Roger Penrose is a remarkable mathematician and has made profound contributions to mathematics and its application to General Relativity. But his opinions on Quantum Mechanics, (e.g., its relationship with conscience) are very fringe, when not outright quack-material. Nobody takes him seriously on this topic and he has made no recognizable contribution or proved anything that would grant any credibility to the idea.

Sabine Hossenfelder is a peculiar character. She raises some good points regarding the futility of a lot of the phenomenological models that are published, in my mind they are little more than busy-work to have something to publish and survive the publish or perish attrition that researchers must endue. And she is right that is not the way to do science. It's a form of overfitting and throwing things to the wall in the hope something sticks. But this is mostly due to publish or perish. Discovering something deep is very difficult and if you have to have several publications per year to renew your contract you have strong incentives to build a silly toy model with little chances of being right. But the problem lies in the incentives that have been set up in academia. Remove them and most of those silly publications will disappear. But then it's hard to establish a different set of incentives that ensure those that most deserve funding get it. Beyond that fair criticism it's hard to understand what she proposes as an alternative. She doesn't bring anything constructive to the table. Pack it up and de-fund physics until our technical means allows us to probe the Planck scale?

There is certainly an argument to be made on how much funding different sciences should receive given their potential contribution to society. And I see a lot of low hanging fruits in other sciences that would grant most funding going there. But theoretical physicists cost pennies to our society; they are few, poorly paid, and require little more than pen and paper. At the same time, theoretical physicists have contributed to this date immensely valuable contributions that make our developed world possible. It's my perhaps biased opinion that they have had the most outsized impact into our progress. It's sensible capital allocation to keep some funding in the chance they keep changing our lives for the better as profoundly as they have done in the past.

There is this apocryphal quote that summarizes it quite well, it is said that William Gladston (british minister of finance) asked Michael Faraday what was the usefulness of this electromagnetic field he was researching. To which Faraday purportedly answered, "I don't know, sir, but one day you may be able to tax it". Even if this particular exchange didn't happen, it contains a very valuable truth, when you are researching the frontiers of science the practical application is not always obvious but that shouldn't deter us from doing it.

> "I don't know, sir, but one day you may be able to tax it".

You can't just take any and every topic of research and apply this quote to it. There are always more potential research topics than there is research funding. You need to prioritize somehow.

> when you are researching the frontiers of science

There are many other frontiers of science, than just theoretical particle physics. Maybe some other topics would deserve a bit more resources now?

This implies, I believe, that further progress refining physics will result in similar great societal advances. This can only be based on belief. Maybe. And perhaps a spectacular future awaits us, due to some present-day discovery that now seems insignificant. Yes, one can point to many such instances in the past; but what gives us confidence this will continue into the future?

When we're studying physical phenomena that require machines the size of a small country to test, it's difficult to see how there can be any practical application. The practical application would have to be much smaller, in which case it would be a much smaller test.

I think, at a minimum, we should update our Bayesian priors based on past evidence.

I think her name is Sabine Hossenfelder.

Correct. My bad working from memory.