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Prof. Sabine Hossenfelder has a great article on the lack of progress in fundamentals of physics: "The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics
by Jerry2 5y ago
Prof. Sabine Hossenfelder has a great article on the lack of progress in fundamentals of physics: "The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal " [1]
Choice quotes:
>We know this both because dark matter is merely a placeholder for something we don’t understand, and because the mathematical formulation of particle physics is incompatible with the math we use for gravity. Physicists knew about these two problems already in 1930s. And until the 1970s, they made great progress. But since then, theory development in the foundations of physics has stalled. If experiments find anything new now, that will be despite, not because of, some ten-thousands of wrong predictions.
>Ten-thousands of wrong predictions sounds dramatic, but it’s actually an underestimate. I am merely summing up predictions that have been made for physics beyond the standard model which the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was supposed to find: All the extra dimensions in their multiple shapes and configurations, all the pretty symmetry groups, all the new particles with the fancy names. You can estimate the total number of such predictions by counting the papers, or, alternatively, the people working in the fields and their average productivity.
According to her, and many other physicists, there hasn't been any major progress in phenomenology since 1970s when Higgs boson was postulated.
[1] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-present-phase-of-stagnation-in.html https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-present-phase-...
- KolenCh 5y ago"The Trouble with Physics" by Lee Smolin also talk about this, and the general "group-think" situation of theoretical physics.
- ramraj07 5y agoYou don’t even need to be a physicist to see that they haven’t introduced anything new physics wise in the last 5 decades. Alcubierre drive maybe?
- whatshisface 5y agoOff the top of my head, they've made progress in quark-gluon plasma, discovering the AdS/CFT correspondence, and practical techniques for quantum computing. There's been enormous progress in computational methods, too. There's also been something very interesting going on with twistors. Oh, and 50 years ago quantum field theory was not on a formally sound footing, but now it is (not completely but it's closer). There's also a lot of progress in renormalization (RG group flow). Oh, and don't forget about fifty years of Moore's law. We have solid state to thank for that. I'm sure I could think of more if I gave it more time. The truth is that there have been no earthshattierng paradigm shifts in the last fifty years, but that's OK because they tend to happen once every couple centuries.
- pdonis 5y ago> discovering the AdS/CFT correspondence This should not be counted as progress unless and until it actually makes experimental predictions that are confirmed.
- whatshisface 5y agoIt's used to study quark-gluon plasma but I can't tell you how fruitfully because that would require understanding it.
- pdonis 5y ago> It's used to study quark-gluon plasma I'm not aware of any predictions it has made regarding quark-gluon plasma that can't be made equally well without it.
- analog31 5y agoMaybe a minor note, but all units of measurement are now free of artifact based standards.
- Iwan-Zotow 5y ago> Alcubierre drive maybe? this is old physics, just another solution of the GR
- ben_w 5y agoYes and no. Yes, warp drives are “just another solution” to the Einstein field equations. No, saying “just” in that way is like saying any given computer program is “just” another solution to the Church-Turing thesis. Alcubierre introduced a novel and interesting category of solutions that people hadn’t thought of before.
- lyaa 5y agoTopological materials are relatively new and increasingly promising for both technological and pure science reasons.
- salty_biscuits 5y agoFractional quantum hall effect is a massive one. All the action is in condensed matter. Somehow less newsworthy despite being closer to practical applications than high energy physics.
- throwawaylinux 5y agoA lot of fields go through S-curve advancements, which is normal. Physics is unfortunately looking very normal.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- derbOac 5y agoMight not be a coincidence that Higgs has said he wouldn't have an academic position today.
- narrator 5y agoCould Einstein, being a patent clerk, have gotten his papers published these days? Is there room for non-professionals, or people outside the system to come in and disrupt it? It seems that there's a lot of disregard of wild alternative theories like quantum mechanics would have seemed in the early 20th century.
- gameswithgo 5y agoEinstein was a professional and known entity, he just also had a job as a patent clerk.
- RichardCA 5y agoMy understanding is that there is still disagreement around this. One of the lines of debate is whether his wife Mileva Marić did most of the grunt-work that was necessary to prepare his papers to the level of acceptance for scientific publications at that time. The overall narrative that seems to emerge is that he was undisciplined as an undergrad at the ETH in Zurich, and never would have landed a graduate posting, and the patent office job was a fallback. Mileva was more diligent and helped him out quite a bit.
- hollerith 5y agoEinstein was a patent clerk at a time when government funding for science was vastly lower than today and there were research and teaching jobs for only a small fraction of physics PhDs. Also there were much fewer PhDs back then, so with a a PhD from one of the most prestigious schools, that patent clerk was in fact a physics insider.
- lelanthran 5y ago> Also there were much fewer PhDs back then, so with a a PhD from one of the most prestigious schools, that patent clerk was in fact a physics insider. Didn't he get his PhD awarded only after he was recognised for his work?
- wrycoder 5y agoDr. Hossenfelder is a Research Fellow at FIAS. I don’t think she is a professor.
- narrator 5y agoThe last time we moved fundamental physics forward we got nuclear weapons. Thus, one could argue that there's good and bad parts to our current technological stagnation. Imagine having a spaceship that could travel at relativistic speeds. Can you imagine getting into a traffic accident with that thing?
- scythe 5y agoThe theories that we were dealing with around the dawn of QM/GR were relatively tractable; we could make long-enough-term predictions about the behavior of many systems and we had a library of observations that clearly and reproducibly deviated from those predictions. We had even begun to draw vague correlations among the diverging data. Today, we have experimental data that diverges from predictions... regarding... the number of neutrino collisions we can observe in certain giant tanks of highly pure liquids, and... the scale of variation in the cosmic microwave background and long-range mass density is too small, oh, and... galaxies rotate kinda weird... free neutron lifetime measurements disagree by about 1.1%.... there's not quite enough lithium in the Universe (no, really)... good luck tying all this together into a theory of everything!