The Major Flaws in (Fundamental) Physics | Sabine Hossenfelder

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz, and I'm sure you're aware, regarding an alleged crisis in physics. I interviewed Sean Carroll, and he defended academia. But his defense wasn't just out of loyalty to academia. To me, it seemed like a balancing weight to the growing societal distrust in science, which he sees as a harmful trend. Today, I'd like us to focus not just on the stagnation in fundamental physics, which is a specific claim, but perhaps on the crisis in physics in general, and perhaps even on science as a whole, and I'd like to hear what you have to say. I'll raise objections as they occur to me, and perhaps others' objections too, and I want to hear your objections to those objections, and we can also get into issues of causes and solutions. Okay, why don't you distinguish between the crisis in fundamental physics and the crisis in physics, and then we can move on to science after that. And also what is meant by crisis? Because I made a claim of stagnation to Sean Carroll, which is different from crises. Right. So, when I give talks on this topic, this is always the first thing I say. I don't like talking about crises. I talk about stagnation, because what it means is more clear. A lot of people think that if we had a real crisis, that would be a good thing, because it's an opportunity to have a breakthrough or something, so we would know what we should do. But that's not what it is. So, for me, I think calling it stagnation is more accurate, because that's what I see. We're just not going anywhere. We're like a treadmill, we pretend we're running, but we're not making any progress. So, actually, I can't recall ever talking about a crisis in physics in general, because I don't really know much about what's going on exactly in physics in general. It's just a huge field with so many subdisciplines. So, I tend to focus on what I call the foundations of physics, where we think about the most fundamental questions. Because that's what I know, right? So, the problem here is that we haven't made any progress on the big open questions for a century. Then we made progress until the Standard Model was completed sometime in the 1970s, depending on how you count. Then you could say, for the next five, ten, fifteen years or something, people were trying out different things, and they were expecting to get somewhere. At some point, you know, sometime in the mid-80s, and maybe the 90s, something went wrong. What happened is that they started doing the same thing over and over again, and it didn't work, and they never revisited those approaches. So, we still don't know what dark matter is made of, if it's made of anything. We still haven't figured out how to measure gravity. We still don't really understand how quantum mechanics works. So, we haven't really found a better theory or a phenomenon that we can actually get to. How are people supposed to solve some of these fundamental problems, like quantum gravity as you mentioned, or dark matter, without experimental evidence, or testing between different theories? Because there are different proposed solutions to what dark matter is, as well as how to measure gravity. It's just that they're outside the experimental reach. So, would you say that this is the theorist's fault, the experimentalist's fault, or nobody's fault? Yes, that's a very good question. So, actually, strictly speaking, we shouldn't lump all these problems together, because each problem is its own problem. Dark matter is completely different from the other problems that I mentioned, because in this case, we do have some experimental data. So, we know that something is not making sense, literally, in fact. If we take what we know, which we have in the Standard Model, and we put it there, it doesn't work properly. And so, introducing some kind of dark stuff is a solution that you can do. But for one reason or another, things don't always go the way they should. So, it raises some other problems. And also, it opens up a question like, what is it made of? Is it made of anything? Then there's this competing theory, modified Newtonian dynamics, or modified gravity in general, and we still haven't figured out how to rule one out or confirm the other. Then these other questions, which we have like quantum gravity, is often framed as a problem of inconsistency. And we can talk about what that exactly means. Quantum mechanics, as I personally said, is also a problem of inconsistency. But I think if you ask other people in the field, they would object that that's the case. Then there are other problems that people like to talk about, which I actually think are not problems, and that's some uncertainties about the Standard Model, for example, like the strong CP problem, or the supposed unnaturalness, like why the Higgs mass is so small, the hierarchy problem, as it's sometimes called. And there's a list of other issues that people have, like baryon asymmetry and things like that, where I would say, these are not good problems, because it's not clear that they actually require a solution. So you could say, I don't like that the Standard Model has just these three generations, and we don't have a deeper explanation for it. But maybe that's just the way nature is. Maybe nature just has three generations, and there's no deeper explanation. So I think it's not a good problem to work on, because we don't have anything to start with. There's no problem that actually needs to be solved, if you know what I mean. That's not the case with quantum gravity, where you could say, okay, actually, if we take general relativity and combine it with quantum field theory, it doesn't work. We don't know what to do. So there's a real need to develop new mathematics. And I think that's what makes this a promising avenue. Just for people who don't know some of the problems, or so-called problems, it's about CP violation. Then there's something called theta, which seems to be zero or close to zero. And then physicists don't like small values, because they like to have at least a small-valued function. So they can say, okay, this is the reason for the small value. And you could say these are fake problems, because maybe the reason is the nature of nature. So let's talk about the actual problems, which I think you've divided into two categories. One is inconsistency with data. So maybe the muon experiment is that one, or the data from it. And then internal inconsistencies. So let's stick to internal inconsistencies. Quantum gravity is one, and the projection postulate in quantum mechanics is another. Are there others, or is it just the two, for internal inconsistencies? Well, there are more technical issues related to quantum field theory, but they become very technical very quickly. So maybe let's leave those aside. But yes, there are some other mathematical problems that people have. For example, you could ask, is quantum field theory actually a well-defined framework to begin with? Which is a very philosophical question to ask. If it works, then should we worry about whether it's well-defined? Oh, interesting. That's very interesting. I didn't know that. I thought you were going in the other direction for any progress towards well-defining QFT. And that's what I said and I don't want to talk about. Yes, because I don't really know. That's not something I have, like axiomatic quantum field theory is not something I've worked on myself. So I know that it exists. I know that there are problems that people are working on. But I don't really know much about it. So, you know, this is not a good topic to talk about, because I'm just talking nonsense. I see. I see. So the thing I was going to say is, well, do you consider soft theories and asymptotic symmetries as progress in physics, or progress in dual copy relations, like the measurement of gravity dualities or the measurement of gravity relations? Well, all of that is very interesting because it helps us to better understand the theories that we already have. But it doesn't really help us, you know, it's not new physics in the sense that it's not a fundamentally new phenomenon that's been predicted. It's not really that, at least I don't see how it helps us answer these questions, like the big questions that we've just been talking about. So, of course, you know, people who work in this field, they see a lot of progress, because they write a lot of papers, and they try very hard to understand the mathematics. And I'm not saying that this is all useless, you know, in particular, I've talked about this recently in a video, flat capacity stuff. So that's a very interesting development. And the whole AdS/CFT stuff is also fascinating. You know, they're learning a lot, a lot about the mathematics of gauge theories, and how quantum field theory actually works, like there are many more structures than we thought. But, you know, when it comes to those big fundamental questions that we started talking about, at least for now, I don't really see what we're learning from it about that. So there's a long story about Neymar Canhamer, and you know, the demise of spacetime or that it's doomed, right? That's like spacetime is doomed, and that's the famous quote. And this might be like, maybe this is the actual way to do it. So maybe we have to describe quantum physics in terms of these capacities. And that will give us an idea of how to deal with quantum gravity. But at least for now, I haven't seen that happen. Yes. And you also see that as a chance discovery argument, and hopefully, if we explore this, we'll stumble upon a solution. But there are many different paths we could have taken. And if we justify our explorations consistently, we'll find something that will be useful. So, yes, well, the problem is that chance discoveries have happened, and they will likely continue to happen. But the question is, how likely is that? So I don't have a big problem with people, in fact I don't have a problem with most people, this point. But, you know, research methods like the expansive hologram or area holography and other very math-heavy things have taught us something. And yes, you know, something surprising might come out of it. But I don't think that, you know, historically speaking, it's been a very fruitful strategy. And historically, people also had the advantage of having some data they could look at. I've actually asked this question, like, this is like the big issue, like, we don't have any data to guide us to a theory of quantum gravity. And that leaves a lot of room for mathematical manipulation. And you can overdo this, you know, there's a lot of math you can guess, and that's why we have all these different approaches to quantum gravity, right? So everyone has their own idea about what the right thing to do is. That's what this channel is about. Yes. So what are we going to do, Kurt? Right? So are we going to make videos about everything? And at the end of the day, we have a vote about what's the prettiest? I don't think that's a good way to do it. Well, for me, I didn't like the expansive hologram. It was interesting. But it was for a specific kind of quantum field theory, n equals four, as well as Yang-Mills superfield. But then it was recently generalized to holography, I think. I think it's holography. And now it can compute without supersymmetry for phi three, phi cubed, I think. But anyway, the point is that you would classify that as cool, but not progress. Well, you know, it's progress to some extent, but it's not progress on the questions that we've been talking about. Right? So at least I don't see how it is. So, you know, we can have an endless debate about what exactly we mean by progress. Right? Is progress in writing a paper? Yes, well, I think, you know, personally, what I'm talking about is making progress in finding some kind of new physics. And that, in my opinion, is a better understanding of the theories that we already have. And yes, you can call that progress in a sense. But, you know, that's not what I personally care about. And frankly, I don't think that's what most people care about when they talk about the foundations of physics. Right. Then you go back and say, yes, but actually, you know, we've calculated some Feynman diagrams for three more numbers or something, oh, yes, I'm cool. Nice - good. So there's a cool diagram in one of your videos. And I'll overlay that on the screen. I'll simplify it more than it is, where the Standard Model appears here on the x-axis, let's imagine Standard Models, the predictions are a straight line instead of a curve. And then the deviations from that are what people expect. But we've only tested from zero up to here. And so far the Standard Model is correct. And these predictions continue along the x-axis. But people's theories all diverge from there. Then they say, look, I'm falsifiable because the other energy scale, you can either prove me right or wrong. And then it generally turns out that the Standard Model is correct. So, we have a variety of different theories that can predict, but they also lie outside the experimental reach. So, outside of dark matter, although we don't know it, we don't know if dark matter is a particle, as no one has discovered a dark matter particle. So we just have the distribution of dark matter. And my problem is that it's very difficult to make progress in physics without experiment guiding us. Then the other question is, well, well, look, if progress is difficult, why are we writing all these papers? And so I assume that's part of your critique. And I wonder if this critique is included, and that taxpayers are paying for it. And then I wonder to what extent your problem with paper production, and academia as a whole, would disappear if it wasn't funded by taxpayers? Well, we're still unable to make progress. So, you know, just stopping paying people doesn't help us understand how quantum gravity works. But yes, I think it's kind of a double bind, you know, I would say, well, you know, if they're not making actual progress, then what are we paying them for? So it's kind of a double insult. It's not just that you think they should be trying harder. Let me put it that way. But in fact, we also have to pay for it. So, but yes, you know, just stopping paying them won't help much. At least I don't think so. We have to think of another way of doing this. So I really think it's a systemic problem. And I also think it depends a lot on how these problems arise, but at least in the foundations of physics. We are witnessing this overproduction of predictive models that are repeatedly ruled out. And what I've tried to convey is that this is a systemic problem that physicists think they should be working on. And I really think this is kind of a misunderstanding of the philosophy of science. They think that just because you can write it down in mathematics and it's falsifiable, because in principle, you can do a measurement and rule it out. It's good science. And I've tried to convey to them, that's not true, you know, for a hypothesis to be scientifically useful. It must solve some problems. The only thing you have to do is add something on top of what we already have, but we don't really need this for anything. And you know, just on a purely mathematical level, it's completely obvious why this doesn't work, because there are infinitely many of these potential predictions you can make. And therefore, the probability that any one of them is correct is zero. So I'm not surprised that it doesn't work. And you know, you know, in my book, I discussed that if you look at the history of physics, theoretical achievements came from solving inconsistencies. And this is just an observation, and I think it's true. I don't actually know why that is, but it seems to work. And that's why I was saying that we should focus on solving inconsistencies, like, for example, quantum gravity, quantum mechanics, and forget about these fake problems, like the hierarchy problem, the strong CP problem, and so on. Are you looking for the perfect holiday gift? Masterclass has been my favorite recommendation for something truly meaningful. Imagine giving your loved ones the opportunity to learn directly from world-renowned instructors. With Masterclass, your friends and family can learn from the best to become their best. It's not just another streaming platform, it's a treasure trove of inspiration and personal growth. Whether it's learning critical thinking from Noam Chomsky or gaining practical problem-solving skills with Bill Nye, exploring the richness of history with Doris Kearns Goodwin, or my personal favorite, learning mathematical tricks or techniques from Terry Tao. There's something for everyone. 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That's masterclass.com's slanted theories, your gateway to unforgettable learning experiences. Strong CP problem, and so on. Well, imagine your critique would also apply to the different theories of quantum gravity that exist, like loop or string, because the string theorists will say, what we do is, well, we've solved one of the main difficulties in combining general relativity with QFT. Specifically, you can't go down to zero because you have the minimum string length, and gravitons come out of the theory without adding gravitons to the theory. Isn't that progress? And I imagine you would say, either you would say maybe at first, or you would say no, wholesale. So what do you say about the many approaches related to quantum gravity? Yes, well, consistency is good and good, but that's not the whole story. It can't be, because there are always multiple ways to solve mathematical inconsistencies. And that's why we have these different approaches to quantum gravity. String theory, and you know, we can talk about any of them, you know, they all have problems, let me put it that way. And there's a lot of debate about which one is better and which problems are more serious. So we have string theory, loop quantum gravity, asymptotic safe gravity, and then there are some less well-known approaches like causal dynamical triangulation. Frankly, I don't know what happened to that, I haven't heard anything about it for a while. Maybe causal sets, which now seem to be having some kind of revival in these over-graph things, which I find very interesting. But in the end, you know, if you have a theory, you still have to go and test it. And I think the probability, in fact, the necessity of testing quantum gravity has been neglected for a long time, because physicists thought, well, it's never going to be testable anyway. Which raises the interesting question, well, if that's what they thought, then why were they working on it in the first place? Because then it's not really science. And anyway, the interesting thing is that in the last ten years, this discussion has completely shifted to, yes, we might actually be able to test it. And I think the reason this shift has happened is that for a long time, when people talked about testing quantum gravity, they had what's called the strong gravity regime, where you could actually see, is it strings or loops? So you'd be able to distinguish the details of whatever happens at high energies. But in fact, you should also see the effects of quantum gravity in the weak field limit, which we can test in the lab. In principle, you know, we're not there yet, but maybe we will be in a decade or two. And I can talk more about this, but I think this is a very interesting shift because people are now thinking about how to make predictions for experiments that might actually happen at some point. Yes, in fact, I spoke with Yvette Fuentes about her proposal for how to test quantum gravity in the lab, and then I also spoke with Chiara Marletto. And there are various proposals being put forward. Now, you said that solving internal inconsistencies is one thing, but again, there's a variety of them. So it seems to me that this is not a sufficient condition. It's a necessary condition to solve internal inconsistencies. What would be the next condition? If you are a grant-making body, and Sabine is a grant-making body, and people come to you with proposals for you to give some money to someone in theoretical physics, what are you looking for? You know, frankly, I would just say to them, don't ask me. I think it's not a good procedure. We should deal with this in a smart way. I mean, the most obvious thing I always tell people is to learn from your mistakes. And that's exactly why I'm so upset about what's happening in the foundations of physics, because that's not what they're doing. They're making the same mistakes over and over again. And so, and that's also why we see very little novelty, because they're just, you know, keep repeating the same things in, you know, slightly different forms, but there's no big change. Then there's this whole societal problem where people who try something different have a hard time getting funding. So, yes, I think that would be one of the main points. I think there should be, if you want people to start something really new, they need more time than you have in most of the grants that you get, which are usually for two or three years. And that means practically that you have to think about applying for the next grant the moment you start working on the current grant. And that makes people extremely risk-averse, because you know you have this pressure on your back that you need to bring money back soon. So you need to produce results, like several reliable research papers a year or something like that. Otherwise, it doesn't look good. So you can't just say, I'm going to think about this big question for the next five years and see what comes out of it. That's not possible. And of course, you know, you don't want to hire almost 10,000 people sitting around thinking big thoughts. That doesn't make sense either. But I think you need at least a few people to be able to do that. And it seems to me that we have very few people who can do that. And it's becoming less and less rather than more and more. And the other issue, which I've talked about extensively in my first book, is the issue of self-reinforcing bubbles that you get in research, and which I think string theory is a very good example of. String theory and also supersymmetry, you know, all of this is beyond the Standard Model predictions that I made for the LHC, which didn't pan out. Because what happens is, once you get a PhD in a certain area, you get a postdoc in it, and you apply for grants on it. At some point, it becomes impossible to change topics because nobody will give you money, and nobody will hire you, because it will take a year or maybe two years to learn something new. So I think something very simple we can do to prevent this self-reinforcement, because people can't get out of the field. So they are constantly forced to tell themselves that this is what they want to do. And you know, attracting more funding for the same thing means just giving people a chance to start something new without the pressure of having to produce research papers immediately. Like some kind of, you know, refocus grant, or maybe that's not a good word, you know, redirection grant. Yes. Interesting. Okay. So it sounds like two solutions. Well, well, one of the problems people think is that there's a dependency on grants, but you're saying it's not just dependency on grants, but it's dependency on these short-term, short-term grants of two to five years, because and in order to make significant progress, you need much longer time frames. So over-reliance on short-term grants, and so on, grants don't pay you to switch topics, and switching topics might be necessary. So we have sour grapes, which is that if you try to achieve something, and then you fail, you look at it, and then you start to despise it. But we have the opposite, which is that if you have something, you start to adore it. In string theory, you start to adore it and you start to think that it's what's needed to push you forward or forward. Let me correct my error here. I'm sure this is part of it. Okay, so I don't know. So I haven't done a psychoanalysis of the entire string theorist community. So I mean, I've interacted with some of them. And I think most of them actually believe in what they're working on. So I think it's real. And I think the reason mostly is that people who are not actually convinced that this is a good thing to do, they just leave. Because the working conditions are not that great. So, you know, you have to have enough motivation to endure some pain, basically, to stay in academia. And so, I think most of these people have the motivation, but a lot of it comes from social reinforcement, like they live in a community where people constantly tell each other that this is the right thing to do. Especially in the string theory community, this has been the case for at least 20 years, when my interaction with them was more extreme, where they rarely talked to someone who wasn't a string theorist. And so, in fact, again, this is just my impression, it has actually gotten much better given that there's more AdS/CFT, because that connects to other research fields like condensed matter physics, heavy fermion physics, and that sort of thing. So it's less isolated now. Yes, this was the point I made to Sean Carroll, because Sean was saying, well, I was suggesting to Sean that he was misrepresenting the views that say there's a crisis in physics, because the people who say that are actually, making a very specific claim about theoretical physics and fundamental laws, and not just physics as a whole. And he started to bring up engineering achievements, like looking at topological phases of matter or condensed matter physics, and so on, and so on. And I was saying, well, but that's not what your opponents mean. Then I was saying that if there is a crisis, and not just stagnation, it's a combination of stagnation and silence, with the silence being in the string theory community, for example, they don't listen to theories that exist outside of it. In fact, they don't know, and then they'll say it's the only game in town. Then when I talk to string theorists, and I bring up alternative theories, they'll say, well, they haven't been able to summarize it in a way that theorists agree on. So, for about 20 years ago, when I was actually working on quantum gravity, often on quantum gravity phenomena, I was always interested in how to test these things. And you could try to extract some predictions from string theory phenomena, or you could use loop quantum gravity, or you could follow other paths. And that's why I interacted with people who worked on all sorts of different things. And they certainly didn't usually know what the others were talking about, like they had a lot of prejudices. And sometimes, you know, it was a bit ridiculous. So I don't really know what has happened in the last fifteen years, because I've just stopped working on this. But as I said, it seems like my impression is vague, like the whole loop quantum gravity stuff has completely veered off in its own direction. So nobody has any idea what these people are doing. They're just doing their own thing. Then we have the string theorists, where the whole community has split into two camps, basically. So there's one, this is the much smaller camp of those who believe that string theory is like the theory of everything. And then we're given the correct theory of quantum gravity and all that sort of thing. And then there are these people who believe that string theory is a useful tool for better understanding quantum field theory. And that's where most of the AdS/CFT stuff lives now. You know, it's a tool to better understand exotic metals, like that's a typical selling point, you know, people like to bring up. That's possible. In general, I think the prospects are greatly exaggerated, but maybe I say that about almost everything. So it's not specific to string theory. But yes, I mean, that's not specific, I think, to this particular research direction. You see this in many other fields as well, where people are forced to overspecialize, and they split into different camps. And they have to have some reason why their stuff is better than other people's stuff. And they often do that by ignoring what other people are doing. You see this also in astrophysics in this debate between dark matter and modified gravity. It's truly shocking how many people who are completely opposed to modified gravity have no idea how it actually works. So I've seen this with my own eyes. They say, no, we know dark matter is the thing. Then they point to something completely absurd, like the lead group, you know, which, you know, the lead group is like this observation, which is neither here nor there. So it's generally hard to explain everything, and it seems to be an extreme statistical value, whatever. But they have such a compelling image, you know, in blue and red, you have to explain this image why I'm fumbling here. So it makes no sense. And they say: this is proof of it. But if you look at the details, that's not true. And so I always find this a bit sad that actual astrophysicists who should know these things, like who should actually look at the details, will look at this, like, is this really true? Does it actually rule out modified gravity? Because it doesn't. You can easily spin a story that it rules out dark matter. And there are other stories like, you know, with the cosmic microwave background, and these are all things that Stacey McCulloch has been following, like forever, you know, how the CMB radiation peak has actually ruled out dark matter. You know, if you look at the predictions, I've looked at this at some point, this is actually true, you know, they made a prediction that actually differs from what's observed, but they didn't conclude that dark matter has been ruled out. Instead, you know, they fumbled with the theory. And so, and the painful thing about this is that if you talk to astrophysicists, they won't know these things. Like, this is not in their group code, basically. So it gets forgotten. And that's what I find very sad. You know, drawing different conclusions from data is one thing, that's fine. But I don't even know what's happening elsewhere. That's not good. You know, this is a serious societal problem. So, do you see another grant as knowing your competitors? Or do you think this is just part of your job as a physicist? Yes. And so, I think physicists, and not just physicists, this is a comprehensive scientific thing, should be more aware of these social dynamics that force them to stay in a corner where some things can be completely forgotten. Or they are so convinced that something is true, and they never go to check it. And so, I find this very disturbing. And that's also why we have all these wrong predictions for what's going to happen at the LHC. You know, all the stuff about supersymmetry and dark matter particles was supposed to show up in extra dimensions and gravitons and black holes and so on. Well, they were all, I've already pointed this out with the theta parameter, and they were all predictions based on the idea of nature, which is not a scientific criterion. It's, in the end, if you look at it, it's an argument from beauty. And I tried to talk to people in this community even before the LHC collider was turned on, and I was trying to find out, why are you using this? Why do you believe this? And they insisted that it's a mathematical criterion. And you can still see this in the archives today, and people are still using these arguments. And I think this is just a fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on. So, they grew up learning that this is how you build theory, and that this is a good criterion. And they never questioned this, where I would say, well, you should, you know, not just trust these other people, what they say. So, yes, at first, I raised this question about trust in science. And this is like, one of the main reasons why I have difficulties trusting scientists, because I've seen this happen wrongly in my community. LBW This is a great point to talk about general distrust in science, but also about your issues with science in general. So, let's get to the so-called crisis in science. I think, let me check again if you have a YouTube title. Well, you can tell me if you have a YouTube video called The Crisis in Science. And you weren't referring to someone else, as if you were actually saying that there is a crisis in science. Sabin: Yes, I've definitely mentioned that, but I can't remember what the title is. Sorry, because, you know, I change titles frequently. So, I have no idea what the current title is. You'll have to search for it. LBW Well, let's give some behind-the-scenes for people who are not YouTubers and don't know how to test thumbnails and titles. And then they see something like The Crisis in Physics. Let's imagine you came up with a thumbnail like this, or your team did. And then they say, Sabin, what you're doing is clickbait. And you're contributing to distrust in science with such provocative statements. So what do you say to that? Give people some behind-the-scenes. Sabin, look, people used to mock how bad my thumbnails were. So, if they now say your thumbnails are clickbait, I say, yes, I finally figured out how to do it. Yes, but more seriously, I think most people who complain about titles and clickbait, and you know, YouTubers do it just for clicks or whatever, they don't know the first thing about how YouTube works.

So, if it were easy to create a video that grabs attention and get rich from it, everyone would have done it. So, yes, I mean, as you pointed out earlier, we usually write a whole bunch of titles, and we produce a whole bunch of thumbnails, which luckily you can now A/B test at least three of them. If you have more, you have to repeat it several times. And the thumbnail and title that you see in the end are the best. And that's how it works. And yes, I mean, of course, that everyone I think on YouTube is trying to find a way to get the video message across to their audience in the best way. And usually, I just try to find something, you know, sometimes it's a stupid way to summarize what's in the video. So, in this video, I explain X, Y, Z, because I found that the titles that don't really work are the ones that misrepresent the content of the video. Often, you know, it's not intentional. But, you know, I look at it later and I say, I think it's about something else than what it's actually about. And that's surprisingly difficult. I mean, there's a reason why there's a book of headlines in major newspapers, because that's not easy. So, you know, I know this sounds now like I'm apologizing for something. I'm just trying to say, you know, it's not as easy as people think. I usually try to be to the point. And I think that's kind of my brand. You know, I just say things as they are, and some people find it offensive. I guess that's just who I am. Have I always been this way? Yes, pretty much. You know, a lot of people blame me for being German. Maybe that's a part. I think you blame yourself for being German. Yes, I mean, to some extent. I mean, I've heard this. I've heard this a lot. Like, this is a stereotype. Like Germans, this is what I've been told. Right. So, Germans are very direct, and they often come across as rude or unfriendly. And, you know, if that's what people think, then I guess that's true. I'm not intentionally trying to be rude or unfriendly. And I think most Germans wouldn't look at me that way. But yeah, I mean, so I think I've always been the type to say, I think this is bullshit. And then I just say that this is bullshit. Yeah. And I think some people find that attractive in a way. Yeah. I think that's a well-established personality trait. I think that's an agreeable trait in the Big Five personality model, which has a heavy genetic component. So maybe there's some truth to the Germans. I need to see a population study. I definitely got it from my mother. Right. Now, what about the humor? Yeah. What about that? Your videos have a lot of jokes in them. Are those your writings? Are they your team's writings? Is that something that runs in the family? Is that something that comes naturally to you? No, I actually do it myself. I've tried to outsource it to other people, but it hasn't worked out very well. I tend not to find other people's jokes funny. There's also the issue that I try very hard to make my jokes somewhat clever, if that makes sense. So they're often about science. Some of them are inside jokes that I think most people won't really get. So it's really hard to leave that to someone else. So I've been doing it myself. Some days I feel funnier than other days. Sometimes it's very difficult to land some jokes, and that's also one of the reasons why I've been doing these phone jokes, where the phone rings and the boss tells him. And I'll be like, oh yeah, we'll just constantly be modifying the phone structure on the fly or something like that. And the thing is, it's taken me a very long time to come up with these jokes. I have a lot more respect now for professional comedians and funny people because it's so difficult. And at some point too, you don't want to repeat yourself too much. And that's why I do it from time to time, but not as regularly as I used to. I used to do stand-up when I was 18. And what you do is you get an open mic, and you're up there for five minutes at the open mic. And I told myself, every time I go to an open mic, I'm going to come up with five new minutes. And there was a lot of work. And I bombed. So I did really well the first few times. And then I bombed the fifth or sixth time. And then I remember that crushed me because I had done so well the first few times. And I had this overconfidence and this pride. And then I stopped doing it for a year after that because I was so shocked by it. So what did you start doing again? Well, after that, I continued to do it for a while after that. And then things faded because I became a director and used my math skills for that, and then I became a voice actor using the math and physics from my university studies. Okay, that's cool. I would actually, yeah, I'd be very interested to hear some of that. But yeah, so yeah, no, think about it. I'm serious. It's embarrassing. Well, it can't be more embarrassing than my stupid jokes. But yeah, if you're talking about science, you know, if I do a video about, I don't know, the expanding universe or something like that, there's an additional problem that people have to understand that it's a joke. So, if you go to a comedy show, you're supposed to laugh. So I have to do that, I always have to make sure that people already know that it's a joke. And now you're supposed to laugh. Well, editing might be part of that too. So when you're about to start a joke, the camera zooms in or your team cuts in. We do that. Right, right. And, you know, I have kind of this jokey voice, you know, with kind of cues for people, and now this is a joke. You can laugh now. But it doesn't always work. You know, some jokes just, I think, fail. People don't really see what's funny about it or something like that. Yeah, it's a lot harder than most people think, I think. Do your kids find you funny? So I don't know. Do you have kids? No, the weird thing. I have a wife. Yeah, well, that's the start. That's supposed to be the precursor. The thing about kids is that they, until a certain age, don't get jokes. And I found that kind of weird because I was always making little jokes, you know, a bit sarcastic, you know, statements about, you know, something like, oh, really, I would never have thought of that, you know. Or if I dropped something, right. And you have a five-year-old who says, oh Mommy, I just dropped an egg. And I say, oh, really, you don't say, you know, that kind of thing. Kids don't get that. It's sarcasm. And so they take it literally. And then they'll point out, yeah, there's an egg. And you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so at some point, they start to get that, at around age nine or ten or something like that. And I'm now at the age where they're starting to make their own jokes. So I find that very interesting. So, you know, they're kind of trivial jokes at this point. I think sarcasm is particularly simple. I actually try not to use it too much because it's too simple. You mean to say in your videos? Yes, it comes across. I have actually, of course, experimented with ChatGPT to write jokes. But most of what ChatGPT puts out is sarcastic remarks, and they always sound somewhat similar. So it gets really boring. But yeah, I think that's the simplest thing to do. And, you know, I love three or four books on "How to be funny," or the most common types of humor and stuff like that. Oh, that's hilarious. Yeah, that's funny, isn't it? That's very funny. Yeah, if you study it, it looks bad. Yeah, go on. I'm a scientist, right? Yeah. So, Sabin, I'm sorry, Sabina, I should have said Sabina, right? Yeah, but don't worry about it. Okay, Sabina. One of the reasons I got into comedy is that I never said anything funny until I was 18. And the reason is that I loved Seinfeld, I loved watching, I loved any comedy, but I never thought I could produce comedy. Then I thought, well, it turns out that Seinfeld himself, Jerry Seinfeld, didn't say anything funny, at least not to his family until he was 22. He decided to become a comedian as soon as he graduated. And I remember thinking, why can't I study how comedy works the same way I study a math problem? So I was doing a real analysis when I was 17. And I remember some of those problems were very difficult. And I'm thinking, well, why can't I approach jokes in the same way? So I started writing jokes, and I started finding formulas. And as I mentioned, when I went on stage, I did very well the first few times. The guy thought I had been doing it for months. So this analytical quality of analyzing jokes is successful. Yeah. Yeah, I've noticed the same thing. I think it works to some extent because I look at really good comedians. It's a lot about how they deliver things. It's a lot about the performance, you know, they're funny in themselves. And I just, I'm a bad performer. Like, I just can't do it. You know, I think, you know, frankly, I'm not funny. And that's why these kinds of jokes that I'm telling, they're not funny funny, sort of, you know, they're funny, because they're not funny. Yeah. So I try to do my best. How do we end up talking about jokes? I was? I was very rational when I was 18, and I remember saying, if I'm going to tell a joke, it has to be such that a robot could read this joke with the same tone of voice, and it would elicit laughter, it wouldn't elicit laughter, because I'm doing something physical with my body, or I have the right confidence. And I didn't like Kramer from Seinfeld because of that. I remember thinking about that slapstick comedy, and I wanted to be like Seinfeld. I looked at Seinfeld, and he said he dissects jokes with a scalpel. He breaks them down and gets down to the nitty-gritty. And I love that. I love wordplay. But anyway, when you and I met, at the Institute for Arts and Ideas, we talked about how you've tried to have people write your scripts before. You've tried to outsource some of it to research people, not just scriptwriters. But it hasn't worked. Can you talk about that? Yeah. So it wasn't 100% a failure. Yeah. I have worked with some very good people who saved me a lot of time by doing the research, looking through the literature, finding out what the key references are, reading them, and what the main points of the references are. But I found it very difficult to find, and essentially impossible, to find someone who's good at doing the research and writing a YouTube script. And so in the end, I always ended up doing most of the work. I also had a few scriptwriters who unfortunately made some mistakes that I only discovered in many cases, by chance, because it was something that I knew. And then I became suspicious and started looking into all these other things. And so I went through a lot of people very quickly. So, for example, the one thing that drove me crazy is that I've always told people, I'm a little bit of an over-organizer. So, when you start working with me, you get a long paper, outlining what you should and shouldn't do, because I don't like to repeat myself. And one of the fundamental things seems to be to not always trust the references used, like never ever. You know, a website says, there was a report and the report says X, Y, Z, you have to look at the report. And you won't believe how many times you look at the original report, and it actually didn't say that. And some people, no matter how many times you tell them, don't do this, they'll still do it. And they think they'll get away with it. And unfortunately, in the end, I'm responsible for that. And I always think that I should check everything, but of course I don't. And I don't always notice. And that's why shit happens. And in the end, I'm the one who's going to be blamed, right? And now, mostly, I do everything myself at the moment, which is also not a good arrangement. And that's why I mostly talk about things that I know about myself, at least a little bit. So that's another thing. We tell our kids that we're not supposed to judge a book by its cover. We even pretend to live by that philosophy ourselves. You're supposed to just review the content itself, not the cover of the content. It's the inside that matters. And yet, people will simultaneously claim that they don't like YouTube titles. So why? If the content is there, why do you care? Are we not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but please judge it by its thumbnail? Or are we not supposed to refrain from judging until we understand the essence or the content? What is it? And the other thing that I see is that you're supposed to judge people by their own merits. But it now seems that people are judging others based on who their audience is. In other words, you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but you can by the demographics of its sales. Yeah, well, first of all, I don't see that very much in my comments. And also, in general, as on YouTube, at least, you know, the weird things that used to happen on Twitter, as you've probably noticed, it's a very weird place and it gets weirder every day. But at least for what I see in my YouTube comments, to the extent that I can read them, I mean, I get thousands of comments a day, so I can't really read them all. I try to read as many as possible. Most of them are from ordinary people, I would say, you know, they're interested in physics. You know, the average person who's interested is how I would describe most of my channel's audience. And many of them are also students in one field or another, usually physics and related disciplines. And of course, many of them, and I know you understand this too, are independent researchers. They're working on their own things. And they have their own ideas about everything. And that's fine with me. So I don't really see a big problem with that. And then you get what you call science deniers, who are looking for a reason to reject some scientific findings that they don't like. Often, that's climate science, because it doesn't fit their political views or something like that. And they'll jump on anything that proves their point that you can't trust scientists. The thing is, I understand where these people are coming from. As I said, it seems as if what I saw happening in my field of expertise, destroyed my trust in scientists. And I haven't regained it because I haven't done anything to fix the problem. I have no reason to believe that the same problem doesn't exist in other disciplines as well, and that's why I've looked closely at what they're doing in climate science. And I've actually attended some conferences and spoken to climate scientists. I've interacted with a number of them, and that's why I can now confidently say, no, climate change is not a hoax. It's a real thing. And climate science, the community has its problems. But the problem isn't that they're making up climate change. And so, my approach to the problem of science deniers is to take them seriously because there was an origin to their distrust and try to address that on a fundamental basis, to look at the science and say, no, this is why the evidence is there. And so, people still feel distrustful of the institution of science. And I think the only way we can address this problem is to make it better. In other words, you're going against people who say like, look Sabin, with your brilliant rhetoric, people love the word rhetoric, or your sparkling thumbnails or whatever you have, you're contributing to distrust or distrust in science. You're like, no. First of all, there are some people who always strip something and take it out of context and use it as ammunition for whatever reason. So, that will always be the case. So, first, there's that. But secondly, you're bringing up issues that haven't been talked about and now scientists are talking about them. People in academia are talking about them. By the way, many people in academia agree with you. And so, you're contributing to public trust in science, or at least trying to regain that trust by promoting science. Is that a fair summary? Yes, I think it's wrong to try to hide these problems, because at least I think they're quite obvious. So, there's something interesting that a lot of people in academia like to forget. I think 90% of people who get a PhD or, you know, who do something in academia, leave. So, there are a lot of people who have direct experience in academia and are no longer working in academia. And these people know very well what's going on. And I know from the comments that I've received that a lot of people who are very concerned about what's going on in academia, know what they're talking about. They've seen it with their own eyes. So, it's not as easy as we say, they're all climate deniers. You know, they're all kind of weird in the head or something like that. So, I think that's a serious problem. We need to do something about it. And the first thing you have to do is acknowledge that you have a problem, basically. So, I was surprised when I said earlier that there aren't enough people thinking about the fundamental issues, because for me, there's an overproduction of these people. And in my estimation, from what I see from being on the inside, formerly inside academia, and also from talking to people on the inside and seeing this whole trend, it seems like we're producing more and more physicists or people with a set of physics skills and people with a set of math skills, and then they have nowhere to go. So, I'll read a recent tweet. Someone said, after I get my PhD, I'll definitely be able to find some jobs in my field. Next number. Well, what about access to online journals so I can continue my research? No, well, at least I can still upload my work to free online pre-print repositories, right? Also no. And then I commented, this really shouldn't be happening. I feel like we need to create an underground scientific community. So, do you also see that there's an overproduction of scientists, or do you not see that? And I want to know more about this underground scientific work. So, the overproduction of PhDs, that's a long-standing problem that's been discussed back and forth. And I think most people who I've talked about this with agree that it's driven by the need for cheap researchers. So, a lot of grant generation depends on how quickly you can produce research papers. And the more young students and postdocs you can hire for cheap jobs, the better. And so, you see this in a lot of institutions, and I've seen it with my own eyes. In fact, I was one of them, where you hire students, young postdocs, and hire them for these very cheap jobs, they produce their three papers, and then you fire them. But for most of them, there are no landing spots. You know, there aren't enough jobs. And the reason this doesn't change is because the people higher up in the hierarchy, like professors, especially younger ones, need these people to produce all this research. So, and I think that's why this isn't changing. I don't really know what to do about it. I'm just telling you, I think that's what's happening. I remember this tweet. And the reason that I thought it was interesting is that this is a problem that I've seen with a lot of people that I know who have left academia, most of them voluntarily, you know, and gone on to get another job, you know, that would feed the family more reliably. But they don't lose their interest from day to day. You know, in many cases, they have unfinished research, or maybe they have some other research, things that they want to work on. And, you know, they do it on the weekend, out of passion. But then they run into the problem that they're no longer affiliated with some institution, and some journals won't even accept their research, which I think is just completely insane. Like, why do you need a university affiliation or something like that to submit research to a journal that's supposed to be peer-reviewed? That makes no sense. And you can also ask, for example, if they want to go to a conference, you know, they can't apply for any funding or anything like that because they don't have that affiliation. And then there's also the community issue, right? You're no longer really connected to the community. And, you know, you've become a bit disconnected. And as I said earlier, once you look at the numbers, I don't have exact numbers in my head, but I'm pretty sure like the vast majority of people who have had a connection to academia at some point, eventually leave. So, and that's why I have this tweet about underground science, which is what I'm loosely calling it, you know, all these people who want to do this research work, but they're not affiliated with a university or another research institute. But what do they do? Do you know how they organize themselves? Why can't these people apply for travel grants? Why can't they submit papers? That makes no sense. And so it seems to me that if I had more time, maybe I would do something about it. You know, it's not that hard to fund a community where people can get together and try to find a way to solve this problem. But yeah, I think it's a growing problem. You know, I see more and more people in this situation getting frustrated by it because they've written a paper. And let me be clear, I'm not talking about some people who have revolutionary new quantum mechanics. You know, it's usually like super technical stuff, or some kind of data analysis, or, you know, something that came out of a PhD. Yeah, right. Or actually this tweet from the guy, actually what he wanted to do is he wanted to publish his PhD thesis in the archive. And, you know, he's already got a PhD, right? So how bad can it be? Why won't they let him publish his PhD thesis? Like that's insane. And of course, I mean, I understand that the archive has a lot of problems with regards to whether it finds people to manage the papers. And so there are things going wrong there. But I have less understanding for this when it comes to journalists who are actually making money from this kind of thing. Yeah, I'm very interested in independent scholarship. So while theories of everything has a large audience there are a large number of academic researchers watching the show, and I also want to contribute to academia in a way outside of academia. And I see that as a big gap that complements academia rather than opposing it or bringing it down or anything like that. I see that universities are doing something necessary. And I would like to help that and see where its problems lie and just fill the gaps. But I'm not entirely sure how to do that. So anytime, Sabina, when you have... ideas, or anyone from the audience, feel free to reach out to me. I want to bring up something you said... Well, I want to bring up a criticism I've heard directed at you that I think is unfair. And then I want to bring up something I think you said that was unfair in one of your videos. So, the criticism that's been directed at you, and it's something you just said, which is, look, I've identified a problem, and then I've said, I don't know how to solve it. And some people say, look, she just raises problems. What are the solutions? I think that's completely unfair. In the scientific method, your assumptions live and die on their own with regards to whether they're right or wrong. You can state a problem without knowing the solution. So, in the early 2000s, when Smolin released his book against string theory, the string theorists criticized him. They were saying, look Lee, you're just trying to promote your own theory, which is loop quantum gravity. Peter Woit at the same time had his own criticisms of string theory. And then the string theorists came to him and said, look, well, you're just criticizing without offering any alternative. Either offer or shut up is something that people say. I don't think that's fair. I think criticism should stand on its own. It's not about whether there's a solution attached to it. Then the thing that you said that I think is unfair is that Peter Woit now has his own alternative. And I remember you in a video, and I don't remember the video, so I apologize, but you were lamenting some scientific problems. And then you said that the only people who are talking about this are me and Peter Woit and Eric, and those two have their own solutions that they're trying to promote. So you said, well, but that doesn't detract from what they're saying. Now, this was an off-the-cuff remark in just one video, and you have thousands of videos. So, it's unfair of me to even bring this up, because if you examine anyone who has such a wealth of content, you'll find different sentences here and there to nitpick. So I don't want it to be that I'm being mean-spirited or perverse in my speech. But I would just like you to expand on this, to tell me what your thoughts are on what I just said. I can tell you exactly. So, first of all, it was mostly intended as a joke. So I know both Eric and Peter Woit. And what was going through my mind when I said that is that we had a meeting, and this is a really long story, and it's Eric Weinstein's idea. And we all sat down with some other people, including Garrett Lisi. And it was about theories of everything. Like, officially, the topic was my book, my book Lost in Math, in which I explained how you shouldn't proceed with theory development. Right? So my whole point is that you should have a concrete problem to solve. Like, you should try to find an inconsistency to solve, and then you should try to find a way to test it experimentally. So that's like, you know, my summary. And of course, you can disagree with that, and maybe you have a better way of doing it. But the irony of the whole thing is that I ended up with these people who are doing exactly what I said we shouldn't be doing, right? So Garrett Lisi, Eric Weinstein, Peter Woit. And that's exactly the same thing that they're doing too. And so I find that, you know, there's a certain irony to it. You know, I don't know, you know, I understand. When was this meeting? Oh my god, it must have been before Corona. Sorry, that's how Germans call it, Covid. I don't know why Germans stick to this, and call it Corona. But yeah, I think it's funny because I, you know, I tried to make people understand my criticisms, and even those who sympathize with it don't want to actually use it. So I'm like, okay, okay, you know, whatever. So what can I say? When you said that you investigated climate change, and then you spoke to climate scientists, and you saw how different, it's called Gilman's memory loss, I think, where you see, actually, no, it's not Gilman's loss of memory. It's the opposite, where you noticed how scientific reports can be wrong in physics, but you've actually researched it in other fields. And now you're not just a fan of science journalism, but maybe scientists. So what if someone said, well, this is similar to claiming racism, where you interacted with a few women, or a few minorities, or a few of any other thing, of white people, and then you had bad experiences, and so you generalize to all white people, or all males, or whatever you have, instead of keeping the claims specific and not generalizing. So, how do you distinguish between criticizing science as a whole, or criticizing scientists as a whole, versus just the specific claims that you've researched? I think we're mixing two different things now. So, the first is a matter of my trust, where I say that I don't trust scientists because of what I said, and the other is what's wrong with science in general. So I think when it comes to the matter of my trust, it's just, I want to see evidence. I'm not necessarily saying that there's something wrong with these other disciplines, but I want to know why I should trust these people. So I think the comparison isn't quite sufficient. In fact, I'm trying not to fall into the trap of Gilman's memory loss, by saying, well, but it's a problem in this discipline only, because I think it's a systemic problem, so I have no reason to assume that it's not also present elsewhere. So when it comes to science in general, I rely more on data, which I've talked about in a recent video. So, I've long thought that these are also some links back to Eric Weinstein, whom I've known for a long time, so it's a really long story. Anyway, I've been very interested in the economic impact of technology, and there's a long backstory about how progress seems to be slowing down, which I think is called Tyler Cowen. I think that's how it's pronounced. Economist. Yeah, and other people have worked on this for a long time, how can you actually measure the impact of technology on our society? And at least my understanding of what they found is that progress is slowing down, and there are two different ways of looking at it. So, in fact, Tyler himself seems to have recently said that there seem to be some indications that the trend has reversed, and then other people have disagreed with him. So, you know, that's his field of research. I see. I've been very interested in so-called scientific metrics, or bibliometric analysis of what you can extract from scientific literature, and I've actually had a research project on this topic. So that's another long story that I don't want to get into. You don't want to get into it, or you do? No, I don't want to get into it, because we'll talk tomorrow. So I know a little bit about bibliometric analysis, and I've worked on it myself. There have been many research papers that have indicated that there's evidence that scientific progress is actually slowing down. And you can always ask, how exactly did they measure scientific progress? And everyone does it in their own way. That's the whole technical system, basically, where they come up with new metrics. And so the reason why I find that convincing is that it doesn't really matter how they did it. They've always found pretty much the same thing, which is that scientific progress has been slowing down since the 1960s and 70s, which also aligns with this economic analysis. Then there's the narrative side of this story, which is what John Horgan wrote about in his book The End of Science, which is exactly what we started with. Like this impression, we're not really making progress on these big open questions, like they've been open for a long time and nothing seems to be happening. So John Horgan thinks that we've just reached the end of science, and that's why his book is called that. And I think that's a bit of an exaggeration, but I think his observation is fundamentally correct. He actually wrote a new preface for the book on its 20th anniversary, which was just two years ago, where he says, well, I've re-examined the points that I made in the book, and it basically turns out to be true. We still haven't figured out what consciousness is. We still don't know what dark matter is. We still don't know what quantum gravity is. We're still talking about vague words about what complexity is, and things like that. I think that's fundamentally true. We can't talk about objections to this because they're always pretty much the same. I find it a bit tiring, and you must get the same thing on social media, it's always the same objections coming from people who haven't heard of the topic before, and you end up repeating the same things over and over again. So in this case, the typical objection is that as science becomes more mature, progress becomes more difficult, and therefore progress slows down. What can you hold against that, where on the other hand, the number of scientists is growing exponentially, which makes us doubt a little. Then the other issue is different disciplines. If you look at something like medicine and physics, for example, you'll find that physics is much older than what people started. We can talk about exactly when medicine actually started, because there was a lot of quackery in the early days. Serious medicine is a much newer field than physics, which is thousands of years old, and especially astronomy. So what's the meaning of progress in all these disciplines slowing down at the same time if it's just about the nature of knowledge itself? It doesn't seem like it. It seems like a systemic problem with how we organize research. And I understand that this is not a conclusive argument, but I think it's perfectly reasonable. And at the very least, you might think it's something we should take seriously, and that we have to change something about how we organize science. Well, so it's not an argument that the fundamentals haven't changed. It's more about the questions that have remained open and unanswered for some time, and it's been that way for a variety of fields at roughly the same time. Yes, that's exactly right. So my big problem isn't that these questions have remained open for a long time, but that we're not getting anywhere. We're doing the same thing over again, and it seems like a systemic problem across all fields. So it seems to me that something is not quite right. Does that make sense? Yes, the only field where I don't see this, I don't see anyone saying there's a crisis in physics, a crisis in the environment, any crisis, everyone's in a crisis, except for computer science. And the fundamentals of computer science haven't changed since the 1940s, even before physics, since Turing and Church. Now, there are unanswered questions about the limits of computation and complexity issues, but they're like near-base machine code questions, but they don't question the base. Yes, in fact, I think one can make a fair point that all the progress that we're seeing in science in general has probably not been driven by computer science exactly, but computer science in a broad sense, which has extended to technology and technological applications and data analysis, and so on. I mean, certainly as in physics

Itself, I mean, I remember when I was a student, if you had an integral that you couldn't solve, and it wasn't in the table, that was the end of your research. You were like, okay, that's it, you can't solve this integral. And that problem just completely evaporated, right? You say, okay, we can't solve this integral, we put it into the computer, and the problem is solved. And that's like almost a trivial thing, how computing power has had such a big impact on physics. And it's certainly also true in other disciplines, like if you look at medicine, just data analysis, if you look at MRI, fMRI, and all these things, you need to analyze this data, you need computers, right? So I think that's the driver behind it. But then you can also ask yourself, what has made this progress in computer science possible? And I would say, well, ultimately, it's all about physics. You need to know what semiconductors are, how they work, what the band gap is, and all that sort of thing. I know there are people who argue that this is not historical, and it's not how it happened. It was just a coincidental thing, so people were fiddling around with things here and there. It's not like they sat down and developed a theory of semiconductors, and then built it. And that's not what happened. But I still think that if you look at it from a constructive point of view, in terms of how science is built, it comes back to our understanding of physics, materials, electricity, and so on. So that's where it comes from. So what we're doing now is we're trying to get out of the science that we've already discovered, what we can do. So we're working on making computers smaller and smaller, and there's still a lot to do. In fact, John Hogan in his book makes it clear that this is not what he's talking about. So, there's a lot of stuff that you can build upon the science that we already know. For example, in computing, and there's also robotics and so on, which seems to be the next big thing that's going to come knocking on the door. Robotics seems to be. And so there's still a lot of research to be done. But what matters to him, and what matters to me as well, is these big new discoveries about the world. And so, of course, as a physicist, I have a strong opinion about these things. But I think that physics, and especially the foundations of physics, is a very important field, because that's where we get the deepest insights about nature. So, if we don't make progress in the foundations of physics, sooner or later, progress in all other disciplines will also dry up. This sounds a bit pompous, and there are a lot of people who disagree with this. You probably know this whole argument about what we actually mean by fundamental physics. Is biology less important than physics? I would say yes, but biologists might disagree with me. Anyway, I think that if we really want to make progress as a society as a whole, we need to make progress in the foundations of physics in the sense of actually discovering some new phenomena. Maybe understanding quantum mechanics, maybe quantum gravity, although I personally think that's rather unlikely, but anything, something really. Yes. So, don't you see that your work on supersymmetries is just a contribution to useless research being produced? No, of course not. And even if it were, I would never admit it. No, but look, we've already talked about this. I'm thinking about everything. If I tell a joke, I read three books, I analyze the joke structures, as you say, I think about the subtext, I try to find the most powerful phrase, and which word comes and in what order, or how can I? It starts? Oh, that's interesting. Great. Right. And so, that's also how I've approached the question of what I'm doing my research on, more or less? And that's why I wrote my first book. It was trying to figure out what I should spend my time on? Because there's only so much time in my life. So what is the most promising thing to work on? And I've tried to take my own advice seriously. Maybe it hasn't been entirely successful, but at least I tried. And so, I've tried not to work on problems that I think are fake problems, but I've tried to focus on problems that I said are real problems, where time is well spent. The problem now is that I haven't been able to get funding to work on it. And that's why I'm now in the situation I'm in, where I'm funding my own research by creating YouTube videos, and I rely a lot on people who support me, and people on Patreon, and people who join my channel, and for whom I'm very grateful, also, because otherwise it wouldn't be possible. And so, the reason why I ended up working on supersymmetries is that I came to the conclusion that the best way to make progress is to figure out what's going on in measurement and quantum mechanics. And why this particular problem? Because we know it's something that's in the measurable domain. It's literally a measurement process. It happens in the lab all the time, and it's perfectly reasonable that it has relevance to practical applications, because it's in the domain of parameters that are easily accessible experimentally, which we can actually access with the devices that we build. Do you have any new ideas about quantum gravity? About quantum gravity? No, because I've been focusing on this measurement problem. So, ultimately, well, sort of, yes. I know this sounds very confusing now. So, I've suspected for a while that the two problems might actually be related, partly, as you know, because Penrose has this idea that the wave function collapse happens somehow due to gravity. And I'm not very happy with this particular model of how it works. And so, I've tried to find a different way to combine these ideas. And actually, last month, I made some progress, which I think is very exciting. Great. I don't know how much you want to hear about it, because it's going to get a little - yes, I'd love to hear about it, especially if you're collaborating with Tim Palmer or if it's different from that. No, he doesn't like it. So, I don't know. So, we talked about it and he gave me good feedback, but I don't think he really likes the idea. So, it goes back to a paper I wrote 10 years ago or something, which is vaguely called the possibility of solving the problem by quantizing gravity or something like that. And what I was trying to point out in this paper is that for purely logical reasons, there's a possibility of solving the problems of quantizing gravity that nobody has talked about before, which is that all these problems that we have, if we quantize gravity perturbatively and then the theory produces all these infinities, and it's non-renormalizable and all these problems, then we need string theory or quantum gravity. It shows up at very high energies, which we haven't tested yet. Yes. And so, in particular, we don't know that quantum physics itself works the same way at this energy scale as it does at low energies. So, I said, you know, what we can do is, if we go to these high energies, where perturbative quantum gravity becomes a problem, we just say that the quantum effects go all the way. So, we go back to classical physics. And so, as you can see, these two problems suddenly become the same problem. And that's why we can't measure gravity because we don't understand where the quantum effects go in measurement. Yes. And once you make that connection, you have a way to determine where the deviations from quantum mechanics should occur, because now you can estimate that they should come with the magnitude of quantum gravity effects, which don't happen, if that makes sense. So, as you say, it should happen at this scale for the problematic quantum gravity contributions to disappear. And so, even if you don't know exactly how it works, what the exact mechanism is that makes it disappear? It provides you with a way to estimate the scale at which it should happen. And I've done that. Another frustrating part of the story is that I couldn't think of any experiment that could actually reach that scale. And that's unfortunate. Right. So, you're part of the problem. Well, as you can see, what I can do now is come up with a reason why this would be accessible in the next experiment that they're going to build somewhere. And that's exactly what I don't want to do. And now I have this problem. Well, I've finally found a way to do it. I've found a way to make this estimate. But it's not particularly interesting because you can't test it. So what do I do now? So, I decided myself, I'll write it down anyway and put it out there because maybe someone else can think of a way to test it. But yes, that's the current situation. So I'm at a loss for the proposal. So, you're saying that at high energies, quantum effects might diminish because we have some problems with quantum gravity at high energies only, like low-energy GR with QFT. Right. And then you're linking that to the measurement problem, but the measurement problem happens at low energies too, doesn't it? Yes, that's exactly the right question to ask. Because when I was talking about high energy, that was a very vague way of explaining the idea. So, the question is exactly what quantity do you need to calculate? So, first of all, usually if they talk about high energy expansion, it's not really energy, but it's something like momentum transfer. So, it's of the order of energy. But first of all, you have to use something that's actually invariant. So, energy is really bad. So, you can think about whether we should use mass, but mass doesn't really make sense either. And so, I eventually came up with a way to do it in path integral because that fits well with a paper I wrote several years ago. And you can then estimate the contribution from this quantum mechanical term in the path integral, which we know how it looks. So, that's the nice thing about it. We know how this contribution looks relative to the normal term without the quantum gravity contribution. You can ask, okay, when does the crossover happen? When is this term approximately the same magnitude as this term? So, it's a bit more complicated than energy. It's something like the integral of spacetime over the stress-energy-momentum tensor coupled to the metric, if that makes sense. Something like that. I would be remiss if I didn't mention the abundance of research papers that have been produced, which The Economist has covered. They have an article explaining this problem simply and concisely titled "Scientific Publishers Produce More Papers Than Ever Before." They confirm what you've been saying, at least from the perspective of financial incentives. They say the reasons depend on business models or subscription fees. But they brought up special issues as another reason, and I haven't heard you mention that before. Well, yes, I mean, special issue is also something I've talked about. The problem is basically that publishers make money by selling things. They sell subscriptions to journals or books or special issues, but they don't want to spend money to produce content. And so, they've internalized these special issues where they hire a so-called guest editor. The guest editor invites people to write contributions to the special issue on a topic, and then they publish this special issue and basically sell it to libraries. Initially, I don't want to bring up all the special issues. They started from a good idea, I think, to give some space to rapidly emerging fields where there aren't many people who know each other. So, you want to bring all these people together in one issue. So, a new field has something to start from. It's the same idea as with the rapid response workshops that they do in some places, if you've heard of that before. There's a new issue emerging in the scientific community. You want to give people some networking opportunities. They need to get to know each other. They need to develop their new language. And so, special issues came from the same idea. But what happened then is that some publishers misused this to produce cheap content and then make money by selling it. And that has certainly contributed to the rise in publications. I haven't read the article in The Economist, but I think that's true. I'm not actually sure that this is the biggest problem. So, this has been going on for at least, I don't know, since before COVID. They still don't get it right. And so, what I've seen in the last three years or so is that everyone knows that this is basically not really the right thing. And more and more people don't want to have anything to do with it. So, I expect that this is actually already declining at this point. So, my final question is a definitional one, since you're more skilled at this than I am. What title should we call this video? Oh dear. Sabine Hossenfelder talks a lot about bullshit. I'm sure of that... Sabine is paid. Yes, but I have to warn you, what will happen, you'll understand it's reported by YouTube due to mild profanity in the title. Yes, I don't know. I think, pick the most interesting one. I'm not sure if it's good to have my name in the title, if that's more appealing or more repulsive. But I think there's no way around it, is there? I mean, otherwise how are people supposed to know what's in the video? So, well, what comes to my mind is the stagnation in physics. Instead of a crisis in physics. Now, if I wanted to be more dramatic, I could put a crisis in science. But what would you say? Maybe I'll take what you're going to say here and put it, and people will see. Oh dear. You're putting me on the spot immediately. Yes, well, the potential problem with this title is that it must have appeared twenty times already, this idea with a crisis in science, a crisis in physics. Maybe we use something related, but not exactly in terms of words, like maybe what's wrong with physics. Maybe you've already used that as a title, so you'd better take that. Yes, I don't want to compete with the great Sabine. Yes, well, I get the idea. Just don't use exactly the same words that others have already used, because people might think, well, it's just the same stuff again. Why string theory is correct Yes, but then people will feel misled, won't they? Of course. Well, that was a joke. Well, right. Yes, that's my definition. Well, first of all, by the way, that's a joke. And secondly, that's my definition of clickbait, when it's not just something that peaks, but it doesn't deliver. Yes, right. Exactly, right. Honestly, I think when people say my videos are clickbait, what they're referring to is the stupid pictures of me with facial expressions on the thumbnail, which I have a very simple explanation for, which is that I don't know what else to put on the thumbnail. You know, you must know this problem. You're talking about very abstract things. What the hell do you put on the thumbnail other than yourself? And that's why I have a whole set of 100 pictures of me making silly faces, just so there's something to put there. So the way it works, just if you want some behind-the-scenes for our channel, the way it works is that the full podcast which is one to three hours long, the full podcast, gets my meticulous attention to the title and thumbnails. There are two different kinds of titles for people who are unfamiliar. There's the YouTube title, and then there's what we call the thumbnail. So, we play around with different combinations and test some of them, but they have my personal touch. But then we also take clips out of those clips because not everyone has the stamina or wants to watch a five-hour podcast. So we take out 10 to 15 minute clips. And that's marketing. I have a marketing guy, a great marketing guy who's in charge of the daily clips. And he does that. And I tell him, don't do it, as long as it's not, it doesn't say, Penrose reveals his theory, like the word "reveals," it will get more clicks. We've tested that, but we said, okay, no, that's too much. The hidden nature of quantum, hidden is another nature that we removed, although hidden actually works. Like we just tested a title called The Hidden Potential of the Brain, and it works better than The Potential of the Brain. But I and even the marketer himself didn't like it. And so we just went back to The Potential of the Brain. But anyway, he's in charge of the titles of the daily clips and the thumbnails, while the full podcast gets more of this. The fact that I'm asking you, to get your actual opinion, is my fingers in it. Yes. So you must have tried that too, that there are a variety of AI plugins that you can use to generate titles. And they're pretty bad. Like hidden is one of those words and reveal, you know, debunk this thing or whatever with lots of capital letters. You don't want to miss it. Yes, yes, exactly. Right. Yes, yes. Yes. It's embarrassing for me. Maybe they'll work. Yes. I can't even get myself. Like, this is something I've discussed with my agency. Like, there are a lot of people who put big words in the title. And I've tried it several times, but every time I look at it, I say, I can't do that. And I remove it again. Yes. Okay. So we still don't know what you're going to call the video. Yes. No, I might say what's wrong with physics or something like that. I think what you said is right. And I'll blame you. So, if I get criticized for being clickbait, I'll reply to every comment. You can blame me. Yes. Yes. You know, I find it interesting that the word Clickbait, you know, it's so overused at this point, and it's largely meaningless. So I remember when Clickbait was a title that you actually had to click to find out what it was about. Right. So it's like, this is the stereotypical thing, she woke up on her wedding day, and you won't believe what happened next. Like, that's the stereotypical Clickbait. Or I found this grandma in Utah that toothpaste does dot dot dot. Exactly that kind of thing. And now we have sort of deceptive titles that people don't even recognize as Clickbait. For example, there was a video titled The Man Who Killed the Most People in History. And you probably know who owns this video, but you have to click on the stupid video to find out that it's about the guy who put lead in gasoline or something like that. Right. So, I would call that stereotypical Clickbait, because you have to click on it to find out what it's about. But I think people don't register these things as Clickbait, which I find sort of interesting. So it's just a remark. I think I wouldn't call it Clickbait. The reason for me is that the content has to be mismatched between it and the title. So in this case, it looked like the person who was delivered, must have had some reason to suggest that this person killed the most people. I thought it would be Stalin or Hitler or whoever dropped the bombs. No, no. I didn't really look into it. That's exactly right, I think it might be true. Yes. So as you can see, I wouldn't use the word Clickbait in that sense, because the examples we just mentioned, like stereotypical Clickbait, we really like these five daily tricks or whatever. They actually deliver. You just, it's interesting. You have to click on it to find out that it's very stupid things. You know, yes. Yes, yes, yes. Whatever. Okay. Well, it seems like a great place to stop. Nice talking to you. Yes, nice talking to you. And it was great meeting you in person. Oh, yes.