Challenge Established Opinion Without Conspiracy Theories
Challenging experts is hard, but there are ways to be skeptical without being a conspiracy theorist or lunatic.
Scientists have reputations for challenging established theories, but sometimes they fail. One theoretical physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder, recalls another physicist’s story. Nima Arkani-Hamed studies particle physics and favors a different approach to pressing issues than the field at large.
One of the field’s accepted theories is that each particle in particle physics has a twin. This theory is called supersymmetry. These twin particles haven’t been observed in the Large Hadron Collider, the machine that uncovered the Higgs-Bosun particle.
Arkani-Hamed used to use natural beauty as a guide to his experiments. When that approach failed to uncover new data, he pivoted to an idea called split susy. Split susy is the idea that the twin particles are too heavy to be seen by the LHC instead of too small. The response he got was shocking:
“I have been literally yelled at by people at conferences. It’s never happened to me before or since.”
It’s a dramatic reaction, but Hossenfelder takes the opposite approach with her book, Lost in Math. Her book not only challenges established opinions in physics but also shows readers how to challenge conventional wisdom without resorting to conspiracy theories.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Applied Knowledge to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.