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Seems like a misguided rant. The whole beginning of "but what about applications?" makes no sense.

The complaints about what is essentially p-hacking might apply to CERN (but probably not), but doesnt work with LIGO where many events were detected by their model-free pipeline.




IIRC the author doesn't believe black holes exist, so not surprised.


Sure, but there are two possible ways to "not believe" in black holes.

One can say "there is an alternative not yet known explanation to gravity and this explanation will not have singularities/math artifacts." While GR is one of the most verified theories in physics I have some modicum of sympathy for that view.

What is disingenuous is her view "black holes dont exist because GR measurements are bad." Because they really are good and statistically significant. For LIGO results you can reject the nature of the compact bodies (although the fits are very good), but you cant reject the event of the detection.


Indeed, but if you ignore much of the crack-pottery and the lack of understanding of fundamental statistics you could find some valid criticism of current physics in this piece (but more like needles in a hay stack).

Physics is now entering a new era of "exploration". This means lots of data and little results. The career of the average scientist will be a series of papers where they prove that they found nothing. I can see how this is frustrating or boring to many people but it is the only way forward. The low hanging fruit has been harvested decades ago. The methodologies of measurements have to adjust accordingly and the purpose of experiments has to be advertised correctly.


Judging by how many open problems and paradoxes remain in physics and cosmology, I would not agree with the low hanging fruit being harvested along time ago. It seems more like they harvested the fruit from a spindly looking diseased part of the orchard and missed the healthy part of the orchard. If the physicists and cosmologists were to simply rearrange their models in a more sensible fashion I think they would quickly figure out nature and productivity would return. First there would be a lot of rewriting of all the current information in a much more sensible theory of nature. Then there would be pushing forward on a much sounder foundation. And biggest of all, the applications that would arise are amazing. Imagine drawing energy from spacetime. Imagine manufacturing with spacetime as your raw materials.

Clue: Start with taking that Big-Bang/Inflation picture and overlaying it on each of the jets from every SMBH. Now force yourself to believe that as true and it won't take long to figure out what is going on.


> Indeed, but if you ignore much of the crack-pottery

She claims to have studied physics for twenty years and have a PhD in accelerator physics. If true (and she seems too well-informed to be lying), her crack-pottery is at the very least well-informed enough to likely contain many useful insights and views worth considering. Especially regarding physicist culture.

There is a page where she shares a few of her novel[0], and speaking as someone who dropped out of physics myself (just a lot earlier than she did) I certainly recognize more than a few themes in the feedback contained therein.

[0] https://kirstenhacker.wordpress.com/2019/07/30/reviews/


It's kinda neat that one of her major complaints with physicist culture is pernicious groupthink, and that some of the primary arguments against her are prima facie dismissals for not subscribing to consensus.


Not subscribing to consensus is not an argument against her. Not addressing that there are non-model-dependent detections (ie not in danger of p-hacking) and her support of much disproved (experimentally) tired light are why people don't take her seriously.

There are plenty of things wrong with high energy physics and cosmology, the fact that most theory is not-even-wrong is a big one. She is, however, often barking up the wrong tree.


It sounds like you are more familiar with her beliefs and this subject material than me. Would you mind elaborating on your disagreements?

Personally, I don't think any measurement is non-model-dependent. It's a question of which model. You need a model to turn some physical phenomenon into bits in memory and yet another model to interpret these bits.

I am also not convinced tired light is any more falsifiable than any other cosmology. I'm sure all it's problems could be rectified by adding enough terms that depend on variables we cannot ever measure. A version of it may be falsified, but there could always be another version with dark-whatever that explains any deviation. I feel this is just another way of expressing dismissal by non-adherence to consensus.


The only mention of tired light in this article was here:

>This story has elements of self-consistency and inconsistency; WIMPs + tired light and the Higgs + big bang are two ways to say the same thing, but why do physicists insist on speaking in five, different languages at the same time? It is as though the tower of Babel fell down when the first nuclear bomb went off.


I mean I left physics after doing my PhD precisely because I felt it wasnt exciting, but I disagree with the criticism of "big data." I know analytic results are romanticized and even now physicists are looking to express things in but a few equations, but it might also be that the world is complicated and to learn the details you really need to crunch a lot. Kind of like in avalanches, lots of things can be modeled by power laws but the actual details are incredibly messy and non-integrable.




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