Professor Dave is Back on the Warpath

Sabine Hossenfelder posted The 10 Biggest Physics Paradoxes and Problems. It is a reasonable list.

Professor Dave Explains posted a 3.5 hour video on Further Exposing Sabine Hossenfelder With Six Physicists:

At this point, everyone who watches my content is well aware that Sabine is a disgusting fraud peddling propaganda for fascist oligarchs. But there are some who absolutely refuse to watch a single second of me exposing her simply because I'm not a physicist. Well that's an easy fix. Let's talk to some physicists and see what they have to say about her, shall we?

Special thanks to Christian Ferko, Sam Gregson, Michael Peskin, Daniel Whiteson, Ivano Basile, and Nick Warner for their phenomenal commentary.

If you ask a string theory professor about the merits of string theory, of course he will promote it.

Last week he also posted Avi Loeb is a Fraud Now:

Avi Loeb is a Harvard astronomer turned pseudoscience-peddling fraud. Since 2017 he's been spewing horseshit about how everything is aliens when it definitely isn't, just to sell a bunch of books to credulous laypeople. Predictably, when the scientific community politely pushes back on his bullshit, he throws a toddler tantrum. I wonder what will happen if someone exposes him in a not so polite manner? Let's find out.

So Dave is a non-physicist criticizing a Harvard professor with fringe ideas. Okay, but what's all the hostility to Sabine doing something similar?

I criticize some of these peoplee also, so nothing wrong with criticism.

Peskin gets asks whether theoretical physics has made progress in the last 70 years. He points to big progress in the 1960s and 70s, and says that current work could take centuries.

The reality is that theoretical physics has made very little progress since the 1970s. Hugely expensive projects get sold based on past glory, and they are unlikely to deliver much.

And she says that there's no precedent 1:24:24 for this uh kind of situation in physics. But actually there's a very 1:24:30 interesting precedent which goes back to the 16th century in Copernicus. 1:24:35 So in the 16th century it was very important to predict the motion of the planets the moon uh because astrology 1:24:44 was very important to all of the political figures at that time. Uh that was the way to predict the future. To 1:24:50 predict the future you had to know what the stars were telling you.

And over 1:24:55 thousands of years uh from the time of Talamy in the uh um Alexandrian period 1:25:03 uh people had been studying the cosmos and derived a quantitative theory of the 1:25:09 motion of planets and it worked extremely well. You could predict how um 1:25:15 visible planets uh like Jupiter and Saturn, Venus would move across the sky. 1:25:22 The problem with this theory was that it actually made no sense. It had odd 1:25:28 elements to it. For example, if you watch Mars in the sky, you'll see that 1:25:34 at certain points in its orbit, it has what's called a retrograde motion. It goes it turns around and goes backwards 1:25:40 for a while and then it goes forwards again. And this was explained by adding 1:25:46 things to uh the tameic theory. Um things called epicycles where you have 1:25:52 motion. Talmatic theory was based on everything going around the earth but then you would add little circles and uh 1:26:01 um extra pieces to the orbit in order to fit the data. Mhm.

And this is more or less what we have 1:26:07 today with the standard model. It gives us a good quantitative understanding of 1:26:13 the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interaction. But it's built on a foundation of sand.

He does not like Sabine because she is negative about building new particle colliders.

If he has to cite Copernicus, you know his argument is weak.

I wonder about the politics of this. Dave is a Woke Leftist, and he has somehow decided that his targets are right-wingers. Sean M. Carroll also has fringe ideas, but he is a fellow leftist and gets a free pass.