On Monday the physicist and author Sabine Hossenfelder caused quite a stir in the particle physics community. She penned a piece for the Guardian about how the race to create new particles is “useless” and that since the 1980s physicists have invented an “entire particle zoo” that experimentalists have failed to spot.
“Talk to particle physicists in private, and many of them will admit they do not actually believe those particles exist,” she writes. “As a former particle physicist, it saddens me to see that the field has become a factory for useless academic papers.”
Peter Woit from Columbia University wrote his own blog post to disagree, noting that Hossenfelder is “going after a small group of stragglers, not the centre of theoretical activity”. He added that experimentalists on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have blown “huge holes” in dubious high-energy theories “by doing exactly what Hossenfelder complains about”. “In this story they’re not the problem, they’re the solution,” Woit wrote.
“Boringly predictable”
Given the reaction to the opinion piece, notably on Twitter, Hossenfelder put out a separate blog post responding to the responses. “My recommendation is that theory development should focus on resolving inconsistencies, and stop wasting time on pseudo-problems,” she wrote. “Particle physicists, rather unsurprisingly, don’t like the idea that they have to change. Their responses are boringly predictable.”
Indeed,one tweet suggested that Hossenfelder wrote the Guardian piece to help sell her latest book, a comment that received a swift rebuke. “If you want to sell books, I recommend you don’t write them about theoretical high-energy physics,” she said. “It’s not a topic that has a huge market.”
Staying on the theme of physics-related promotions, you can now support the arXiv preprint server by buying their stylish hoodies, t-shirts and mugs. Described as “an open research sharing platform reinventing scientific communications,” arXiv is home to preprints of many of the papers that Hossenfelder derides. What is more, you can read them free of charge and come to your own conclusions.
You can the find the merchandise at Bonfire, and all proceeds go supporting arXiv.
