
Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years - ash
https://iai.tv/articles/why-physics-has-made-no-progress-in-50-years-auid-1292
======
ISL
I strongly disagree that the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40
years.

We have been looking _really_ hard for answers to persistent questions. While
we have not found affirmative answers, physicists have systematically ruled
out option after option after option. We have not yet discovered a unified-
theory-of-everything, but we know a whole lot more about what that theory is
_not_.

Furthermore, the past 40 years have seen the emergence of precision cosmology
(and the dark-matter/energy paradigm that it entails), the observation and
confirmation of neutrino oscillation, the detection of gravitational waves
(and the nuclear physics revolution that has begun with GW170817), SN1987A,
and so much more.

The coming decades are poised to learn so much more, a lot of it from the
stars. GAIA, LISA, updated terrestrial GW detectors, LSST/Rubin, TMT, SKA, and
more are all poised to tell us much more about things we don't understand.
Particle physics will move forward too, though it is uncertain how quickly.
The right breakthrough in wakefield accelerators, though, could be
transformative.

Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;

It is the center hole that makes it useful.

Shape clay into a vessel;

It is the space within that makes it useful.

Cut doors and windows for a room;

It is the holes which make it useful.

Therefore profit comes from what is there;

Usefulness from what is not there.

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu - chapter 11

~~~
mfer
> I strongly disagree that the foundations of physics have not progressed for
> 40 years.

I think, we are getting a peak at the politics of the practice of science when
you look at the article and comments, like this ones parent.

A bunch of this is about the unobserved. The theoretical rather than then
experimentally observed (think scientific method).

Whose theories get the funding to be looked into? Whose ideas are published
and talked about in the popular places?

A post of Sabine's talked about how she thinks the crisis in physics isn't
about physics [1]. Is it instead about the politics of the money and
popularity? Is it about the psychology of being wrong? I mean, different
physicists contradict each other and the truth isn't what's popular it is
what's observed, right? If people contradict each other they can't all be
right.

What's most interesting, to me, is how this isn't about what's been observed
but all those human system qualities that people bring to the table.

[1] [https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-crisis-in-
phys...](https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-crisis-in-physics-is-
not-only-about.html)

~~~
conception
I think what people miss about the industry of Science is that, logically, if
a paper says "A=Foo" then we'd expect it to be true. And if another comes out
that says, "A=Bar" then it's confusing, are both wrong, are both right.

But instead, the way it works is a consensus is built. Researcher Bob - "We
see that A=Foo." Researcher Sally -"Well, I see that A=Bar." Researcher Timmy
- "Well, I see that A=Far." Researcher Kimmy - "Well, I see it as A=Fbar."
Community over time - "Now the community has seen that A=Fbar is consistently
correct and can be relied upon and used." 20 years pass... Researcher Jeff -
"Well, I see that Ab=Fbar actually." Community - "That's bullshit." Researcher
Betty - "Well, actually I see that too. But I see Ab=FbarC". etc etc

Since we don't know what we don't know, it isn't really a "We're done!"
situation for someone to get 100% correct, it's a process of evolution in
knowledge.

~~~
mfer
> We see that A=Foo.

I think part of this is that scientists don't "see" as in observe these
things. Instead they "think that" something is the case. And, they have math
and ideas to back that up.

If we had repeatable observation of the things it would be much harder to make
disagreeing arguments.

~~~
XorNot
You're putting a lot of unstated assumptions into what "observation" is.

If you see a shimmer in a desert, does that mean there's an oasis?

------
cletus
Does anyone else feel like the abstractions and models in physics have gone
passed the point where the casual outsider (even a technically and
scientifically minded one) can no longer intuitively understand it?

Because that's how I feel. There are so many things I just don't understand
now like:

1\. I originally thought the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle was a natural
consequence of using particles (photos) for measurement. Instead however it
seems to be a fundamental property of the universe, which I only learned after
finding out most of the mass of hadrons comes from the relativistic motion of
quarks and it explains why hadrons don't collapse to a point.

2\. What does it even mean to create more space? The universe is expanding.
Ok, I can accept that. But what does it _mean_?

3\. I find the models for dark matter and dark energy to be... _unsatisfying_.
I realize there's experimental evidence for unobservable mass but it _feels_
like a fudge.

4\. Of course we still have no quantum model for gravity.

5\. I don't really understand what a fundamental force really is. Like why
does electromagnetism have a repulsive opposite but gravity doesn't? When I
tried to look into this I ended up down some rabbit hole of "gauge forces" and
got completely lost. Why is the Higgs Field not a force?

6\. Why are some predictions of the Standard Model so incredibly accurate
(like the magnetic moment of an electron IIRC?) while others are so incredibly
inaccurate (eg IIRC the QFT prediction of vacuum energy is off by 120 orders
of magnitude).

7\. Why are there exactly three generations of particles (ignoring the Higgs)?
What does a generation even mean?

I could go on. I don't for a second mean to suggest any of these notions are
wrong. It's just that the models have gotten so complex (it seems?) that it
just feels like something huge is missing, something that will eventually seem
obvious in hindsight. Or am I just a lemur trying to figure out how an
airplane works?

~~~
effie
Yes. First, intuition depends on your experience. If you never studied
physics, most things will be nonintuitive (heavy bodies don't fall faster than
light ones? really?)

Second, modern 20th century physics education (courses, textbooks) suffered
sustained corruption of methodology by scientific authorities, where the quest
for understanding was renounced in favor of "modelling" and "prediction" (e.g.
authors of orthodox quantum theory and their less bright pupils perpetuating
that attitude) and later by institutionalized system of university research
which propels tweaking and applying old ideas to detriment of trying new ones
or questioning past ideas that are too ingrained.

This leads to a large portion of theoretical physics publications being more
and more about complex calculations where most applicators do not even try to
understand "what is going on", they just assume the same quantum methodology
with some tweaks (i.e. different configuration spaces, more dimensions,
different Lagrangians, new fields that fix problems of the previous ones,
tricks with removing some ugly series terms etc).

Sometimes these tweaks get fancy names (superstrings, loops, dark matter) but
they are really an additional concept that needs to be put in to save the
edifice from those radicals who would like to try actually new and
incompatible ideas.

When you study 20th century physics yourself from original sources, you'll
find the stuff taught currently actually has highly varying degree of
credibility. Some stuff is rock solid, such as relativity, molecular theory
and chemistry, nuclear physics and solid state theory, and some stuff is ...
well, more unfinished and less credible - such as standard model, force
unification, quantum gravity, dark matter, etc.).

If you want to get some solid ground on which to build intuition, start with
the rock-solid physics as known till 1905, then after that makes sense, learn
about its problems (explanation of emission spectra, inconsistency of EM
theory with Newtonian mechanics), then after that take a deep breath and read
original papers on quantum theory and particle/nuclear physics.

This will take years to understand. The later theoretical stuff around
Standard Model details (lepton generations, stability of particles,
unification of gravity and QFT) is a decades old project that nobody knows how
to finish. It is stuck for now, and has little relevance for understanding
those previous things.

~~~
pas
Hm. Comparing paradigm shifts with model based realism is not really valid
criticism of either, yet understandable.

The folks who just added one more term to the old stuff to make it predict
better - let's call them the old guard necessarily did it to point out that
old models can become slightly new ones too. Even if in the long run they will
be seen as the evil holdouts.

Yet at the same time we know that just whipping up a new fancy maths model
won't solve anything in itself. New models need to make new testable
predictions.

And then even new models require lengthy fine tuning, which requires costly
experiments.

Alas textbooks are very often terrible, but not because they emphasize
predictions and models over "understanding" \- but usually because they omit
to elaborate on how to select the better of two models, how paradigm shifts
happen, how anomalies are ever present - and thus make practical model
selection even harder. Plus they regularly fuck up the math explanation part,
exactly because they use terrible language and models.

Finally, it's always data that cleans up the mess. Either practical usefulness
- engineering, applied science. Quantum experiments, q-bits, and so on. And on
the high-energy end cosmology and astronomy.

Anyone harking about how the crisis is about politics usually wants to
allocate more money to theorists, so we will finally get breakthrough
theories. Yeah, great, we already have a lot of those, but without data we
don't know which one to take seriously.

Furthermore pouring money into theory is a nice idea, and comparatively cheap
(compared to a new collider), but that won't solve the very pragmatic
employment question for the collider builders. (Who are out of luck anyway,
because the era of building bigger underground circles seems to be over. But
they would gladly build anything, but they won't make good theorists, even if
pundits' articles seem to imply there's a simple slider between theory and
experimentation.)

------
SiempreViernes
Personally I find it amusing Hossenfelder is now invoking the need for
learning philosophy of science, given how hostile she's been to it before. See
for instance

[http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-unbearable-
ligh...](http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-unbearable-lightness-of-
philosophy.html)

that begins with: "Philosophy isn’t useful for practicing physicists. On that,
I am with Steven Weinberg and Lawrence Krauss who have expressed similar
opinions."

Though to be fair, she clarifies that she wishes philosophy wasn't so useless,
and that:

"Philosophers in that area are necessarily ahead of scientists. But they also
never get the credit for actually answering a question, because for that
they’ll first have to hand it over to scientists. Like a psychologist, thus,
the philosopher of physics succeeds by eventually making themselves
superfluous. It seems a thankless job. There’s a reason I preferred studying
physics instead.

Many of the “bad philosophers” are those who aren’t quick enough to notice
that a question they are thinking about has been taken over by scientists.
That this failure to notice can evidently persist, in some cases, for decades
is another institutionalized problem that originates in the lack of
communication between both fields."

This is the sort of reasoning that got me reading Hossenfelder in the first
place, not the conspiratorial posts she writes now... :(

~~~
jjmorrison
I thought the article was not great. But the fact that she's changed her mind
on the topic makes me like her a lot more. How can we learn more if we don't
change our mind?

~~~
ssivark
Nothing wrong with changing one’s mind. But need to be thorough enough to
provide a rigorous rebuttal of the arguments made by one’s past self :-)

------
d--b
Short version, without the anger and bitterness:

Theoretical physicists' way of working is to put forward baseless mathematical
models and build $40bn machines to prove them wrong. They should instead work
on theoretical inconsistencies that have been known for a while.

~~~
throwlaplace
that's because experiment drives physics rather than mathematical consistency
(no matter how much people pretend it's about "beauty"). plenty of
mathematically consistent physical theories have been falsified by experiment
and plenty of mathematically inconsistent physical theories have made precise
and accurate predictions.

~~~
Anon84
When was the last time an experiment had a result that wasn’t explained by
theory (supralumimal neutrinos aside)?

~~~
leereeves
Observations of the cosmic microwave background, galactic rotation,
gravitational lensing, and redshift led to the concepts of "dark matter" and
"dark energy" that aren't yet explained by theory.

~~~
Anon84
The cosmic microwave background was first detected in the 1960s, gravitaional
lensing was predicted by Einstein in the early 1900s and redshift can be
traced back to the later half of the 1800s (as an extension of the Doppler
effect)...

~~~
leereeves
It's not the existence of these phenomena that's unexplained, but specific
observations that don't fit our current theories.

This article seems like a decent introduction:

[https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/five-reasons-we-
think-...](https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/five-reasons-we-think-dark-
matter-exists-a122bd606ba8)

------
peignoir
And academia is failing too, I can’t remember what Nobel prize mentioned that
he could not get one today as most researchers are stuck in having to produce
papers for the sake of keeping their grants. What would be needed is a lot of
free time and freedom to think ...

~~~
peebz
It was Peter Higgs who said that
([https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-
higgs-...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-
academic-system)).

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
This is a much bigger issue. Research has been distorted by irrelevant
bureaucratic productivity metrics. So the illusion of regular activity is
rewarded, while anyone who takes ten years to explore a truly original ground-
breaking idea is punished and excluded.

------
DanielBMarkham
Good essay. Yes, the sociology and politics of the way we do science is
overtaking the reproducible learning aspect. Foundations for many things, like
physics, are as solid as necessary for doing a lot of work, but by the time
you get to the point where you should be testing, rearranging, and ferreting
out flaws in the foundations, you're so indoctrinated into a culture that you
don't have the mental tools necessary to do the required work. So instead you
just chug along the way the last generation did, adding a decimal point here
or there.

It's not wrong. It's just not changing over time. It is stagnant.

The nice thing about physics is that with new advances in astronomy and the
lack of a unified theory, it keeps getting poked with reminders that there may
be missing pieces. That's not true in many other fields.

~~~
hhas01
Stagnant? Or just _mature_ , like a fine cheese and wine?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
As an outsider, I don't know. There is a presumption that since things have
changed over time, they will continue to change. This very well might not be
true. I didn't want to get too Kuhnian, so I just used the word "stagnant" for
effect.

Once again, as an outsider it doesn't seem to me that they are anywhere near
"done", but they sure as heck look like a mature science. Physics and its
children have given us amazing things. Spending a lot of time playing with
math wasn't one of them. All sciences have one aspect in common: until you get
to reproducibility, the conversation in the community tends towards groupthink
over time. That's a human characteristic not related to any one field of
study.

------
ArtWomb
As science historian John Horgan noted in _The End of Science_ the parallel in
physics is with academic humanities departments becoming mired in "irony"

The End of (one type of) Physics, and the Rise of the Machines

[https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=10680](https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=10680)

Seems there are two possible outcomes. The deluge of data leads to better
correlation which smooths over the flaws in current models. And corrects
errors with some minor fudge factor that contains no further significance.

From Dark Matter to Galaxies with Convolutional Networks

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05965](https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05965)

Or something deeply profound is discovered. The thing which cannot be ignored.
And instead leads to an explosion of new physics. Recognizing patterns of the
latter class will perhaps always be the domain of the human operator.

------
j1vms
The role of this "era" may be in reformulating quantum physics and,
separately, general relativity in new ways that make the ideas more accessible
to more people, and earlier in their lives. The goal could be to make of
modern physics... the _new_ classical physics. That is, we start to let go the
crutches we still teach because it is thought that day-to-day life is more
readily explained by Newtonian physics. We are now in era where most advances
(e.g. smartphones among them) could not exist in their present form without
modern physics.

Once more people accept the concepts of modern physics as a way of life
(perhaps intuitively?), we will be in fertile territory for any potential new
revolution in physics.

~~~
gus_massa
These theories have a very precise mathematical formulation and very weird
unintuitive consequences. If you try to teach them without math, you only keep
the weird unintuitive part and it's more unintelligible.

For quantum mechanics you have to know eigenvalues and eigenvectors. This is
studies in the first years of the university in a technical career. I'm not
sure if it can be teach much earlier.

For Special Relativity you have to know Minkowsky spaces. It's not so
difficult, it can be moved to the first years of the university.

For General Relativity you have to know curved spaces. It's not imposible to
learn, but you can get a Ph.D. in Math or Physics without studding curved
spaces.

~~~
shuspect
We can keep math, but switch to better theories, with plausible explanations.

A kind of Pilot Wave can explain quantum weirdness to layman people with ease.

We can ditch theory relativity and calculate speeds relatively to CMB, which
is much easier to understand.

We can ditch Big Bang theory and, instead, accept that light is not immortal,
because it ages with time. IMHO, Dipole Repeller and Shapley Attractor are
much more attractive and easier to explain than Big Bang.

~~~
krastanov
All three examples you gave have problems or inconsistencies and this is why
they are not used. You are being downvoted because you are suggesting teaching
formalisms that are known to be insufficient simply because they fulfill your
personal criteria of intuitiveness.

~~~
shpeedy
We have no perfect theory to explain everything, so it's just tradeoff,
exchange of one set of inconsistencies for another set of inconsistencies, but
with better intuition. I'm doing it here, in my country.

The problem with current theories is that I understand them when I reading
them. It's like piece of complex code or book with complex but boring text,
like phonebook. I can follow it, when I read it, but I cannot reproduce it
when book is closed.

Can we teach a phonebook to kids? Yep. Is it useful? Nope.

Recently, I did "quantum physics in one picture" experiment. Results are very
good: lots of reposts, comments, interest in topic.

~~~
krastanov
But it is not a tradeoff in the cases you picked, rather one set of formalisms
has drastically more inconsistencies than the other. E.g. pilot waves: you
gain having real numbers (which I _personally_ see little value in) and you
gain having a more mechanistic intuitive source of the interference (which is
indeed interesting). However describing multiple interacting entangled
particles becomes incredibly difficult, describing annihilation and second
quantization which is needed for the quantum behavior of fields is not
completely done yet, and (what I consider the most substantial problem) you
can not work with finite level systems (i.e. anything but a spinless particle
in a box is very difficult to describe by pilot wave theory).

In short, pilot waves were a worthwhile avenue of research, but we have seen
they are incredibly cumbersome or even insufficient in many quantum mechanics
problems.

~~~
shpeedy
Yep. Pilot Wave theory is underdeveloped theory, but it helps to develop
intuition. Walking droplets are even better for that. IMHO, it's better to use
QM to solve QM problems in science, but use walking droplets and Pilot Wave
Theory to develop intuition for others. Walking droplets are easy to
demonstrate. Double slit experiment can be reproduced in school lab. This way,
quantum physics can be taught in school for children of age 12+, so they will
be ready to solve much more complex problems when they will be PhD.

Entanglement is hard problem for PWT. Photos of entangled photons[0] are
intriguing, because they look similar to behavior of walking droplets in some
experiments (see dotwave.org feed). I hope, someone will be able to reproduce
entanglement in macro. Currently, my top priority is to reproduce
Stern–Gerlach experiment in macro (I suspect that interference between
external field and particle wave creates channel, which guides particle into
spot, but it better to see it once). Second priority is creation of "photons"
in macro. Entanglement will be third. IMHO, all of them require microgravity
to reproduce in 3D.

[0]: [https://phys.org/news/2019-07-scientists-unveil-first-
ever-i...](https://phys.org/news/2019-07-scientists-unveil-first-ever-image-
quantum.html)

~~~
krastanov
With some caveats, I happily agree with the angle from this last comment! I
agree PWT is a great way to get people hooked on quantum science, even if I
consider it as a dead end for fixing the inconsistencies we have (semi-
personal semi-professional opinion).

------
kingkawn
Because the sophons have been sabotaging our experimental results

~~~
MiroF
Great series to all who haven't read it!

~~~
philbarr
It is a really good series, even if it is a bit like reading a sci-fi story
whilst being beaten over the head with a physics textbook.

~~~
RealStickman
I actually quite liked that. Adds something more to the text imo.

------
pxhb
I think that the article raises some interesting points, with some that I
agree with and some that I do not.

I think it would have been helpful for the article to put the 40 years of no
progress in perspective. Are we looking for progress on the scale of the
theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, and so should we be comparing to
the timescales between Newton and Einstein/Schrodinger? How should we think
about the rate of progression in a ‘mature’ field such as physics? Should it
be linear (big discovery every 40 years), faster (new discoveries are faster
due to bootstrapping from other discoveries), or slower (diminishing returns)?

------
snowwrestler
What actually is the foundation of physics? The observations or the theories?

We believe, as an assumption (or nearly as a matter of orthodoxy) that there
are simple universal laws that govern consistent natural phenomena. One could
argue that that is the foundation of our science of physics in that if that
wrong, the whole thing falls down. But that has not “progressed” and really
should not change... which seems consistent with the concept of a building
foundation. Building foundations don’t move and shouldn’t move.

What about theories, which seem to be the focus of her blog post? Well we
should be careful to distinguish between our theories and the fundamental laws
we think they describe—the map vs the territory and all that. I would really
hesitate to call our theories a foundation of physics. For one thing they are
known to be provisional; intended to be changeable. That’s not how foundations
usually work.

When observations contradict theories, the theories must move. From that
perspective one could say that observations are more foundational than
theories. Once a piece of evidence is properly observed, it doesn’t change.

And the thing is, we have collected major (I would argue foundational)
observations in the last 40 years. We observed the Higgs boson and
gravitational waves, and I would call both of those foundational.

That they agreed with existing theory is somehow being taken for a crisis? I
guess it’s a crisis if your job is to come up with new theories and you’re
lacking reasons to do so.

But there are plenty of mysterious observations yet to be explained. Many of
the observations related to dark matter and dark energy fit within a
retrospective 40-year time horizon. Call them astronomy if you like, but going
back up to my second paragraph, we believe they should be explainable by our
physical theories.

~~~
throw0101a
> _What actually is the foundation of physics?_

See Naturalism:

> 1\. _that there is an objective reality shared by all rational
> observers.[20][21]_

> 2\. _that this objective reality is governed by natural laws;[20][21]_

> 3\. _that reality can be discovered by means of systematic observation and
> experimentation.[20][21]_

> 4\. _that Nature has uniformity of laws and most if not all things in nature
> must have at least a natural cause.[21]_

> 5\. _that experimental procedures will be done satisfactorily without any
> deliberate or unintentional mistakes that will influence the results.[21]_

> 6\. _that experimenters won 't be significantly biased by their
> presumptions.[21]_

> 7\. _that random sampling is representative of the entire population.[21]_

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_\(philosophy\))

Some other approaches:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science#Current_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science#Current_approaches)

Basically you have to make some metaphysical assumptions before doing science
can even get off the ground. If you believe that reality is an illusion
(Buddhism? Hinduism?) then you're less likely to be interested in
understanding the world's workings. If you think that things occur for
capricious reasons (e.g., pagan gods being the cause of things), then there is
no reason to ask " _why?_ ". If things happen not because of inherit
properties but because of God's Will (Occasionalism), then who can understand
the mind of God?

I've heard it argued that science mostly developed in (Western) Christendom
because it brought together all of the above assumptions under its
Aristotelian world view. If you look at the invention of the telescope in
~1600: it spread over the world with-in a couple of decades, but most cultures
weren't really interested in it.

~~~
davidivadavid
Another relevant segment of the Philosophy of science article is the
realism/anti-realism dichotomy.

I find it an interesting line of reasoning that the current lack of progress
is due to the default naturalistic approach whose sole purpose is finding
"truth" vs. a more pragmatic, non-realist approach that would have a much more
concrete purpose (e.g. solving particular problems). Truth for the sake of it
with no practical experiments seems to have been a dead end.

~~~
throw0101a
It can be argued that it is up to engineers, not scientists, to develop the
practical uses of 'raw' science.

~~~
davidivadavid
It can. I think the lack of coupling between the two is the crux of the matter
here.

------
ocfnash
I dare say the author is right on many points but statements like:

"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."

make it hard for me to share her point of view, especially as these ideas are
not mentioned.

~~~
celticmusic
I'm not sure how you missed it, but she did give a recommendation. Attempt to
resolve inconsistencies as a means of discovery.

~~~
cambalache
This is so general and vague that it is useless, even more considering that
the author has been saying the same for the last 10 years (the same timeframe
her career progression stopped) and there is not a single valuable paper
proposing a somewhat-valuable idea. I hate to sound like Lubos Motl (for the
cognoscenti) but Sabine's criticism is trite.

~~~
danharaj
It's not general and vague if you're a practicing physicist and know what
those inconsistencies are. For example, the Standard Model assumes neutrinos
don't have mass, but they do.

~~~
pdonis
_> the Standard Model assumes neutrinos don't have mass_

No, it doesn't. The _original_ Standard Model from the 1970s did, but then
neutrino masses were discovered and the Standard Model was modified to include
them.

~~~
danharaj
By which mechanism do neutrinos gain their mass?

~~~
pdonis
AFAIK the seesaw mechanism is the one currently used to model neutrinos in the
Standard Model.

------
strangescript
I have become a bit more pessimistic about it the state of discovery. Things
have slowed despite the current generation having abundant access to
overwhelming compute power and the internet, things that did not exist even 30
years ago. There has never been a better time to collaborate or prove out
theoretical models, yet there has been a decrease in needle moving
discoveries.

~~~
scottlocklin
Maybe the internet is an impediment to doing science. It certainly seems to
shorten people's attention spans.

~~~
devcpp
More importantly, the most brilliant minds (and there are still a LOT of them)
are working for large companies on unimportant problems instead of doing
research. Academia has lost all of its prestige, and companies pay
ridiculously more.

------
7532yahoogmail
I've read several of Sabine's blogs over several months. I think she has very
good ends in mind, has courage to push back on corporate/academic inertia ...
such inertia comes with any human organization ... On the negative side she's
big on complaining but small on alternatives. She's also a bit too
blunt/dismissive of people -- this from a person who also dislikes corporate
happy talk. As such it's not clear if she'd confer distinction if she had a
large budget, an institution, and group of experimentalists. An Oppenheimer?
No.

~~~
hhas01
Aye, it’s easy to make criticisms (and Zeus knows the price of good science
_is_ eternal vigilance), but the easiest and most satisfyingly Ockhamite
explanation of the slowdown in physics remains: all its low-hanging fruit is
long since taken.

And while there’s no harm in pondering the philosophical origins of the
scientific method while debating where to go next, we should take care not to
go backwards either, as that way lies fractal navel fluff and bloody string
theory.

~~~
achillesheels
It’s amusing you jocularly employ Zeus in this conversation. Galileo,
Descartes, Newton, Maxwell, etc. did not have Zeus on their minds, maybe it
would be wise for you not to either?

~~~
hhas01
[https://comb.io/dqaqWp](https://comb.io/dqaqWp)

------
jonbronson
"...mindless production of mathematical fiction..."

This derisive comment betrays the authors own hypocritical stance, claiming
physicists are too close-minded, while simultaneously ridiculing the role of
advanced mathematics in formulating new physics hypotheses, arbitrarily
declaring them mindless fiction.

~~~
CuriouslyC
Nope. The criticism is of searching for new physics by chasing mathematical
elegance, instead of trying to explain observations.

~~~
SiempreViernes
Actually, Hossenfelders great fight has been with the concept of
"naturalness", a fight that has now been won by the LHC killing off all the
theories based on that concept.

And it wasn't ever so simple as "chasing mathematical elegance instead of
trying to explain observations", the problem has been that there was a theory
that could explain almost perfectly everything within a certain region of
physics, but can't easily be extended.

Thus you work on crazy schemes to extend the existing theory (all the sensible
ones already having failed), or you are forced to make an entirely new
framework, and that takes a lot of work before it's finished enough to even
reproduce the results of the limited theory.

If you take the second route, you are very vulnerable to the "chasing
mathematical elegance" slander, but it's not like the other guys are doing any
better: there aren't actually any unexpected observations that need explaining
_within the reach_ of the existing theory.

~~~
nonbel
>"the problem has been that there was a theory that could explain almost
perfectly everything within a certain region of physics, but can't easily be
extended."

Sounds a lot like overfitting.

~~~
kosievdmerwe
Sounds more like a formula that needs more terms.

Compare the classical physics formula for momentum, p=mv, vs relativistic
formula, p=γmv. γ is almost 1 for most low velocities, it only starts jumping
up to infinity when we get close to c.

The point being that the classical formula is pretty good in it's zone of low
velocities, but as soon as you get too far out of the implicit term's
"constraints" the formula breaks down and you need to add more to it to get it
working for both low and high velocities. Which doesn't sound easy.

~~~
nonbel
Adding more terms sounds like more overfitting.

~~~
jfengel
It sounds like that only because scientists reformulate their models in terms
that people are familiar with. Actual physicists don't work in terms of the
gamma correction factor; they work in tensor fields that don't look anything
like conventional arithmetic.

But they can pare all that down to something expressed in terms people are
familiar with. And that has the bonus purpose of helping them understand why
the familiar terms were familiar: the "correction factor" is small under
circumstances we encounter, and only becomes large under circumstances we
rarely do.

If that intrigues somebody enough to learn the actual physics, they'll
encounter a completely different and more-encompassing formulation which looks
not at all like overfitting. One that turns out to be more elegant, in fact,
cramming more information into less notation. But it's information nobody
needs until they're doing fairly advanced physics, so we're not going to be
teaching it in elementary school any time soon.

~~~
SiempreViernes
Don't worry about it, I think you're talking to a NN stuck in a local optima
around the term "overfit".

------
ineedasername
First, I disagree that physics, and its foundations, have not changed.
Incrementalism is common in mature areas of study, but the cumulative effect
is still felt.

Second, I am reminded of Thomas Kuhn's _The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions_ [0] This work described exact the state, with historical examples
of the cycles, whereby progress exhibits peaks and valleys, periods of time
wherein little monumental progress is made followed by brief frantic periods
of discoveries, often stemming from the fertile ground laid by those who
worked in plodding toil.

And so I am more inclines to believe we are in such a trough at the moment and
not even a particularly deep one. Various avenues of thought & experiment show
amble potential to thrust us forward into one of Khun's Scientific
Revolutions.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-
Revolutions-50th...](https://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-
Revolutions-50th-
Anniversary/dp/0226458121/ref=sr_1_1?crid=519N2NFV2IAG&keywords=structure+of+scientific+revolutions+kuhn&qid=1578957587&sprefix=structure+of+sci%2Caps%2C149&sr=8-1)

------
swayvil
Consider a Venn diagram. 3 circles : the observable, the understandable, the
communicable. Intersecting at a chubby triangle. That's physics. And it's
pretty darn small compared to the rest of the diagram.

Maybe the triangle is exhausted. All mapped out. The limits of the method have
been met. Time to find a new method.

Maybe?

------
elfexec
Do we really want something fundamentally important as the foundations of
physics to progress or change quickly?

History of science and the philosophy of science has shown that the
foundations of sciences progress a little here and a little there until these
"little progresses" gain enough momentum to create a paradigm shift. And we
only recognize these "little progresses" in hindsight after the paradigm
shift.

Technological advances also tend to progress science. We tend to believe that
advances in science lead to advances in technology but historically, it's the
other way around.

More likely than not, there are man "little progresses" being made toward an
eventual paradigm shift, but until it happens, we won't recognize how
important those "little progresses" are.

------
seemslegit
I really really want a reason to not dismiss this as vapid demagoguery running
on the "Woman scientist challenges predominantly male establishment on
stagnant paradigms" ticket because this is absolutely what it reads like.

"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. "

This is one heavy claim (two actually), is there some place where she
elaborates what that idea is in terms more specific than "resolving
inconsistencies" and "more theorists" ?

~~~
senderista
I think she’s bitter and aggrieved but I’ve never seen evidence of her playing
the gender card.

~~~
seemslegit
Not sure why the original response got flagged but: I think that her being a
woman in this context provides this kind of output with more amplification
than if she hasn't been while at the same time diminishing her opportunities
for honest collegiate feedback. That's not her fault or an advantage that
she's deliberately taking, or an advantage all for a researcher, maybe for an
author/pundit.

------
mellosouls
Woit response:

[https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/](https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/)

------
narrator
Unpopular opinion:

The last time we had progression in the foundation of physics we just got even
more powerful world destroying nuclear weapons. Maybe it's just too dangerous
to advance physics outside of deeply classified government programs. In order
to keep new physics from destroying the earth, funding is diverted to make
work projects for physicists working in cosmology and string theory that will
never actually have practical significance.

------
PopeDotNinja
Sabine has a great YouTube channel, too =>
[https://www.youtube.com/user/peppermint78/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/peppermint78/videos).

On the topic of the LHC, particle physics, and future colliders, I like this
video =>
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go2TaEUQpF4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go2TaEUQpF4).

------
montjoy
Sometimes when I’m working on a coding or troubleshooting problem I get stuck
iterating on an issue when really I need to step back and try to think about
solving things a different way. My impression is this is what she’s trying to
advocate the physics community to do. I think her overall tone is too negative
and is turning a lot of people off but overall I think she is a needed voice
just to make sure we’re on the right track.

------
eagsalazar2
Doesn't it seem likely that there are important natural phenomena of
complexity that simply exceed human ability to comprehend them no matter how
long we work to understand them and no matter what evidence we stumble upon?
That that evidence will always remain mysterious until we first develop
artificial intelligence (for example) capable of interpreting it?

------
cjfd
Actually, string theory arose as a way of doing exactly what this person
requests. It was noticed that quantum field theory and gravity do not go
together, so it was attempted to do something about this. So, it did not
really work out? Well, you know the thing with this kind science is that it is
unknowable beforehand what you are or are not going to find.

~~~
mellosouls
The claim of sceptics along these lines is that string theory has produced
nothing in 50 years and some string theorists appear to be in denial of that.

~~~
orbifold
In science as in pretty much any other discipline you should always weigh
someones opinion by their believability / credibility. The credibility of
someones opinion on something is a function of their knowledge / experience of
the subject and things related to it. To first approximation most sceptics
have close to zero credibility making claims about string theory, as they have
not produced scientific output remotely comparable to proponents of string
theory. This is simply because people like Witten tower far above most other
working theoretical physicists.

~~~
mellosouls
This sounds suspiciously like argument from authority. You will be more
convincing if you address the argument, not the alleged experience of those
making it.

Please see my response to the previous objection in the thread (the sibling
comment to yours) requiring specific examples of progress which would silence
the critics - it remains unanswered.

------
Koshkin
Indeed, theoretical physics has long ago stopped providing foundational
explanations. It became strictly what essentially it had always been - a
calculational tool. Whether calculations possess explanatory power is a
question of psychology and sociology.

------
8bitsrule
Sometimes the impossible takes us a little longer.

US school teacher, then geologist J. Harlan Bretz spent as much time as he
could 'out in the field'. It was as a result of -extensive- observations that
he arrived at his 'outrageous' Missoula Floods hypothesis. He spent 40 years
defending his interpretation; he remained 'out in the field' most of that
time.

His critics had spent -very- little time in the field. They _knew_ he was
wrong. In 1979, he was awarded Geology's top prize.

------
nonbel
It stagnated when they started doing NHST, ie checking for a difference from
"background" vs collecting and comparing data to the predictions of various
theories to distinguish between them. Same thing that has destroyed every
field of research that adopted this approach.

~~~
nonbel
Imagine if Einstein just predicted that the position of the stars would appear
to be different during the eclipse, rather than displaced by an exact amount.
The last 40 years has seen physics become more like the former (bad) than the
latter (good).

------
senderista
“They do not think about which hypotheses are promising because their
education has not taught them to do so.”

Pretty rich coming from someone who’s written a bunch of papers on doubly-
special relativity and similarly unpromising hypotheses.

------
LinuxBender
I do not agree that physics has not progressed. I do however believe there may
be some dogmatic contamination in some processes that may have stalled some
progression. Gravity for example, big G or little g and why?

------
jakeogh
recent stuff on dark energy:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21974117](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21974117)

(by the blog's author Sabine Hossenfelder)
[https://youtu.be/oqgKXQM8FpU](https://youtu.be/oqgKXQM8FpU)

(more on the confidence tldr Λ>1 still)
[https://youtu.be/7UNLgPIiWAg](https://youtu.be/7UNLgPIiWAg)

------
konschubert
This is my pet topic, but:

How can we expect to make progress in our theories if we haven’t even agreed
on a consistent interpretation of today’s quantum theory?

~~~
cygx
Because explanatory stories aren't strictly necessary: While it certainly
helps if we have them available because they allow us to reason intuitively,
the hallmark of science is the predictive model.

In contrast, a bunch of explanatory stories lacking an underlying predictive
model is what we call pseudo-science.

~~~
konschubert
An "interpretation of a theory" is not an "explanatory story, it's a way to
map the equations ("shut up and calculate") to reality.

It's not a contested notion that every theory needs an interpretation.

~~~
cygx
I would phrase things differently:

The way to map a theory to reality is via its predictions. The interpretation
is how the theory fits into my mental model of reality.

In principle, reality could be strange enough that we are incapable of holding
a good model of reality in our brains that evolved to avoid getting eaten by
lions instead of doing quantum mechanics.

I certainly hope that's not the case, but neither can I rule it out.

~~~
konschubert
I think you and me mean different things with “interpretation”.

> The way to map a theory to reality is via its predictions.

Agree, and I call this mapping an “interpretation”.

(I thought this was the general usage of the word in the scientific context,
but I may be wrong.)

------
rpz
In the spirit of pointing out inconsistencies...I am not a physicist, but
something I've been confused about lately is why the action constant has a
unit of seconds baked into it.

Feels like E = hf is an experiment with a hard coded 1 second measure time.

Why not express the relationship in terms of power?

P=uf where u is the action constant without the seconds unit hard coded. And
E=utf has a variable time parameter

~~~
rpz
Down votes? Care to explain? I'm just trying to learn here :)

~~~
akubera
Didn't downvote, but they probably came because you asked a very tangential
question to the subject.

I'll try to answer it: I think you just want to move units around so h
(Planck's constant) has units of Joules instead of Joule-seconds. While this
works mathematically, it doesn't really make sense physically, where we care
about the energy of a photon because that's the value that is conserved (along
with momentum, also relating to h) during any interaction (e.g. the quantity
gained by an electron if the photon is absorbed). It really doesn't make sense
to want to quantify the "power" of a photon, which doesn't have any physical
meaning, in favor of a simpler constant.

You are right about the constant 'h' having a "hard-coded" 1-second built in,
but so do ALL derived physical constants . If we, say, changed it to two
seconds, the number would be cut in half to reflect the scale change and
preserve the energy of the photon (or any action) because that does not depend
on scale.

As to "why is it Joule-seconds?": that's the discovered law of nature. If the
energy was proportional to frequency squared, h would be in units of J*s².

~~~
rpz
Consider it this way. Suppose we all agreed to never use numerical values in
the units section of an equation... then in this case we'd need a symbol for
cycles in cycles per second aka Hz.

If we leaves Planck's constant as is in E=h _(cycle /second), then the units
would end up as Joule_cycle... odd right?

That's what brought me to writing the formula as

E=utf

I guess it should really be

Delta E=u(delta t)f where u is in joules t is (seconds per cycle) and f is
(cycles per second)

~~~
rpz
The upshot of what I'm saying here is that I believe that each wavelength of
light is delivering the same quanta of energy regardless of frequency

------
boyadjian
Maybe the actual foundations of physics are sufficient for explaining our
everyday life on earth.

------
moralsupply
Perhaps we need some new mathematics, not new physics

~~~
tim333
I think setting AI on it may be the way forward.

~~~
hhas01
AI is not some magical pixie dust or golden retriever chasing a stick. It may
have its applications in pattern matching, particularly in chewing the exabyte
datasets we increasingly have now, but it isn’t going to fetch the answers for
us. Heck, it won’t even tell us the questions.

~~~
tim333
We shall see. Not today but give it 20 years and you may be surprised.

------
empath75
I don’t get it. What does she want people to do?

~~~
eitland
Look for minor inconsistencies and start from there.

~~~
gus_massa
> _Look for minor inconsistencies and start from there._

That's exactly what (a lot of) people is doing! Is there a second suggestions?

There are some "interesting" experiments. One is the anomalous magnetic dipole
moment of the muon.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_magnetic_dipole_mome...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_magnetic_dipole_moment)

    
    
      Theoretical:  0.000116591804(51)
      Experimental: 0.00011659209(6)
    

Can you spot the difference? The experimental result is too big, like 3.5
sigmas too big. For most sciences 3.5 sigmas is a lot. In particle physics 3.5
sigmas is interesting, but it may be a fluke.

People is trying to solve it. The idea is that the theoretical model is
missing a particle or an interaction between the known particles. So, it's a
guess game. You must guess how the particle must behave. Some properties like
charge are fixed, some properties like mass are a parameter. So you must guess
the main properties of the particle and tweak the parameters until you get a
theoretical result that is closer to the experimental result.

The problem is that the new proposed particle may change the theoretical
expected result of other experiments. So you must fix the theoretical result
of this experiment without breaking allllllllllllllll the other experiments.

And the properties are very constrained.

The easier to explain is the charge that must be an integer number. Or in some
cases n/3, but you must explain very well why the fractional charges are no
found in the wild. Other charges are posible, but people will think you are
nuts unless there is a lot of supporting evidence.

Other properties are more difficult to explain, like the symmetry of the W+,
W- and Z0 particles. If you propose a new particle that interacts with the W+
particle, there are a lot of restrictions because the particle you propose
must interact with the W- particle, or you have to propose another particle
that interacts with the W- particle in a very similar way. And at the same
time, you must also fix a similar problem with the Z0 particle.

More details in
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_beyond_the_Standard_Mo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_beyond_the_Standard_Model)

The main problem is that most of this extensions to the standard model are
very technical and boring, and they are not covered by the popularization
press.

------
mathgenius
Particle physics != foundations of physics.

------
wallace_f
Physics has made a lot of progress in social justice and representation and
these kinds of comments putting down "her point of view" is the type of toxic
masculinity that will send us back 100 years.

~~~
Pigo
Just out of curiosity, how was op supposed to phrase that sentence in order to
keep from being toxic? Was it just the pronoun that was offensive, or was it
just having any critique at all?

Disagreement and critique is a positive thing if it's done with respect.
Handling someone with kid-gloves is demeaning.

~~~
wallace_f
See below comments, particularly shkmmo's. My comment above was socratic
irony.

------
bronlund
There will be no real progress before everyone agrees to unfuck everything
Einstein fucked up.

~~~
Anon84
Such as?

~~~
bronlund
The Aether.

Einstein isn't alone though, there are others. Like how Heaviside ruined
Maxwells original 20 equations. And there aren't really that many explanations
to how this came about. It could be a result of stupidity of course - or it
could be that someone for some reason maybe didn't want everyone to know.

Imagine if you could modulate electromagnetic scalar waves to in-phase at a
specific point in space. Someone could put a quad of energy confined to your
bedroom and no one could tell where it came from. It would make the Hiroshima
bomb sound like a firecracker and all you need is a lot of electricity and
antennas. Big antennas though.

~~~
jakeogh
You might enjoy this Arecibo tour. NP4B (Bob Zimmerman) mentions the subject
of your comment at the end:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQJawfbjpxw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQJawfbjpxw)

------
rafaelvasco
Two reasons: Either scientists and academics have stopped exploring (true to a
degree..) or they have been looking in the wrong places with the wrong
mindsets and incomplete reasoning. (mostly this.); That said science has
evolved a lot yes. But it could have evolved a thousand fold more if it wasn't
for that second reason;

------
Merrill
>But all shortcomings of these theories – the lacking quantization of gravity,
dark matter, the quantum measurement problem, and more – have been known for
more than 80 years. And they are as unsolved today as they were then.

Would solving these shortcomings make life better for anyone?

Other than the now famous physicist that came up with the solution, wouldn't
the others working on these problems become unemployed?

------
plmu
Thinking about dark energy and the renewed controversy about it, e.g.
[https://www.space.com/dark-energy-not-
debunked.html](https://www.space.com/dark-energy-not-debunked.html).

We have grave inconsistencies in cosmology, yet very bold conclusions are
made, assuming that our theoretical understanding of gravity and general
relativity is 100% correct at all scales.

The claim about accelerated expansion, only 30 years old, is an example of the
enormous arrogance of modern science, knowing that such theories have been
developed and debunked every few decennia in the past 100-200 years.

The historical perspective seems to fail completely, and todays physicists
seem to be so confident even though their colleagues of only a few generations
ago have been proven wrong many times. Why would anything be different now,
because we throw so much money at it, because we have wonderful computers,
have we become so much more intelligent as a species?

