Consider physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's take — on the arguably idiotic Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

© 2019 Peter Free

 

07 August 2019

 

 

Mental rot at the heart of Western society

 

I have mentioned before that "science" is not an antidote to humanity's carnal affair with deadly sin.

 

Pertinent to this thought, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is one of the proportionately few good minds resisting the Bullshit Tide that is engulfing allegedly western "civilization":

 

 

Today, a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics has been awarded to Sergio Ferrara, Dan Freedman, and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen for the invention of supergravity in 1976.

 

The Prize of 3 million US$ will be split among the winners.

 

To date, we have no evidence that supergravity is a correct description of nature.

 

Supergravity and supersymmetry are mathematically very fertile ideas.

 

They lend themselves to calculations that otherwise would not be possible and that is how, in the past four decades, physicists have successfully built a beautiful, supersymmetric, math-castle on nothing but thin air.

 

Awarding a scientific prize, especially one accompanied by so much publicity, for an idea that has no evidence speaking for it, sends the message that in the foundations of physics contact to observation is no longer relevant.

 

© 2019 Sabine Hossenfelder, Special Breakthrough Prize awarded for Supergravity, BackReaction (06 August 2019)

 

 

I would say that Dr. Hossenfelder's critique . . .

 

. . . is a pretty good description of the entirety of western culture, as it exists today.

 

Lots of quasi-magical belief.

 

(Particularly in the United States.)

 

Virtually no relevance to anything real.

 

Allegedly good minds wasted on masturbatory fantasies.

 

No intellectual requirement for presenting evidence or objectively rational analyses . . .

 

. . . generally concerning pretended "phenomena" unrelated to anything demonstrably important.

 

Except, of course, with virtually sole regard to looting one's fellow humans for personal gain.

 

 

The moral? — It is all fake news — pretty much everywhere and in everything

 

If the planet is fortunate, we humans will disappear.

 

Having been, for the most part, a dreaming malaise.