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Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

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Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#161
post #86

I strongly disagree that the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years. We have been looking really hard for answers to persistent questions. While we have not found affirmative answers, physicists have systematically ruled out option after option after option. We have not yet discovered a unified-theory-of-everything, but we know a whole lot more about what that theory is not . Furthermore, the past 40…

Lee Smolin deals with this question in Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum. He relies on the same facts, makes many of the same points you do, and he comes to the exact opposite conclusion (assuming, of course, that I actually understand your position fully, and his as well). That's interesting to me because I think it might point to a philosophical disagreement between your views and his, especially in epistemology.

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MOND is a better explanation than dark energy.

There was an article linked here just a week or two ago. Its claim was that the distance measurements used in cosmology may be wrong on larger scales. With the correction there is no need for MOND or dark energy. This needs confirmation of course. I have yet to see the "expected" galactic rotation curves that are contradicted by observation a lead to ideas about dark MATTER. I'm mean I've seen the curves but cant fin…

> I'm mean I've seen the curves but cant find the math behind them. You often see weak references to Keplers law which doesnt even apply, so that leaves me very skeptical.

Huh?

This is directly derived from 3rd law

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#164
Does anyone else feel like the abstractions and models in physics have gone passed the point where the casual outsider (even a technically and scientifically minded one) can no longer intuitively understand it?

Because that's how I feel. There are so many things I just don't understand now like:

1. I originally thought the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle was a natural consequence of using particles (photos) for measurement. Instead however it seems to be a fundamental property of the universe, which I only learned after finding out most of the mass of hadrons comes from the relativistic motion of quarks and it explains why hadrons don't collapse to a point.

2. What does it even mean to create more space? The universe is expanding. Ok, I can accept that. But what does it mean?

3. I find the models for dark matter and dark energy to be... unsatisfying. I realize there's experimental evidence for unobservable mass but it feels like a fudge.

4. Of course we still have no quantum model for gravity.

5. I don't really understand what a fundamental force really is. Like why does electromagnetism have a repulsive opposite but gravity doesn't? When I tried to look into this I ended up down some rabbit hole of "gauge forces" and got completely lost. Why is the Higgs Field not a force?

6. Why are some predictions of the Standard Model so incredibly accurate (like the magnetic moment of an electron IIRC?) while others are so incredibly inaccurate (eg IIRC the QFT prediction of vacuum energy is off by 120 orders of magnitude).

7. Why are there exactly three generations of particles (ignoring the Higgs)? What does a generation even mean?

I could go on. I don't for a second mean to suggest any of these notions are wrong. It's just that the models have gotten so complex (it seems?) that it just feels like something huge is missing, something that will eventually seem obvious in hindsight. Or am I just a lemur trying to figure out how an airplane works?

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We just need to innovate" K.

In this case, though, the idea that we need to resolve inconsistencies is the correct diagnosis and shines a light on the incredible failure of the prevailing institutions. Take for example the idea that a photon is both a particle and a wave. This dogma has been force fed to students for decades without the glaring inconsistency being resolved, or even pointed to as a thing that needs resolving — something is either…

That inconsistency was subject to an immense amount of scrutiny by thousands of scientists for over a hundred years. Albert Einstein received a Nobel Prize for resolving the inconsistency. The theory that ultimately resolved it is called quantum mechanics. That's no longer an inconsistency.

Better examples would be the inconsistencies between general relativity, which demands curved spacetime, and quantum mechanics, which prohibits curved space. This is a very real inconsistency at the heart of modern physics. Many, many people are actively working on solutions for it. Search for Grand Unified Theory or Theory of Everything for more information. Candidate theories include string theory and its derivatives, loop quantum gravity, etc. There are plenty more.

The problem is that designing experiments for these theories is Hard. Big-O Capital H Hard. My flight's about to board, maybe I can expand on it during my layover.

Dark matter is another example. Observations of the speeds and orbits of stars in galaxies and galaxies in galactic clusters are not consistent with our measurements of their masses. Plenty of candidates for dark matter have been and are continuing to be tested.

Candidates include MOND, which supposes that our theories of gravity need to be modified when acceleration is astronomically low. We have designed experiments to support or disprove these theories and most of the results have landed on the side of disproving them. (search for "bullet cluster" or "dark matterless galaxies")

Another candidate is MACHOs. ("MAssive Compact Halo Object") Basically the universe is teeming with small black holes, brown dwarfs, loose planets unassociated with any star, basically a lot of stuff we can't see. We have designed and executed experiments to search for these, but the results have concluded that there are insufficient such objects to explain the inconsistency.

The third candidate with traction is WIMPs, or "weakly interacting massive particle". Basically theorizing that there are other types of unobserved particles that have mass but do not interact via the electromagnetic force, which makes them very difficult to observe. There was hope that neutrinos could explain all these, especially when it was demonstrated that neutrinos have mass. However, experiments trying to bound the mass of the neutrino have shown they are not nearly massive enough to explain the observations. Experiments are ongoing to find these particles, but have yet not discovered anything we can't already explain. However, there's a problem: maybe they're just too difficult for any experiment to observe. In that case, we might be SOL.

These are just two examples. All of science are all the other examples.

The idea that this person is the only person probing inconsistencies is pure hubris. It's not a useful starting point for a conversation, unless the point of the conversation is to talk about how awesome you are and how much everyone else sucks. Which is all I got from this article.

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A photon isn't both a particle and a wave. It's something else that happens to share some features with both.

>> A photon isn't both a particle and a wave. It's something else that happens to share some features with both. But physicists have given up on figuring out what it IS. They have decided that having math that can predict the outcome of experiments is enough. They're not wrong, but it feels rather unsatisfying. IMHO there have been a couple avenues worth exploring that are being largely ignored.

> But physicists have given up on figuring out what it IS.

It depends on what you mean by that. What they've given up on is trying to find some sort of anthropocentric analogy. It's understandable that this is unsatisfying, since analogies are fundamental to how we understand things. Unfortunately, there's no reason to believe that a good analogy will exist.

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#167
post #86

I strongly disagree that the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years. We have been looking really hard for answers to persistent questions. While we have not found affirmative answers, physicists have systematically ruled out option after option after option. We have not yet discovered a unified-theory-of-everything, but we know a whole lot more about what that theory is not . Furthermore, the past 40…

> I strongly disagree that the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years.

I think, we are getting a peak at the politics of the practice of science when you look at the article and comments, like this ones parent.

A bunch of this is about the unobserved. The theoretical rather than then experimentally observed (think scientific method).

Whose theories get the funding to be looked into? Whose ideas are published and talked about in the popular places?

A post of Sabine's talked about how she thinks the crisis in physics isn't about physics [1]. Is it instead about the politics of the money and popularity? Is it about the psychology of being wrong? I mean, different physicists contradict each other and the truth isn't what's popular it is what's observed, right? If people contradict each other they can't all be right.

What's most interesting, to me, is how this isn't about what's been observed but all those human system qualities that people bring to the table.

[1] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-crisis-in-phys...

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#168
post #133
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no believing in them. Gravitational waves have been observed and you can't "believe" or "not believe" in them anymore than you can "believe" or "not believe" in electricity.

The observations are still subject to debate. The signals are far below the noise and can only be discerned with fancy statistics, which some groups have failed to reproduce. See Hossenfelder's detailed critique at https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/09/whats-up-with-ligo...

No, it is not a detailed critique, it is a list of little more than rumours. Hossenfelder is satisfied with describing the LIGO collaboration as suspicious and then backing off with ”of course, I don’t belive this.

If you belive that clickbait I feel bad for you, but it’s too low quality to spend time debunking.

Re: Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

#169
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"the problem has been that there was a theory that could explain almost perfectly everything within a certain region of physics, but can't easily be extended." Sounds a lot like overfitting.

If that’s what it sounds like then that is a failure of my description: the problem is nothing at all like overfitting, and casting it in that light would be pointless.

How many free parameters do "the foundations of physics" allow?

I was concerned a few years back when a "blip" at CERN resulted in theoretical physicists publishing 300+ different theories to explain it in a short period of time. All of these theories were presumably consistent with "the foundations of physics". And I guess that "blip" got rejected as a not something worth explaining anyway.

Sounds like post-hoc overfitting to me.

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