Save me from physics posts on Facebook

By Brian Clegg

I don’t use Facebook to find out about science – it’s a bit like asking for a gold watch in a pound shop. But inevitably the algorithm does occasionally push me a physics-related post, and often I then get rather irritated with what I read.

I recently say a post from the Quantum Physics page which scored high on the irritation factor. This is an anonymous page, which is labelled as both ‘AI creator’ and ‘Digital creator’ (apparently the latter label just means that it’s a source that produces original online content). 

The particular post that grabbled my attention featured what might have been a photo of the late American physicist John Wheeler accompanied by the headline ‘There is an interpretation of quantum mechanics which in reality is not discovered by science; it is constructed by it. And its author was not a physicist but a philosopher of science.’

This appears to be a reference to Wheeler’s highly speculative participatory universe theory. But assuming that to be the case, the headline isn’t just clickbait, it’s downright wrong. Admittedly it’s a theory that strays into philosophy, but to describe Wheeler as ‘not a physicist but a philosopher of science’ is, as they say, not even wrong.

I then got onto the text, which immediately contradicts the headline by saying ‘John Archibald Wheeler was one of the most creative theoretical physicists of the twentieth century, the man who named the black hole, developed the S-matrix with Heisenberg, and collaborated with Einstein and Bohr.’ Where’s the philosopher gone? 

There are a few other problems with that sentence alone. Wheeler did not name the black hole – he popularised the term, but it was used earlier at a meeting he did not attend. A quick glance at Wikipedia would be enough to discover that he didn’t develop the S-matrix ‘with’ Heisenberg but independent from him.

Similarly, Wheeler didn’t collaborate in any meaningful sense with Einstein – they knew each other, but didn’t write any joint papers, for example. A much better example of collaboration would have been with Richard Feynman. Overall, this is a very poor introduction to Wheeler’s work.

My moan here could feel like an endangered writer railing against the encroachment of a technology that will eventually replace him. But it’s not – I embrace AI, but I don’t want innocent Facebook users to be treated to a diet of AI slop.

Image from Unsplash+ by Curated Lifestyle

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.