk like that playing video games 😯
That reminds me of an Alpha Centauri quote "A brave little theory, and actually quite coherent for a system of five or seven dimensions -- if only we lived in one."
- Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "Now We Are Alone"
@PositronicTofu You seem to be missing the significance of AdS/CFT correspondence. Any theory which applies to AdS should have a corresponding representation in Minkowski space. Just because string theory operates in AdS doesn't immediately disqualify it.
To be clear, I'm not saying that string theory is a good theory, just that your particular justification for dismissing it (according to your post, since it's entirely possible that you've got a more nuanced position on this than the text of your post implies) is not good. There are better reasons to consider looking elsewhere for a useful theory.
@@Bobbias thanks for pointing that out. Im not sure if that correspondance is speculative or straightforward, in the case of the present formulation of string theory. Many commentators such as Sabine Hodenfelder suggest that it's a stretch, but I'm out of my depth. Still, we're left with it being utterly unfalsifiable
@@positronictofu6505 I'm not a string theory advocate, but I feel the need to point out that Sabine Hossenfelder has somewhat of a negative reputation when it comes to her polemics. I would be wary of using her as a sole source of physics information.
@@keldencowan I've never actually watched her, but the videos of hers that pop up in my feed from time to time, tend to have titles like "this is why I don't believe in science anymore", which is not something that inspires faith in someone as a communicator of science. Having not watched the videos, I can't say anything about the actual information in them, but the titles alone come off as a sort of conspiracy theory "here's what scientists WON'T tell you" kind of thing that they've always turned me off from watching them.
That's why I'm watching this video instead.
Someone mentioned this "A. Collier" to me recently as a real up and comer - watch her UA-cam stuff! Very happy to see such an energetic new member of the physics community tell it like it is. For someone occasionally asked at cocktails what's the latest on strings, and having to almost hold the person still while I try to answer in less than 60 seconds, this video is a bit of a God send. Your link will be shared!
thanks and great adventures in your career Angela!
Here's another answer to "what's the latest on strings?" ua-cam.com/video/t9CQm2N3LJs/v-deo.html
4:48 "im not good at this game"
26:37 proceeds to crush the game by literally being all the way into the womb and you can't pick up soul heart meaning you're literally at full health 😂
The womb is not that hard tbh, except maybe with tainted lost
@@stev4was1Mostly just the full heart damage affecting things. Sheol's harder in general
What she means is "I'm not in the top ten players" 😂
I guess she also got very powerful item in the beginning.
The fun of Isaac isn't that it's hard. It's the enormous variance in difficulty and specific skillset for each run.
Got Technology, Brimstone or Dr. Fetus? Ez game.
Got all health and speed boosts? You're going to have a bad time.
There are 719 items in Isaac. You're, statistically, never going to have the same run - even if you play it every day for the rest of your life.
This is legit one of my favorite videos on youtube.
Now I want to watch you dunk on loop quantum gravity while playing Enter the Gungeon 😁
Absolutely floored by your ability to speak coherently while playing what looks like a difficult game? You sold me on both the game (looks dope) and the fact that string theory is not still a cutting edge going concern. I am definitely The Public, Susskind wrote my favourite popular physics book ever, so this was as much for me as it was for my husband (an astrophysicist who agrees with all your Opinions)
What is your favorite book of his?
I do think it's amazing how good these guys are at communicating science. They real have a knack for getting at what the public want from a popsci book. If only they had used their powers for good instead of evil haha.
@@acollierastro The Black Hole War! It blew my mind, it was the first time somebody was able to get my brain to conceptualise a lot of these esoteric-sounding concepts. My formal physics background ended at 1st-year physics for life sciences so I can't really grok anything other than well-crafted analogies.
I can see why the public (read: me) finds string theory so cool and wild to think about, but I also want to read about what the Other Physicists are doing! It's all neat! I'm sure I'm not alone! Like, what are soft condensed matter people doing? I have no idea. I'd like to know!
@@jh29a not really? the game is there to hold your attention while a difficult topic is being discussed
@@gonzo-chbaf what? How does that even... what?
The binding of isaac is definitely a very difficult game
please make this a series, i've learned so much about physics, and still retained attention through it all, this is awsome!!
Just last week I taught an astro 101 lab class about pseudoscience. In response to someone's question I said something along the lines of "string theory doesn't make any testable predictions" and everyone was shook, they reacted as if a biologist told them evolution was bullshit. I have always cringed so hard at string theory, thank you for this video I needed it.
How is this still a thing? Like, i enjoy string theory as a concept, but I've never thought that it was a primary or main physics theory. I feel like every article I've ever read about it, at some point within the article mentions that it has not made testable predictions, that it has no experimental verification, and/or that it is not considered "accepted".
Do other people just get so wrapped up in the rest of the article that they ignore that critical sentence in it?
The critical point being the quantum physicist don't have a theory no more...and they will not even consider consciousness is a seperate enitity....how can they...its will became metaphysical and religious? ........so yeah string theory it is....a compromise
have you ever gotten through at least the first 100 pages of a string theory book?
"Indoctrinate them young, so they don't ask questions later."
There are pseudoscience classes in college? That's pretty sweet. I'm 33 and never went to college but I've been really interested in going to night classes, now that I'm financially stable, but I want to learn about cool stuff. Even if it's bullshit, I just find early scientific theories interesting, like aether and things like that. BTW you sound like a cool professor.
@@l.-._.-._.-._.-._.-.l string theory is almost “righter” than other theories if you believe QFT is somewhat correct. It is basically string theory but instead of using 0 dimensional objects (points) you study objects with dimensions (strings which are lines or higher dimensional surfaces). You need this because having infinitesimal things in reality is un physical and leads to having to “renormalise” theories as these give infinities everywhere. In this sense if you didn’t know about gravity and Yang mills (electromagnetism, strong force…) but knew about how to do field theory with these objects you would arrive to the conclusion that you’d have particles that behave like gravity and Yang mills. If the timeline was the other way round string theory would have predicted these. Btw string theory gets rid of many unphysical infinities without having to use maths that seems at the very least questionable the first time you see it. Not saying string theory will be the theory that will be final, but definitely looks more right than what we have now
Very nice video! Ironically, some concepts deriving from string theory, like AsD-CFT are sometimes used in some areas of condensed matter theory (which is funny because that's probably one of the branches that is mostly forgotten by science communication) and some people that have ST formation converted to stat mech/ cond mat theory.
17:56 "They spent the 1990s lying to this small child specifically" LMAO me too 😆😆😆.
I'm glad you went so hard and called them out for *lying* , not just "exaggerating" or "being mistaken". I'm especially angry at Michio Kaku who I think deliberately used stuff from science fiction to manipulate young people who don't quite know the difference between science *fiction* and *actual* science. I went to grad school and had a crisis of faith when I realized I didn't exactly know why I was there, whether this was actually a useful field or if I was just going because of dumb lies I absorbed as a child. Eventually I dropped out and (like everyone else I know) went to "industry," which is to say, stuff totally unrelated to physics.
As a graduate student in the early 80s I was at a high-energy physics conference. Andrei Linde was there, talking about cosmology before it was sexy, and there were talks by several early string theorists. Apparently - so they said - there is only one mathematically possible string theory, unlike QFT where you can have any number of consistent ones. I was enchanted. I was blown away. I wanted to do string theory. A year or two later, there were a dozen string theories, none of which looked anything like reality. Soon after that, I left the field.
@@mertanos Maybe my BS detector was fine-tuned back in my undergrad. Or maybe I developed a critical posture about all the hype of the 90s, from fractals to high-temperature superconductivity (I did honors thesis on that subject), passing through nanomaterials, all high energy physics (do you really need 14k PhDs in physics for just that?), the femtosecond universe (religious) explanations by Hawking, and the self-fulfilled prophecies of particle physics.
During my PhD, I attended a lecture by the great Lisa Randall, and she explained how they needed at least 8 dimensions but really 11 to explain gravity and how the next year they would have definite proof. It has been 13 years since that lecture, and still no proof. But she has the #6 book in Particle Physics at Amazon ("Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs").
Michio Kaku in particular is a charlatan. He goes and twists everything into pure pie-in-the-sky fantasy fiction.
I know...
@@DJVARAO Funny, I was just a few years behind you from the sounds of it; and I never bothered learning beyond a surface level of string theory because I got that same impression at first blush. But then, there were already enough clues by that point to warrant skepticism... I honestly can't say for certain I wouldn't have been swept away were I studying in the '80s.
I absolutely love this format! As an ADHDer it's VERY helpful, truly.
I wonder, as an ADHDer, don't you find it distracting?
@@lokanodaADHD is not necessarily an attention deficit disorder but rather an issue with dopamine and sensory stimulus, a person with ADHD requires a higher baseline of noise to be engaged; imagine a computer that works best when all of its RAM is being used and also overheats when it goes too far beyond that threshold.
Its a balance between overstimulation and understimulation and hitting the right areas can allow you too nonchalantly focus on your topic while keeping your mind stimulated where most neurotypical people would be overstimulated
@@lokanoda no
It’s a testament to your teaching ability that you covered so much, but still really emphasize the biggest point: string theory isn’t valid because it can’t be tested. A small simplified nugget I will actually remember and carry forward if I wind up having any conversations about it, which is rare when I normally watch these kinds of videos!
You had to be told this? Lady this is more a reflection of you than the content creators' teaching ability.
@@ocoolwoware you just going through the comments shitting on everyone for a particular reason or are you just kind of a bad person?
@@ocoolwowwhy shame someone for having enthusiasm about learning something. It's not even mistaken attrubution of causation either. She is a good teacher
@@quintoncoleman9653 narcissist like that guy cant help themselves, miserable and empty people
@@quintoncoleman9653because if this person didn't even know this why would they feel they should be interjecting their opinion on the matter?
Came because Kyle Hill sent me. Subbed so fast. Great talk, looking forward to the next decade of breakthroughs for you!
Content aside (which was great), I actually really like this video format. At first I thought it was a bit weird, that having a narrator being distracted by a game would distract the overall content and delivery, but it didn't. It was all very coherent.
And the best part is that it's one continuous, live discussion. I've been getting more and more annoyed by the jump-cut editing style of so many UA-camrs (to the point where sentences are cut off to start the next one). I've really been enjoying these one-take style videos like this (also done by people like Tom Scott and Adam Savage). It's so much more natural and easy to follow when there are pauses between sentences, giving time to digest the message. Great work!
I wish my homeboys hyped me up the way string theorists hyped up String Theory for decades.
Everyone, keep an eye on this man. Big things coming in a decade!!
You want them to lie about your relevancy to the entire world?
@@elderyear who shit in your cheerios
I soaked up the popular-science hype in the 1980s, but since that was slightly earlier and string theory wasn't as dominant, I wasn't so much into string theory as into GUTs, and I ended up working on phenomenological field theory with some of the people who had worked on that stuff (and were very skeptical of string theory). And that didn't really pan out either. The cancellation of the SSC dumped a lot of people on the job market and made it hard. Ended up getting out with a PhD, not getting on the postdoc treadmill.
I sometimes think about how I might have been able to continue in academia if I'd just gone into astrophysics instead--I was offered that chance. But I dropped out and cashed in instead, got into software which was absolutely booming in the late 1990s.
So I guess the thing I'd add is that it wasn't just string theory that kind of crapped out--it was this whole universe of beyond-the-Standard-Model ideas. Supersymmetry, as you said. Elaborate GUTs, technicolor, all sorts of sub-quark-component theories, all these field-theory models with large numbers of moving parts. The frustrating thing is that it seemed like there were all these tantalizing indications, from some apparent numerical coincidence or other, that some of these might be the real deal but they didn't really bear fruit. We've got this situation in fundamental physics where the Standard Model kind of works *too well* to explain the stuff that's feasible to test, but it's obviously incomplete, and there are other things it doesn't make contact with at all but the way forward requires data that is impossible to get. A weird impasse.
(one difference from string theory is that most of these ideas WERE real theories in the sense that they were testable--it's just that we tested them and they were wrong.)
I am tired of untestable and therefore unfalsifiable theories that pop up in perpetuity. it's obviously not a new phenomenon but it's worsened by the existence of the internet/social media. if I was a physicist, I'd be so irritated
The fact that you were able to give a cogent talk while playing Binding of Isaac very competently is amazing. I can't even get to the end without dying, so the fact that you beat it is just icing on the cake.
i wish you would do this more you would be just the most insane twitch streamer. hot physics takes and isaac gameplay has an audience you could never believe
She was made for the segment of Northernlion's audience who's into pop science
@@sandenson so the entire audience then
@@nullsol6274 Probably lol
Holy moly, this was a satisfying video to watch. I'm glad you brought up Dan Olson because this video scratched a very similar itch for me that his videos do. Something about the intersection of nuance and passion when discussing over-hyped ideas. Loved the format too. Great stuff!
I didn't notice it about string theory, but I noticed it about multi-verse. It sells books and speaking engagements. I was quite interested to see Roger Penrose's lack of response (perhaps a polite dismissal) during a panel when a certain book writer kept including "multi-verse" in practically every other sentence.
But Penrose himself has a theory which implies the existence of something quite similar to the multiverse and which is equally difficult to test.
"In god we trust, the others need data"
@@DestructorN7 Yes, but at least he readily admits about CCC "It's a crazy idea."