The contrarian physics podcast subculture
122 comments
·August 21, 2025cycomanic
vjvjvjvjghv
My observation is that anybody who engages a lot on social media is at a very high risk of losing their mind over time. They get caught up in these weird bubbles of constant controversy and group think bubbles . I have seen this with friends but also with more famous people.
For content creators there is a lot of economic incentive. Real science is kind of boring and mundane while controversy is exciting and sells.
m_fayer
It’s one of those “the house always wins” setups. For a while if you have success and integrity, you wag the algorithm. Eventually though, the algorithm always ends up wagging you.
hermitcrab
0x303
> The term was coined by Eric Weinstein in 2018.
Coincidence or intentional? Either way, nice
null
amadeoeoeo
Sabine papers, those in "her area of expertise" were pretty bad, at least those I read. We reviewed several of them out of curiosity in several journal clubs. She is pure show.
glenstein
Wholehearedly agree, I found her intellectually very interesting for a time before thinking that some controversies were kind of manufactured out of uncharitable interpretations to find a contrarian angle, but I can't make a specific case to that end, it's more a general gloss.
I'd be interested if you can say any more about comments she made that are closer to your wheelhouse.
cycomanic
One of the videos was the video on 5G causing cancer IIRC:
f137
This is a very good summary of the evolution of her writings and videos. Unfortunately it seems many many people still see her as the best source of scientific truth.
null
dustingetz
i kinda think we should blame the youtube alg for this, the algs set incentives which shape behavior at scale, and it’s not like one can make a living doing actual physics these days
shermantanktop
By default, people have moral agency for what they do. Exceptions exist, of course, but “I wanted to make more money” is not one of them.
m_fayer
Actually, taking someone’s livelihood hostage is a great and time-proven way to rob initially decent people of their moral agency. The case studies are everywhere.
epgui
You're not the only one who has noticed this, no.
mc32
On the other hand "establishment" science get their hairs up when she criticizes them, so there is that.
She has had valid criticisms of the industry -and it is an entrenched industry like others. Basically the momentum that keeps something going beyond its usefulness but keeping it going keeps the money rolling in.
I admire her willingness to make those people irked even though it brings flak along with it.
arduanika
Tim Nguyen has put an extraordinary effort into finding the truth in this entire long exchange, and it's been mostly thankless.
His appearance on Decoding the Gurus was a highlight of the show's early seasons.
https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/special-epis...
Perhaps you would agree with Weinstein and Hossenfelder that physics today is broken. But that does not in itself prove that the people peddling alternatives aren't even worse.
themafia
> But that does not in itself prove that the people peddling alternatives aren't even worse.
I understand this line of thinking but I don't feel that it's particularly relevant. It seems to be born out of a point of view that physics theories are a binary. We either fully support them with everything we have or we completely denigrate them to the point of demonizing anyone who shows any interest in them.
Surely this can't be the best approach to discovering new physics?
Which is how I view these people. The result of a natural frustration that physics discoveries do not seem to be happening at the rate that they should. I'm not sure they have _the_ answer but I understand _why_ they're acting as they do.
Why this outcome bothers anyone is completely beyond me and now makes me genuinely wonder if there is simply too much gatekeeping within the field.
PaulHoule
The real root of brokenness in physics is not bad ideas or a lack of good ideas but it is that experiments are nowhere near being able to answer the big questions. Ok, we will probably get some insight into the neutrino mass from KATRIN but we are in the dark when it comes to dark matter, proton decay (predicted by all GUTs including string theory), etc.
In the absence of real data there is all sorts of groupthink and nepotism [1] but it is really beside the point. People are fighting for a prize which isn’t there. As an insider-outsider myself I have had a huge amount of contact with (invariably male) paranoid delusional people who think they’ve discovered something great in physics or math [2], it’s really a mental illness.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9755046/ is the master scandal of academia
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Westley_Newman stole away a really good lab tech from the EE department at my undergrad school
jurking_hoff
[dead]
burkaman
The patent office specifically calls out perpetual motion machines on their general "how to apply" page, presumably because they've gotten so many applications:
> A working model may be requested in applications for alleged perpetual motion devices.
dr_dshiv
Dutch alchemist Cornelis Drebbel got a patent in 1598 for the design of a perpetual motion machine. It was a clock that was powered by daily changes in barometric pressure. In the early 1900s, he was largely scrubbed from the history books because everyone knows that perpetual motion is impossible.
The clock worked, of course. There are still paintings of it — based on those, rolex made a functional replica.
But if you've never heard about Drebbel, perpetual motion is the reason. That wasn't his only invention, of course. He also invented:
* The first cybernetic system (a thermostat; a self-governing oven for incubating eggs)
* The first air conditioning system
* The first functional submarine
* Magic lanterns, telescopes (including the one used by Galileo), microscopes, camera obscuras, and pump drainage systems (credited for draining cambridge and oxford)
He was also a beautiful artist — he made engravings of topless women teaching men science and math (the seven liberal arts). Actually, maybe that's why he was erased? IDK. But he was definitely a free thinker and 100% legit. Look him up.
null
throwway120385
There's always a grain of truth or some shared understanding to every grift. You can see it play out in how people sell you alternative diets or alternative therapies. "Processed foods are bad. Here, eat this thing that's been boiled until it is relieved of all nutrition." "Preservatives are bad, here eat this vegetable that's been heavily salted."
Beware of people who seem to be on the same page with you, especially when they're selling you their own idea.
czzprr
I don't know enough fundamental physics to have my own opinion on Weinstein's theory but on optics alone Timothy Nguyen was already winning this debate hands down. If you really had a theory of everything that you genuinely believed you'd relish the opportunity to get into the weeds of a debate. Einstein and Witten are exemplary in this. Weinstein acts a lot more like a snake oil salesman. But, tbh, I'm just going to wait a few years until gpt-9 or Deepmind Alpha-Omega writes the real ToE..
hermitcrab
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein :
"In April 2021, Weinstein self-published a paper on Geometric Unity and appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience to discuss it. In the paper, Weinstein stated that he was "not a physicist" and that the paper was a "work of entertainment"."
It all seems very odd.
mxmilkiib
apparently that was for copyright reasons, as apparently Wheeler nicked some idea decades ago after pooh-poohing it broke
also, probably an attempt at levity/bit of clowning
(I really don't like Eric's politics, especially the essentialist sexism, aside from all the rest, but I'd like to see a good refutation to the Curt Jaimungal iceberg video - https://youtu.be/AThFAxF7Mgw - on the physics thing)
janalsncm
As entertainment goes, I would personally prefer a good movie or a concert to a jargon filled paper.
hermitcrab
All the best scientists release their work on Joe Rogan and threaten to sue anyone who criticizes their work.
krunck
"Scientific disagreements are intricate matters that require the attention of highly trained experts. However, for laypersons to be able to make up their own minds on such issues, they have to rely on proxies for credibility such as persuasiveness and conviction. This is the vulnerability that contrarians exploit, as they are often skilled in crafting the optics and rhetoric to support their case."
Touché.
gwd
There's something strange about this whole narrative. I don't know anything about the science or personalities at all (except for having seen a number of Hosselfelder's videos, and what she said in her recent video about Weinstein). But here in this blog post we have story after story of people who seemed really enthusiastic about talking to Nguyen, and then later ghosted him or changed the topic of conversation or seemed to express a different opinion than the one he thought they'd had. Lots of different people -- podcasters in different domains, academics, etc.
One common denominator across all of these is of course Weinstein (since the conversations are about his work); and so one theory is that somehow he's using his influence with all these people to make them drop an interesting alternate.
But the other common denominator is Nguyen. Knowing absolutely nothing about either the content of these papers or the people involved, a priori, which is more probable: That Weinstein, who has been unable (by his own account) to be taken seriously by academia, has this massive influence across this diverse set of influencers? Or that the results of these interactions actually have something more to do with Nguyen -- either a weakness in his paper, or a quirk of communication, or a vein of unreasonableness in his character, that each person eventually runs across?
If anyone has actual knowledge of Nguyen's character or the topic at hand, I'd appreciate hearing from them.
glenstein
>But the other common denominator is Nguyen
You could say the same of James Randi. But the explanation in Randi's case was that he really was dealing with charlatans, mentalists, etc. I don't think there's enough signal just from Nguyen disagreeing to think that he is the common denominator, though it's possible and you're being thoughtfully tentative about the possibility.
I would also say that scientifically non-respectable theories finding big traction in the online influencer space is the norm, and not especially difficult to explain.
WhitneyLand
This is supposed to be about science.
Tim is the only side willing to publish papers and let them be peer reviewed.
He’s also the only one willing to engage on the merits of the debate. Eric has/will not.
dachworker
ML Research is ripe for such a subculture to emerge, because there are truly so many research directions that are nothing more than a tower of cards ready to be exposed. You need an element of truth to capture your audience. Once you have an audience and you already deconstructed the tower of cards, you start looking for more content. And then you end up like Sabine.
janalsncm
Maybe at some point, but as of now it’s much more applied and empirical. Aside from money, there’s nothing stopping you from training a new architecture or loss function and sharing the weights for everyone to use.
Very recently some researchers at a Chinese lab invented a new optimizer Muon Clip which they claim is better for certain types of LLM training. I don’t think there are enough AdamW fanboys out there for it to cause a controversy. Either it works or it doesn’t.
NitpickLawyer
I happened to watch Sabine's video on the "how dare you.." drama, and I have to say that reading the blog and watching that video don't match. At least that's not what I got out of the video.
From memory: Sabine says she's only doing the video because she is a real-life friend of Eric's. So that's from the start an admission that she's biased. Then she goes off to say that his paper is probably bullshit. Then she goes back to her "but so is the vast majority of theoretical research, nowadays", and she argues it's weird that scientists have no issues making fun of Weinstein but not of their own colleagues who put out papers at least as bullshit.
So, I think the blog's characterisation of her role in this drama is a bit off, from what I remember.
That being said, the short clip of the "debate" clearly reinforced my total disinterest in Morgan's "show", whatever that junk is, and I put weinstein in the same bucket as NDT. Way too pompous for my taste. That he tries to play a physicist on top, doesn't surprise me at all.
cycomanic
>From memory: Sabine says she's only doing the video because she is a real-life friend of Eric's. So that's from the start an admission that she's biased. Then she goes off to say that his paper is probably bullshit. Then she goes back to her "but so is the vast majority of theoretical research, nowadays", and she argues it's weird that scientists have no issues making fun of Weinstein but not of their own colleagues who put out papers at least as bullshit.
But that's the thing, she is essentially equating Weinstein's theory to all other theoretical physics. This is the typical dogwhistling she does, "everything else is bullshit so you might as well believe this ...". She does this sort of ambiguity all the time, and to argue that she is not trying to imply anything is just dishonest.
Now, as to the statement that all theoretical physics papers are bullshit, that's frankly bullshit. And how is she qualified to judge? Maybe in a small niche that is her area of expertise, but beyond that?!
themafia
> "everything else is bullshit so you might as well believe this ...".
I think she's saying "everything else is bullshit so there's no mechanism to rightly determine where to spend the majority of your efforts." Or more appropriately "the existence of alternative theories do not detract from correct theories and never have."
From an Engineering point of view it's perfectly logical. If you're stuck you might as well cast a wider net to see if you can shake any new ideas or approaches loose. Is Weinstein's theory of everything correct? Of course not. Are there ideas within it that might lead in a better direction? I don't think you can conclusively say one way or another until you actually do the work.
> And how is she qualified to judge?
I don't have to fully understand your tool to know that it simply doesn't work in all the places you claim it does. A better question is what are her biases in reaching this conclusion?
NitpickLawyer
> But that's the thing, she is essentially equating Weinstein's theory to all other theoretical physics.
That's the thing that the blog argues, but not the thing I (a complete outsider in this whole thing) got from her video. Her argument was more about how "the establishment" treats this paper vs their own bullshit papers. The way I saw the video it was more of a comment on academia's own problems than weinstein's "theory" (which, earlier she said it's likely bullshit). She's calling out the double standard. I think.
> Now, as to the statement that all theoretical physics papers are bullshit, that's frankly bullshit.
I don't think that's correct. She never said (or I never saw the videos where she did) that all new theoretical physics is bullshit. She has some valid (again, from an outsider perspective) points tho:
- just because you invent some fancy math doesn't mean it works in the physical world
- just because it's complicated doesn't mean it's novel
- not falsifiable is bad science
- not making predictions is bad science
- hiding predictions behind "the next big detector" is lazy
(that's basically what here points are, from the videos I've seen).
cauch
Even if we are generous and accept that GU was more criticized than other bullshit papers, the claim still needs to prove that the difference of treatment is due to some real bias and not a simple fluctuation.
"I saw 2 persons being judged by a judge, and turned out they were both guilty of the same crime, but the first one got less than the second one. The first one had the same letter in second position in their family name as the judge, so it's the proof that judges are biased favorably towards people who have the same second letter"
But then, the problem is that "their own bullshit papers" is doing a very heavy lifting here. The point of Hossenfelder is that String Theory is as bad as GU. But is it really the case? Hossenfelder keep saying it's true, but a lot of people are not convinced by her arguments and provide convincing reasons for not being convinced. The same kinds of reasons don't apply to GU, so it already shows that GU and String Theory are not on the same level. Even if String Theory has some flow or is misguided on some aspect, does it mean that the level of rejection in an unbiased world will obviously be the same as any other bullshit theory.
Another aspect that is unfair is that a lot of "bullshit theory within the sector" dies without any publicity. They stop rapidly because from within the sector, it is more difficult to surface them without being criticized early. For example, you can have 100 bullshit theories "within the sector" and 3 survive and surface without being as criticized as GU while 97 have been criticized "as much" as GU during their beginning which stopped them growing. Then, you can just point at one of the 3 and say "look, there is one bullshit theory there, it's the proof that scientists never confront bullshit theories when it comes from within". Without being able to quantify properly how the GU-like theories are treated when they are "within", it is just impossible to conclude "when it is from within, it is less criticized".
cycomanic
Someone else posted this video of some physicists discussing the Weinstein video and it seems they say the same thing, she is creating a false equivalency.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oipI5TQ54tA
Regarding her other points, she is definitely on the bandwagon of peddling "all academic research is bullshit". There are plenty of examples of that. Now as often there is some grain of truth underneath her points, but she is disingenuous in here arguments.
throw7
"GU continues to be entertained by Hossenfelder". Last I knew she had a video critical of GU and Weinstein.
dang
At first I downweighted this article the way we usually do with internet dramas, but on a second look, I think it perhaps deserves better. However, the title is too high-octane (too sensational and personality-focused) to have a good effect on an HN thread.
I've therefore changed it to a different phrase from the article body, which is more neutral and more about the underlying phenomena. It's not a perfect swap, so if anyone can suggest a better (i.e. more accurate but still neutral), we can change it again.
This is not a criticism of the author—we know what people have to do on the internet. But it's in keeping with what we're optimizing this site for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
(Submitted title was "Physics Grifters: Eric Weinstein, Sabine Hossenfelder a Crisis of Credibility")
nilslindemann
Thank you, Mr. Defender of Curiosity on Hacker News.
lepicz
if anyone wants to go through it:
https://geometricunity.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/Geometric...
possibly recent video from Curt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AThFAxF7Mgw
and that's like 95% of available documentation :)
I have written previously about Sabine. I think it's fascinating to follow her trajectory. Initially I quite liked her show and my impression was that it gave valuable insights and critique of some branches of modern theoretical physics.
At some point I noticed that her shows were starting to significantly diverge from her area of expertise and she was weighing in on much broader topics, something in her early shows she often criticised scientists for ("don't think because someone is an expert in A that he can judge B").
At some point she weighted in on some topics where I'm an expert or at least have significant insights and I realised that she is largely talking without any understanding, often being wrong (although difficult to ascertain for nonexperts). At the same time she started to become more and more ambiguous in her messaging about academia, scientific communities etc., clearly peddling to the "sceptics" (in quotes because they tend to only ever be sceptic towards towards what the call the "establishment"). Initially she would still qualify or weaken her "questions" but later the peddling became more and more obvious.
From what the article writes I'm not the only one who has seen this and it seems to go beyond just peddling.