Hacker News Reader

In any case this is not how science works, you do theoretical physics by publishing in peer reviewed journals and your peers decide whether what you are doing is worthwhile or not. Both Smolin and Hossenfelder have been somewhat successful in doing so themselves, but Hossenfelder specifically didn’t manage to secure a professorship for various reasons and I am sure she has some axe to grind (again probably partially justified, partially not).

View on HN

> you do theoretical physics by publishing in peer-reviewed journals and your peers decide whether what you are doing is worthwhile or not

No, science is not the act of publishing in a peer-reviewed journals, science is using past observations to make models that predict future observations, and then evaluating those models after making the future observations. Peer review is just the industry standard quality control mechanism.

I could have made the point differently. What I wanted to emphasize is that there is an external view of a given field and an internal view. The actual inner workings and process are poorely understood and the few public debates give a very skewed view of the field.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com