
The crisis in physics is not only about physics - Santosh83
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-crisis-in-physics-is-not-only-about.html
======
yummypaint
There is alot going on in physics besides things directly related to the
standard model. Running out of important things to study is of no concern. As
a random example check out the microscopy work by recent nobel prize winner
Eric Betzig.

I think people fail to appreciate the many frontiers that exist in just
understanding how matter interracts with itself. The past was exciting because
we got to discover new building blocks, but that only provides information on
the periphery of whats going on. We know all sorts of stuff about the proton,
but put it in a nucleus with a few dozen other nucleons and its a whole
different story. All sorts of virtual particles are exchanged, its really
complicated, and there literally arent any models that can predict the
properties of the nucleus purely from first principles. There are important
conceptual and computational innovations happening continuously to make
progress on hundreds of problems just like this.

~~~
ImaCake
I was briefly involved in Single Molecule Biophysics, where microscopes push
the limits of what you can do with visible light in order to understand
protein behaviour, where I heard the often repeated warning: "the microscope
is an experiment itself". This was born out of the incredibly fancy and poorly
understood microscope, which was experimental, and it was no guarantee that
you were measuring the protein and not some weird light physics effect!

~~~
Balgair
> and it was no guarantee that you were measuring the protein and not some
> weird light physics effect!

My thesis was in fluorescent bio physics at the nano scale (STED). We
literally had a PI effect. Normally, the 'PI effect' is that when the
professor comes in, the experiment stops working, mostly due to Murphy's law.
With our case, it was because the extra body heat caused the mirrors to expand
and drift out of place, ruining the alignment. This also meant it took a while
for the mirrors to come back into alignment after lunch and first thing in the
morning. What a mess!

So yes, in microscopy, the apparatus very much is part of the experiment and
it takes _ages_ to get things controlled and imaging correctly.

~~~
ImaCake
Thanks for your reply! I actually found out one of my current coworkers helped
build a single molecule scope, he talked about the use of an air cushion
beneath the giant breadboard of lasers to ensure they stayed nm accurate.

~~~
Balgair
Most optics tables are floated on air pistons these days, they aren't super
expensive. It helps with vibe issues and with shock absorption (there is a lot
of slamming your head on the table when doing optics alignment :P ).

------
dannykwells
This was great until the bit about medicine. Medicine has made huge,
tremendous progress in the past 30 years. And there are still many
serendipitous discoveries happening that lead to new drugs. I mean jesus for
the first time ever, a company is going to put up a drug for approval to treat
alzheimers.

Let's not lump medicine in with physics, please. Medicine has always been
skeptical of theories without data and, while maybe facing issues, they aren't
the same as physics.

Its ironic that a physicist, criticizing others physicists, make a common
mistake that all physicists make: over simplification and acting like
everything is just like physics with slight modifications.

~~~
jcranmer
> I mean jesus for the first time ever, a company is going to put up a drug
> for approval to treat alzheimers.

Derek Lowe isn't quite so optimistic about it:
[https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/10/23/th...](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/10/23/the-
return-of-aducanumab)

(tl;dr--the anti-amyloid hypothesis you should be extremely skeptical about,
and the inconsistency in the trial data here is signalling that statistical
fluke should be a high concern).

~~~
dekhn
if you really want to read more, check out
[https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/aducanumab-
analysis.html](https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/aducanumab-analysis.html)

There's a reason I went back to being a software engineer at an internet
company working on ML models that actually work- clinical trials have a long
way to go before they produce results that can be really trusted.

------
nisuni
The author is talking about the crisis of a particular subfield of physics,
i.e. particle physics.

Other subfields are thriving (AMO, quantum information) and maybe it’s just
time to accept the relevance of different subfields changes with time.

~~~
whatshisface
Actually particle physics is doing just fine, the crisis is within a subfield
of particle physics, fundamental beyond-standard-model particle physics.

~~~
the6threplicant
One could say that particle physics is more a victim of its own success.

------
baked_ziti
> 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, and those are subjects
> physicists merely make dismissive jokes about.

Accusing working scientists of being insufficiently reflective on any topic,
let alone themselves or the field they work in, seems without merit on its
face, and frankly so bizarre as to be silly or even dim-witted. Further, the
assertion that only the humanities will save science, or indeed the accusation
that scientists are ignorant of the history of science, is a weighty charge
that I see no reason to even consider believing.

> They believe they are too intelligent to have to think about what they are
> doing.

Come on.

~~~
Ma8ee
I have a PhD in physics. Even though I have left the field, I’ve hung around
with enough of them, and occasionally tried to raise some more philosophical
questions with them.

Sabine is unfortunately spot on.

~~~
baked_ziti
> tried to raise some more philosophical questions with them.

Like what? Genuinely interested, not seeking to argue.

~~~
Ma8ee
This is 10 years ago, so unfortunately I don’t remember details about
discussions I never got going. Some were able to argue for their favourite
interpretation of QM, or rather, how to resolve the measurement problem, but I
mostly got blank stares when I tried to probe a bit more about the ontology.

One of the reasons I left academia was that I never found the intellectual and
curios environment I longed for. The successful people were successful mostly
because they knew how to write grant proposals and which committees they
should be on, not because they did really interesting science.

~~~
pas
Yeah, that's not surprising. Cutting-edge R&D is very boring hyper-parameter
tuning basically, and requires a kind of person that is able to do things for
a long long time (to gather data) and then to think a bit later.

The same goes on with neuro folks. Consciousness, mind, hello? No, just let's
poke rats, thanks.

But this works.

And that's why I don't understand Sabine's viewpoint. She can't just sit in an
ivory tower and stare down the cosmos in a contest until it reveals its
secrets. We need data, better models, better measurements, etc. Yes, sure, it
needs better theorists too, but then why not let the experimentalists do what
they do best? It's not like there isn't a bunch of theorists in every serious
university on the planet, maybe organize them better?

~~~
Ma8ee
Sabine's point is that the current approach doesn't work any longer.

> She can't just sit in an ivory tower and stare down the cosmos in a contest
> until it reveals its secrets.

That is a gross misrepresenation of what she is saying. Did you actually read
anything she wrote? She is criticising the notion that you can make progress,
sitting in the ivory tower, as you exprss it, and coming up ideas about
strings and super symmetries _without_ any experimental data or other
validation from reality. But she is also critical to the approach: just throw
more money and manpower into even bigger experiments before we even know what
to look for and hope something interesting reveals itself.

~~~
pas
But.. but... she can't have it both ways.

The current unexplained data is not much, and the best explanations involve a
lot of hard to test things.

Why? Because there's not enough unexplained data. The easy to test theories
have been already thrown out.

Yes, sure, what she is saying is nice, let's try to explain stuff the simplest
way possible. Occam's razor. But theorists already do this.

~~~
Ma8ee
Of course she can have it both ways. Don’t be stupid. There’s plenty to do in
physics without building an even bigger collider which likely won’t teach us
more than the current one.

~~~
pas
plenty to do, such as?

also, she can't wish away the fact that without data any new theories are
worthless, even if someone conveniently comes up with one.

also, saying that the LHC haven't taught us anything ignores the reality of
all the data that it has generated.

is it shiny "new" physics? no, but it's a crucial prerequisite for that.

particle physics needs new data for new physics eventually.

------
knzhou
As usual with Sabine, this article blatantly misrepresents how science is done
and how actual scientists think, and serves mainly to portray herself as the
only person in the field capable of rational thought. People in the comments
here are picking up on this when it takes an unfair swipe at medicine, but it
really applies to the whole article.

I am not going to bother doing a line-by-line rebuttal, because I've already
done this for nearly a hundred of her previous articles, in forums across the
internet. It just doesn't matter, because tomorrow she will put out another
massively popular article with the same oversimplifications and
misrepresentations, and it will get 1000 times the views any response I write
could. That is what it means to be a public intellectual. I am a working
scientist, which means I have neither the time to keep up nor the audience.

~~~
Barrin92
> As usual with Sabine, this article blatantly misrepresents how science is
> done and how actual scientists think

No offence but she is a trained physicist so she too is an 'actual scientist'
by the very definition of the term. And she's completely right about the
neglect of economic reasoning. The arguments against blowing 40 billion bucks
on an accelerator that will likely not surface anything new is valid.
Physicists gotta accept that opportunity costs are real.

And the 'canary in the coalmine' point in particular in regards to
pharmaceuticals is valid too. The research costs for very specialised, small
scale drugs has exploded by a magnitude or two depending on who you ask. Other
fields are starting to suffer as well.

I would go even further than she does and say it's an almost universal
condition of modern research. We see diminishing returns everywhere, and if
this is not stopped and we don't manage to drastically increase the efficacy
of scientific research we'll effectively flatline at some point.

Almost any material hard metrics you look at like life expectancy, economic
growth or whatever you could consider a sign of technological advancement,
even tens of billions in investment seem to produce only marginal
improvements. We are not living in the golden age of science.

~~~
pxhb
> Almost any material hard metrics you look at like life expectancy, economic
> growth or whatever you could consider a sign of technological advancement,
> even tens of billions in investment seem to produce only marginal
> improvements. We are not living in the golden age of science.

As a knit pick, these metrics are all derivatives of science output, and not
science itself. For example, detecting gravity waves does move the needle on
any of these metrics, but it is still a great achievement for experimental
physics.

~~~
kian
Fantastic mondegreen ("knit pick", like picking at stitching with knitting
needles, as opposed to "nit pick", which is picking off lice eggs to prevent
future annoyance)

~~~
Waterluvian
"Mondegreen" is a word I've needed but didn't know existed. Thanks for
sharing.

All intensive purposes. Get down to brass tax. There's a lot of these that
I've uttered or heard and they last a long time because they sound kind of
sensible.

~~~
GuiA
[https://reddit.com/r/BoneAppleTea](https://reddit.com/r/BoneAppleTea)

------
scythe
Plenty of good points being made in this thread.

I'd like to point out that discoveries in fundamental physics do not always
come from work in fundamental physics. Physical systems exhibit some
"holographic" or "self-similar" tendency where high-level statistical effects
will often mimic low-level fundamental dynamics. For example, wave propagation
was originally described for pressure waves propagating in a physical medium,
then applied to light waves after the work of Maxwell. More recently, the
Lorentz transformations, originally used to calculate the effects of finite-
speed electric fields on susceptible particles, turned out to be a fundamental
property of the universe. And the Hamiltonian path integral formulation,
originally a mathematical curiosity, turned out to be crucial for describing
relativistic quantum interactions.

Some of the work that `yummypaint describes which is being done in quantum
chromodynamics -- a field in which we have a working "lattice" approximation
but almost no real analytical solutions -- may eventually prove useful for a
theory of quantum gravity. However, QCD is still very immature. Those with a
little experience will recognize the phrase "non-perturbative" which describes
some QCD problems -- this also appears in quantum gravity, where perturbation
theory fails. The lattice gauge theory model used to solve QCD problems today
cannot be extended to gravity, but other methods might not have this
limitation.

So the lack of clear and demonstrated progress in fundamental physics does not
mean that we are not learning real facts which can eventually be useful for
describing fundamental physics. The situation is not so dire.

As for critiques of Hossenfelder, it's certainly true that her writing tends
to the dramatic. Just last year she was optimistic about asymptotically safe
quantum gravity:

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-an-old-theory-of-
everythi...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-an-old-theory-of-everything-
is-gaining-new-life-20180108/)

technical FAQ:
[http://www.percacci.it/roberto/physics/as/faq.html](http://www.percacci.it/roberto/physics/as/faq.html)

One might guess that her tone of despair here is a little performative as
well.

------
at_a_remove
Although I am only in physics by degree and not by practice, I think this is
"physics as expected."

Old measurements do not change. Over bog standard Newtonian physics, special
relativity provides additional decimals in the form of significant figures and
mostly in particular circumstances. For plotting the trajectory of a large
rock at comparably low speeds, Newton's equations work rather well on Earth,
once you take air resistance into account. Even if another theory supplants
special relativity for the extreme situations, old ballistic tables will still
work.

Each advance will have smaller and smaller corrections to the experimental
values, in narrower edge cases, even if the mathematics of the newer theory
looks completely different. This in turn means that discarding an old theory
in favor of a new one by experimental confirmation of what was unexpected in
the old system must only come either in the more extreme values (more Telsa to
a magnetic field, for example) or with greater precision and accuracy via more
elaborate and finely-calibrated equipment. Both are expensive, requiring more
time and more work.

I believe she is right in that we are certainly on course for some very time-
consuming and expensive science. However, I do not see an easy way out of it,
nor should we, I believe, expect one. Flip open a CRC Handbook of Chemistry
and Physics; many of the basic values have been long-known. We have added a
few more numbers to the right of the decimal in many cases, but that is it.
Two hundred years ago, a single person with a modest budget could discover new
physics and chemistry. A hundred years ago, a handful of collaborators with
some backing could advance these most basic of sciences. By only fifty years
back, we are looking at budgets in the millions and teams of scientists
working in harness.

It may simply be out of reach to disassemble a galaxy to build a collider
large enough to test some theories and at that juncture, one might well
consider physics "close enough to done." A mote of dust is always going to
fall on some surface no matter how often you polish and buff. At some point
you have to stop fussing and enjoy your furniture.

Yes, it is handy to look for the cases where we can find a way to test our
hypotheses for under a million dollars, in no more than a few years. We will
run out of those, too.

This is "unsexy" to many. The ratcheting noose of entropy in a closed system,
which we can only try to run away from at pedestrian sub-light speeds is,
bluntly put, a drag.

------
gridlockd
I approve of the message that perhaps a 40 billion dollar particle accelerator
is an unwise investment. Otherwise, I'm not sure there's useful information
here.

 _" I try to explain to a cosmologist or particle physicists that we need
smarter ways to share information and make decisions in large, like-minded
communities."_

Making decisions in large, like-minded communities? When has _that_ ever been
successful? Isn't that pretty much the opposite of what has led to physics
breakthroughs, up and to this point?

 _" 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."_

If I was a physicists and some random other physicist of little renown was to
suggest that I (and everyone else) need to "focus more on the
inconsistencies", I wouldn't exactly be swayed. I would be rolling my eyes.
It's just not a very useful suggestion to make.

------
ColanR
I wonder if what the author is observing is an effect of the industrialization
of science. As she pointed out,

> 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.

Maybe what's really going on is that almost every scientist out there is
forced to chase grants and maintain a steady stream of publications. We have
to give our scientists the ability to put long-term effort into projects that
have a low likelyhood of payoff; otherwise research stagnates.

Also, it seems like the 'groupthink' she pointed out is a very real problem.
Remember that weird EM drive associated with NASA? We all know that it's
nearly impossible that it could be a valid phenomenon; but as a global
scientific community, almost everyone dismissed it outright. We should all
have jumped on it, to see if it could possibly be true, regardless of how
outlandish. If we are unwilling to explore the boundaries of what we know,
then we deserve to stagnate, and we will.

~~~
btrettel
The inability to make long-term investments is a major reason I don't intend
to stay in academia after my PhD. Government and corporate labs don't seem
better in my view either.

At present my plan is the following: Keep the amount of time spent making
money to the minimum needed to support myself. Then I can invest my own time
and money into research. I could make money from research via grants/contracts
like normal academics, but that's not necessary in this scheme. I'm thinking
about starting several SaaS businesses.

~~~
ColanR
That is almost precisely my own intention. There should be a club. Have you
heard of one?

~~~
btrettel
I set up this forum a while ago:
[https://www.indiesciforum.com/](https://www.indiesciforum.com/)

But I got busy and never launched. I guess this is the launch then? Feel free
to join, post, etc. I'd love to discuss this with like-minded folks.

~~~
ColanR
Nice! I'll check it out.

------
perlgeek
For a less negative view, I recommend the podcast by Sean Carrol, another
physicist:
[https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/)

There's a broad spectrum of topics there, and quite a few episodes talk about
the foundation of physics, including the quantum measurement problem (several
episodes about that, in fact), string theory and several cosmology topics.

------
trixie_
It feels from the outside, academic research is performed by an individual or
small group that culminates into a paper at the end. When attacking large
problems in physics or biology this seems short sighted. A potentially better
way would be to attack the problem in an organized manner with teams
researching various aspects of the problem and building off of each other.
Remove the whole 'paper writing/journal article' from the equation and just
keep moving forward. Does this exist? Are teams of researchers coordinated
from a high level and moving through problem spaces with clear direction? Or
is everyone working on their small piece, trying to get their bit of credit?

~~~
dwaltrip
Yes, they do exist. See the CERN supercollider, LIGO, the DEMO fusion reactor,
and many other projects.

~~~
trixie_
But is the research using these tools coordinated? Or are these tool created
and then independent researchers schedule time to use them?

~~~
nxpnsv
I worked many years in particle physics. It is coordinated within each
experiment. You can’t just publish as a lot of people stand behind the work
there must be consensus. There are abundances of physics sub groups, article
review boards, research strategies, etc.q

~~~
trixie_
Is it coordinated across experiments?

------
c3534l
I find it strange that the author thinks physicists speculate too much, then
says they should turn to philosophy.

------
jonbronson
"In the foundations of physics, we have not seen progress since the mid 1970s
when the standard model of particle physics was completed."

This seems to discount the explosion of work in the foundations of theoretical
physics. Most notably the many variations of String Theory. Just because the
work has not yet produced experiments that can validate them do not mean they
are not progress. It's some of the most exciting foundational work that's come
for decades.

~~~
pdonis
_> This seems to discount the explosion of work in the foundations of
theoretical physics. Most notably the many variations of String Theory._

Hossenfelder is well aware of string theory, as she says right in the article:

"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."

 _> Just because the work has not yet produced experiments that can validate
them do not mean they are not progress._

But it's not just that string theory hasn't yet produced experiments that can
validate it. It's that (a) direct experiments to validate it are something
like twenty orders of magnitude away in terms of energy scale, so not doable
now or for the foreseeable future, and (b) every prediction it's made so far
that can be tested at energy scales we can probe (such as the prediction that
supersymmetry would show up at the LHC) has been wrong.

~~~
pas
Most of those theories have some implications about lower energy ranges. And
pushing up energies is a great way to rule out a lot of them.

(And some of those theories have some large scale cosmological implications
too, so better telescopes can rule out more.)

But ... there seems to be a lack of (serious) theories that have easily
testable predictions. And this is not surprising, because we also lack easily
reproducable but yet unexplained data. (For example the high-energy gamma ray
busts are very interesting but we have no idea where do they come from
really.)

~~~
pdonis
_> Most of those theories have some implications about lower energy ranges.
And pushing up energies is a great way to rule out a lot of them._

Yes. The problem is that ruling out is _all_ that's happening. Not one has had
an implication about lower energy ranges that has turned out to be right.

~~~
pas
And that's not necessarily a problem. After all, we can measure things with
insane accuracy (LIGO, atto/femto-second laser pulses, neutrino detectors,
etc), our theories about the accessible energi regimes are quite good (14+
digits for QED - quantum electro dynamics).

At some point it's no wonder we need bigger microscopes to see deeper into
reality.

Sure, were someone just come up with an even better theory that can be tested
easily, that would be great too, but since we have no recipe for that, but we
have quite a few for building bigger experiments, that's what most of the
particle physicists advocate.

------
buboard
FFS what crisis. Oh I get it, soon they 'll be talking about a "physics
emergency" to get clicks.

~~~
nxpnsv
This is exactly what she’s doing. I don’t understand why, but she seems to
love controversy and has a very high opinion of herself. She’s clearly not
stupid, but it is so tiresome.

~~~
pnako
There is a market for experts saying "how the experts (except me) got it all
wrong". It's pretty common in economics as well.

------
calhoun137
This is an extremelly well written and well thought out post. Thank you.

Here is my suggestion: how about for the next LHC scale physics project we get
all the governments in the world to put in manhatten project levels of funding
to research machines which can control the climate and the weather to mitigate
the worst impacts of climate change.

This would be a lot more practical and better for science and the future of
the human species than confirming what everyone has known with 99%+ confidence
for over 30 years. Just my 2 cents.

------
mikorym
> crisis in physics

Me: Hmm... interesting. Personally I think they should spend time
consolidating the different mathematical techniques.

> 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.

> String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There’s math for it, alright.
> Pretty math, even. But that doesn’t mean this math describes reality.

I don't really understand this part. I am not convinced that her post says
much [ _], because consider this: she is encouraging observation at the
expense of speculation and then arguing that observational techniques are more
expensive and hence prohibitive in the long run?

Is the real "unhappiness" in academia not just as simple as information
overflow and the fact that only a few can be famous, whether there are a few
or whether there are many? I don't know if that is what people get at with
these kinds of blog posts. In any case, what I have found in mathematics is
that the names of people whose work are worth reading are not necessarily the
ones that you'll encounter first. OP does actually hint at this as well, but
again, is it not just information overflow (and shouldn't be made more
complicated than that)?

[_] The one good takeaway that I see is "focus on inconsistencies".

~~~
mikorym
Wow, forgot about the \asterisk being a reserved character.

~~~
mikorym
> crisis in physics

Me: Hmm... interesting. Personally I think they should spend time
consolidating the different mathematical techniques.

> 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.

> String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There’s math for it, alright.
> Pretty math, even. But that doesn’t mean this math describes reality.

I don't really understand this part. I am not convinced that her post says
much [1], because consider this: she is encouraging observation at the expense
of speculation and then arguing that observational techniques are more
expensive and hence prohibitive in the long run?

Is the real "unhappiness" in academia not just as simple as information
overflow and the fact that only a few can be famous, whether there are a few
or whether there are many? I don't know if that is what people get at with
these kinds of blog posts. In any case, what I have found in mathematics is
that the names of people whose work are worth reading are not necessarily the
ones that you'll encounter first. OP does actually hint at this as well, but
again, is it not just information overflow (and shouldn't be made more
complicated than that)?

[1] The one good takeaway that I see is "focus on inconsistencies".

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> But for all I can tell at this moment in history I am the only physicist
who has at least come up with an idea for what to do.

What, in the whole world? That sounds a bit messianic, if I may.

~~~
andy-x
With that kind of ego she will soon claim "in the known or visible universe"
:)

------
yaseer
This article should reflect on it's own philosophical assumptions.

The differential return on progress with time is not linear.

Intuitively, progress is harder, the deeper we probe.

We have reached the point where we are probing the fundamentals of matter at
the smallest and largest scales in the universe.

This is much harder to progress on than newton's laws, which could be arrived
at through human observation.

------
senderista
Sour grapes from an underachieving researcher.

------
jbob2000
> They do not think about which hypotheses are promising because their
> education has not taught them to do so.

Yes! Thank you! Are the days of Rationalism behind us? Everyone these days
seems focused on trying to prove if the sun will rise tomorrow.

