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Academic here. It's actually great for us. You're usually the first to see the implications for your niche area and have a chance to get a hot paper out rather than a moderately impactful one.

This happens in biology all the time.

PHDs will spend years mastering some intricate multi-day long procedure to do some thing and a new discovery will obviate the need for the procedure completely.

Einstein wanted to measure how fast Earth moves through ether as his research thesis.

That’s life. Sometimes you see it coming and ride the wave, sometimes you’re late to the party.

I believe the alien scientists were depressed by the guaranteed collapse of their civilization, not the difficulty of certain differential equations. So it's more like a doctor getting weird results while working on a cure for a pandemic.

Edit: oops, see the reply below... and my grumpy response. I seriously forgot about that entire plot point.

The history of scientific revolutions does not support this view

Specially because only particle physics suddenly became inconsistent. I can see scientists fruitlessly obsessing with finding why the universe was toying with them, but suicide? OK, they were also seeing intent with individualized hallucinations, and computer interference, but IIRC those messages asked them to to stop particle physics, not to off themselves. They could change fields and live on.

They were getting inconsistent results, not just weird ones. However I agree that suicide probably wouldn't be where they would end up.

In the book they get different results on all tests they run, consistency is gone, that is something else.

well maybe depends how fundamental

if objects you put on a table started falling through the floor it would be a bit stressful

lol

but Dr. Becky gets really excited about all the various "crisis in cosmology" because she knows new science/knowledge will emerge from solving those questions

and you remind me there's another season coming up in that series, can't wait

"Is he still in the grandmother’s house? We would like to speak to him."

Mathematicians proof theorems so they are always correct. Physicists don't have that privilege.

I dont particularly agree with this article, but there have been quanta articles i've read in the past that went so far trying to make the topic accessible that it became incomprehensible. Where they used so many metaphors and simplifications that it lost all meaning.

Science writing for a general audience is really challenging.

Writing for an unfamiliar audience doesn't mean you should hide the name of the problem until after a huge pile of setup.

No.

If you're writing an article about a man going to the store to buy a sandwich, the man, the store, and the sandwich should all make appearances by the end of the first paragraph.

These people are writing informative articles like novels and it's incredibly irritating and a disservice if you're actually trying to inform anybody about anything. If you're writing an article about the g-2 anomaly, "g-2 anomaly" belongs in the title not 1/3 the way in.