Prof. Sabine Hossenfelder has a great article on the lack of progress in fundamentals of physics: "The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal " [1]
Choice quotes:
>We know this both because dark matter is merely a placeholder for something we don’t understand, and because the mathematical formulation of particle physics is incompatible with the math we use for gravity. Physicists knew about these two problems already in 1930s. And until the 1970s, they made great progress. But since then, theory development in the foundations of physics has stalled. If experiments find anything new now, that will be despite, not because of, some ten-thousands of wrong predictions.
>Ten-thousands of wrong predictions sounds dramatic, but it’s actually an underestimate. I am merely summing up predictions that have been made for physics beyond the standard model which the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was supposed to find: All the extra dimensions in their multiple shapes and configurations, all the pretty symmetry groups, all the new particles with the fancy names. You can estimate the total number of such predictions by counting the papers, or, alternatively, the people working in the fields and their average productivity.
According to her, and many other physicists, there hasn't been any major progress in phenomenology since 1970s when Higgs boson was postulated.
The theories that we were dealing with around the dawn of QM/GR were relatively tractable; we could make long-enough-term predictions about the behavior of many systems and we had a library of observations that clearly and reproducibly deviated from those predictions. We had even begun to draw vague correlations among the diverging data.
Today, we have experimental data that diverges from predictions... regarding... the number of neutrino collisions we can observe in certain giant tanks of highly pure liquids, and... the scale of variation in the cosmic microwave background and long-range mass density is too small, oh, and... galaxies rotate kinda weird... free neutron lifetime measurements disagree by about 1.1%.... there's not quite enough lithium in the Universe (no, really)... good luck tying all this together into a theory of everything!
Could Einstein, being a patent clerk, have gotten his papers published these days? Is there room for non-professionals, or people outside the system to come in and disrupt it? It seems that there's a lot of disregard of wild alternative theories like quantum mechanics would have seemed in the early 20th century.
Einstein was a patent clerk at a time when government funding for science was vastly lower than today and there were research and teaching jobs for only a small fraction of physics PhDs. Also there were much fewer PhDs back then, so with a a PhD from one of the most prestigious schools, that patent clerk was in fact a physics insider.
> Also there were much fewer PhDs back then, so with a a PhD from one of the most prestigious schools, that patent clerk was in fact a physics insider.
Didn't he get his PhD awarded only after he was recognised for his work?
His “miracle year” of 1905 was, in order, on the topics of the photoelectric affect published in June, Brownian motion (his PhD thesis) published in July, special relativity published in September, and matter-energy equivalence published in November.
I think so. For Einstein, job #1 was to bring his work to the attention of some of his peers, and it's even easier to do that today, when you can just cold-email a Nobel laureate or a Fields medalist.
All name physicists are flooded with crank emails of the >>EinSteIn WaZ tEh RoNg I aM cLeVeReReR!!1!<< type.
So the odds of a truly revolutionary theory getting taken seriously based on a cold-email are significantly less than zero.
The problem is very obvious - science was both more open and more selective a century ago. There were far fewer PhDs, but they were of far higher quality. And the networks were smaller, friendlier (mostly), and more personal.
Now we have an industrialised corporate physics industry turning out thousands of PhDs a year. Most have been steered away from fundamental questions towards tweaks of the Standard Model - because anything else is career suicide and impossible to get funding for.
And after all of that, there's far more money in finance. So that's where the best people go to waste their talent.
So email a non-name physics professor. They'll probably be clever enough to recognize the revolutionaryness (?) of a theory even if they couldn't invent the theory themselves.
Math, unfortunately, has never been my game. How often does a likelihood or probability become significantly less than 0. Isn't 0 the floor? Or is 0 the 50/50 value?
I agree on the wasting of money for the wallpaper pattern that is called a degree.
My understanding is that there is still disagreement around this. One of the lines of debate is whether his wife Mileva Marić did most of the grunt-work that was necessary to prepare his papers to the level of acceptance for scientific publications at that time.
The overall narrative that seems to emerge is that he was undisciplined as an undergrad at the ETH in Zurich, and never would have landed a graduate posting, and the patent office job was a fallback. Mileva was more diligent and helped him out quite a bit.
Off the top of my head, they've made progress in quark-gluon plasma, discovering the AdS/CFT correspondence, and practical techniques for quantum computing. There's been enormous progress in computational methods, too. There's also been something very interesting going on with twistors. Oh, and 50 years ago quantum field theory was not on a formally sound footing, but now it is (not completely but it's closer). There's also a lot of progress in renormalization (RG group flow).
Oh, and don't forget about fifty years of Moore's law. We have solid state to thank for that.
I'm sure I could think of more if I gave it more time. The truth is that there have been no earthshattierng paradigm shifts in the last fifty years, but that's OK because they tend to happen once every couple centuries.
Fractional quantum hall effect is a massive one. All the action is in condensed matter. Somehow less newsworthy despite being closer to practical applications than high energy physics.
The last time we moved fundamental physics forward we got nuclear weapons. Thus, one could argue that there's good and bad parts to our current technological stagnation. Imagine having a spaceship that could travel at relativistic speeds. Can you imagine getting into a traffic accident with that thing?
Choice quotes:
>We know this both because dark matter is merely a placeholder for something we don’t understand, and because the mathematical formulation of particle physics is incompatible with the math we use for gravity. Physicists knew about these two problems already in 1930s. And until the 1970s, they made great progress. But since then, theory development in the foundations of physics has stalled. If experiments find anything new now, that will be despite, not because of, some ten-thousands of wrong predictions.
>Ten-thousands of wrong predictions sounds dramatic, but it’s actually an underestimate. I am merely summing up predictions that have been made for physics beyond the standard model which the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was supposed to find: All the extra dimensions in their multiple shapes and configurations, all the pretty symmetry groups, all the new particles with the fancy names. You can estimate the total number of such predictions by counting the papers, or, alternatively, the people working in the fields and their average productivity.
According to her, and many other physicists, there hasn't been any major progress in phenomenology since 1970s when Higgs boson was postulated.
[1] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-present-phase-...