Hacker News Reader

Comment by garmaine | Hacker News Reader

> I actually liked that concept, and I think if participle experiments unexpectedly stopped working a lot of scientists would lose heart.

Actual physicist here. We LIVE for that moment when the experiment does something unexpected. That’s when new discoveries are made, and our understanding of the world turned upside down. We got into the field hoping for a moment like that to happen within our lifetime. Suicide? Hell no, we’d be giddy for excitement wanting to see what happens next.

Liu Cixin doesn’t have the faintest clue about scientists and what motivates them. I put down the book as soon as that part happened.

View on HN

Keep in mind that (SPOILERS) the scientists were aware that their results were being manipulated. That's what the suicide note said, and that's also seen in the countdown that was clearly the result of an intelligent being.

Which, again, would be a fantastically amazing discovery, perhaps the greatest ever in the history of science. A physicist would be salivating at the possibilities.

But iirc it started off with a whole history of physics grad students offing themselves when their experiments didn’t work out or confirmed negative results, not just the one you are referring to.

I noticed that issue too, and attributed it to Liu blending some historical Asian and possibly Chinese culture into the mix, where large failures result in great shame, loss of face, and sometimes suicide as a means of redeeming oneself.

Though that still happens occasionally in some contexts like business, it’s not realistic for scientists, as you explain. But maybe Liu was taking some artistic and cultural license here, using something that at least has some precedent.

IIRC, the wave of suicides was confined to the members of the club, so they actually knew what was up. On the other hand, there was at least a strong hint that it was going to spread globally, so you have a point there.

On the other hand, this would still destroy a lot of experimentation in the field of particle physics... although I guess it would be interesting to poke at the edges of the effect?

Maybe you have to rethink this in terms of a computer programmer that knows all his programs will have critical bugs from now on, and there's nothing he can do to avoid it.

No rethinking required. Just imagine if you're any kind of scientist and suddenly 2 + 2 = 5.3 and then two days later 2 + 2 = 4 again.

It's that simple. If there's no reproduction, there's no progress in any activity.

Some extraordinary generalisations being applied there. Given that a large number of people experienced mental health problems during pandemic lockdowns it seems highly plausible that a population would become sufficiently depressed when they know that all of a sudden, despite whatever efforts they now apply towards understanding the universe, it will be futile because another species at a not long before, similar level of advancement had applied a weapon to prevent any possible progress. Sounds pretty demotivating to me!

Perhaps you meant to conclude, ‘that’s not how I’d personally behave, or at least believe I would without having experienced such a trauma’?

Pity you tossed the book away just for that though.

Oh there was so much wrong with that book. That was just the final straw.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com