RE: @acollierastro & The Crisis in Theoretical Physics

We quote @SabineHossenfelder and Eric Weinstein about the stagnation in theoretical physics.

Since the development of QCD in the 70s, there has been almost no significant contributions to theoretical physics which have been proved by experiments. This matches a shift in the way of doing physics, in which research is now done in groups rather than by individuals. Could this be the reason for the crisis in theoretical physics?

We show that almost all progress in the history of theoretical physics has been done by single-author papers, and not by groups of researchers.

Tags: #acollierastro #physics #crackpot #crackpots #historyofphysics #physicsresearch single-author papers #crisisphysics #1973 #ericweinstein

[stefanrusek]

Part of Dr @acolierastro 's point was also that string theory was a dead end side quest that really set progress back.

[mitchellschoenbrun]

One shouldn't ignore the great vacuum cleaner of funding in theoretical physics as well as the need for young physicists to direct their attention to string theory, which has become a type of black hole into which money pours and nothing (but some interesting math) comes out.

[tonibat]

We don't need a giant paradigm shift in physics, as Angela Collier puts it. We only need to:

- Know what 95% of the universe is made of.
- Guess how QM works. What is entanglement, what is a photon, what happens when we measure things.
- Why our galaxy and all others rotate the way we see them do.
- Grasp how long ago the universe started, without the age of observed galaxies embarrassing us.
- Understand not only how much gravity and space curvature there is, but what causes it.
- Same for light and EM field.
- Come to terms with billions of solar masses concentrated in small volumes, for no reason and without ever seeing them go there.
- Why space expands and what it means exactly (and explain why energy conservation is therefore violated to everyone's amusement).
- Why we never see antimatter anywhere in nature.

And a few others of minor importance, that we can ignore for now. Suppose these are questions without answer, aka 'meaningless questions'. Like the question of why did John F Kennedy die from a bullet coming from a building behind when one can see his head being struck backwards in the car? (*) Maybe there was a theoretical physicist at the top of the police department that day?

* BTW his wife Jaqueline got the idea right by instinctively jumping to the REAR of the car.

[CherryColaWizard]

All I can say is this: I don't think McDonald's will ever get rid of the McRib. It'll continue to show up every now and then until the end of time.

[blenderpanzi]

Also: The universe is under no obligation to be easily understood. Maybe the current problems really are that hard? Can we know before we solved them?

[kevinking]

My guess and feeling is that we picked all the low hanging fruit and the problems are harder

[bekindbethoughtful]

My 2cents: the of physics research is having its effects felt.

[lorenwilson]

I don't think that the "publish or perish" climate is much worse now than 50 years ago. One issue with today's hypotheses is the much greater cost to verify. Experimentation costs more because the effect we are looking for is much harder to detect. Think of pre-relativity physics. They thought they could explain all phenomena. It was after telescopes became better that issues with the orbit of Mercury were verified.

[melgross]

I haven’t had physics since 1973. But I do try to keep up. I remain a member of the scientific societies I did when I graduated, because if you don’t read the papers, you really can’t say much. It seems to me that the reason why no major breakthroughs have been made since the ones we’ve seen, is not that there is no individual thought. Yes, that will slow things down. But there’s a much bigger reason. It’s that the “low hanging fruit” has been picked. Much of what was done could be done on a number of sheets of paper. That’s no longer true. The problems physics has been facing since the mid 1970’s are of a different nature. I’ve read many different hypotheses. But those aren’t theories. They’re mainly questions. With the “easy” questions answered, the more difficult ones remain. Those can no longer be posed and answered on sheets of paper. They require computation, various experts on that as well as on the question itself. They require experiments that can’t be easily done. Teams are needed as no one person anymore has the needed expertise on their own. In some cases hypotheses or theories, are either extremely difficult to test, or are possibly impossible to test. So forward progress grinds to a halt. Some concepts may simply be wrong, but are pursued, such as quantum gravity, which may be impossible, as gravity is likely not a force, or possibly not even real. I know that sounds strange, but Einstein himself didn’t consider gravity to be a force. It’s a result of space and matter. Take a moire, for example, does it exist? It’s a result of two other objects that do exist on their own that are put together so as to cross at angles that result in a jagged line, the angle of which depends upon the angle of crossing. So you may say it exists. But take either item away, and while both of them still exist, the moire does not. If one part is space and the other mass, gravity seems to exist. But take one away, and it doesn’t. So this is a major problem of current physics. Finding out how to quantitize gravity may be impossible, as gravity isn’t a force and may not even exist as an individual “entity” much as a moire. If so, then current ideas as to how to achieve a theory of everything will continue to be a failure. So these are some of the reasons why physics has been stuck for so long.

[VoIcanoman]

I'm not a physicist, so this may come of as a bit presumptuous, but perhaps the problem is over-specialization. The paragons of physics of yore, the Newtons and Einsteins, they had many interests (both within and outside of the scope of physics), and pursued multiple types of investigations simultaneously. Moreover, they weren't JUST physicists. The way you see the world, and what you know about it, can impact how you see a specific field of inquiry. I think too many scientists live and breathe ONLY their field - it's what excites them, and they spend almost all of their time and mental effort devoted to it. Similarly, the interdisciplinary progress that has been made in so many other academic circles (including in applied and experimental physics) has perhaps been lacking in theoretical physics. Who are they going to integrate into their research groups? Theologians? Philosophers? That's so...17th century, isn't it? When you have a dominant paradigm, the way to break it is to get new perspectives ON it, by people who think about the world in a different way. But unfortunately, the dominant paradigm has gotten to be so complex, that to understand even more than the basics requires at least an honours degree in physics.

That wasn't always the case - pre-20th century, experimentally-verified theories could mostly be comprehended with a decent science background, and learned men from all backgrounds could grasp things like like thermodynamics and classical mechanics...indeed, modern high school students can pretty-well grasp these theories. But now, while high school students are able to learn about the basics of special relativity and quantum mechanics, they don't have the mathematical background to go further, into general relativity or the real meat of quantum theory. And university physics courses for non-majors don't require calculus as a pre- or co-requisite, so they generally stay away from that as well. The result is that only physics majors (and maybe a few engineering students) manage to truly interact with these theories at the ground level, limiting the pool of people who will EVER be in a position to do research in this area to those who are of similar personality (as it takes a certain type of person to want to study physics). This means that there will be little diversity of thought, when such diversity is exactly what enables scientific progress.

Anyway, I don't think this is a problem that can be easily solved, because the nature of the education system in most countries is one of gradually closing doors that students don't think they'll need to do what they want to with their lives, and therefore, so few people ever achieve the mathematical mastery required to gain an understanding of modern physics theory (and those people are almost never painters or football players or members of the debate club). You want progress? Change the way math and science are taught so that people not already inclined to be interested in them can understand them and find joy in their study. Moreover, find a way to encourage the people who ARE inclined towards the hard sciences to develop other passions that are completely unrelated to physics and math. That's my solution!

[mdahl]

This didnt seem like a very good response to Acollierastro. Some of the items that are mentioned here are subjects of entire videos on her page.

This was my first time on this channel... and my last.

[edwardharvey]

The problem is that for the application of physical concepts into practice products for human use, anything beyond the standard model and field theory is rather trivial. Even the Higgs particle is trivial when one considers that most of what we call mass is the effect of electrical forces. At some level, string theory is little more than intellectual masturbation with no real world application.

[Etlelele]

The relevant research problems today are exponentially harder than those of the past, and making the relevant experiments and disentangling the results takes exponentially more resources. Most of the easy problems have been solved. It's as simple as that.

[HideoV]

This is a massive misunderstanding of experimental physics. Significant theoretical breakthroughs were required to achieve results predicted by pre 70s physics. It's not just a matter of building the right experimental device, it's about understanding the theory behind the building of the device. This is theory that did not exist prior to 1970, but is less title grabbing than the original pre 70s prediction and therefore disregarded by the more general public

[michaeljames]

Re Lone geniuses. Solitude and time to think, and think, and think; to cogitate, to run the same problems over and over unhurriedly in that super-brain, seems to assist the paradigm shifting ideas production. If Newton had been under pressure to logon every day and get papers out, perhaps we may never had the one, big idea. You might have mentioned Descartes, stuck for months in a snow storm, coming up with incredible Meta-physical ideas. If Einstein had had a smartphone hidden in his work desk and not a note-book, if that snowed-in cabin where Descartes holed up, had had decent broadband, if Newton had, had to deliver three online lectures a day even in quarantine, how different it may have been. Engineering progress needs access to everyone else's mistakes and incremental progress, but maybe truly new ideas need solitude.

[plm]

You are correct, the Band wagoning witnessed in physics has become the norm, all published papers nowadays have more than one author. They are all doing different versions of the same thing. If a smart guy like Ed Witten does something, all modern physicists pile up around him like suckling puppies. If Einstein wrote GR today, Editors would summarily reject it because GR was so different from anything in physics then. Band wagoning is poison, and those that have drunk it think of themselves as sober.

[innocentsmith]

To be fair, most "theoretical" physicists these days are computational physicists.

[iseriver]

Eric isn't a physicist, he doesn't publish, he doesn't do research, he doesn't even communicate science. He does push conspiracy theories.

[aniksamiurrahman]

Since the massive technological leap during the cold war - people has become very impatient. Very impatient. Just as we expect some brand new mind boggling technology and billion dollar startup each year, seems like we're similarly expecting paradigm shifting theories each year in the same vein. This terminal addiction of "Next Big Thing" is very very dangerous. Cos, growth in technology and Commerce too will hit a plateau one-day; may not be so far from today. Perhaps, theoratical physics and the disconnect here is a foreshadow of what to come all over the spectrum? The only other way is, beside enabling individual creativity, is to be patient and get over the "next big thing" addiction.

[philshorten]

Hey physics dudes, "it looks hard"!
As an ordinary idiot looking at the things you smart people do....
It looks REALLY hard. (I mean like much harder than dividing the bill after a meal out with friends)
And discovering absolutely anything at all that is new is doubly hard.