I wish physicists would dare blame themselves for (insufficiently dis)trusting their statistician, mathematician & philosopher colleagues. The reason for physi

I wish physicists would dare blame themselves for (insufficiently dis)trusting their statistician, mathematician & philosopher colleagues. The reason for physics research becoming more wide, limited & shallow instead of more narrow, broad & deep seem to stem from the foundations of mathematics. See here for the foundations of math itself: https://mathoverflow.net/a/25385 https://mathoverflow.net/a/25385 http://math.andrej.com/2016/10/10/five-stages-of-accepting-constructive-mathematics/ http://math.andrej.com/2016/10/10/five-stages-of-accepting-c... (If you struggle with comprehending the above, try drawing Venn diagrams of the logical operations involved to gain a geometric understanding of the matter.) And here for the foundations of probability theory: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-88-470-2107-5_5 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-88-470-2107-... Gian-Carlo Rota - Twelve Problems in Probability Theory No One Likes to Bring Up, The Fubini Lectures, 1998 (published 2001) Two decades old, but the title still rings as true today as it did twenty years ago, unfortunately. And here, for the obligatory philosophy slap fight abound in statistics: https://www.quora.com/For-a-non-expert-what-is-the-difference-between-Bayesian-and-frequentist-approaches/answer/Jason-Eisner https://www.quora.com/For-a-non-expert-what-is-the-differenc... The philosophical solution to which basically boils down to this image macro: https://i.imgur.com/MPAntbK.jpg https://i.imgur.com/MPAntbK.jpg But for which we lack a sufficiently advanced & logically consistent mathematical formalism, both due to people mostly ignoring, out of ignorance [because from where else do you get the action of ignoring!], the philosophical solution, and, more importantly, because we lack a sufficient mathematical formalism for it due to, among other things, the issues with probability theory. And here, a small shimmer of hope in the foundations of statistics: http://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/phofstra/Simpson.pdf http://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/phofstra/Simpson.pdf There exists another, unrelated to the above presentation, avenue of highly interesting research out of Brazil, but their results haven't yet reached a stage of maturity where people throw together easily understandable powerpoint slides, which I'll neglect mentioning here for now, because I'd consider that bad etiquette. Personally, I feel partial to blaming all of this on this Euclid translation error, albeit I say that in partial jest: http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/teaching/dm-reading-assignments/Euclid-Second-Proposition-Math-Intell.pdf http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/teaching/dm-reading-assign... ...which people still fall for, even in 2018, as exemplified in quite a few papers on the foundations of geometry published in recent years. In closing: Physicists don't stand the furthest to the right in this xkcd comic, and out of frame, even further to the right from the already left out philosopher, there exists a recursive boxing match between numerous fields of science conveniently left out of the graphic to maintain a sense of strict hierarchy & order in a reality that lacks such hierarchy: https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/ Also, I'd like to point out that the title of that blog post technically represents a statistically testable hypothesis.