'Why the Foundations of Physics Have Not Progressed For 40 Years' (iai.tv) 231
Sabine Hossenfelder, research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, writes: What we have here in the foundation of physics is a plain failure of the scientific method. All these wrong predictions should have taught physicists that just because they can write down equations for something does not mean this math is a scientifically promising hypothesis. String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There's math for it, alright. Pretty math, even. But that doesn't mean this math describes reality. Physicists need new methods. Better methods. Methods that are appropriate to the present century. And please spare me the complaints that I supposedly do not have anything better to suggest, because that is a false accusation. I have said many times that looking at the history of physics teaches us that resolving inconsistencies has been a reliable path to breakthroughs, so that's what we should focus on. I may be on the wrong track with this, of course.
Why don't physicists have a hard look at their history and learn from their failure? Because the existing scientific system does not encourage learning. Physicists today can happily make career by writing papers about things no one has ever observed, and never will observe. This continues to go on because there is nothing and no one that can stop it. You may want to put this down as a minor worry because -- $40 billion dollar collider aside -- who really cares about the foundations of physics? Maybe all these string theorists have been wasting tax-money for decades, alright, but in the large scheme of things it's not all that much money. I grant you that much. Theorists are not expensive. But even if you don't care what's up with strings and multiverses, you should worry about what is happening here. The foundations of physics are the canary in the coal mine. It's an old discipline and the first to run into this problem. But the same problem will sooner or later surface in other disciplines if experiments become increasingly expensive and recruit large fractions of the scientific community. Indeed, we see this beginning to happen in medicine and in ecology, too.
Why don't physicists have a hard look at their history and learn from their failure? Because the existing scientific system does not encourage learning. Physicists today can happily make career by writing papers about things no one has ever observed, and never will observe. This continues to go on because there is nothing and no one that can stop it. You may want to put this down as a minor worry because -- $40 billion dollar collider aside -- who really cares about the foundations of physics? Maybe all these string theorists have been wasting tax-money for decades, alright, but in the large scheme of things it's not all that much money. I grant you that much. Theorists are not expensive. But even if you don't care what's up with strings and multiverses, you should worry about what is happening here. The foundations of physics are the canary in the coal mine. It's an old discipline and the first to run into this problem. But the same problem will sooner or later surface in other disciplines if experiments become increasingly expensive and recruit large fractions of the scientific community. Indeed, we see this beginning to happen in medicine and in ecology, too.
You are confusing Chemistry with Physics (Score:2)
Chemistry hasn't really changed much, other than new periodic table elements, but Physics has changed.
Other than that dead end string theory you all wasted so much time and effort on.
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Re:You are confusing Chemistry with Physics (Score:5, Funny)
That just makes it the scientific equivalent of Depression era make work projects, only instead of digging ditches with spoons the physicists are investigating stoner-tier "dude what if, like, everything was like a tiny little string man, and it was just like, wiggling around and stuff. But the strings are made of smaller strings and it's like that book people reference all the time that of course I never read and 'it's strings all the way down!' Whoa!"
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On the other hand, now those physicists are uniquely qualified to work as budtenders or poets.
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Ask the ethanol industry. They've done wonders when it comes to work creation over the years.
Re:You are confusing Chemistry with Physics (Score:5, Interesting)
And in fact, Physics hasn't changed that much since Peter Higgs 50 years ago predicted the Higgs Boson, which was necessary to unify the Electroweak and the Strong Force. Since then, the Standard Model of Particle Physics has stalled. No progress in unifying General Relativity and Particle Physics. No ideas that are testable in experiments, at least not in experiments we can afford to pay for. We have inconsistencies in our observations and the models we use to make sense of the observations. But no progress in filling the gaps. Dark Matter was predicted by Fritz Zwicky 80 years ago. We still don't know what it is. We just know it has to be there. Dark Energy was not really predicted, but rather put in as a kludge by Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago. Still no progress in knowing what it actually is. Just more observations that Dark Energy might actually be real.
So here we are: lambda-CDM model for astrophysics and the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Two completely separate realms of Physics, each unchanged since at least half a century, with no known intersections. And lots of strange observations which don't fit either of them.
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All I know is from taking recent courses in Engineering Physics and Chemistry.
From my viewpoint, not much new in Chemistry at all since forever, just better measurements, but Physics has continued to change. It might not be apparent to you, but my first degrees were from the 80s, so it's noticeable. And I worked in BioChem in the aughts doing research.
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Chemistry, like Physics, is a large field with many sub-disciplines. The subset that is relevant for an Engineering course probably hasn't changed much because advances in polymers and bulk material properties is driven by industrial applications (which also haven't changed much). But other areas, especially more fundamental areas like stereo-controlled organic synthesis and reaction coordinate modeling, have seen a lot of advancement in the last 50 years.
Re:You are confusing Chemistry with Physics (Score:4, Informative)
Materials science has made order-of-magnitude progress in both theory and implementation during that period.
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Re:You are confusing Chemistry with Physics (Score:5, Insightful)
As Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist, I guess she knows what she's talking about.
And in fact, Physics hasn't changed that much since Peter Higgs 50 years ago predicted the Higgs Boson, which was necessary to unify the Electroweak and the Strong Force. Since then, the Standard Model of Particle Physics has stalled. No progress in unifying General Relativity and Particle Physics. No ideas that are testable in experiments, at least not in experiments we can afford to pay for. We have inconsistencies in our observations and the models we use to make sense of the observations. But no progress in filling the gaps. Dark Matter was predicted by Fritz Zwicky 80 years ago. We still don't know what it is. We just know it has to be there. Dark Energy was not really predicted, but rather put in as a kludge by Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago. Still no progress in knowing what it actually is. Just more observations that Dark Energy might actually be real.
So here we are: lambda-CDM model for astrophysics and the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Two completely separate realms of Physics, each unchanged since at least half a century, with no known intersections. And lots of strange observations which don't fit either of them.
I've studied physics since I was 19 years old. I'm 74 now. Your assertion that things have stalled is false.
I'm reminded of law enforcement investigations where the public, media, and families think no one's doing anything because there's no progress.
In reality, progress comes in small steps. Physics has been dead at least 42 times since the 1700s.
We're still working on quantum mechanics. It's weird, but that makes it exciting. Hossenfelder is, indeed, a physicist, but SHE has failed to make much progress and she's makes most of her money on doom and gloom by way of books, YouTube, lectures, and a blog.
It's a sweet spot for her.
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Can you list a few examples? Particularly fundamental physics, since that is what this article is concerning?
Building a big super collider so that we can observe the Higgs Boson is not an advance in fundamental physics, it is a confirmation of an advance that was made 50 years ago. Likewise, observing some weird new astrophysics is not a fundamental advance in the theory, just more observed weirdness that can't be explained by current theories.
Sabine is not saying Physics is dead, just that research priorit
Re:You are confusing Chemistry with Physics (Score:4, Informative)
Renormalisation group theory, that is used to understand critical phenomena and quantum field theory, appeared in the mid- 70s and is a fundamental advance. Ok, it's a bit over 40 years ago now but not much.
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Building a big super collider so that we can observe the Higgs Boson is not an advance in fundamental physics, it is a confirmation of an advance that was made 50 years ago
So confirmation of predictions isn't advancement AND
Likewise, observing some weird new astrophysics is not a fundamental advance in the theory, just more observed weirdness that can't be explained by current theories.
Observations being used in predictions isn't advancement.
Okay, so I'm going have to get some clarification from you then. What exactly are you using as a scorecard for "advancement"? Because you've pretty much excluded all of science here, except for an insanely artificially thin definition of it. From all the criteria you've put forth the only item that clearly stands out that you would consider an advancement is along the lines of "predictions based
Re: You are confusing Chemistry with Physics (Score:4, Funny)
Re:You are confusing Chemistry with Physics (Score:5, Interesting)
Sabine Hossenfelder laments missing progress in general. The last Grand Concepts or Grand Theories that were introduced into Physics date back to the 1930-1960ies. Since then, we have lots of work on details (e.g. Hawking Radiation, actually finding the Higgs Boson), lots of lofty Meta Theories (e.g. (Super-)String Theory, Super Symmetry), but nothing to tackle actual open. glaring problems like a testable Quantum Gravity, Dark Matter and Dark Energy, or 33 free parameters in our theories no one knows why they have the values they actually have.
Super Symmetry for instance was introduced in 1971, nearly half a century ago, and we still don't have evidence for a single super symmetric particle, just lots of handwaving like Dark Matter might partly consists of super symmetric particles. String Theories are even older, but still no idea came up how to actually test them, and no, bulding an accelerator the size of our galaxy and feed it with the energy of 10^6 quasars is not a feasible plan. Possible explanations for Dark Energy like Quantum fluctuations causing negative pressure give predictions for their effects which differ from the actual observations by a factor of 10^120. The Standard Model of Quantum Theory yields no new particle types for the next 10^15 times the energy we use right now. Current theories predict that we will find exactly nothing new in an upscaled LHC 10 times the size and power, so what's the point in building one? And yes, LIGO's detection of gravitational waves is a very important result, but one that was expected anyway since a century.
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Still no progress in knowing what it actually is. Just more observations that Dark Energy might actually be real.
It might be real, or the things we don't know about might simply be symmetrical.
Re:You are confusing Chemistry with Physics (Score:5, Insightful)
The world's a complicated place, without statistics there would be no physics. You seem to think experiments are cheap and always come back with a yes or no result. They aren't cheap and figuring out what to test with the limited amount of money available for testing it hard work. And the result of an experiment is more data that statistics must be applied to because a trend in a few terabytes of data just doesn't start dancing naked shouting "I'm here!!".
You also seem to think experiments somehow are immaculately conceived away from theories. What is it you think they are testing? Without a theory, there is no context within which to test. Let a million theories bloom, we won't know which ones are the right ones unless we sift through them. That sifting takes a lot of mathematical expertise to see if they contradict known theories that have experimental support. And if they contradict, is the original theory wrong? The new theory? Experimental support is just that, experimental. It doesn't hold universally but within a context and only up to the accuracy of the experiment. And the experiment's relationship to a theory doesn't grow on trees, it's hard work ferreting out that connection.
Re:You are confusing Chemistry with Physics (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, but without spending all the time and effort on string theory, we wouldn't know if it was a dead end or not. Thats the issue with fundamental physics... there are many possible ways to describe phenomena, and until a lot of time and effort is spent attempting to confirm such hypotheses, it is impossible to rule them out. History is littered with such discarded theories, but without them, we wouldn't be where we are today.
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Exactly.
I hear phrenology is coming back, but I hope that's a very bad rumor.
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OTOH, lots of legit work is being done in medical physiology that involves the shape of the outer surface of the brain.
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Hence my comment. You know, I just realized, maybe Trump has a flat smooth brain ...
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Chemistry hasn't really changed much
The theory of quantum electrodynamics unified the scientific fields of physics and chemistry in 1949-50. Feynman and 2 other people shared the Nobel Prize for it in `65.
Since then, chemistry is an engineering discipline, and the science it is based on is merely called "physics."
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So, you're saying you've decided whether light is a wave or a particle then? ... didn't think so ...
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It's a wave particle, duh.
Re:You are confusing Chemistry with Physics (Score:4, Informative)
Uh, no. First, while QED made interpretation of quantized energy states more intuitive and consistent with other theories, it still cannot be solved completely for molecules more complex than H2. It hardly qualifies as Chemistry if you are restricted to hydrogen, so approximation methods have been developed and refined over many decades,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
Second, bonding and structure-activity relationships is only a small part of Chemistry. Models/theories/frameworks that actually make useful predictions requires significantly more than just an understanding of the math behind electrostatics and quantized energy levels,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
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What I said is really basic stuff, and what you said isn't even responsive to it.
Also, why are you linking to the mobile version of wikipedia? Hang up and drive.
Chemistry isn't hokus-pokus, and it isn't really that interesting to argue over if maybe it is. So, to make it simple I'll quote the parts of the link you provided that say the same thing I already said.
From Physical organic chemistry:
Physical organic chemistry is the study of the relationship between structure and reactivity of organic molecules. More specifically, physical organic chemistry applies the experimental tools of physical chemistry to the study of the structure of organic molecules and provides a theoretical framework that interprets how structure influences both mechanisms and rates of organic reactions. It can be thought of as a subfield that bridges organic chemistry with physical chemistry.
And from Physical chemistry:
Physical chemistry is the study of macroscopic, atomic, subatomic, and particulate phenomena in chemical systems in terms of the principles, practices, and concepts of physics such as motion, energy, force, time, thermodynamics, quantum chemistry, statistical mechanics, analytical dynamics and chemical equilibrium.
Chemistry is a different field than physics because it is about different questions, lik
97% of physicists agree... (Score:5, Funny)
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More like... (Score:4, Insightful)
... the foundations of physics are hard and need expensive technology like supercolliders or you have to wait for the next theoretical genius observer to put two and two together.
Then you have the problem that only a tiny minority of the population is educated enough to even understand science and check and verify the work, so of course lots of garbage/bs/error would pile up, we as a culture only care about commercial relevance we aren't all that big on fact checking or reproduction. The human race has generally been creatures that create a culture of expediency and waiting until the last minute. As we usually see with environmental disasters, healthcare, or mental illness. Problems are only addressed in terms of what billionaires would like to have addressed since the global public is largely stupid and inept. So you get whatever that small minority of monied interests think is worth focusing on and that's usually things that are low hanging fruit kind of stuff.
The history of man is the history of religious delusion and madness, it is not one of enlightenment, it is one of sticking ones head in the sand when it conflicts with ones views. Human beings are generally bad at the truth and reality.
Re:More like... (Score:5, Interesting)
... the foundations of physics are hard and need expensive technology like supercolliders or you have to wait for the next theoretical genius observer to put two and two together.
Actually you need both. The LHC has so far delivered what I always termed the "nightmare scenario". We found a Higgs completely consistent with the Standard Model and nothing else. A theoretical genius is not enough, the author of the article is right in that you need inconsistencies in the theory and resolving these inconsistencies is what leads to the next breakthrough.
Where the author is wrong though is that the reason theorists are flailing around with more and more speculative theories is that there are so few inconsistencies for them to use in their speculations. Whenever new inconsistencies are found theorists flock towards them. When we found an unexpected bump around 750GeV/c^2 at both ATLAS and CMS in mid-December a few years ago by January there were well over 200 theory papers on the arXiv sadly more data made it go away but it shows the hunger theorists have for new, unexplained data. The problem is that, other than the big ones of Dark Energy, Dark Matter and Quantum Gravity there are no serious inconsistencies that need explaining and trying to explain Quantum Gravity is partly what gave rise to String Theory.
What we clearly need are more pieces of the puzzle for a genius to figure out and finding those pieces is getting more and more expensive since collider technology has not significantly changed since the 1950's - strong focussing, stochastic cooling and superconducting magnets etc helped but the underlying technology is still magnets and microwaves and it is getting harder and harder to push them further.
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IIRC a bit popped up with neutrino oscillation which doesn't really fit the standard model. But that doesn't really seem t have advanced theory on in a major way yet.
No loose threads (Score:3)
Re: More like... (Score:4, Insightful)
Where in regards to dark energy and dark matter are people putting carts before horses?
The standard model seems to be comically boring and extremely useful because it gives us really advanced technology that would have generally been indistinguishable from magic a while ago. And it is still indistinguishable from magic for most people using modern technology.
Still out there in space we can see objects behave in ways that suggest that there is a lot of invisible mass and energy. It’s invisible, non-interacting, so its ‘dark’. There’s no room for this in our model.
We can’t simply be wrong because the tools we currently have work extremely well, so thats really odd and interesting. But we have to be wrong it seems, so there may be additional degrees of freedom if we find a new model that describes our observtions better.
So what is your point?
Meta-physics just deserve less media attention (Score:4, Interesting)
If the foundations of physics have not changed much over the last decades, that may be a good sign that they are pretty solid, and fail to model/predict reality in only very minor aspects mostly irrelevant to our lives.
Re:Meta-physics just deserve less media attention (Score:5, Insightful)
They aren't solid, and we know they aren't solid. There's just no obvious way to fix them. The string theory that he lambasts so vehemently was one attempt. It doesn't seem to have worked, but it was an attempt.
The thing is, relativity is inconsistent with quantum physics, yet both are highly tested (in different areas). They can't both be correct, or we don't think they can, and yet they both pass every test we've thrown at them.
To complain about things that can't be tested is not useful. Maybe they're correct, and maybe they aren't. If you can't test them, all you can say is whether they are consistent. The problem is that relativity is inconsistent with quantum theory, yet both pass every test...but there are lots of areas where only one of them can be tested. So we know *something* is wrong.
He says we should devote our attention to reconciling the inconsistencies, and then complains about a (failed? probably) attempt to do just such a reconciliation.
I think what he's really saying is that he failed some advanced math class, but I'm not certain. And not interested enough to dig further. (Hey, I failed an advanced math class, and had trouble with hyperdimensional geometry...but that may have been a philosophical disagreement about the meaning of folds through a higher dimension.)
Re:Meta-physics just deserve less media attention (Score:5, Informative)
No, they can both be correct, for their relative fields. Quantum mechanics works great for small stuff. It even dissolves nicely into what we know for larger stuff. As does general relativity. It works for really big stuff, and dissolves nicely into smaller stuff.
And by dissolve, I mean you end up with regular newtonian mechanics because the terms that matter when you're very small or very big end up going towards zero. We ignore relativity in our normal lives because while we should be correcting our measurements, the error is so tiny it's swamped by other imprecisions.
The problem is, the physics of quantum mechanics and relativity breaks down horribly in situations where you have very small meets very dense and big, like a black hole and you need to combine them. Or you roll the film backwards and try to get closer to the Big Bang, where very big is now very small. All the equations we have blow up - we start suddenly dividing by zero, or even worse, zero divided by zero. Infinities start appearing as well, and stuff that converges normally start diverging and the math goes haywire.
That's usually a sign of an incomplete explanation. That's why we started with String Theory, because all of a sudden the math went good again. But then we noticed that sometimes the math was basically impossible to do. And then we discovered String Theory was just a window into something bigger (M-Theory) which allowed us to actually do the impossible math because you can transform the equations into another domain where that calculation is much easier. (Think of it like using logarithms to turn multiplication into addition, or Laplace transforms that turn convolution into addition)
The big problem so far is that M-Theory and Brane Theory is it's not yet even on theoretical physics - it's still a philosophy where the math makes sense and works. And it's not developed enough where we can generate testable hypothesis (at least theoretically - it's still very hard to do experiments involving things like black holes and big bang).
But the math works, it's just not developed enough to come up with thought experiments we can use to test it with. That's the difference between philosophy and science. M-Theory, Brane Theory, are all very promising physics, but it's still at the philosophical stage
Plus, all this is still highly theoretical. All the physics we need for modern day life as we experience it can be explained adequately with both quantum mechanics and relativity. We use both everyday - GPS satellite atomic clocks are corrected for relativistic effects so they send the correct time. Quantum mechanics comes into play everytime you snap a photo, download a file, etc. Flash memory exploits quantum mechanics for its operation.
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In my opinion, all these attempts to figure out through math might not have results even in centuries.
We need to start doing long range experiments out in between the stars to verify our assumptions, and then it will be solved easily. Without experiment, it is a bit silly to expect to solve this one. After all, that's the problem; we understand everything we can test experimentally here on Earth, and there is still something missing from our understanding. We need new experiments at larger scales.
But nobody
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Reading the article would lend more gravity (see what I did there) to your assessment.
"He" is a "she."
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I'm not a physicist, but I do know a (now retired) physics professor, and I discussed this with him many years ago. The problem preventing reconciling relativity and quantum theory is that at the scales where quantum theory becomes important, relativity breaks down. This is because relativity treats all sources of gravity as point sources, and Uncertainty (of position) effectively turns them into blob source
Re:Meta-physics just deserve less media attention (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's time to invoke Albert "god doesn't play dice" Einstein here, whatever turns out to be the explanation will probably seem like crazy talk at first. Physics doesn't make sense, I feel solid yet obviously radio signals and a bunch of other things pass through me like I'm not even there. If I throw a baseball from a moving car it'll obviously go faster than when I'm standing still, but the light from a lamp doesn't. I've accepted that this is the way it is because a lot of bright people seem to agree that's how it is but to a medieval man it probably sounds like we're batshit crazy. It's not his fault the world is so weird.
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We know this because we look in our telescope and can see it with our own eyes.
False. We believe it because we made predictions, collected data through telescopes and when the data didn't match the predictions we did a bunch of statistics, and from the statistics we "know" that if it did exist it would be self-consistent. So it might exist. It might exist, and if it does, it saves the predictions.
There is no experiment to test though. If you could see it with your own eyes, there might be an experiment. ;)
*Hugs his Stephen Hawkings plushie* (Score:3)
Keep your cold pricklies off my fuzzy logic.
String Theory (Score:5, Interesting)
I became an engineer because of string theory. After I got my BS in physics (late '80s, at the "superstring revolution") I was sick of hearing about it and became a chemical engineer.
Re: String Theory (Score:2)
That is a story of triumph.
Too many minds have been lost to the self-masturbatory abyss that is string theory.
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"self-masturbatory "
Re: String Theory (Score:2)
Google "mutual masturbation".
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That was a reasonable decision. The world only needs a few theoretical physicists...the problem is they've got to be the right theoretical physicists.
String theory never had an obvious point of application, and if your mind is suited to be an engineer, you were correct to move away from it. (Very few good engineers would also be good theoretical physicists. The mind-set required is very different.)
That said, an engineer is not well suited to judge the quality of theoretical physics. (And, of course, the
Here's a *better* question.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't today's journalists avoid shitty click-bait headlines and completely biased reporting?
It's almost as if journalists don't give two shits about things like "facts" and "objectivity" anymore.
Where has all the actual journalism gone?!?
Re:Here's a *better* question.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Where has all the actual journalism gone?!?
We aren't willing to pay for it. No one subscribes to their local newspaper any more, and that's the foundation of the food chain.
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Hey, Slashdot never seems to want to take my money. Always seems broken.
Part of what's good about the news here is that, no matter how screwed the reporting, there'll be a dozen pedants fact-checking every last detail for the karma.
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It's almost as if journalists don't give two shits about things like "facts" and "objectivity" anymore.
Where has all the actual journalism gone?!?
Actual journalism has long been about convincing people of bullshit you just made up.
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Why can't today's journalists avoid shitty click-bait headlines and completely biased reporting?
It's almost as if journalists don't give two shits about things like "facts" and "objectivity" anymore.
Where has all the actual journalism gone?!?
Good point.
Headlines like, "Dinosaurs Honked Like Buicks" (real, btw), don't make reference to the last paragraph of the study that says, "We are not certain that our speculation is correct and we invite other scientists to work fine-tuning our ideas."
Confirming existing theories (Score:5, Insightful)
"The consequence has been that experiments in the foundations of physics past the 1970s have only confirmed the already existing theories. None found evidence of anything beyond what we already know."
Possible that hindsight is 20/20 and if we had not confirmed those theories, we'd be wondering if they were reliable theories in the first place? Someone has to do the grunt work of confirming theories, and science demands that multiple confirmations are needed.
I'm not a scientist, but at face value it seems that the author needs to lead by example and show the scientific community what they're missing out on by not doing things differently. Discover something new by trying some new scientific method, and say "see? that's what I mean"
Someone saying we need "new" and "better" ways of doing things is nothing new. The same could be said for pretty much any discipline, couldn't it?
Re:Confirming existing theories (Score:4, Interesting)
Why should it? (Score:3)
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Kinda true, but also kinda not. True that we probably won't see massive paradigm shifts, most of the history of physics was bunk, and a lot of physics work has just been propagating the same things.
But that doesn't mean it is stagnant, and that doesn't mean it's a bad thing right now.
Hossenfelder has some good points in her article. True there is an awful lot of theory hunting for observation, in stark contrast to centuries past where observation lead to theories. And there is a lot of "theory in search o
Because it's too expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Making real progress in physics now requires vast quantities of funding. We've pushed the limit of knowledge so far that most will only over be able to theorize about advancing physics, and not experiment our way to new discoveries.
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Making real progress in physics now requires vast quantities of funding. We've pushed the limit of knowledge so far that most will only over be able to theorize about advancing physics, and not experiment our way to new discoveries.
Funding is part of it, but a lot of it is energy. If SpaceX succeeds in getting a relatively large number of people off planet, that opens up new possibilities. It's possible to try out things off Earth that no one would allow on Earth because it's too dangerous. And by its nature, messing around in the solar system is high energy. Very high energy if it's done at convenient human timescales, as The Expanse series points out (and sci fi authors dating all the way back to the Golden Age when fission and
Re:Because it's too expensive (Score:5, Interesting)
You would think so but it is actually untrue. There is a new move towards tabletop physics https://news.stanford.edu/2019... [stanford.edu] and new ideas like plasma acceleration do not need big bucks to make progress. In fact physics is alive with new discoveries despite the seeming dead end of string theory and the death of super-symmetry at the LHC. New ideas abound such as Information theory and black holes, ADS/CFT correspondence, new experiments are continuously refining the understanding of quantum mechanics and the CMB gives a different Hubble constant to visual observations which may mean something significant.
All the science that drives the engineering that makes our world depends on theoretical mathematical ideas developed a hundred years or more before. String theory may turn out the same way, though I regret to say we will almost certainly be dead when it does.
Admittedly there seems to have been a long hiatus in foundational physics "just shut up and calculate" is famously the response to the lack of understanding of Quantum physics. Our uniformly cost efficient and interconnected society is probably largely to blame for any stagnation of progress. No one is going to get funded to pursue crazy breakthrough ideas in this environment, every piece of funding has to have a predictable publishable outcome if the budget is going to be approved for next year. We probably need venture capitalists to fund physics departments, eight out of ten departments will pursue an idea that fails and they all lose their jobs and the university closes down the department. But two of them come up with something.
Perhaps we are also suffering from the fact that rather too many things were discovered at the beginning of the last century, Quantum physics, General relativity, Big bang cosmology and The standard model. The only comparable foundational physics prior to this zoo was Faraday's electromagnetism a hundred years earlier and Newtons gravity a hundred years before that, the rest was more or less deduced by the Greeks 2300 years before that. It takes time to understand and master new ideas. Newton invented the newfangled mathematical technique of fluxions to do differentiation and calculate movement under gravity but Leibniz's derivative and his notation replaced Newton's fluxions and are what we use today. If there had been hundreds of years between these discoveries the mathematics might have changed enough to see how these apparently contradictory ideas can be joined up. Or more likely we just need one other new idea to do the job, like understand exactly what times arrow is - because it is meaningless in the current formulation of both quantum mechanics and general relativity.
Either way I think the Professor is being overly pessimistic as it looks like progress may finally be coming.
"philosophy" and "sociology" of science LOL (Score:2, Informative)
They do not think about which hypotheses are promising because their education has not taught them to do so. Such self-reflection would require knowledge of the philosophy and sociology of science...
No it doesn't.
...and those are subjects physicists merely make dismissive jokes about.
They're right to do so, because those fields ARE jokes LOL
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It amuses me that the first thing often taught in a philosophy course is that it is impossible to prove that you understand the same thing as someone who has tried to communicate that thing to you. For example if I say the sky is blue, do you see a blue sky or do you see a yellow sky and just call it blue because that is what people call a yellow sky. Being unable to communicate ought to put you off philosophical pondering but fortunately it does not seem to put the students off.
Don't let them fool you (Score:2)
It's because of the Sophons!
https://villains.fandom.com/wi... [fandom.com]
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Sophon powers
Capability of scrambling Earth's particle accelerators
Faster-than-light communication via quantum entanglement
Near-omnipresent surveillance
Tremendous computing power
Self-repair mechanism
Ability to project messages directly onto human retinae
Control over weaponized probes known as the Droplets
Japanese sword proficiency (in robot form)
Jfc lol
Bad Assumptions (Score:5, Interesting)
Bullocks (Score:5, Interesting)
In the past 20 years there have been a watershed of new discoveries in physics based on equations that have revolutionized how we do and think today and it's increasing.
There are many expensive and many cheap experiments pushing the frontiers of knowledge as we speak. Every day brings a new amazing paradigm shift!
Examples:
Discovery of mass of the neutrino
Strong hints at a possible sterile neutrino.
Penta-quark and larger structures.
Multi-messenger astronomy.
Leading to the Kilonova event
Decays of Xenon in novel ways.
Higgs Boson.
Bottom Strange Matter.
New structure discovered in neutrons in atoms.
Quantum Computing and associated encryption.
Fusion break even point
Elimination of many Dark matter candidates
Just because you are not following the results and scientific journals gives you no right to put down thousands of hard working theorists and researchers and say nothing is happening and no one is thinking!
Re:Bullocks (Score:5, Informative)
Just because you are not following the results and scientific journals gives you no right to put down thousands of hard working theorists and researchers and say nothing is happening and no one is thinking!
The author of the article is Sabine Hossenfelder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] she's theoretical physicist who specialized in quantum gravity, so it think it's safe to assume she's aware of the discoveries in your list. She seemingly has no research discoveries of her own, but published the book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray in June 2018.
Re:Bullocks (Score:4, Informative)
There's nothing wrong with writing a pop-sci book. Plenty of accomplished scientists do, and more should. See, for example,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
She seemingly has no research discoveries of her own
And how did you determine that, exactly? A Wikipedia page? Try looking for her actual articles,
https://arxiv.org/search/gr-qc... [arxiv.org]
She seems to have done fairly well. Not everybody is going to get a Nobel Prize.
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I'll add that she has a YouTube channel that I like. The technical level of Sabine's discourse is a tad higher than PBS Spacetime (which I am also a big fan of). Her channel isn't a tutorial, but more about a what's happening within the academic physics community, the good the bad and the ugly. She's a straight shooter as far as I can tell.
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... and don't forget direct detection of gravitational waves.
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The actual applied physics (like condensed matter physics) has progressed tremendously.
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Quantum Computing and associated encryption.
Discovery of Bigfoot
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Everything on your list is either,
A) Confirmatory experiment for theory that was developed decades ago (ex: Higgs), or
B) Observed weirdness for which there is no theory
Basically, you just confirmed Sabine's point. There have been no significant advances in fundamental physics in the last 50 years. Sabine argues that this is because of an obsession with fanciful math instead of a focus on actual important theoretical inconsistencies. Maybe that's true, or maybe it's just hard.
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Some serious Bose-Einstein developments
That's only new engineering allowing an experiment that confirmed old physics, though.
That's an example of the foundations not progressing; they ran out of predictions that would some day be testable, though in the past they had already built up a stockpile of predictions that they expected to eventually be testable.
If that had been a new theory, it would have been huge, and would have affected the "foundations of physics." But it was an old theory. The foundations were merely verified, not progressed.
Unexpected (Score:2)
We shouldn't speculate on the nature of the uvrse? (Score:3)
writing papers about things no one has ever observed, and never will observe
So he's suggesting that we shouldn't speculate on the nature of the universe? We should focus only to things that can be observed from our tiny dot in space?
Isn't speculation part of the scientific process? You first come up with a theory, then you try to device an experiment to prove or disprove that theory. At this point there are many theories we can't prove through observation or experimentation, but that doesn't many we won't be able to in the future.
To close our minds to the nature of the universe, and focus purely on things we can observe, seems like a road that will lead nowhere. Innovative thinking is an important part of science, as is failure. Even if most of these theories turn out to be wrong, the important thing is that we're trying to find the truth.
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Could you give us an example of an aspect of "the nature of the universe" that isn't observable?
Just a guess, but ... (Score:5, Informative)
Why the Foundations of Physics Have Not Progressed For 40 Years
Theoretical Physics gave us 30% of our world GDP (Score:3)
You are confused (Score:2, Insightful)
You have identified a fault in academia not the scientific method. The truth is that the easy stuff is done. Going forward progress will me measured in decades if not centuries. And we likely need to create new tools.
Question is backwards (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, the time line went:
Approximately 322 BCE, Aristotle created the foundations of physics
1687 CE, Isaac Newton overturned them - about 2,000 years later.
Approximately 1917 CE, Albert Eistein overturns Newtonian physics - about 230 years later
Now a bunch of weenies are complaining that we haven't had a new genius overturned Albert Einstein in about 100 years. Though they cite lesser changes that happened about 40 years ago).
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Agree wholeheartedly, and I made almost the same point higher up the thread. I would add that perhaps we are also suffering from the fact that rather too many things were discovered at the beginning of the last century, Quantum physics, General relativity, Big bang cosmology and The standard model. The only comparable foundational physics prior to this zoo was Faraday's electromagnetism a hundred years earlier and Newtons gravity a hundred years before that, the rest was more or less deduced by the Greeks 2
Quite simple. Easily explained (Score:5, Funny)
Before you accuse me of being an egomaniac, please do consider the evidence, Sir. No one is asking, Why the fundamentals of computational geometry have not progressed in the last 40 years?
So there you have it.
Spoiler alert (Score:3)
The Second Foundation is on Trantor!
Everybody knows that.
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The Second Foundation is on Trantor!
Everybody knows that.
... except the mule! ;-)
Short cut (Score:2)
resolving inconsistencies has been a reliable path to breakthroughs
Now inconsistencies are resolved by inventing a new particle which you then call the breakthrough...
Card carrying physicist here... (Score:5, Insightful)
What is the actual substance of this article.
Lets look carefully:
Paragraph 1; progress has stalled.
Paragraph 2; physics is changing! The easy evidence has been gathered. -- the natural law of physics are unchanging and it seems silly to say they are.
Paragraph 3; fewer experiments lead to fewer discoveries. -- unless you know of easy experiments, this is a pointless statement.
Paragraph 4; Don't look where the evidence points you, because it is too expensive. Instead let us all invest in navel gazing and group think. --WTF?
Paragraph 5; We tested our foundations for wiggle room and found nothing easy to explore.
Paragraph 6; So that I don't get accused of proposing group-think, l will gas-light the establishment.
Paragraph 7; Because there is no easy evidence, we should stop speculating on complex ideas. -- WUT?!?
Paragraph 8; The signal to noise ratio is low.
Paragraph 9; Because we can't easily fathom the complexity of reality we should throw out the single most powerful and useful philosophical process in history.
Paragraph 10; Stop using the best tool in your toolbox, for reasons!
Paragraph 11; Don't refute my baseless assertion with the obvious. I'm not interested in reality. My solution is 'You need to fix it!'
Paragraph 12; Quit earning a living on solving what you can do, instead do something else - doesn't matter what else.
Paragraph 13; You shouldn't worry, it's not really a problem.
Paragraph 14; You should worry that people are working on things they can do!
Paragraph 15; It's spreading, OHH nooeess!
Paragraph 16; tangent to pharmaceuticals for my conclusion.
Paragraph 17; Stay tuned for incoherent ranting.
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(also accurate).
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As a physics professor... (Score:4, Interesting)
... I say this article (or rant, really) is empty BS. It is true of course that fundamental physics is moving slowly and it is certainly true that standards are going up and so science is getting more expensive. But there is no alternative to the scientific method and the author does not provide any alternative. there is a quick claim that she alone know the way forward but we never learn what her great insight is. She does mention that she wants people to focus on resolving discrepancies in existing data. Well, that's what people are doing right now. That's where the money is already going. That is the obvious answer and everyone is on it.
Sure, some theorists are exploring beyond what is known. But as she correctly mentions, theorists are cheap. What she does not mention is that theory without experimental data is math. So a bunch of people are doing math, which may be useful to understand the universe or it may pop up in some other area. One thing we know for sure is that math is going to come in useful if it really pushes the limits of what we know. But beyond math and these pioneering theorists, everyone is getting their funding by trying to resolve fundamental differences in physics theories (GR vs QM for example). Her rant is at once self aggrandizing and pointless.
So, what's wrong? (Score:3)
Physicists are doing exactly what she is saying.
And that's why it is so messy, with all these formulas, constants, etc... That's because this mess is the answer to what we are observing. They look at reality and everything that doesn't fit get thrown out. And sure, it is done using means of the current centuries. Using computers to match models with huge amounts of ridiculously precise data.
The difference between real professional physicists and crackpots and amateurs is that the pros take all observations into account and really try to fit everything, including the small, hard details. The result is ugly and difficult to understand, but it is the best at modeling reality. Amateurs try to find elegant interpretations that are appealing but don't fit the observations.
So what is she complaining about? Observations are king already, for all reputable physicists.
Not surprsing - and not a bad sign (Score:2)
Physics hasn't changed a lot because the models we have do a good job of predicting the outcome of experiments that we can do. There are multiple models for predicting particle physics at higher energy but we can't afford to build accelerators to reach higher energies. (a lot of work has gone into that, but we may be up against some fairly hard engineering limits).
Cosmology and astrophysics HAVE advanced at lot in the last 40 years. We have far more information on the early universe, dark matter, dark en
Time for an ultraviolet catastrophe? (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not a physicist. But, as I recall, there was a famous physicist in the 19th Century, Lord Kelvin, who predicted that physics was mostly finished. Everything explained, except for a few things like the 'ultra-violet catastrophe'. Black body radiation didn't quite match predicted models. Max Planck created a mathematical model that worked by introducing the notion of quanta. And suddenly physics was revolutionized.
Then there was Albert Einstein, who pondered how physical experiments shouldn't change with different frames of reference. Somebody doing the measurements to deduce Maxwell's Equations on a moving train should come up with the same values as someone doing them at the train station. His conclusion was that the speed of light had to be the same for all observations, and the only way to make that inflexible was to make both space and time flexible.
So what are the ultraviolet catastrophes today? My candidates are, the Measurement Problem, Quantum Entanglement, and the fact that the Theory of Relativity does not reconcile with Quantum Mechanics.
I gather that Quantum Mechanics uses discrete mathematics, and Relativity is smooth, and uses analytical calculus, and that's why they can't be reconciled. The Measurement Problem really just shows to me that QM isn't really a theory, just a set of rules that give the right answers. (Yeah, I know, a lot of people will say that's all any theory is. To those people I would say, let's just agree to disagree.)
I saw on Youtube part of an interview by Freeman Dyson (of the Dyson Sphere), where he talked about meeting Enrico Fermi. [Fermi's rejection of our work (94/157)] He and his PhD students were working on some theory, and Fermi politely shot it down:
I showed him the graphs on which our experiment, our theoretical numbers were plotted and Fermi's experimental numbers were plotted, and the agreement was on the whole pretty good. And Fermi hardly looked at these graphs, he just put them on the desk, just glanced at them very briefly and he said, 'I am not very impressed with what you've been doing.' And he said, 'When one does a theoretical calculation, you know, there are two ways of doing it. Either you should have a clear physical model in mind, or you should have a rigorous mathematical basis. You have neither.' So that was it - in about two sentences he disposed of the whole subject. Well then I asked him, well what does he think about the numerical agreement, and he said, 'How many parameters did you use for the fitting? How many free parameters are there in your method?' So I counted up. It turned out there were four. And he said, 'You know, Johnny von Neumann always used to say, "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." So I don't find the numerical agreement very impressive either.' So I said, 'Thank you very much for you help,' and I said goodbye. There was nothing more to be said. The whole discussion took maybe 10 or 15 minutes. And I came back to Cornell to tell the team the bad news. So that was another watershed in my life, and I think it was profoundly useful what Fermi did. He had this amazing intuition. He could spot what was good and what was bad right away. I mean, we might have worked on these calculations for five years if Fermi hadn't given us the red light and, as it was, Fermi was absolutely right because in the end of course it turned out that the theory on which we based the whole calculation was an illusion.
With the arrogance of a layman, let me say I don't think math rigor is enough. You need that clear physical model too, and QM doesn't have it.
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I am not a physicist.
As a physicist, let me add some comments.
But, as I recall, there was a famous physicist in the 19th Century, Lord Kelvin, who predicted that physics was mostly finished. Everything explained, except for a few things like the 'ultra-violet catastrophe'. Black body radiation didn't quite match predicted models. Max Planck created a mathematical model that worked by introducing the notion of quanta. And suddenly physics was revolutionized.
Then there was Albert Einstein, who pondered how physical experiments shouldn't change with different frames of reference. Somebody doing the measurements to deduce Maxwell's Equations on a moving train should come up with the same values as someone doing them at the train station. His conclusion was that the speed of light had to be the same for all observations, and the only way to make that inflexible was to make both space and time flexible.
Yes, it is quite possible that we are in a similar situation.
So what are the ultraviolet catastrophes today? My candidates are, the Measurement Problem,
Yes, I agree. The measurement problem is a real question which is still open. My personal opinion (which is not shared by many) is that the complex linear structure of quantum mechanics approximation to a better non-linear theory. The reason is that wherever we observe interference effects, there is a nonlinear effect. Except in quantum mechanics...
Quantum Entanglement,
Quantum entanglement might seem strange, but I do not see
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Such as?
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5€ says it's Electric Universe.
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Your envy is unnecessary. The academics who do this stuff largely get paid peanuts, There are more people qualified to do these jobs than there are jobs so they have a rough time getting into them.
Your wasted taxes are mostly spent on weapons that incinerate children and their parents at the behest of a couple of hundred people who have three quarters of your nations wealth. They also pay for lots of propaganda to convince you that the reason your life is crap is because of someone other than themselves - t
+1 (Score:5, Insightful)
The modren universititty is an abject abomination.