Sabine Hossenfelder fires back: academia's impact metric turned physics into a paper mill
skdh · x · 2026-10-16
Physics communicator Sabine Hossenfelder claps back at physicist Thomas Van Riet, noting she wrote a book a decade ago arguing physicists should care more about mathematical consistency, and accusing critics of ignoring broken academic incentives: "impactful" means "other academics like it," and string theory thrives because it generates endless papers. The spat stems from François Chollet's quip that string theory is "what happens when an intelligent system is starved of sensory input and starts hallucinating."
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