“They aren’t worried about what’s going on. They’re worried about people finding out what’s going on…”
— Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder in a YouTube video, September 17, 2025.
YouTube influencer Sabine Hossenfelder (1.7 million followers) isn’t talking about American politics when she notes that certain powerful people are worried about people finding out what’s going on.
She’s talking about bullshit coming from the tax-funded halls of science.
In her September 17 YouTube posting, she actually used that word: “bullshit”. More than once. She’s obviously not happy with the way theoretical physics has been playing out lately.
From her perspective, these particular tax-funded halls are not in fact ‘halls of science’ but rather ‘halls of pseudoscience.’ This particular form of pseudoscience involves theoretical physicists.
Theoretical physicists purportedly do the hard work of explaining why the universe exists, and why it operates in mysterious ways that can be explained only by theoretical physicists.
But according to Ms. Hossenfelder, what theoretical physicists have been doing since the 1970s is inventing fairy tales and then illustrating those fairy tales with complex mathematical formulas. These (worthless?) mathematical formulas are attractive to pseudoscientific journals and governmental funding agencies, with the result being that — according to Ms. Hossenfelder — theoretical physicists can earn a nice living, if they simply keep churning out useless formulas that almost no one understands and that do no one any good, but that keep the government checks rolling in.
This sounds a bit like how journalism works, except the government checks are few and far between.
A few theoretical physicists have expressed displeasure at the idea that a fellow physicist like Sabine Hossenfelder can refer to their scientific papers as “bullshit” to her 1.7 million subscribers.
I’m writing about this, not because I’m concerned about the arguments among theoretical physicists — which are, of course, merely theoretical arguments — but because a lot of people have been calling “bullshit” about a lot of things, lately.
We seem to be living in the Era of Bullshit.
I noticed that Daily Post editor Bill Hudson recently used that exact term in reference to a presentation by Pagosa Springs architect Brad Ash, during a public meeting about the proposed (and controversial) “Pagosa West” subdivision across the highway from the City Market shopping center.
This surprised me, because although our editor can be an arrogant asshole at times, he rarely uses the word “bullshit” in his editorials. But I suppose, if a theoretical physicist can refer to published theories of universal physical processes as “bullshit”, then a small-town website editor is allowed to use that same term to describe a presentation by a small-town architect.
In perhaps related news, published in The Washington Post, the Environmental Protection Agency has reportedly ordered scientists in at least one of its research offices to immediately pause efforts to publish research… “according to two agency employees familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.”
From the article by Amudalat Ajasa and Hannah Natanson:
Staff from the EPA’s Office of Water were summoned to a town hall meeting this week and instructed to halt work on most ongoing research papers, the two employees said. The researchers were told that unless scientific journals had already returned proofs — the final step in the academic publication process — the studies would be subject to a new review process, the employees said.
The decision to reevaluate all manuscripts was made by political appointees, the two employees said.
After the Washington Post article was published, EPA press secretary Brigit Hirsch denied that political appointees had ordered a review of research papers.
Ms. Hirsch called the article “false information that has been credibly refuted.”
She could have simply called it “bullshit”. But apparently, she didn’t.
And the Washington Post reporters could have used that very same term to characterize Ms. Hirsch’s comments. But they didn’t. They merely quoted her, allowing her to refer to their article as “false information”.
This raises a question that’s been on my mind lately. If a journalist quotes someone spouting bullshit, does that make his entire article into bullshit?
You can understand why I would be concerned about this.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.