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Science needs reason to be trusted
Sabine Hossenfelder
That we now live in the grip of post-factualism would seem naturally repellent to most physicists. But in
championing theory without demanding empirical evidence, were guilty of ignoring the facts ourselves.
Im a theoretical particle physicist and I doubt the value of theoretical particle physics. Thats awkward already, I know,
but it gets even worse. Im afraid the public has good reasons to mistrust scientistsand sad but true I myself nd it increasingly hard to trust them too.
In recent years, trust in science has been severely challenged by the reproducibility crisis1. This problem has predominantly fallen on the life sciences where, it turnsout, many peer-reviewed ndings cant be independently reproduced. Attempts to solve this have focused on improving the current measures for statistical reliability and their practical implementation. Changes like this were made to increase scientic objectivity or more bluntly to prevent scientists from lying to themselves and each other. They were made to re-establish trust.
The reproducibility crisis is a problem, but at least its a problem that has been recognized and is being addressed. From where I sit, however, in a research areathat can be roughly summarized as the foundations of physics cosmology, physics beyond the standard model, the foundations of quantum mechanics I have a front-row seat to a much bigger problem.
I work in theory development. Our task, loosely speaking, is to come up with new somehow better explanations for already existing observations, and then make predictions to test these ideas. We have no reproducibility crisis because we have no data to begin with all presently available observations can be explainedby well-established theories (namely, the standard model of particle physics and the cosmological concordance model).
But we have a crisis of an entirely dierent sort: we produce a huge amountof new theories and yet none of them isever empirically conrmed. Lets call it the overproduction crisis. We use the approved methods of our eld, see they dont work, but dont draw consequences. Like a y hitting
the window pane, we repeat ourselves over and over again, expecting dierent results.
Some of my colleagues will disagree we have a crisis. Theyll tell you that we have made great progress in the past...