The whole idea of giving things back to Egypt is currently tainted by the complete lack of professional respect everyone else on the planet has for the guy running things there. I could picture institutions saying they'll send artifacts back and then just dragging their feet until he retires.
"Gee, sorry my ancestors stole that thing from that house a hundred plus years ago. Too bad there's a jerk living in the house right at this moment, that's why it hasn't been returned yet."
It's a little strange to have so little morals you accept a stolen gift from conquerors and don't make the slightest effort to return it over a considerable period of time, even after doing such a thing becomes the accepted moral thing to do...and then suddenly develop a conscience and set of morals so particular that "who is running the country" means you can't return it.
It's almost like it's a very thin excuse and not a legitimate reason.
It doesn't belong to France, and it's not France's place to decide that they don't like the particular guy running things at that moment and thus refuse to return it.
Really, Europe just has a massive problem refusing to acknowledge any of the brutally oppressive colonialism it was responsible for across centuries...
That might make sense if you were unaware of all the other repatriation projects underway or completed. It’s been a hot subject since the 70’s and there’s been a lot of thinking and work put in.
That political entity no longer exists, and the people of Egypt would likely never have willingly parted with the many obelisks and other historical artifacts that have left their shores.
1. You need to draw the line somewhere. It is simply not possible (nor even desirable) to redress all historical wrongs. It seems reasonable to not attempt to redress wrongs which are out of living memory for anyone involved.
2. As others pointed out, the people currently living in Egypt is not the same people who lived there when these things were built anyway, and there was a hell of a lot of conquest to get from there to here. This is not a case where the Ottomans stole it from the original owners. That makes this not a very good candidate for giving it back.
The people currently living in Egypt are most definitely the same people that built these things. The Coptic Christians of Egypt liturgical language is a direct descendant of ancient Egyptian and the Muslims of Egypt are well documented to be descended from converted Copts.
I started a new job in 2017 rewriting a rather large website with tons of functionality. The old one had to be replaced because it wasn't maintained and started to become a security issue.
I started doing JS and React/Redux for that job, and just as I was getting the hang of it React broke all my knowledge by coming up with "the modern way of writing React components", hooks. In my opinion there was absolutely nothing wrong with the old way of writing components. I never rewrote my now more than year old project, kept using the normal way of writing React components, which was still allowed. Two years later the depreciation messages started flashing by in the build process, and I was looking at a moutain of work having to refactor the complete front end.
Luckily I was able to move on to other things. But React always left the taste in my mouth of "don't, it auto-breaks after time".
I recently visited this old employer, and they have now hired a new coder to rebuild the old website, which is becoming a security issue.
Yes, although you will not find a climate scientist that will admit to having used a model that was clearly wrong. They just silently update the model and hope you don't ask. And if you ask, nope, they will not hand over their model. But trust me bro, the models are correct.
Marc Zuckerberg: "I notice Elon has become much more popular than I am. Elon also owns an internet social platform. Elon has removed most of the censorship from his platform. Maybe if I do the same I will be popular again too?"
Elon hasn't removed most of the censorship from his platform - in fact, he's increased censorship - and I doubt Zuck will either.
What he's done is loudly proclaim to be removing censorship, while also removing censorship from the group that most loudly complains about censorship (which he also belongs to), and increasing censorship on their enemies, who are not so loud.
Facebook is for the let's just say older folks but Instagram and Whatsapp are wildly popular. Threads is meh. Began promising but has become a place for bots. Only account I check in once in a while is James gunn who seems devoted to that platform.
If anything, Elon has largely increased the amount of censorship on his platform[1][2]. The only demographic whose voice got louder is the far right[3], in order to please the new presidency. Zuckerberg is going for the same strategy, facts and democracy be damned.
If by "remove censorship" you mean systematically promote right-wing content and downrank left-leaning content, unban neonazis, russian bots and other fascistic influences, then yeah, that's what Elon did.
Also what "Left stranglehold on culture" are you speaking of?? Workers have been losing rights in this country for decades. You clearly bought into the lies.
Here it is in the same format you did:
> Removes facts
> The right suddenly gets a stranglehold on culture
Ignoring that the USSR tried all this stuff in the 20s until Stalin got rid of it, you know full well that there's a difference between some communist academic working in an office in Berlin or whatever and the Soviet union
Who exactly are you taking about? Marx and Engels seldom spoke of sexuality. What does an economic theory has to do with LGBT rights? And no the USSR was never "woke"[1], not even in the 20s, you can't just claim stuff like that. Bring sources next time.
I have an X account that I only use to access tweets friends send me occasionally. Whenever I go there, my "for you" page is filled with Elon Musk, Alex Jones, libs of TikTok, etc. Not a single remotely left-leaning account in sight.
If you don't believe me, try it. Create a new account and see for yourself.
Well yeah. If it said anything else they wouldn't be allowed to post it on X. Did you see the recent news that Elon banned his former supporters en masse for disagreeing with his stance on H-1B visas?
Also Marc Zuckerberg: "I notice Elon and Trump are 2 weeks away from running the primary government to which I'm more or less answerable... better batten down the hatches"
Lets' assume the Higgs boson doesn't exist. A large group of scientists has spent 10 billion dollars of public tax payer money to create an experiment that will prove it's existence. It cost them many years to do, decades, and most scientists have staked their entire career on the outcome of the experiment. Turns out, they were wrong, and the particle doesn't exist.
Those scientists now have two options: 1) Being thruthful about the non-discovery, thereby suiciding their own careers (and income!), evoking the wrath of the taxpayer, and basically becoming the laughing stock of the scientific community. 2) Just make some shit up for a while and go on and enjoy your pension which is only a couple of years away.
You are right about the incentives being aligned a certain way. But, while the justification for the LHC might have been Higgs, what most high-energy physicists (theoretical and experimental) really cared about was validating beyond-the-standard-model (BSM) physics e.g. supersymmetry, hidden valleys etc.
Every search for BSM physics has returned a negative result. You can look at hundreds of arxiv papers by the two collaborations (CMS and ATLAS) that exclude large portions of parameters spaces (masses of hypothesized particles, strengths of interactions etc.) for these BSM models. If anything was found, it would be a breakthrough of enormous magnitude and would also provide justification for the next collider.
So, people have been truthful about the non-discovery of ideas that were extremely dominant in the high-energy community. This did not make them a laughing stock within the scientific community because every serious scientist understands how discovery works and the risk of working at the cutting-edge is that your ideas might be wrong. No one that I know of "made some shit up" in evidence at the LHC.
What do tenured faculty do? They either keep working on the stuff or pivot to other stuff. They are tenured - sure, some lose grant money but I know multiple physicists (very famous too) who have been working on other topics including non-physics problems.
The main criticism is whether we need these extremely expensive experiments in an era of global economic and political uncertainty. The usual argument from the physicists is that (a) we need these to advance the cutting edge of our knowledge (which might have unknown future benefits), and (b) these programs result in many side-benefits like large-scale production of superconducting magnets, thousands of highly trained scientists who contribute to other industries etc.
Whether this is a valid argument needs to be decided by the citizenry eventually. By the way, (via Peter Woit's blog) Michael Peskin recently gave a talk on the next-generation of colliders, the technologies involved and what theory questions have to be answered before making the case for funding - https://bapts.lbl.gov/Peskin.pdf
Thank you for your explanation of what else could've been found with the LHC and that a lot of work was actually done to disprove the existence of a lot of stuff.
Kinda kills my thought experiment though, but I guess that's the point. Thanks.
There were lots of things people really were hoping to see from the LHC, and weren't seen. supersymmetry being one example. Not seeing those things is just as important to everyone involved as seeing them is, so although the theories may try to modify their theories to explain why nothing was seen at those energies, it isn't in any of the experimenters interests to pretend they observed something they didn't.
See also the number of experiments conducted to try and observe things like dark matter candidates with various properties. All those experiments are in competition to either show presence or absence, and absence is just as important because it's proving that you made an incredibly sensitive detector and have used that to show that a particular possibility really wasn't the right one.
By this rationale the moon landing also never happened, because everyone from NASA was incentivized to lie about it. Why bother even going when you could fake it?
I just said I loved the thought experiment. There's multiple ways to see the flaws in it. Like: how would that large group of scientists (be it at NASA or CERN) keep such a fraud a secret for such a long time? In NASA's case there'd be a lot of people coming clean on their death beds, which hasn't happened of course.
"thought experiments" like this are worse than useless, it's a way for people on the internet to discuss any hypothetical topic without actually knowing anything. You take some contrarian view and say "yes if I constructed the whole world to back into my preconceived view it could be true". It's unfalsifiable. TFA has actual facts.
>1) Being thruthful about the non-discovery, thereby suiciding their own careers
By writing this it seems like you are under the impression that no science happened until they discovered or "non-discovered" the particle. But that is of course wrong.
It would be no harm to the bureaucracy if they did not find the Higgs. The scientific community would have reacted with excitement and the search for the hole in the standard model would have been apace. In many ways this would have been better for particle physics funding. The standard model is now complete, and we still don’t have a unified field theory. I’m not a physicist but have been following this search through popular writing since I was a kid. Is there now any reason to build a bigger supercollider, and/or is there a risk of the entire field stagnating till someone comes along with a testable theory?
Off the top of my head, Hawking’s books talk a lot about the GUT and are still relevant, Greene’s book on string theory is an advancement of conceptual attempts to find one. It’s harder to point to now because so much of the public discourse since the mid-2000s has moved online.
Yes? Wouldn't that mean that "the party" is over, just write a single paper and you can shut down and dismantle the machine you've just finished building?
Not hardly. If there was no Higgs, then some other mechanism would be needed to cause the same effects the Higgs does. We’d need the LHC even more then.
No, you keep running the machine, hoping to find a useful signal. More data means more fidelity. A lot of that has been probing the properties of the Higgs, but it's also spent a lot of time ruling out quite a lot of proposed extensions to the standard model.
The LHC wasn't built to discover the higgs. Another primary motivation was looking for supersymmetry and dark matter candidates. But really it was more general than that. Every time we've built a bigger collider we've found something new, and on some level, they just wanted to see what would happen. New data means new things to explain.
From the perspective of the (real) physicists involved the outcome is the same.
Most of my colleagues who have stayed in particle physics post Higgs are wishing it was never discovered.
The motivation of scientists is not well-understood by others, but assuming people make a career in particle physics for the income or job stability is ridiculous. The alternative cost is so high it has to be that they actually really like what they do.
Yep, every single physicist I know would be twice as good at my job as I am and would have twice the earning potential if they switched with me. They don't do it because it sounds incredibly boring to them. "You mean someone might ask me to tweak the size of a button on a website? No thank you!"
Ironically, some physicists (specially maintaining webpage for their project on CERN) might actually have to tweak the button sometimes. But usually they rarely do it and usually without being asked /s.
We know what they did because a _lot_ of scientists desperately wanted to find supersymmetry and various dark matter candidates with the LHC and they've found absolutely _nothing_ and didn't actually just "make some shit up".
Instead what they are doing is insisting that we build an even bigger particle accelerator.
The scientist calling bullshit that can back it up gets in history books. The others eventually lost credibility.
So I (and pretty much all scientists I'e ever worked with) would call it a failure.
By your implication, nuclear fusion researchers would have "found" it decades ago. But since reality wins in the end, and scientists are generally not pathological liars, they did not. They continue to advance the field.
There's ample other cases demonstrating the flaws in your story. Bad scientists don't tend to last long under the gaze of reality.
Your options are reversed. Under the mass conspiracy scenario, any individual scientist could become famous and promote their own career by whistleblowing about the fraud. But if the scientists are truthful as a group, they can guarantee further research and grants because the standard model is wrong and more experiments will be needed.
You don't seem to understand what "thought experiment" is. It is not when you pull some contrived nonsense out of your ass and make conclusions from it.
You also don't really seem to understand how scientists view science. When something that nobody expects DOES happen, and similarly, when scientists expect very very much to see something and clearly do not, both of those outcomes are exciting for scientists.
Predicting something from a model or theory and then having it be confirmed very successfully sure is great for that theory or model, but is the most BORING outcome for the scientists working on it.
Confirming someone else's fairly successful and well developed model is rarely how you gain money or fame in science.
Is that how it works in the scientific community? I'm not actively involved, but I feel like publishing my findings, one way or another, would require explaining how I arrived at them in a manner that would be reproducible (and thus, verifiable to an extent) by others. What am I missing?
Not asking rhetorically, by the way. I'm just genuinely curious.
The challenge with the results from the LHC is that there's no second one, so no completely independent reproduction. That said, there were two experiments which were seperate apart from using the LHC for the collisions, and both of them have published their full raw data and methods of analysis, so a fabrication would require falsifying quite a large quantity of raw data in a way that hasn't been detected yet, and co-ordination between quite a lot of people.
I'm quite confident in guessing that you've never had any first hand contact with experimental physics research.
If you did, you'd know that most people aren't there for "the income", but because they enjoy advancing physics.
Yes, sure, if there's a non-discovery, physicists will move on to the next best thing which is "... can we still learn something new about how the universe works?" They won't "just make some shit up".
Counter-point: non-discoveries do happen all the time, and we can look how they turned out. Nuclear fusion has been failing for decades, and scientists "making shit up" is extremely rare. In 40 years one team tried making shit up (cold fusion) and got wrecked by the scientific community.
You're quite wrong in your guess but that's ok. I work in a research lab actually, and there's lots of experimental physics going on here.
I never claimed people are choosing a career in physics research for the money, I just used the argument of having to choose to lose ones income. Also, I can't help but notice though that, when ascended high enough on the academic ladder, the income isn't a joke either.
Do you know what severely hurts your income as a scientist? Lying about the data and then other people finding out. With the amount of data both of LHC detectors were publishing covering up the lie would be impossible- it’s exceedingly difficult to fabricate data convincingly (see Jan Hendrik Schön).
I would be much more worried about errors in methodology than falsifications.
The income is a total joke compared to what those people would be able to make on any private sector job ladder. Anyone who can be a tenured research physicist could easily make seven figures (likely more) in finance.
Yeah I guess this might be hyperbolic. But my sense is that quite a few quants make seven figures, and that people capable of being tenured research physicists could be at least in the top of that group, if not partners / executives at those firms, which I believe is often an eight figure job. If they could stomach the work, that is...
2) When clicking "details" on one of the search results, and then the back button, the search results disappear.
3) Other than that, thanks man great service!