The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

It is not clear to me in what way the tone of your post differs from that of the article.

Well, if you can't build your own super-energetic-particle accelerator, borrow some-one else's! In this case, that would mean telescopes pointed at jetting black holes. Those bad boys are very high energy and should be making some really exotic particles. Granted, the resolution we need isn't really there yet either, but I think that making a system spanning telescope is a bit easier than a system-spanning accelerator. Still, you're right, the next (theoretical) energy regimes are much higher than what we can manage to build today. We're forced to look at the stars for 'inspiration' for the foreseeable future. This particular golden age of physics is passed.

Here's a snippet:

> Another comment-not-a-question I constantly have to endure is that I supposedly only complain but don’t have any better advice for what physicists should do.

> First, it’s a stupid criticism that tells you more about the person criticizing than the person being criticized.

These feel closer in tone to "personal attack" on her critics to me than a discussion of their ideas.

There is also discussion of ideas in the article, which I have no problem with. But snippets like that feel like unnecessary salt that doesn't add anything. While her critics are (I agree, mostly) wrong, there is no reason to call them stupid.

> The modern astrophysical world view, which began with Galileo, and its challenge to the adequacy of the senses to reveal reality, have left us a universe of whose qualities we know no more than the way they affect our measuring instruments, and — in the words of Eddington — "the former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber." Instead of objective qualities, in other words, we find instruments, and instead of nature or the universe — in the words of Heisenberg — man encounters only himself.

-- Hannah Arendt, "Vita Activa"

Heisenberg and others knew that, I'm sure many current scientists do too, but going by output, the situation is dire, the intertubes are full of people talking about being "unbiased" or "objective" even about human matters, when not even the hard sciences are truly objective! It's like people simply agreed that because they're not religious or whatever, they're now correct. If they are wrong about anything, since they supposedly are on the side of science, they can be sure that will be corrected, so they can consider themselves correct even today. Before you know it, you have superstitious people who think their superstition constitutes the absence, the opposite of superstition.

We went from Heisenberg to a chemistry teacher cooking crack while his assistant gets all bug-eyed about the power of "science, bitch!". Or this "critique" of the game Soma I saw recently, where the Youtuber mentions that "people who are smarter than you and I are saying the universe might be a simulation". What I see is people booby-trapping everything with stupidity.. making things so stupid, and then glorifying that, that injecting even a lick of seriousness into anything would cause massive offense, hurt a lot of egos. To me it's the analog of religious fundamentalists going to church 20 times a day to get hyped and primed with caricatures of those not of their flock, and fantasies of how great it's all going to be when those are gone.

But I'm not sure I can blame physicists for that. I don't know enough about what they do, I see what "everyone" else is doing, and that's horrid by itself. It's not the job of physicists to ask deep questions about what it all means, it's the job of everybody.

> There is nothing "obviously wrong" about the standard Copenhagen interpretation

Can you tell me how to calculate whether a system of particles will cause another system of particles to collapse or not?

Can you tell me under what circumstances a system of particles will evolve unitarily or not?

Can you shade the region of the spacetime diagram of EPR where the wavefunction is collapsed? How about in a delayed choice quantum eraser experiment?

If you tell me "you're not allowed to ask those questions" (or "hm, I never thought of that!"), then you're directly illustrating the complaint here about physics!

The common narrative is that Copenhagen, many worlds, and the other interpretations of QM are all equivalent, but they are not. Copenhagen adds an extra physical event-- collapse-- where the wavefunction is suddenly nonunitary. The burden is on Copenhagen to tell me how and when this happens, and in fact to prove that it happens at all. Many worlds, on the other hand, predicts the same phenomenon-- the apparent collapse of a wavefunction to an eigenstate-- without adding unitarity violation, or any other phenomena at all beyond the normal, extremely well-verified mechanics of multi-particle system scattering; it merely treats the environment is a multi-particle quantum system.

Many worlds is the null hypothesis (no, the extra worlds are not extra suppositions, they are predictions of known physical laws), and the burden is on Copenhagen to show that unitarity violation exists, and the burden is extremely high (possibly insurmountable?) for EPR and eraser experiments.

When Copenhagen was devised, most believed that there was some "underlying state" in QM, and that measurement told you something about what the underlying state was. Bell's theorem should have sent a shockwave through the community which forced everyone to reevaluate fundamental assumptions and self-correct wrong ideas. But by accident of history, John Bell was too shy to publish in a major journal, and no one even read his result for four years. The implications of Bell's theorem were slow to diffuse through the community, and so the disruptive moment of reckoning that should have happened never came. By the time it was well-accepted, the narrative in physics had become "you're not allowed to ask about what quantum mechanics means, just shut up and calculate", and so the cognitive dissonance was cast aside. Annealing this attitude and this misstep away is taking excruciating decades.

EDIT: I also don't mean to imply that there aren't deep and beautiful things in modern physics. There are! But physics is concertedly avoiding asking deep questions in areas where (I strongly believe) it is most important. The claim that "the meaning of QM is outside the scope of science" is exemplary, I think, of that attitude.