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I think this assessment is magnificently incorrect. Over the past 30 years there have been very important experiments, many of which have reached the mainstream
by reikonomusha 10y ago
I think this assessment is magnificently incorrect. Over the past 30 years there have been very important experiments, many of which have reached the mainstream. This includes anything from the Higgs experiments to the LIGO experiments. What about things closer to the HN crowd, like communications infrastructure like the Internet?
The discovery of the transistor didn't bring an iPhone overnight. Same with many other scientific discoveries that had to go through a long engineering phase. I see a similar trend happening now with quantum computation, which has seen great leaps over the past 20 years and continues to accelerate in both academia and industry.
It's my opinion that, at least in America, we live in a less intellectually disciplined and intellectually favored society. Anti-intellectualism, even in nominally educated portions of society, seems to be on the rise. This unfortunately has the effect of making science look stagnant to the larger population, and unless there are gadgets of instant gratification that science explicitly produces, it'll remain somewhat obscure to folks uninterested in advancement for the sake of advancement.
As for the multiverse stuff, I'm not sure why you think that it has to do with the arbitrary selection of constants. The multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn't say "anything happens and it all happens in separate multiverses", but rather that—in simple terms—non-deterministic events like measurements bifurcate into separate universes. But QM still posits that the results of these non-deterministic events are each probable, and each obey the same laws of physics equally. In other words, it has a more "butterfly effect" on us, keeping physical constants as truly constants, not a "splitting of universal laws effect".
- scottlocklin 10y agoHiggs and LIGO are big nothingburgers compared to anything that happened in physics in any given year between 1910 and 1950 or so. Meanwhile "physicists" spend their careers doing piffle like writing programs for quantum computers that arguably will never exist in the corporeal world. Yeah, I coulda been one of those guys: I even had a pretty good idea for an imaginary QC platform and a position in a major research institution. I couldn't live with myself: I got a job in the valley. Physics and science in general looks stagnant to the larger population because it is actually stagnating. Stating otherwise is mendacity of the highest order.
- eliasbagley 10y agoWhy is it stagnating though? Lack of talent? Lack of funding? Is it that all the lowest hanging fruit is gone and the problems are becoming intractable to solve?
- rubber_duck 10y ago>Is it that all the lowest hanging fruit is gone and the problems are becoming intractable to solve? Considering that the only way to even observe Higgs is to build a multi billion dollar collider I'd bet on that one.
- scottlocklin 10y agoSocial problems, IMO. Physics career track is designed to produce this outcome. Peter Woit (OP) wrote a decent book on the subject.
- dekhn 10y agoI disagree with the assessment of LIGO being nothing- LIGO is the only physical confirmation of the existence of gravity waves. It did a nice job of turning something we predicted from theory into an observation that is hard to deny (it's also a tour de force of engineering and management).
- mojuba 10y agoLook at how computing has changed in the past 30 years. From huge ugly boxes with CRT monitors to powerful touch computers in our pockets. How is this not physics? Sure, the principles and the foundations were laid out in the decades prior to that, but moving in smaller but important practical increments is also science.
- criddell 10y agoThat's a win for engineers I think. Isn't the stagnation argument saying that physicists aren't creating new foundations for the engineers of 2075?