Ask HN: Is physics moving forward?

One of the biggest problem is fragmentation. People used to be "philosophers of the natural science", now they are experts in "implementations of quantum algorithms with cold ions". So its unlikely to get so many good people in one place (as the number of fields is astonishingly high) and to get progress between/outside of fields (many fields are a bit historical/arbitrary) - as many scientist (even eminent) lack of even basis knowledge in other sciences (or even - subfields). So things requiring bigger picture may be already out of scope.

When it comes to switching fields or dying - did you read: http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2015/07/will-our-und... ?

From the particle physics end, the revolution stopped because accelerator technology stalled out. If the laser-wakefield (or similar) accelerators can pan out, there may be a resurgence of the 1950's era of progress.

Just because the Standard Model happens to have panned out doesn't mean that its experimental verification wasn't a triumph. The Standard Model didn't have to be true!

The solar neutrino thing is phenomenal, at least to me, we surely see CKM mixing in the quark sector, but to see leptons change flavor, and do so on such a grand scale is astounding. When the problem first came up, flavor violation wasn't even on the table.

Precision cosmology has really laid out that there's something really, really big about Physics that we're missing. Really big. And it says it with such statistical and systematic vehemence that even the most curmudgeonly skeptic (myself included) is forced to confront it. In combination with the Bullet Cluster, there's almost no escape from the conclusion that there's something really important to be found.

Totally agreed that parameter space, without qualifiers, is a vague term.

Some parameter spaces are more important than others. I'd argue that the absence of new signals at LHC, the absence of bright new lines in Fermi/GLAST data, the absence of new lines in ultra-high energy cosmic rays, the absence of any signal in any EDM experiment, the absence of any equivalence principle violation or anything else in the gravitational sector, the absence of any experimental signal for any dark matter candidate, the continued expected behavior of the Hulse-Taylor pulsar, etc. are all important, especially in light of the problems of CP-violation, the complete incompatibility of the Standard Model with General Relativity, and the extremely good agreement between observed cosmology/BBN with the \LambdaCDM model.

A lot of really good people have pushed really hard experimentally on entirely reasonable theories, and those ideas have been severely constrained. In my own field, precision tests of gravity, theory is forced to contort itself to avoid experimental constraint. LHC is putting the screws to supersymmetry; there's still plenty of room there, but there's a lot less than there was a few years ago.

As experimentalists, we've got little patience for contrived models of parameter space. As each experiment takes 5-10 years, we only get a few in our lifetime, so we try to make our work as meaningfully-impactful as we can.

The job market for physics has not changed substantially in the last twenty years.

By 'we go slow because we will go far', I meant only to emphasize that regular incremental improvements generally trump blitzkrieg efforts.

Understanding things is certainly great, but you can't even claim you understand something new if you can not use that new understanding to achieve something you couldn't before it.

Or, more clearly, pure theory is good for mathematicians, but scientists can not even claim a theory is new if it has no application.

It's certainly not what I'm expecting. Even if it hadn't gone on to be central to our engineering, I would have liked to have known about general relativity or QCD.

Understanding things is certainly great, but you can't even claim you understand something new if you can not use that new understanding to achieve something you couldn't before it.

What do you mean by understand something new? This week we started to understand something new - understand many things new - about Pluto. Are you trying to claim that this isn't true unless we can use it somehow? What is it you're trying to say?

Or, more clearly, pure theory is good for mathematicians, but scientists can not even claim a theory is new if it has no application.

Is astronomy not a science? Or palaeontology? Or archaeology? Those are all observation-oriented sciences that don't conduct experiments but do gather information and develop knowledge.

I have no idea what it is you're trying to say about claim a theory is new - do you want to rephrase that? What would you say about the recent discover of pentaquarks? Pentaquarks are useless, but our knowledge of them is quite new.