And, embarrassingly enough, that’s plain to see for everyone who does not work in the field. Over and over again I have heard them justifying their mindless production of mathematical fiction as “healthy speculation” – entirely ignoring that this type of speculation has demonstrably not worked for decades and continues to not work. Instead of examining the way that they propose hypotheses and revising their methods, theoretical physicists have developed a habit of putting forward entirely baseless speculations. If they react at all, they are insulted if I point out that social reinforcement – aka group-think – befalls us all, unless we actively take measures to prevent it. I encounter this dismissive behavior personally pretty much every time I try to explain to a cosmologist or particle physicists that we need smarter ways to share information and make decisions in large, like-minded communities. None found evidence of anything beyond what we already know.īut theoretical physicists did not learn the lesson and still ignore the philosophy and sociology of science. The consequence has been that experiments in the foundations of physics past the 1970s have only confirmed the already existing theories. They believe they are too intelligent to have to think about what they are doing. Such self-reflection would require knowledge of the philosophy and sociology of science, and those are subjects physicists merely make dismissive jokes about. They do not think about which hypotheses are promising because their education has not taught them to do so. But physicists still operate by the “just look” idea like this was the 19th century.
The only way to avoid being sucked into this vicious cycle is to choose carefully which hypothesis to put to the test. A $40 billion particle collider is such a dead end. This cycle must eventually lead into a dead end when experiments become simply too expensive to remain affordable. Lack of progress increases the costs of further experiment. It’s a vicious cycle: Costly experiments result in lack of progress. And lacking those discoveries, the technological progress that would be needed to keep experiments economically viable never materializes. With fewer experiments, serendipitous discoveries become increasingly unlikely. This is why, in physics today, we have collaborations of thousands of people operating machines that cost billions of dollars. Technological advances have not kept size and expenses manageable. As physics has progressed, the foundations have become increasingly harder to probe by experiment. The major cause of this stagnation is that physics has changed, but physicists have not changed their methods.
And they are as unsolved today as they were then. 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. The last to-be-confirmed particle was the Higgs-boson, predicted in the 1960s, measured in 2012. Sure, some aspects of these theories have only been experimentally confirmed later.
Ever since then, the theories we use to describe observations have remained unchanged. In the foundations of physics, we have not seen progress since the mid 1970s when the standard model of particle physics was completed.
0 kommentar(er)
