Lots going on in the foundations as well, esp. cosmology. Particle physics is hardly the end all be all. I mean the reality is that for going significantly beyo

Lots going on in the foundations as well, esp. cosmology. Particle physics is hardly the end all be all. I mean the reality is that for going significantly beyond the Standard Model you just need higher and higher energies -- energies that might even be impossible for humanity to explore ever. One could build a better accelerator which Sabine opposes because it's unclear whether it will yield anything (but honestly that's science. If there were guarantees, it wouldn't be called "research"). Or one can theorize and do thought experiments and hope that one will discover mathematical constraints that rule out a big class of models. It's not like she has a better plan. She says "new and better methods". I mean that's exactly what physicists try and pursue. I highly doubt that an ambitious young scientist wldn't try and get a cool publication if they could think of a novel theory. But the reality is that novel ideas that fit all the existing experimental constraints are very very very hard to figure out. People work on them but lack of a million new models a year is not because of some groupthink but because physics is hard.