Nautilus: The Present Phase of Stagnation in the Foundations of Physics Is Not Normal

[No Excuses]

Interesting article on how our foundational understanding of physics has not seen a major breakthrough in decades essentially. The author, who is a physicist herself, also runs a really interesting blog criticizing modern foundational physics and published a book criticizing modern theoretical and experimental physics. 

 

One of her main critiques is that building an even bigger large hadron collider is likely a waste of money if you are testing bad theories. 

 

http://m.nautil.us/blog/the-present-phase-of-stagnation-in-the-foundations-of-physics-is-not-normal

 

 

Quote

 

Nothing is moving in the foundations of physics. One experiment after the other is returning null results: No new particles, no new dimensions, no new symmetries. Sure, there are some anomalies in the data here and there, and maybe one of them will turn out to be real news. But experimentalists are just poking in the dark. They have no clue where new physics may be to find. And their colleagues in theory development are of no help.

 

Some have called it a crisis. But I don’t think “crisis” describes the current situation well: Crisis is so optimistic. It raises the impression that theorists realized the error of their ways, that change is on the way, that they are waking up now and will abandon their flawed methodology. But I see no awakening. The self-reflection in the community is zero, zilch, nada, nichts, null. They just keep doing what they’ve been doing for 40 years, blathering about naturalness and multiverses and shifting their “predictions,” once again, to the next larger particle collider.

 

I think stagnation describes it better. And let me be clear that the problem with this stagnation is not with the experiments. The problem is loads of wrong predictions from theoretical physicists.

 

 

 

 

[DCSaints_fan]

Yes its been hard to find anything new for decades.   Although I'd consider the detection of gravity waves a pretty darn important milestone.

 

This is one reason I am all for space exploration and colonization.   I think exploring and inhabiting other worlds, will open up many possibilities we never considered because of our Earth bias.    

 

I think Neil deGrasse Tyson commented about M-theory I think, or maybe some cosmological theory, saying how it was at the moment, impossible to test experimentally, but that he was OK with that (with a smile of course) 

[Fresh8686]

Are there any physicists here who can shed some light on the stagnation of these methodologies in some small way? I'm not a physicist by any stretch, but I have a personal hobby of studying the effect of tension on thought and how varying intensities shrink or expand the capacity for the creation of greater levels of dynamic frameworks. So much so, that most paradoxes humans hold or ascribe to are actually failures in mental tension to view reality in the proper level and breadth of context and inherent dynamicism.

In other words, people look for unification or simplification, when beyond a certain point such efforts create a corruption of dynamicism and dead-end new tiers of conclusions and avenues for expansion. Rather than simplification, in my humble opinion they may need to factor in multi-tiered methodologies running on parallel pathways, threshold breaching cascades both independent and concurrent to the change itself that breached that threshold, stay away from seeking absolutes, and instead focus on how things are tethered and the dynamics that come from the tension of that tethering.

In order to have a more dynamic mind, you need to train physically to develop more dynamic senses and I have a feeling most physicists don't stretch themselves in those ways. Judging by the article it seems that most just sit on their butts and publish imaginary **** that sounds good but doesn't actually produce anything new.
 

[CousinsCowgirl84]

I think the law of deminishing returns have applied here. And while we havnt made a lot of new break througs, we have done a great job of verifying the theory of relativity, I’d say that’s one of the biggest things that’s happened over the past ten or so years, the fact that none of the experiments have contradicted the theory is good news for our understanding of physics. 

[FanboyOf91]

1 hour ago, Fresh8686 said:

Are there any physicists here who can shed some light on the stagnation of these methodologies in some small way? I'm not a physicist by any stretch, but I have a personal hobby of studying the effect of tension on thought and how varying intensities shrink or expand the capacity for the creation of greater levels of dynamic frameworks. So much so, that most paradoxes humans hold or ascribe to are actually failures in mental tension to view reality in the proper level and breadth of context and inherent dynamicism.

In other words, people look for unification or simplification, when beyond a certain point such efforts create a corruption of dynamicism and dead-end new tiers of conclusions and avenues for expansion. Rather than simplification, in my humble opinion they may need to factor in multi-tiered methodologies running on parallel pathways, threshold breaching cascades both independent and concurrent to the change itself that breached that threshold, stay away from seeking absolutes, and instead focus on how things are tethered and the dynamics that come from the tension of that tethering.

In order to have a more dynamic mind, you need to train physically to develop more dynamic senses and I have a feeling most physicists don't stretch themselves in those ways. Judging by the article it seems that most just sit on their butts and publish imaginary **** that sounds good but doesn't actually produce anything new.
 

Not a physicist, but from what I've read, the current state-of-the-art model in particle physics (the Standard Model) is able to predict every elementary particle that's been discovered. Which is good until you realize the Standard Model was developed in the 1970s, only integrates three of the four fundamental forces of physics (strong, weak, electromagnetic), and has fairly significant limitations that prevent theoretical physicists from integrating relativity. Every weird physics theory you might have read about (supersymmetry, string theory, M theory, etc.) has been an attempt to beat the Standard Model, and every single one has utterly failed despite the best efforts of some pretty smart people. Theoretical physicists have basically prayed for the past few decades that the Large Hadron Collider finds a particle that breaks the Standard Model before they run out of money and have to work on Wall Street creating financial derivatives.