
Why there were no fundamental discoveries in physics since the quarks in 1968? - ned7
Why was the first half of the last century full of fundamental discoveries in physics like the photoelectric effect, Quantum physics, Nature of light etc, but no significant discoveries are made since the 60s ? Did we become so obsessed with building new tech and optimizing the existing ones to the extent that we forgot about fundamentals?
======
dragonwriter
> Why there were no fundamental discoveries in physics since the quarks in
> 1968?

There have been; 1968 was the first physical evidence supporting quarks, but
the top quark wasn't observed until 1995.

That's kind of important, because a _lot_ of effort between 1968 and 1995 went
into fleshing out the theory around the quark model and confirming it,
including hunting down the theorized ones not yet observed. Heck, the six
quark model wasn't even _proposed_ until the 1970s, much less confirmed.

Now, if you want to revise the question to “since 1995”...

Then we’ll talk about the Higgs boson, theorized in 1964 (just like the
original quarks) but confirmed in 2012.

------
PhilWright
I think you are making the mistake of assuming that there is always something
more fundamental to discover. It could be that we have now discovered all the
pieces of the puzzle, all the building blocks are now known about. Maybe the
LHC has not discovered anything new, apart from confirming the Higgs, because
there is nothing more to be found.

Maybe the issue that is that we cannot work out the theory, the equations that
correctly describe it all properly. Maybe dark energy and dark matter and not
actually 'other stuff' but just an indication that there are errors in our
theories. Fix the theory and the 'other stuff' disappears. Quantum physics and
General Relativity need to be combined at some point and doing so may resolve
everything! Or it could simply be that human intelligence is not capable of
finding the solution. In the same way a dog is never going to understand
calculus, maybe you need an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000 to solve physics.

~~~
hhs
> Or it could simply be that human intelligence is not capable of finding the
> solution. In the same way a dog is never going to understand calculus, maybe
> you need an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000 to solve physics.

In philosophy, this is called cognitive closure. It’s possible that we humans
are hitting some “edge” just like, in your example, you mentioned that a dog
may never grasp calculus. To my knowledge, I’m not sure if there’s a way to
scientifically test this.

~~~
garmaine
Turing disproved this. If the universe is mathematical, we can understand it.

~~~
tlb
Only if you assume unlimited compute time. For instance, if the equations that
describe the universe are a million lines long (as opposed to Tegmark's
"should fit on a T-shirt" criteria) then it could take an impossibly long time
to discover them.

~~~
garmaine
That’s not how scientific discovery works. We aren’t handed a description that
might have fractal complexity, but rather we invent models to describe it.
Even if reality is infinitely complex, out descriptions need not be. And it’s
well established that our approximate models can be vastly simpler than
underlying reality.

~~~
tlb
We have, today, approximate models that are simple. But they're not quite
exact for things like quantum gravity. If you want an exact model, it is
presumably longer. Presumably, because smart people have looked for a long
time for simple models that are more accurate and haven't found one.

If the exact model is only moderately long, then we (or a Turing machine) can
discover and simulate it. But it's at least conceivable that the shortest-
possible exact description of physics is extremely long.

~~~
garmaine
The issue is more of data availability. Quantum gravity is hard to pin down
because the differences are not observable at energies we can test or at
cosmic scales we can measure. If we had a probe skirting the event horizon of
a black hope the answer might be obvious. But we don’t.

------
muzani
My theory is that after a few generations we've treated Science as a truth,
and not a process. Science should be displacing existing science. There are
likely some things that we have understood wrong, but nobody is out there
trying to actively disprove what we know of physics. Nobody can get funded
trying alternative hypotheses that explain the same phenomena.

This might also be because there are no new phenomena to explain. There's a
lot of resistance to observing new and old phenomena because that can
"disprove science", as if there's some war between science and some kind of
alternative. For example, ghosts have been observed by millions, but instead
of finding some solid hypotheses for these, we dismiss them as some kind of
mental illness in observers. Ghost hunters use electrical signals or some
similar sensors, and we dismiss them too, instead of trying to find out what
is causing these signals.

A lot of scientific work still happens in fields like psychology/cognitive
science, or medicine, which people intuitively feel are off. But little in
physics.

~~~
gus_massa
> _but nobody is out there trying to actively disprove what we know of
> physics._

You get a Nobel when you disprove what we know of physics, so it is an
interesting research topic. Currently the main problem in particle physics is
that everything is working too well, so nobody know where too look to find a
new theoretical result.

A few years ago many people was thinking that the neutrino was a Majorana
particle (in particular, in implies that the neutrino and the antineutrino are
the same particle). I didn't like that idea too much [1], and luckily the
experiments failed and that theory is slowly fading [2].

More recently, some other people expected that the next step was supersymmetry
(the electron is a fermion, and the supersymmetry says that has a heavy
version that is a boson). I liked it [1], but I think the experiments are also
not favorable [2].

> _There 's a lot of resistance to observing new and old phenomena because
> that can "disprove science"_

No. The LHC is working, and making observations and redoing the old
calculations. Sometimes because there are new combinations of particles that
nobody had seen before, sometimes because they must give some calculations to
the graduate students so they can publish something.

> _My theory is that after a few generations we 've treated Science as a
> truth, and not a process._

In other comments in internet discussions I sometime get this feeling too. But
don't confuse that with the attitude of the people doing research.

[1] I'm not an expert in this area, I only took a few courses in particle
physics. It's more like a coffee time discussion level opinion.

[2] But you never know if experiments at higher energy will revert the trend
and have results that agree with the theory.

------
gus_massa
This idea is circulating in the web, but it's just cherrypicking what
important and discover means to create a storm in a teacup. The main problem
is that the experiments are very expensive and the pipeline from the
theoretical idea to the experimental confirmation has become too long. So you
must wait a few decades to see which of the weird current theories is the
correct one.

Note that the bottom quark were discovered in 1974, and everybody expected to
see the top quark then, but it was confirmed in 1995. So that push the dates
at least 10 years or more.

The neutrino oscillation was discovered in 2001, and it forces a change in the
"Standard model" to add mass to the neutrinos. Depending on how you count,
this may reduce a few decades the time of no new things.

This year there was an announcement of a possible fourth neutrino, it's
unconfirmed because they have only 4.5 sigmas, but it is very promising.

