Daily conspiracy

[AFTT47]

The Rise of ‘Conspiracy Physics’

Streamers are building huge audiences by attacking academic physics as just another corrupt establishment. Scientists are starting to worry about the consequences.

In recent years, a group of YouTubers and podcasters have attracted millions of viewers by proclaiming that physics is in crisis. The field, they argue, has discovered little of importance in the last 50 years, because it is dominated by groupthink and silences anyone who dares to dissent from mainstream ideas, like string theory.


The German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has attracted 1.72 million YouTube subscribers in part by attacking her colleagues: “Your problem is that you’re lying to the people who pay you,” she declared. “Your problem is that you’re cowards without a shred of scientific integrity.”


https://www.wsj.com/science/physics/the-...s-dd79fe36

I used to watch Sabine Hossenfelder frequently until she started focusing on her claim that the physics community is broken. Not being an actual scientist, I don't feel qualified to weigh in on this. I get what she's saying but I can't personally evaluate a scientific paper and determine that it's nothing but elegant mathematics unconnected with the real universe.

The issue seems to be that physics has been drifting into areas of pure mathematics, theories which cannot be falsified. Technically, that isn't science. It's not just string theory. The Big Bang Theory doesn't work without Inflation, another questionable area of research. Inflation in turn seems to require a multi-verse - something which also can't be falsified.

I don't know what to think. The universe or multiverse is what it is. It doesn't care whether or not we can make sense of it or whether or not we have the capability of falsifying some of our theories about it. String theory, Inflation and a multiverse are good-faith attempts to explain observations. What are physicists to do if the evidence leads them into areas where the scientific method cannot be applied? Does that mean the field of theoretical physics is dead?