Sabine Hossenfelder, on YouTube: I can’t believe this really happened.

From the description: “My former academic institution discontinued my affiliation with them after members of the community complained about my criticism, on their research, and on academic conduct in general, and I refused to agree to tone policing. Free speech in Germany has a big problem indeed.”

She refused to remove a video that labeled some physicist’s research “100% bullshit,” and she was fired from the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP). This center belongs to the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Fakultät für Philosophie, Wissenschaftstheorie und Religionswissenschaft.

“Fired” is not an exact term, as she was an “external member.” The “external member” status is not a form of employment, but an unpaid, non-permanent, and symbolic affiliation, which is indicative of an informal academic collaboration with the MCMP.

They removed her member page, but not everything from the archives.

“Germany, the land of the free thinkers.” Yeah, sure.

Criticism that doesn’t use “the B-word” (BS) is possible. She rephrased it: “A lot of research and the foundation of physics is now pseudoscience. It hasn’t followed the scientific method for decades.”

And she goes on at length:

Of course, I’m not the only one who has noticed this problem. I call it mathematical stories or mathematical fiction or just bullshit. Others have called it mathematical gymnastics or fairytale physics [Jim Baggott: Farewell to Reality. How Fairytale Physics Betrays the Search for Scientific Truth, 2013]. It’s why David Lindley declared the end of physics [David Lindley: The End of Physics. The Myth of a Unified Theory, 1993]. And one of the reasons why John Horgan declared the end of science [John Horgan, The End of Science, 1996]. I’m not making any particularly novel observation here. But it keeps going on. This is what blows my mind. It doesn’t matter how obviously this is pseudoscience. It doesn’t matter how many people call out this problem or how many books are written about it. It doesn’t matter what I say in any of my videos. It keeps going. They keep on producing more of these garbage papers each day, and they continue to get published, and they continue to get paid for it, and then they put out press releases, and the media picks it up, and people ask me what I think, and I say it’s bullshit because that’s what it is.

The problem is widely known among people in the field, who tend to acknowledge it privately but would never admit to it in public because their money and their reputation depend on it.

Well, most of them wouldn’t admit it. One of the fearless exceptions is Will Kinney. Will works on cosmology, more specifically inflation, which is one of those highly problematic areas. Here is what he recently [on Aug. 22] wrote on X-Twitter: “There are papers on inflation on @arXiv almost every day, usually more than one. It’s an impressively productive field. But the vast majority of those papers are model-building, writing down a slightly tweaked version of a previous model, and working out its consequences. There’s no limit to the number of papers that can be produced this way. It’s very productive. But the papers are mostly useless. Nobody, including the people writing the papers, has any realistic expectation that any of these models are correct. They’re just an exercise in empty mathematical world-building.”

What prompted Will to write this was a book that appeared recently, The Ant Mill by Jesper Grimstrup, also a theoretical physicist. Let me just read you how Jesper summarized this:

“I’ve written a new book about the sociology of [theoretical high energy physics]. The field is in crisis: no major breakthrough in 50 years and yet a remarkable absence of conceptually new ideas… [My] analysis shows that a massive social force towards mainstream research has emerged, a force that pushes the field towards tribalism and groupthink — and prevents young researchers from pursuing their own independent research interests.”

That is 100% correct. And this isn’t just about the tax money that’s being wasted. Think about what all those intelligent people could do if they didn’t waste their time on this nonsense. I don’t blame the people who work in these areas for what they’re doing. Most of them believe that what they do is science because it’s what they’ve learned and what all their colleagues are doing, and they never question it. This is how groupthink works.

Then they’re shocked if someone outside their bubble says it’s pseudoscience. But look at it from a sane distance, and you can immediately see what the problem is. In fact, I think that most of you can see the problem better than the people who work on it. This is one of the hallmarks of pseudoscience. It seems to work like science. From the inside, it’s difficult to tell. They have entire courses and degrees and conferences and everything. It’s fascinating, really.

There are even scientists studying pseudoscience. This book [Pseudoscience: The Conspiracy Against Science. Edited by Allison B. Kaufman and James C. Kaufman, MIT, 2019], which I highly recommend if you’re interested in these things, has a very interesting report from a woman who earned a degree in naturopathy. That’s some quack medical profession in the United States. She explains in detail what’s wrong with the scientific claims and then concludes, “It’s taken two years of investigation into the naturopathic profession as well as starting over in a master of science program in biomedicine to understand how deeply and effectively I was brainwashed by my naturopathic schooling. The naturopathic belief system is strong. Many naturopaths I used to know would prefer to reject me outright rather than consider a perspective that challenges their worldview.”

The same can be said about most theoretical physicists in the foundations. They’ll reject what I say outright. It can’t be that what this woman says is correct. They think they are too intelligent to fall for groupthink. So they conclude the problem isn’t them. The problem is me. Make Sabine go away, and the problem will go away. But I’m not causing the problem. I’m just drawing attention to it. The fact is that the people in this discipline have invented mathematical stories for non-existing laws of nature for decades. They invent new particles. They invent new forces. They invent modified gravities. There are hundreds of tales for the beginning of the universe, multiverses, extra dimensions, and so on. You see some of this in the popular science headlines every day, and it’s like naturopathy. There’s zero evidence that it works.

Did Sabine really just compare physicists to naturopaths? Some of them, yes. The biggest difference is that quack cures can actively harm people, whereas quack papers about dark matter don’t do much besides wasting tax money.

Why did my institute decide to discontinue my affiliation? I’ve been advised they don’t like the public perception of me drawing attention to these problems. They aren’t worried about what’s going on. They’re worried about people finding out what’s going on.

Exactly what’s the problem with those theories that they invent? The problem is that science is based on the principle of learning from mistakes. These physicists’ method of theory development, which amounts to just guessing some mathematics that looks nice, hasn’t worked ever since they began using it about half a century ago. Yet they continue using it. They’re not learning from their mistakes. This is what makes it pseudoscience. The underlying problem might be that many physicists have this idea that the scientific method just means you generate hypotheses, and then you test them, rinse, repeat. But that isn’t how it works.

I couldn’t be bothered to watch through the end (some more 12 minutes). She’s too verbose, and she never puts it down in writing. I’ll leave the rest to YouTube addicts.