
Physics is stuck - mellosouls
https://www.salon.com/2020/09/06/physics-is-stuck--and-needs-another-einstein-to-revolutionize-it-physicist-avi-loeb-says/
======
djaque
Whenever I see headlines like this, I'm reminded that physics has a
communication problem where the public thinks that high energy physics is the
only type (or the only worthy type) of physics out there. There's a lot more
to the field than the next theory of everything, and those other fields aren't
stuck

For instance, in just this decade human kind turned on the first x-ray free
electron laser and increased the state of the art in the brightness of x-ray
sources by 10 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE!!! I'm not sure I can fully explain how
transformational that level of improvement was because I work on the
accelerator side, not the user side. But, at least understand that there are
entire subfields that now exist which didn't before. Not just physics, but in
biology, chemistry, materials science, and numerous other fields. It's an
instrument so powerful that every other scientifically advanced nation is now
building their own. That instrument was developed by physicists and not high
energy physicists.

I feel that this also gets at a sort of toxic notion that I've noticed some
high energy physicists in my own department have (not all, but you probably
know the people that I'm talking about). The notion is that if you aren't
working on 12 dimensional quantum theories of gravity or the holographic
principle and black hole physics, then you aren't a real physicist. Somehow
they think that if your work has a real world impact, then it's tainted in
some way. I'm not sure how it's gotten this way, but I've actually been told
as much by another grad student that my field should be moved to the
engineering department because we aren't doing real physics.

~~~
Koshkin
So... why is the XFEL _not_ “just” an achievement in engineering? Is there a
(new) physics somewhere in it? (Genuinely curious.)

~~~
djaque
I forget who said it, but there is a quote in physics along the lines of "we
already have a theory of practically everything, but it is so complicated that
we can use it to predict almost nothing."

All of basic principles that underlie our everyday experiences don't need
quarks and gluons. They're governed by standard quantum mechanics which was
fleshed out in the 20's. However, just because we have Newton's laws of the
subatomic world doesn't mean we can answer interesting scientific questions
with them. I'd even say that people that call something like the standard
model a "theory of everything" are a little naive since you can never use to
it make predictions outside of the most simple systems.

That area (pushing ahead away from model systems) is the complexity frontier
of physics and is where I'm most excited for advancements. It's where we can
write out the equation that describes high-TC superconductors, but it has so
many dimensions that we can't solve it and make one that works at room
temperature. Is that engineering or physics? I'd call the scientific problem
of figuring out the laws that emerge from quantum mechanics for these
complicated systems physics.

In a similar vein, Maxwell "discovered" the free electron laser in the 1800s.
He wrote down the laws of E&M and then everything in the world was solved.
That's clearly a dumb way to think of it though, and the new physics that was
discovered were the emergent laws that fall out of it when you apply those
laws to a system of relativistic particles.

In particular, the emergent phenomena that had to be discovered for the free
electron laser (FEL) was the micro-bunching instability. It's a subtle
interaction between relativistic particles and a field of photons that will
feedback and cause them to bunch together while dumping their energy into the
field of light producing the coherent laser radiation. It was that phenomena
and the realization that it could be used to create a powerful laser that are
the new physics here.

On the other side, the advancement of the FEL to the point that it could make
x-rays requires a lot of other new physics to create the machine. This is
where there is a bit of a blurred line between physics and engineering.
However, I'd still call what we're doing (developing new laws of physics that
govern complex systems) physics. Just because we use them to build a machine
doesn't make them engineering any more than a solid state physicist
discovering a new phenomena in semiconductors and then Intel taking advantage
of it in their next generation of processors.

In order to REALLY understand our physical world, we can't write down
reductionist laws and say that we're done. It's also notable that the two
developers of the free electron laser are rumored to be in the running for the
Nobel prize in physics, so it's not just me who thinks that they are
physicists, not engineers.

Edit: BTW, here is a great paper that reviews the physics that makes a free
electron laser work if anyone is interested.

Huang, Z., & Kim, K.-J. (2007). Review of x-ray free-electron laser theory.
Physical Review Special Topics - Accelerators and Beams, 10(3), 034801.
[https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTAB.10.034801](https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTAB.10.034801)

~~~
Xcelerate
> I forget who said it

Paul Dirac. The quote is:

"The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large
part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the
difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations
much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that
approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be
developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex
atomic systems without too much computation."

------
Mugwort
Physics doesn't need another Einstein. Einstein explained Brownian motion, the
Photoelectric effect, created special relativity and general relativity, the
cosmological constant, helped found quantum mechanics, served as an invaluable
critic of quantum mechanics. Then he foundered. Einstein never accepted
particle physics, refused to follow new developments and became a dinosaur.
This sadly is what most "physicists" are doing today, the followed in
Einstein's footsteps, mostly the dinosaur part.

What does physics need? The world doesn't know. Nobody knows but someone will
do it, someday in a manner no one else thought possible or could really
anticipate. In fact, that's not entirely true but new developments will happen
and only a handful of people will be in the loop. Lorenz, Poincare etc. e.g.
laid some vital groundwork for relativity.

My own two cents on the matter is that we really don't understand our theories
well enough and are badly in need of a firmer foundation. The situation is
analogous to calculus before Weierstrass, Cauchy, Dedekind and Cantor.

Of course, mathematics wasn't completely stuck just because calculus wasn't
fully developed. Probability and non-Euclidean geometry were stunning
developments which predated a truer understanding of real numbers.

So it is with physics right now. Unification, strings, etc. isn't working out
so well right now. Quantum computing is now a thing and Quantum mechanics is
enjoying a second revolution not unlike the General Relativity Renaissance led
by Penrose, et. al.

We can't predict the future. We don't know the sequence things we need to take
the next step in AI or even if there is one. Will some form of deep learning
be all we need? Probably not but possibly yes.

Physics is right where it should be. Frustration is part of the process. We're
feeling some pain because our approach isn't working. Instead of having
answers to everything maybe we should focus on better questions.

~~~
canofbars
I'm not a physicist or even a researcher of anything but I sometimes watch
youtube videos of people experimenting with material sciences and chemistry
and a trend I have seen is that even things that we consider to be very basic
have a huge lack of good quality information available.

One youtuber I saw spends time looking at new research papers for ideas and
has found that they are just impossible to reproduce. Following the steps
exactly as well as every possible variation doesn't produce anything close to
the results described in the paper. In another video [0] he attempts to make
glass and finds that almost all of the information available on the internet
about making glass is not enough to actually make glass since they contain
only enough information to register a patent but not enough to make from
scratch.

I wonder if we will see huge gains by just making complete and unobfiscated
information available to the public since it looks like even the foundations
of society are secret company internal information.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUcUy7SqdS0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUcUy7SqdS0)

~~~
1_player
The world should have a "crafting" wiki, which explains how to build anything
from scratch.

From how to make glass from sand to how to build a quantum computer.

~~~
foobar1962
Would the crafting wiki contain instructions for crafting the wiki itself?

(An attempt at humour referencing the "set of all sets" paradox. That is all,
as you were.)

------
dboreham
[http://cns.physics.gatech.edu/ChaosBook/extras/CNYang.html](http://cns.physics.gatech.edu/ChaosBook/extras/CNYang.html)

"In the next ten years, the most important discovery in high-energy physics is
that 'the party's over'."

~~~
pier25
Can you explain for a layman what that means?

~~~
mellosouls
Experiments needed to confirm "fundamental" physics predictions (eg. large
accelerators a la CERN) too costly to be pragmatic, or at least to continue
the tradition of timely theory-experiment interplay.

Bear in mind though that the comment was made in the 1980s; people on both
sides will debate how prescient he was.

Some background and counterpoints in the context of the proposed Chinese
super-collider:

[http://ias.ust.hk/ias/files/pdf/1508403651_b2.pdf](http://ias.ust.hk/ias/files/pdf/1508403651_b2.pdf)

------
Kednicma
Let's finish working on our current experiments first, and _then_ declare that
we're stuck. We have particle accelerators, gravitational-wave telescopes,
solar probes, and planetary probes which we're either still building or still
operating, and we haven't finished falsifying-or-verifying all of our
predictions.

It's certainly wrong to imagine that we need a Great Man in order to come and
fix everything. Perhaps we need a Great Insight, but also perhaps the insight
has already been published and it simply hasn't been well-adopted yet. After
all, people are still today fighting against basic century-old quantum
mechanics, hoping that reality is more material and determined than it
actually is.

~~~
ganzuul
It is hard to believe how entrenched locality and realism are in physics. A
semester of philosophy should bury them for good. A more modern concern is
Boltzmann brains, but those too should offer no barrier to a philosophically
aware mind. Perhaps a mere PhD or decade of contemplation would enlighten them
to mysteries of the anthropic principle.

~~~
BlueTemplar
The anthropic principle is one thing, but Boltzmann brains is so close to
solipsism that it's worthless for scientific inquiry. While some philosophy
background should be mandatory for physicists, I don't see why they should
waste so much of their time on Boltzmann brains ?

~~~
ganzuul
It is a decent model for ontology, and ontology is good training for observing
cause and effect. We grow up to make a lot of erroneous assumptions so we need
to train to become good observers. Basically wrestling with the idea lets you
observe some of your own biases.

------
unemphysbro
Reminds me of Philip Anderson's testimony against the funding of
superconducting super collider.

(need to register to read the article) [https://www.the-scientist.com/opinion-
old/the-case-against-t...](https://www.the-scientist.com/opinion-old/the-case-
against-the-ssc-63734)

Incentives in academia seems to be directed towards bringing in grant money. I
like Barto and Sutton's discussion of 'nomadic' researchers (8:54, but the
entire video is great):

[https://www.coursera.org/lecture/sample-based-learning-
metho...](https://www.coursera.org/lecture/sample-based-learning-methods/andy-
barto-and-rich-sutton-more-on-the-history-of-rl-1riMx)

I don't know if this is a positive or negative for scientific progress, but,
those are just two links that add perspective to academic research/funding.

------
lebuffon
I have read that in the 1800s the upper crust were being told to not allow
their children to pursue a career in Physics. The commonly held view was that
Newton had uncovered all the good bits and there was really nothing left to
discover.

Then someone asked "What are those blue sparks I see when I take off my jumper
(sweater) in a dark bedroom?"

We just need to find the next sparks. :)

~~~
pvg
This is an anecdote usually told about Max Planck (and may have originally
been recounted by Planck!) and his adviser, Philipp von Jolly. Some decent
sourcing here:

[https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/2129/who-said-
that-e...](https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/2129/who-said-that-
essentially-everything-in-theoretical-physics-had-already-been-dis)

Electricity was a subject of intense study throughout the 19th century and
before (think of the people we've named units and effects after - Galvano,
Volta, Ampere, Ohm, etc)

------
spodek
I have a PhD in physics but work on sustainability -- what I consider the most
important role for someone who understands nature today. I constantly meet
people who are surprised to find that turning on a light in their homes causes
fossil fuels to be burned. Their ignorance is their business, but the
greenhouse gases become everyone's.

~~~
defterGoose
Can I ask what you're working on specifically? As a lapsed graduate-level
physicist turned entrepreneur, problems related to climate change have been
making me frantically search for a place where I can make meaningful
contributions.

~~~
spodek
Nearly everyone says we know what to do, we just lack the will to do it. We
lack leadership -- not telling people facts, figures, doom, gloom, and
instructions. That's management, which is important, but leadership -- helping
people do what they want to but haven't figured out how. No leaders or people
with authority understand nature and I think it's easier for scientists to
learn leadership than leaders to learn science.

I support more science, but it's overwhelmingly clear. We don't need more
science to create a vision and strategy. People need to feel meaning and
purpose, to have an expectation of success. That comes from what leaders work
on -- stories, images, role models, systems, emotions, and culture.

So I focus on leadership -- bringing what people like Mandela, Eisenhower,
Ali, and Deming brought but I don't see anyone doing today. My TEDx talks
[https://joshuaspodek.com/tedx](https://joshuaspodek.com/tedx) and podcast
illustrate what I'm working on, though I've advanced a lot since then.

Here are podcast episodes describing my strategy:

\- [https://shows.pippa.io/leadership-and-the-
environment/episod...](https://shows.pippa.io/leadership-and-the-
environment/episodes/224-clarifying-my-strategy)

\- [https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-
environment/episo...](https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-
environment/episodes/301-does-it-scale-my-modified-tesla-strategy)

\- [https://shows.pippa.io/leadership-and-the-
environment/episod...](https://shows.pippa.io/leadership-and-the-
environment/episodes/260-creating-the-muhammad-ali-of-the-environment)

\- [https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-
environment/episo...](https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-
environment/episodes/310-the-start-and-end-of-any-serious-conversation-on-the-
env)

------
amai
It seems to me that the idea of supersymmetry will have the same fate as the
idea of an aether. But physics wasn't stuck at the heydays of the aether
theory and it is also not stuck now. There is much more to physics than just
supersymmetry:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics)

But maybe some fresh ideas from other fields of physics are necessary for
particle physics. The problem it seems to me is that the people working in
high energy physics and string theory are often very narrow minded and are
ignoring important developments outside of their own field.

------
foobar1962
The time for another Einstein will only be after there has been another
Michelson–Morley experiment.

~~~
Koshkin
To be fair, Einstein did not know about (or even had a need in) the Michelson-
Morley experiment when he created SR.

~~~
jonathanyc
That’s unclear—Einstein himself made contradictory remarks on this. See
[http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1974Obs....94...81J](http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1974Obs....94...81J)

------
sriku
I've always been amaZed by the collaboration and synthesis of ideas that
happened during Einstein's time. Consider how important and contributive the
following were to the famous relativity theories and the other names involved
-

\- Mach's principle

\- Michelson - Morley experiment

\- Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism

\- minkowsky space-time

\- Lorentz transformations

\- Riemann's geometry

\- Ricci curvature tensor

\- Christoffel's connection symbols

\- Newton's observation and attempt to account for the perihelion precession
of mercury's orbit (not to mention his motion and gravity laws in the first
place)

\- Schwarzschild's solution to the field equations

\- Kerr metric and solutions

\- .. and amongst all that we have the Einstein field equations

~~~
Svoka
Yes. It seems that folks forget that Einstein didn't invent all this things.

------
kzrdude
See also the (now decade old) book The trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin.

~~~
mikhailfranco
I prefer Woit's _Not Even Wrong,_ which has a lot of interesting historical
detail and personal anecdote, in addition to the headline polemic.

------
hitekker
Here is a similar article on powerful members of a scientific community
seizing control of the mainstream view and inhibiting scientific progress:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21911225](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21911225)

------
LatteLazy
Around when Einstein started there were only a few unsolved problems in
physics. One gave up quantum mechanics, another relativity. That was basically
chance.

Maybe dark matter research will just find dark matter and yield neither more
questions nor useful applications. Maybe it will yield a whole new area of
enquiry with 1001 useful applications.

We just don't know. No one should assume that X Hours/Dollars/Papers in
physics represents an actual amount of "discovery".

------
kristianpaul
Physics needs more data, this is not a single person effort. Actually i’m
those who believe this a golden edge for Physics and the constraint is not
having another single brilliant guy but resources that could help us validate
even further or break what its already known.

------
zwilliamson
Shout out to the sophons from Trisolaris interfering with research.

~~~
cbHXBY1D
I always thought it interesting that Liu was tacitly saying that new
breakthroughs in physics can only be done in places like CERN with a LHC-like
project. Humans couldn't make theoretical breakthroughs anymore.

------
vertbhrtn
In some sense, the modern institute of science is somewhat like an orthodox
church: a few pre-approved lines of thinking with a swift punishment for
heretics.

This is the biggest strength of science: this rigidness of thought is what
protects it from clever charlatans. But this is also its biggest weakness
because this risk-averse behavior, when scientists can't risk saying
unapproved things without torpedoing their own reputation, is why science
makes only tiny steps. Right now physics has reached a rather big obstacle on
its way and the usual risk-averse-one-tiny-step-at-a-time tactics won't work.

~~~
mrtksn
Wasn’t it always like that? If someone actually believes in non-orthodox ideas
will simply face the backlash, follow the path anyway and later be recognized
for the extraordinary accomplishments if these ideas turn out to be worth the
salt.

It’s much better to give a hard time to dedicated people than to risk giving
an easy time to charlatans.

Since you can’t really judge novel ideas, you can make the process just hard
enough that charlatans drop out to some area where they can get fame and money
for cheaper.

~~~
foobar1962
One of the challenges with unorthodox ideas is that occasionally some of them
lead to great new understandings, but it's a very low signal-to-niose ratio.
The orthodoxy can perhaps be excused for their reluctance for entertainment.

------
Fellshard
Fluff 'science' from Salon is not exactly a resounding endorsement for the
article's content.

------
crb002
We need a research satellite around Mars to better understand long range
forces. The immediate problem is being bound to Earth distance experiments,
including astronomy from two long range reference points. Also need a Venus or
Sol orbit solar satellite with a massive capacitor on it for doing obscenely
high power experiments.

~~~
rocqua
What would you want studied with that satellite? Which forces?

afaik gravity is pretty well studied by predicting the planets

~~~
dumbfoundded
Gravity is poorly tested at the smallest scales:
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.3588.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.3588.pdf) .
Perhaps space based experiments could help. I also think astronomy would
greatly improve.

------
fizixer
> Physics is stuck

I agree.

> needs another Einstein to revolutionize it

Nope. The smartest minds today need to work on two topics: AI/AGI, and anti-
aging/longevity

Once these two problems are cracked, we'd be on a smoother transition path
towards Type-1 Kardashev civilization.

Then the smartest (long-living) minds can sit down with their favorite AGI
collaborators in their ivory towers and have all the fun they want to have.

~~~
arcticfox
Although another 'Einstein' making breakthroughs is totally possible, AGI
gives me a lot of solace as a sort of back-up plan.

If we have indeed hit some type of human wall, AGI at least gives us some long
term option to potentially leap it.

I'm not sure how much longevity research would help on that front, given the
age distribution of scientists making breakthroughs, but it's nice in its own
right.

~~~
fizixer
The longevity is really healthful and youthful longevity, not longevity for
its own sake.

I recommend looking into longevity forums, SENS foundation, Aubrey de Grey
talks, etc, etc.

