Science!

I thought Anton's new video on fast radio bursts (FRBs) had a lot of good and interesting stuff, including a newly proposed explanation for at least some types of FRBs:

Strange Magnetism From a Repeating Radio Signal That Just Won't Stop

The couple videos I have seen of that woman I always come away with thinking "She is the type of person that is all that is wrong about science and it's application."

Yeah, lately I've been having... mixed feelings about Sabine. She is undoubtedly a good science communicator, and has the sense of humor to be able to make engaging content for a lay audience. She tends to come off a bit like "Old Man Yells at Cloud" the way she goes on about string theory, supersymmetry, and so forth, but there is a reasonable amount of valid criticism in her bluster- string theory has gotten away with quite a bit, and has probably syphoned off a disproportionately large chunk of the talent base, based in no small part on wild hype and braggadocio from string theorists and irresponsibly uncritical sensationalism from journalists. And her interactions with those very string theorist cheerleaders at conferences and interviews tends to be HIGHLY entertaining, since she's so blunt and direct. 

But she also lately has, apparently, been trying to grow her channel, by courting certain political demographics, even at the expense of misrepresenting the science. Which is.... not good if you're running a science channel- a lot of people get their information on science topics from her, and trust her expertise, even when she's being a bit of a crackpot and/or speaking outside of her field of expertise.

A case in point, her recent video on trans care. Why a theoretical physicist is doing a video on trans health care in the first place is a bit odd. But then she plays the "bothsidesism" game of positioning herself as the only sensible one between two crazy extremes, and frames the question along the lines of "on one extreme you have transphobes who think transgenderism is evil and a disease, and on the other extreme you have people saying gender affirming health care saves lives", with her own view (ie. "the truth") in the middle.

The problem is, the empirical/medical data and existing studies pretty unequivocally shows that gender affirming care does save lives: gender affirming treatment has a significant effect on suicide rates, which are just insanely high among trans demographics. And this bit about questioning whether trans care actually works is a common anti-trans, rightwing talking point. Worse, Sabine's attempted critiques of the science on the matter are quite thin and in several cases involve fairly obvious e.g. mathematical errors. Which is suspicious, since she's as smart as they come and unlikely (in my estimation) to make those types of errors organically. 

So Sabine is, evidently, trying to court viewers on the political right, by positioning the actual scientific consensus and apparent fact of the matter (!!) as an extremist ideological position. So a science channel is willing to (deliberately) get the science wrong in order to grow their channel. Not great. Another case is her "why is everyone neurodivergent now?" video- another suspiciously common talking-point from the right is the implication (or explicit claim) that people are falsely claiming to be trans, or autistic, or gay, or whatever, in order to be cool or hip... when in fact we don't need to look any further than changing norms and growing societal acceptance to explain why people are openly identifying themselves as belonging to previously stigmatized groups, i.e. LGBT, neurodivergent, trans, etc.

And Sabine either knows this, or at the very least is smart and resourceful enough to find out... but she is seemingly more interested in growing her channel to include the political center-right.

Its a sad development, imo, and I certainly hope I'm mistaken (but don't think I am). At any rate, still lots of other great space/physics channels out there, PBS Space Time, Anton, Cool Worlds, Dr Becky, FermiLab, etc

I mean, string theory is sort of its own can of worms, but for the most part, frontier physics is often highly speculatory and often beyond the bounds of current (or even foreseeable) observational/experimental abilities. And most frontier physics turns out to be wrong anyways (sort of by definition). But I still like that (and think its important) they cover these topics, because wrong/bad models are still part of the process of scientific investigation, and because the frontiers of physics is always where some of the most exciting stuff is happening so its important for recruiting talent and general scientific literacy. Its also where, also more or less by definition, new entrants into the field have the most space to make a name and reputation for themselves, where the most work remains to be done. So I think its still important to cover the more wacky, messy, and probably wrong vanguard of astrophysical and cosmological science.

There's also the fact that things sometimes look like they are beyond any possible confirmation/falsification, only for that to turn out not to be the case. When black holes were first discovered in the math of GR, it was thought that the existence of black holes was, empirically, beyond possible corroboration even in principle. Black holes are after all, regions of space from which no light, no radiation, no information of any kind can escape to arbitrary distances, and so seemed to be like the metaphorical tree in the forest that falls when no one's there to hear it. But then people figured out that real astrophysical black holes could have accretion disks, which would be visible (indeed, in the case of quasars would be some of the most spectacularly visible objects in the universe), and 100 years later we had an image of one.

And so things like eternal inflation or the string landscape may look completely untestable, there's always the chance that some clever mind or new development changes that. And I'm not even completely ruling string theory out, either. I think its still possible, though apparently quite unlikely at this point, that string theorists will come up with some good observational tests for their theory. I just think a disproportionate amount of eggs have been put into the string theory basket, and so its time to give other research programs priority.

And I appreciated PBSST's 2-part episode on string/M-theory, because there were (and are) reasons why so many physicists got so invested in it, so I liked that they covered that stuff as well as string theory's far more well-known shortcomings. And I like that they've done episodes on e.g. loop quantum gravity. Looking at all this stuff gives people a really informative look into how science operates as a social institution and cooperative project, how rivals programs and models play off each other and how the community has to work its way through a process. 

I think the only danger here in misrepresenting highly speculatory frontier science as anything other than what it is, but I feel like PBS and Matt O'Dowd are pretty good about being upfront and explicit about where the models they're talking about weigh in observationally and in terms of the support/consensus of the physics community. Anyways, obv YMMV, I know this is sort of a contentious point these days, so this is all just imo. 

Oh I don't know, I suspect they did two parts because you can't really tell the story of the rise and fall in the popularity of string theory without talking about why it seemed so promising and got so popular (e.g. ads/cft correspondence or gauge/gravity duality) and why it fell out of favor (such as its string of failed promises RE proposed observational tests, predicted supersymmetric particles, and so forth). I don't think there's any such thing as pure objectivity- we all have our own personal biases as individuals, on top of the cognitive biases common to all humans- but I'm not aware of any reason to think of Matt as some ideological partisan on the topc of string theory or anything, since iirc his background is in quasars and AGNs. He's covered the topic of quantum gravity in a number of episodes without betraying any obvious axe to grind that I noticed, but maybe I'm missing something.

As for whether space and time are real, I guess I would agree or disagree depending on exactly what we're referring to: in relation to the so-called "simulation hypothesis" (which is not a genuine empirical hypothesis so far as I can tell, but rather is a reformulation of a thought experiment that's been ratting around philosophy departments for the past few centuries), the question is whether space and time are in some sense real (as opposed to illusory, merely apparent, simulated, etc)... and is absolutely philosophy masquerading as science.

But in relation to e.g. quantum gravity or the foundations of physics we can ask whether space and time are fundamental, which is a bit different, and is very much a legitimate empirical and scientific question- the issue is whether space and time are fundamental, not in the sense of real vs illusory or simulated, but fundamental vs. emergent: we're asking whether space and time are higher-order properties which emerge from, say, finite loops in a spin network (as positing by LQG). And so that's a legitimate question that is at the heart of some of the biggest problems in physics and cosmology right now (quantum gravity, early Big Bang cosmology, black hole physics, etc).

This is awesome

Ok this is even more bad-ass, Webb released a deep field image, with thousands of baby galaxies in the very early universe (less than a billion years old, only a few hundred million years after recombination). JWst is the fucking GOAT.



(click here for a larger, zoom-able version of the image)


- JWST press release

Very interesting new Night Sky News episode from Dr Becky; discusses a new paper that claims that Betelgeuse is now in the carbon-fusing stage of stellar evolution, meaning it is nearing the end of its lifetime. The paper predicts that Beterlgeuse could go supernova within decades (!!!)- in our own lifetimes.



And here is the paper under discussion:

"The evolutionary stage of Betelgeuse inferred from its pulsation periods", (Saio, Nandal, Meynet, Ekstöm 2023)


(emphasis mine)

In short, they found that carbon-burning stellar models fit their observations of Betelgeuse's variation periods. Suggesting that Betelgeuse is itself in the carbon-burning phase, and so very close to going supernova- much closer than previously thought.

So there are some MAJOR caveats here; we're talking about best-fit models, and this paper has not yet passed peer-review. So take this with a grain of salt (or two). But still very exciting if true.

Fortunately Betelgeuse is far enough away (and positioned such that we aren't looking down the barrel of the gun of its poles, if'/when it produces gamma ray burst while going supernova- yikes) that we don't have anything to worry about here on Earth.

But it will be a very pretty blot of light in the sky, visible with the naked eye, and will be hugely useful for observational/scientific purposes (the last supernova we were able to witness was in the early 1600s). Not to mention its pretty awesome just on a conceptual level- what's cooler than seeing a gigantic nuclear fusion reactor, larger than we can even really really comprehend, blowing up?