Physics is dying. It鈥檚 mathematical fiction. Science is failing. Most of academic research that your taxes pay for is almost certainly bullshit. I don鈥檛 trust scientists.
Would you believe me if I told you these statements came from a popular science communicator?
While the Trump regime eviscerates science, Sabine Hossenfelder, a German physicist by training turned science YouTuber, published聽聽whose thumbnail states in large red letters, 鈥淎cademia is Communism.鈥 And an upcoming book called聽The War on Science, written by a coalition of grievance-mongers including Lawrence Krauss, Peter Boghossian, and Gad Saad, received a glowing, official聽: 鈥淗igher education isn鈥檛 what it used to be,鈥 she wrote. 鈥淐ancel Culture and DEI have caused many to keep their mouths shut. Not so the authors of this book.鈥
Hossenfelder, who began her online career breaking physics down into digestible morsels for the public, has become a case study when contemplating the question of what responsibilities we have as science communicators, a job with no barrier to entry and no professional order to set and attempt to enforce ethical standards.
鈥淣o one鈥檚 doing anything about it鈥澛
I鈥檓 not disputing Hossenfelder鈥檚 skill as an educator. I鈥檝e watched some of her science videos and found her to be gifted at explaining complexity without sacrificing nuance. The problem is her alarmist language, which misleads her 1.67 million subscribers on YouTube into thinking that universities are communist, groupthink sloughs where lazy fabulists engage in self-gratifying fiction to waste taxpayer money. Over the course of multiple videos, her claims widen to absurd levels: first, particle physics is dying, then all of physics is facing certain death, and finally science itself is on the verge of collapsing. 鈥淏ecause the future of physics depends on it,鈥 she said聽聽in reference to wanting people to listen to her warning. 鈥淎nd the future of science depends on the future of physics, and the future of our civilizations depends on the future of science.鈥 She鈥檚 not going for half measures, and I have to express amazement at her pronouncement on the entirety of science. How can one person accurately judge all of systematic knowledge gathering to be headed for a cliff?
Why is science failing according to her? She believes the foundation of physics isn鈥檛 based on sound scientific principles, with physicists drunk on their own mathematics, conjuring up fake subatomic particles to fit models divorced from reality. Somehow, this alleged problem gets transposed to every field of scientific study.
Her rants about science conking out, which tend to get her聽聽than her actual science videos, reveal a striking anti-establishment view. She paints publicly-funded researchers as accomplices in a giant scam: they apparently sit on committees to approve each other鈥檚 research funding knowing full well that it is all fiction meant to 鈥減roduce useless papers that no one understands,鈥 she聽, 鈥渁nd therefore no one dares criticize.鈥 I wonder if Hossenfelder has ever sat on a grant review committee. I have. I鈥檝e even chaired one. I鈥檝e also helped researchers assemble grant applications. I鈥檝e witnessed scientists carefully document the long history of studies that led them to this one question they want to answer; put together detailed budgets; explain why they and their collaborators are uniquely qualified to tackle this question. To say this is all a scam is ludicrous.
Dave Farina, a popular YouTuber who has a Master鈥檚 degree in science education, has聽聽and the impact it could have on trust in science. Hossenfelder has since doubled, then tripled down. Confidence in science is a hard thing to measure, with media headlines often highlighting surveys that ask basic questions like, 鈥淒o you trust scientists?鈥 When we dig down into specific scientific questions, we often notice gaps between what scientists agree on and what the public at large believes: on issues like climate change, vaccine safety, the theory of evolution, the safety of fluoride in drinking water. These rifts have been exploited by political movements based on science denial. Now listen to聽: 鈥淪cience is failing. It鈥檚 failing right in front of our eyes, and no one鈥檚 doing anything about it.鈥 Whether she means to or not, her hyperbolic attacks on academic research can only fuel distrust of science itself.
What is Hossenfelder鈥檚 solution? Recently, she鈥檚 been contemplating privatization.
Defunding academia
滨苍听聽thumbnailed 鈥淎cademia is Communism,鈥 Hossenfelder argues that the defunding of academic research will probably happen, whether we want it or not, and she cites Elon Musk鈥檚, Marc Andreessen鈥檚, and Peter Thiel鈥檚 vilification of universities: that they鈥檙e bastions of communism and the enemies of progress, with their researchers essentially on government welfare. She expands on the arguments in favour of moving basic research to the private sector: that government grants tend to be short-lived while entrepreneurs plan for the long term; that serendipitous discoveries could still happen within companies; that silly research ideas would no longer be financed; and that private investors are better at taking risks than national funding bodies.
Is any of this true?
The idea that universities are strongholds of communism is not only laughable but part of an explicit assault on education聽, including Christopher Rufo who famously tweeted about how he was going to make the phrase 鈥渃ritical race theory鈥 toxic. The red scare is not over, and calling universities 鈥渃ommunist鈥 is an effective way for its enemies to rally the public around them. That Sabine Hossenfelder has answered the call surprises me.
Government grants are often limited in their duration, true, and academics spend a good amount of time begging for money. But the idea that private companies can fund basic research鈥攚ith no immediate return on investment鈥攁nd do so with long-term stability does not hold water to me. Pharmaceutical companies, for instance, pivot. They abandon projects when they don鈥檛 appear to be paying off. They operate under the watchful eyes of their investors and must produce deliverables and quarterly reports. I have a hard time imagining companies investing in聽, when DNA hasn鈥檛 even been discovered. Why should they care when a monetizable application may be decades down the line?
It thus incentivizes a shift away from 鈥渟cience to learn about the universe鈥 and toward 鈥渟cience to deliver profitable technologies.鈥 I can鈥檛 see the humanities surviving; yet, for all the vicious attacks on silly-sounding thesis titles, the humanities guide how we plan, execute, interpret and disseminate science. Privatization can also make safety more malleable in the pursuit of profits. A complete move of fundamental research away from universities would turn scientists into influencers, trying to get their ideas financed by the public at large and by temperamental oligarchs. If you still think billionaires from the richest countries on Earth are rational, munificent arbiters of how humanity should spend its resources, I don鈥檛 think you鈥檝e been reading the news lately.
Even more fundamentally, scientific research is a collaborative activity. It thrives in disclosures: papers, pre-prints, presentations. The private sector is competitive and arms itself with non-disclosure agreements. How is basic research supposed to move forward if it is uniquely performed in silos?
Sabine Hossenfelder accuses academic physicists of making up fictional particles, of weaving mathematics the way that Scheherazade braided tales to delay her death. The end result, according to her, is a lack of discoveries. As聽聽have pointed out, this is false. Physicists discovered the theorized Higgs boson. They detected gravitational waves, which led to a Nobel Prize. They imaged an actual black hole, found at the center of the M87 galaxy. They identified聽聽so far鈥攑lanets that orbit stars other than our sun and that can be detected indirectly using creative means.
And since my own qualifications lie with the biomedical sciences, and since Hossenfelder鈥檚 worries extend to science as a whole, we have also made substantial progress on biological issues in the last decades: mRNA vaccines used in both humans and livestock; medications like Ozempic; targeted therapies against cancer; the sequencing of the human genome and the genetic material of many other species; the discovery of CRISPR and of small, non-coding RNA molecules like microRNAs; and the taming of HIV-AIDS from a deadly disease into a life-long, suppressed condition, to name but a few.
A cynic may claim that we鈥檙e not innovating as much as we used to, when quantum mechanics was a fresh new proposition or when we put a man on the moon. But innovation within a field of study is not linear: the low-hanging fruit gets picked first, until we鈥檙e left with thornier rewards. This is normal. It鈥檚 not a sign that science has reached the end of its life.
Knowing which bit of theorizing or of fundamental research will end up paying dividends is practically impossible to guess. I mentioned Mendel鈥檚 peas: this monk鈥檚 obsession with the statistics of pea plant progeny paved the way for the theory of evolution and our understanding of how traits like eye colour and predispositions to cancer are transmitted from parents to children. An interest in bacteria that thrive in hot springs led to a revolution in the lab, where DNA could easily be amplified and studied by harnessing聽one of a bacterium鈥檚 robust enzymes.
The path from basic knowledge to technology is not always straight. Ideas come from everywhere. Basic research belongs in the open.
It鈥檚 not dying; it鈥檚 imperfect
So why, you may wonder, has Sabine Hossenfelder repeatedly agonized over the end of science? Dave Farina hints at it in聽聽criticizing her: audience capture. With access to analytics, we can see what performs well and decide to do more of it, because this is what our audience wants.
Content creators whose paychecks depend on views are incentivized to double down on what gets the best response. Hossenfelder鈥檚 grievance videos鈥攊nitially just a story she told about her negative experience trying to work within academia, later becoming an on-going discussion of how science is collapsing鈥攄o well. High views lead to more ad revenue, better sponsorship deals, and more viewers donating to her Patreon. She鈥檚 currently making聽聽on Patreon alone. I鈥檓 happy that there鈥檚 room online for profitable careers in science communication. I also can鈥檛 rule out audience capture, whether conscious or not, encouraging Hossenfelder to keep posting new videos about how science is broken.
The thing is, I could have gone down a similar path. As a Ph.D. student, I noticed worrying problems in the research I and others around me were conducting. Some findings in the literature wouldn鈥檛 replicate. One large dataset had to be analyzed via cherry-picking what we hoped would be promising. Molecular signatures in the blood were being published as a promising way to diagnose cancer, even though they didn鈥檛 overlap with each other for a given cancer type (I ended up聽). A local talk by epidemiology rock star John Ioannidis鈥攚ho would later turn COVID contrarian鈥攐pened my eyes even more: science had a problem. I abandoned the Ph.D. program a year after my committee members had asked me if I really saw myself graduating in this lab after rotating through multiple projects, some of which we were forced to abandon.
I could have turned this experience of the difficulties, inefficiencies and failures of scientific research into a lucrative career as a science contrarian. I could have rung the bell, become a whistleblowing regular on the podcast circuit, written a book about the underbelly of academic research, where fraud and incompetence are routine. And I would have misled people in the process while enriching myself.
Science is not broken, and it most certainly is not dying. It is an inefficient human activity. Its aspirations are marred by bad systemic incentives, like encouraging researchers to publish sexy findings in big journals. It needs to be improved, and many scientists are hard at work doing just that鈥攖o claim, as Hossenfelder does, that no one is doing anything about it is foolish. In the span of my own short career in labs, I have witnessed the rise of open science, the repeated questioning of certain popular statistics in papers, and better reporting of papers that get retracted, as well as an increased awareness on the part of journalists around animal studies and preprints. Deficiencies in science won鈥檛 be solved by taking an axe to the whole thing. It requires coalitions, transparency, and positive incentives.
Sabine Hossenfelder often聽聽she receives after, for example, getting an op-ed published in聽The New York Times聽辞谤听The Guardian, but no deontological police is going to come after her for misleading people about the state of science. We science communicators don鈥檛 have professional orders. Our mistakes are pointed out by peers, by topic experts, and by the public at large. We can choose to focus only on the insults as a way to dismiss all criticism, but it won鈥檛 improve our game.
We need to be accurate when describing the state of scientific research. When we catastrophize, we feed a disillusionment which political actors can weaponize to get rid of scientific evidence they find inconvenient. That鈥檚 when science communication starts to skid toward propaganda.
