The current paradigm of particle physics will likely fail after the next accelerator -- everybody abandon ship RIGHT NOW!!Elf! So since the early seventies the

The current paradigm of particle physics will likely fail after the next accelerator -- everybody abandon ship RIGHT NOW!!Elf! So since the early seventies there was an interplay between discovery machines, accelerators that prioritize high energy over high precision, and precision experiments. In practice these are proton accelerators, which accelerate to very high energies since protons are heavy, but have the downside that protons are itself very complicated objects, and electron accelerators, that have the opposite trade off, electrons are light and therefore lower energy but are very simple and analyzing the results is therefore very easy. The way the interplay worked is, that the precision experiments would constrain the parameter space for the next generation of discovery machines, and then the discovery machines would give the next generation of precision experiments a target. This is to a large extend just research by timetable, and funding agencies love it. Physicists can write a proposal including a list of expected discoveries and funding agencies can then just check that list quarterly. This paradigm will most likely come to an end after the next accelerator. The next accelerator will be a Higgs factory to measure with very high precision the properties of the Higgs boson. Now theory did progress a lot in the last four decades, but it closely mirrored this path of experiments and therefore did work within a quite well defined paradigm. That is what she means with "no progress," there was a lot of progress, new calculation techniques, new techniques for model building, the entire effective field theory ideas and so on, but that is all in service of a narrowly defined paradigm. So it is probably a good idea to start looking for more risky research, because we a pretty sure the boring predictable stuff is coming to an end, but I think that the characterization of "no progress" is a quite unfair characterization of a very fruitful endeavor.