The crisis in physics is not only about physics

This was great until the bit about medicine. Medicine has made huge, tremendous progress in the past 30 years. And there are still many serendipitous discoveries happening that lead to new drugs. I mean jesus for the first time ever, a company is going to put up a drug for approval to treat alzheimers.

Let's not lump medicine in with physics, please. Medicine has always been skeptical of theories without data and, while maybe facing issues, they aren't the same as physics.

Its ironic that a physicist, criticizing others physicists, make a common mistake that all physicists make: over simplification and acting like everything is just like physics with slight modifications.

There is alot going on in physics besides things directly related to the standard model. Running out of important things to study is of no concern. As a random example check out the microscopy work by recent nobel prize winner Eric Betzig.

I think people fail to appreciate the many frontiers that exist in just understanding how matter interracts with itself. The past was exciting because we got to discover new building blocks, but that only provides information on the periphery of whats going on. We know all sorts of stuff about the proton, but put it in a nucleus with a few dozen other nucleons and its a whole different story. All sorts of virtual particles are exchanged, its really complicated, and there literally arent any models that can predict the properties of the nucleus purely from first principles. There are important conceptual and computational innovations happening continuously to make progress on hundreds of problems just like this.

> They do not think about which hypotheses are promising because their education has not taught them to do so.

Yes! Thank you! Are the days of Rationalism behind us? Everyone these days seems focused on trying to prove if the sun will rise tomorrow.

As usual with Sabine, this article blatantly misrepresents how science is done and how actual scientists think, and serves mainly to portray herself as the only person in the field capable of rational thought. People in the comments here are picking up on this when it takes an unfair swipe at medicine, but it really applies to the whole article.

I am not going to bother doing a line-by-line rebuttal, because I've already done this for nearly a hundred of her previous articles, in forums across the internet. It just doesn't matter, because tomorrow she will put out another massively popular article with the same oversimplifications and misrepresentations, and it will get 1000 times the views any response I write could. That is what it means to be a public intellectual. I am a working scientist, which means I have neither the time to keep up nor the audience.

I’m going to have to disagree. Anyone in pharma or med devices can tell you that major innovation is basically outsourced to venture capitalists, where if successful through clinical trials (always a big if), it can become acquired. This is not a method for radical innovation, e.g. a device to stop a hazardous insulin metabolic response to digestion versus the current insulin-pump market.