# Forum > Discussion > Mad Science and Grumpy Technology > Science CERN, Daniel Everett, Nicholas Taleb, and Wanna-Be Rambos of Science

## Coeruleum

In a Numerical Coincidence, Some See Evidence for String Theory

Apparently, you can find evidence for string theory just with mathematics and without a particle collider at all, which just makes all the CERN people look like a bunch of wanna-be space cowboys with their science raygun, and lazy people who would rather throw their dad's money at a problem to see if that solves it than actually have to, God forbid, do math.

Speaking of CERN, apparently the Large Hadron Collider isn't enough of a waste and a newer, bigger particle collider is in the works. This is also the only article I've ever read with the common sense to say that maybe dark matter and dark energy don't represent new particles, a point of view which I got banned from some subreddits on Reddit for bringing up.

The World Doesnt Need a New Gigantic Particle Collider

And while I also agree with an article I read accusing all of linguistics of being a pseudoscience, the first place I've ever thought of a macho mentality usurping science had nothing to do with people building bigger particle colliders to try to compensate for something, but was Daniel Everett's expeditions and refusal to come up with any theories.

The bonfire of Noam Chomsky: journalist Tom Wolfe targets the acclaimed linguist

Likewise, I've met people who straight up said they thought professors were worthless because Nicholas Taleb, ironically a professor, said academics don't have "skin in the game." 

What do you think about the Rambo mentality and science? Honestly, it's probably a lot better than the abstracted theorist mentality of people like Chomsky who have legitimately said "universal grammar doesn't make predictions, it's a field of study like biology" but optimally we wouldn't be tweedy armchair theorists or science Rambos who think theorizing is for nerds, we would just do math and make observations.

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## Manga Shoggoth

> Apparently, you can find evidence for string theory just with mathematics and without a particle collider at all, which just makes all the CERN people look like a bunch of wanna-be space cowboys with their science raygun, and lazy people who would rather throw their dad's money at a problem to see if that solves it than actually have to, God forbid, do math.


You cannot find any evidence for string theory in mathematics. You can create a theoretical framework that describes it, but you then have to prove it in real life experiments. The evidence is the experimental results, not the theory.

The people in CERN have done plenty of maths. That's how they know what they are trying to prove.

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## Willie the Duck

> What do you think about the Rambo mentality and science?


I think that if you want to drag the rest of this forum into an intelligentsia turf war; you will have to do more than framing all sides except your preferred one as variations of wanting big toys because they are afraid to do real work, masculine insecurity, and other low-hanging-fruit/hackle-raising phrases. There are legitimate arguments for each of your positions, put in the effort to make them. Trying to grab people by the adrenal- and tribal- response processes is something every one of us has seen on the internet many many many times.

Regardless, my positions are thus:
Scientific research needs both theoretical development and experimental verification. Either to the exclusion of the other is unlikely to break new ground.Making colliders to do experiments hoping to find (mathematically suggested) theorized particles and analyzing the results _is_ 'doing math and making observations.'No field (nor sub-field) of science is immune to both desiring lots of investment in their field and assuming that their field is most suited to answering important questions.The notion that dark matter and dark energy might not represent new particles is hardly new or rare, there have been any number of them with fun acronyms like WIMPS and MACHOS and the like -- each of which have been mulled over and deemed possible and impossible multiple times over the past 3 or so decades.Hossenfelder's point about other uses for the money spent on colliders is not wrong, but it's an argument that can be made about any number of things -- the latest moon shots and trips to Mars (rovers and potentially manned) are equally scientific endeavors with very low immediate benefit with costs that must be weighed against concerns like global warming and epidemics.Tom Wolfe and Noam Chomsky ('s acolytes) trading accusations of arrogance is a surreal form of art. I'd love it, except that it highlights an insufferable component of nerd culture -- it becomes a multi-headed giant with each one pointing at the other yelling 'they think their soooo speshul!'

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## Mechalich

> Hossenfelder's point about other uses for the money spent on colliders is not wrong, but it's an argument that can be made about any number of things -- the latest moon shots and trips to Mars (rovers and potentially manned) are equally scientific endeavors with very low immediate benefit with costs that must be weighed against concerns like global warming and epidemics.


Expanding on this, it's also more of an issue of how scientific funding operates in the current world than anything else. The members of every field and sub-field are always going to advocate for more money to support research, because they've spent their entire lives acquiring the belief that what they do is super-important. It's up to governments, corporations, NGOs, and other stakeholders to decide how to spend the limited pile of research dollars they possess, and there are other priorities beyond just simply research return per dollar in many cases - the space race, rather famously, was mostly a proxy struggle triggered by geopolitical competition (forum rules prohibit any real discussion of this, but it's a very significant point). 

It is very common for certain types of research to acquire line-item status in funding operations, which makes it difficult to redistribute to a new field that might have greater priority, especially because entrenched interests associated with those outlays will work hard to defend them. Taking money from, for example, physicists and giving it to biologists is guaranteed to make not just the physicists themselves mad, but a whole bunch of other people as well, all of whom may lobby their relevant representatives. Funding is basically always more of a political issue than a scientific one (again, forum rules mandate stopping there). 

As such, while the argument that a new, more powerful, particle accelerator is an extremely inefficient thing to spend $20-50 billion dollars on is quite strong, the trick is ensuring that if it gets axed those $20-50 billion dollars are actually still spent on science of any kind rather than simply evaporating.

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## TaiLiu

What is the "Rambo mentality"? How do you demarcate science from pseudo-science, and why do you think linguistics isn't a science?

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## Gnoman

Scientists once used mathematics and observation to fully describe the properties of luminiferous aether. There is no such thing as aether. 
There are extensive studies of the rate of spontaneous generation of organisms. Organisms do not spontaneously generate. 

I could go on and list far more examples, but the core point is that it is very easy to come up with an idea that seems to perfectly match observed reality and everything you think you know about the universe. It is also extremely easy for these ideas to be fundamentally wrong and utter nonsens, because you never have any idea how much you don't know. Until you have solid observational data to suggest that the numbers in your notebooks mean anything, your notebooks aren't good for much besides kindling.

If you denounce the people looking for experimental proof of your theories as "rambos", you are not a bad scientist. You have no right to call yourself a scientist at all.

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## Sean Mirrsen

Pure mathematics is useless for proving physical principles. Mathematics can be used to describe physical principles, and attempt to extrapolate from known principles to predict unknown ones, but to actually prove them you have to conduct experiments with actual physics, and the less you rely on mathematics to see the results of those experiments, the better.

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## Bohandas

> and why do you think linguistics isn't a science?


Probably (and ironically if so) because it's a soft science. You can't build a lingusitics accelerator.

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## Rogan

> You can't build a lingusitics accelerator.


You can, it's called Twitter  :Small Wink:

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## Lvl 2 Expert

> You can, it's called Twitter


Ah, that's what they're doing. It's a form of crowdsourcing. Scientists type a post with a few big words, and then the public fires lots and lots of small words (like "no", "wrong", "bad" and "evil") at those posts to try and create new, bigger words.

It makes so much sense now.

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## Vinyadan

> Probably (and ironically if so) because it's a soft science. You can't build a lingusitics accelerator.


Linguistics is generally held to be either the hardest of soft sciences, or the softest of hard sciences. The problem is that hard rules do exist, but they exist within a cultural fact, and cultural facts aren't insulated from history (the mix of human interactions among themselves and with other realities). So Grimm's Law is a scientific law, but it affected a determinate language area within a determinate frame of time and stopped being productive after a certain time (it's why English has _fish_ instead of something like _pish_).

I think linguistics could be compared to geophysics, because they both allow you to examine stratified materials and identify what happened and why they are like that.

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## TaiLiu

> Probably (and ironically if so) because it's a soft science. You can't build a lingusitics accelerator.


Oh, I see. If so, it's a strange point for Coeruleum to make, especially after saying that particle colliders are unnecessary for science.

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## Vinyadan

About the linguistic accelerator, I am not so sure it cannot be "built". However, it generally ends up being something so massive, it cannot be conceivably done by any single person or within a single lifetime, and it would also require a series of definitions. For example, one could argue that Caesar conquering Gaul, the creation of the Rhine frontier, and the stationing of rich soldiers and powerful Romans made the adoption of Latin words in Gaul much faster, but also observe that Latin actually supplanted the Celtic languages; so one could distinguish between word usage and language change. On the other hand, William conquering England and the establishment of a Norman ruling elite made the adoption of French words in English undeniably faster. That isn't substitution of a language by another, that's actual change within a language.

TV is also a bringer of language change, although mostly towards uniformity. From this point of view, Twitter is small fries.

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## Sean Mirrsen

> You can't build a lingusitics accelerator.


Maybe it's just not as necessary. Particle physicists use accelerators to smash particles together and see what happens, but any ignoradoofus can bumblesmash some words together, no accelerator required.

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## Manga Shoggoth

> Maybe it's just not as necessary. Particle physicists use accelerators to smash particles together and see what happens, but any ignoradoofus can bumblesmash some words together, no accelerator required.


Oh, acceleration is very necessary. Any fool can smash words together. To make it look like something important you need some really fast talking.

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## snowblizz

> Ah, that's what they're doing. It's a form of crowdsourcing. Scientists type a post with a few big words, and then the public fires lots and lots of small words (like "no", "wrong", "bad" and "evil") at those posts to try and create new, bigger words.
> 
> It makes so much sense now.


Apparently it also cost something like 44 billion. Am not sure that was a better investment than whatever cern is doing however....

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