I don’t know how much people listen to Sabine Hossenfelder’s opinions on things, but the article mentioned the age old desire for unification and symmetry, and

I don’t know how much people listen to Sabine Hossenfelder’s opinions on things, but the article mentioned the age old desire for unification and symmetry, and frankly, I have to point out how aestheticist, unscientific, biased, and frankly typical it is for an LLM trained on modern (theoretical physics) conversations to go in search of unification. I know AI isn’t doing new science any time soon (or even this decade) but what I do think is that it’s probably dumb to bias your AI to go hunting for grand unified theories when what it should be looking for is unanswered questions grounded in first principles and proposing candidate experiments to discover the shape of data behind those doors, AND ONLY THEN proposing theories. The modern mechanics revolutions of the 20th century demonstrated that our intuitions were completely mismatched for what the truth was. Planck himself rejected the notion of curve fitting which ultimately birthed energy quanta. It’s OUR macro universe that is the weird one, a strange corner case of quantum reality in the absurdly large.