Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Trash. When you say "most", your sample should at least pretend to cover the range of "things".by chermi
- Surprised at the quick dismissals in the comments here. Of course the title is a bit sensationalist, that's the case for all pop-sci articles. I don't think anybody would reasonably believe physicists disagree about for example Newtonian mechanics. Aren't the following facts still pretty interesting?
> The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics came in at 36%.
> Although it's often reported in the press that the black hole information paradox has been resolved in favour of information preservation, the survey found that 19% of physicists still side with Stephen Hawking's earlier view that information is lost.
To see how the survey is useful, consider the "null hypothesis" so to speak, that a majority of physicists agree that one answer is most likely. Such as the Collatz conjecture from mathematics, where if surveyed, probably around 80% of mathematicians would agree that it's true, even though it's not been settled yet. Clearly this is not the case for most of the ten questions in this survey.
- The title is radically untrue. Most physicists agree on the overwhelming majority of physics. The body of the article makes clear that the title is deceptive:
> asking physicists what they actually believe about ten of the most contested questions in physics.
In other words, most physicists don't agree on ten specific questions that have not been settled. That's a tautology and is a very far cry from "most things".
by JohnFen