To be clear, hype isn’t just lying.
We have a word for when someone lies to convince someone else to pay them, and that word is fraud. Most of what we call hype doesn’t reach that bar.
Instead, hype lives in a gray zone of affect and metaphor.
Some hype is pure affect. It’s about the subjective details, it’s about mood. “This is amazing” isn’t a lie, or at least, isn’t a lie you can check. They might really be amazed!
Some hype relies on metaphor. A metaphor can’t really be a lie, because a metaphor is always incomplete. But a metaphor can certainly be misleading. It can associate something minor with something important, or add emotional valence that isn’t really warranted.
Hype lies in a gray zone…and precisely because it lives in a gray zone, not everything that looks like hype is intended to be type.
We think of hype as a consequence of incentives. Scientists hype their work to grant committees to get grants, and hype it more to the public for prestige. Companies hype their products to sell them, and their business plans to draw in investors.
But what looks like hype can also be language, and culture.
To many people in the rest of the world, the way Americans talk about almost everything is hype. Everything is bigger and nicer and cooler. This isn’t because Americans are under some sort of weird extra career incentives, though. It’s just how they expect to talk, how they learned to talk, how everyone around them normally talks.
Similarly, people in different industries are used to talking differently. Depending on what work you do, you interpret different metaphors in different ways. What might seem like an enthusiastic endorsement in one industry might be dismissive in another.
In the end, it takes two to communicate: a speaker, and an audience. Speakers want to get their audience excited, and hopefully, if they don’t want to hype, to understand something of the truth. That means understanding how the audience communicates enthusiasm, and how it differs from the speaker. It means understanding language, and culture.
4 gravitons 
You’ll remember looking at my work earlier this year and deciding that you couldn’t see a way to pitch a piece about it. @DavidKordahl on Twitter (who is, more substantively, also head of a small physics department in Louisiana) posted a piece for 3 Quarks Daily a few days ago, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/07/a-quantum-correspondence.html
You can see David also struggling to find a narrative, resulting in a style of article I don’t recall seeing often. Relative to this blog post, I think it’s fair to say that David avoids hype. I love his candor: it’s surely more possible to learn from it than from hype.
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Thanks! David’s piece inspired me to think a bit about what the key “selling points” are for a proposal in formal theory. I’ll have a post on the topic, it may help you think about who you’d be best served pitching your idea to.
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Some hype really is remarkably close to lying, though. I think every particle physicist is familiar with the endless Nature papers that claim to, e.g., send signals faster than light, or rewrite the past, or construct perpetual motion machines. The main text of the papers are always written conservatively, but the title, abstract, and introduction are designed so that any non-physicist will get the impression that this is what they actually did. And the authors will directly tell journalists the same, so that all nuance is lost in the popsci pieces.
There’s also an annoying trend of “analogue experiments” which take totally mundane systems and describe them with the language of high energy physics. It’s not just the analogue wormhole made out of a couple qubits. In their language, a bathtub contains a black hole when the water drains faster than the wave speed. And a balloon has negative mass because it floats up in air. Recently, there was a claim of a “direct” observation of relativistic length contraction, but when you look at the paper it turns out that the authors just took photos of a box at rest and simulated what the length contraction effect would look like.
One problem with this hype is that it debases physics down to the level of the social sciences. The public is constantly being bombarded with shocking claims, yet nothing concrete ever comes of it. So the smart non-physicist gradually comes to believe that, like psychology, physics research is just meaningless and unreplicable. They also start to think that “anything goes” in quantum mechanics — that we must not have any idea how the quantum world works, if revolutions are happening every day. (Despite the Nature papers almost invariably being described perfectly well by textbook QM from the 1920s!)
But the biggest problem is that Nature hype sucks the excitement out of real frontier experiments that tell us genuinely new things. Progress in physics has always relied on doing better and better measurements. But Nature bait is mass-produced using cheap, standard lab components with mediocre sensitivity; the PIs are just doing measurements that could have been done decades ago, but describing them with a different, intentionally confusing, choice of words. All this activity will never tell us anything about new physics, but it draws all attention to itself. Could we fund a bold new initiative like LIGO today, when there are armies of PIs claiming they can perform even greater miracles for 1/1000 the cost?
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Actually, on further thought, there’s an even bigger problem with Nature hype. All conventionally prestigious institutions promote it in unison: the “top” journals, the honored professors, the university press offices, and the newspapers. Among these institutions, many are dissatisfied, but there is a very strong social convention to avoid criticizing hype in public. (“Be collegial!” “It’s not a zero sum game!”) So when the smart nonphysicist starts to suspect something is amiss, after seeing their hundredth popsci article about crazy quantum stories, the only people they can turn to are iconoclasts like Sabine Hossenfelder. They trust Sabine because she correctly identifies some hype as BS. And they keep trusting her when she says everything else in physics is BS as well.
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Universities have PR departments to do the hyping. The real research should be in the professional journals. Many scientists have blogs for posting explainers and communicating with interested people outside their specialty. They also have smaller groups for people with close research interests. A reputation for puffery or self-promotion ought to be a career killer.
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I don’t think there’s a career in history that managed to discourage self-promotion. Self-promotion looks different in different cultures, but in one way or another it’s a human universal.
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