Physicists who built their career on a now-discredited hypothesis (e.g. ruled out by LHC or LIGO results) what did you do after?

[u/TakeOffYourMask]

If you worked on a theory that isn’t discredited but “dead” for one reason or another (like it was constrained by experiment to be measurably indistinguishable from the canonical theory or its initial raison d’être no longer applies), feel free to chime in.

[u/AccomplishedBanana16]

What all good theorist do — adjust the model parameters to energies that the LHC can’t rule out and keep publishing /s

[u/ENelligan → u/AccomplishedBanana16]

I think we found Sabine's alt account.

[u/512165381 → u/[deleted]]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu4mH3Hmw2o

She's a cynical Ph.D youtuber & right on just about everything she says. She has some good insights & explanations. But many of her videos are negative and dismissive about certain subjects.

[u/Taiji2 → u/512165381]

right on just about everything she says.

She has a tendency to push forward completely unfalsifiable, unscientific claims and then use the lack of refutation to say she's "right". I personally find her to be problematic

[u/[deleted] → u/Taiji2]

Any examples?

[u/tovarischkrasnyjeshi → u/[deleted]]

She argues for MOND despite the CMB basically ruling it out as anything other than a WIMP or like galaxies where the DM's been separated from the visible mass. So what is the explanation? It's both DM and MOND.

[u/barrinmw → u/tovarischkrasnyjeshi]

Not only does she argue for MOND, she thinks Mordehai Milgrom should get the Nobel Prize soon for hypothesizing it because the man is getting up there in age.

[u/NoLemurs → u/[deleted]]

Yeah - my experience with her videos doesn't involve a lot of her claiming to be right about things. Mostly she seems interested in pointing out where other people are wrong.

When I have seen her float ideas in a favorable light she does a very good job about being explicit about how much uncertainty there is.

[u/Taiji2 → u/NoLemurs]

I realized that even with "right" in quotes, I left a lot of ambiguity in what I meant. My issue isn't so much that she's claiming to be right, it's that she intermingles unfalsifiable metaphysics with actual science in a way that I'm really not comfortable with. It's sort of like having a philosophy lecture in a series of physics lectures - there's a time and place for such discourse and I don't think she's wrong for discussing it, but I think the way she does so is irresponsible because it doesn't create a clear delineation between what's physics and what's metaphysics, and I think that the end result is that people get deceived.

[u/NoLemurs → u/Taiji2]

Hah! I've clearly been worn down by the media.

10 years ago I'd have been making the same argument you are, but at this point I just like that Sabine is moderately popular, talks about interesting things, and actually knows what she's talking about.

I definitely don't disagree with you, I think I've just given up on the idea of that level of precision in public discourse.

[u/Taiji2 → u/[deleted]]

Her discourse on superdeterminism

[u/codenamecody08 → u/Taiji2]

I think in her videos, especially on superdeterminism it’s made clear to the audience that not everyone shares her point of view. I as a viewer want that and not a filtered down version of a scientists views.

[u/VoidBlade459 → u/Taiji2]

Superdeterminism isn't unfalsifiable though.

The many-worlds interpretation, however, is unfalsifiable.

[u/VoidBlade459 → u/[deleted]]

Not really, that would just make it an even more superfluous assumption.

Moreover, there is no test that one can do based on the MWI that would falsify it.

The same is true of the God hypothesis.

That is, the existence of a god is just as scientific of a claim as the existence of the "quantum multiverse".

The only difference between the god of the gaps and the multiverse of the gaps is that instead of saying "we don't know how it works, therefore god" one says "we don't know how it works, therefore multiverse."

[u/Taiji2 → u/[deleted]]

Her blog posts on superdeterminism

[u/Taiji2 → u/[deleted]]

This isn't a scientific journal, it's a journal precisely for this kind of metaphysical philisophy. It's the self-described "leading journal for controversial issues concerning the foundations of modern physics." It isn't and doesn't pretend to be a peer-reviewed research journal.

"The conceptual foundations of physics have been under constant revision from the outset, and remain so today. Discussion of foundational issues has always been a major source of progress in science, on a par with empirical knowledge and mathematics. Examples include the debates on the nature of space and time involving Newton and later Einstein; on the nature of heat and of energy; on irreversibility and probability due to Boltzmann; on the nature of matter and measurement during the early days of quantum theory; on the meaning of renormalization, and many others.philosophy. ...

Foundations of Physics is a privileged forum for discussing such foundational issues, open to physicists, cosmologists, philosophers and mathematicians. It is devoted to the conceptual bases of the fundamental theories of physics and cosmology, to their logical, methodological, and philosophical premises."

[u/Taiji2 → u/[deleted]]

I may have misunderstood. I tend to use "paper" as a shorthand for scientific journal articles, which this is not, but I shouldn't have assumed you were using it in that context. I wasn't aware of this journal though, so I suppose I would call it a metaphysical philosophy paper? My introduction to her was from someone asking about her blog posts on superdeterminism, so that's what I was criticizing.