Is foundational physics stuck?

[Markus Hanke]

This is with reference to the following recent short video by Sabine Hossenfelder:

I must say that, while I don’t necessarily share all of her pessimism, I do find myself agreeing to some of what she says here. My problem though is that I have never myself worked in professional academia, and have only a peripheral awareness of how exactly funding, the “paper mill” etc work when it comes to research in the foundations of physics. I also haven’t read her book Lost in Maths. I am thus curious to hear from those on this forum who do work in professional academia - what do you think about her comments? Is there any merit in the notion that there are systemic issues in academia, specifically in physics?

She does have a good point though in that we have made little progress in the foundations of physics since the ~1970s, and that much of current work feels a lot like people randomly and blindly groping in the dark by inventing maths that don’t seem to be motivated by any real-world data points, hoping to just stumble across that next breakthrough. This isn’t really how science should work.

Comments, anyone?

[studiot]

1 hour ago, Markus Hanke said:

This is with reference to the following recent short video by Sabine Hossenfelder:

I must say that, while I don’t necessarily share all of her pessimism, I do find myself agreeing to some of what she says here. My problem though is that I have never myself worked in professional academia, and have only a peripheral awareness of how exactly funding, the “paper mill” etc work when it comes to research in the foundations of physics. I also haven’t read her book Lost in Maths. I am thus curious to hear from those on this forum who do work in professional academia - what do you think about her comments? Is there any merit in the notion that there are systemic issues in academia, specifically in physics?

She does have a good point though in that we have made little progress in the foundations of physics since the ~1970s, and that much of current work feels a lot like people randomly and blindly groping in the dark by inventing maths that don’t seem to be motivated by any real-world data points, hoping to just stumble across that next breakthrough. This isn’t really how science should work.

Comments, anyone?

 

I can't agree with Sabine or her harangue. Nor was I impressed by the camerawork continually switching viewpoints.

I don't agree with her premise that there has been no progress in the last 50 years. Just that she is looking in the wrong place for it.

 

Yes I am sure there are problems in academia, but I have emboldened your second question as it contains where I think some of those problems lie.

"Specifically" is the key to me. Specialisation.

Not just in Science, but since you ask, specifically in Physics.

Here I have to confess to being partly a victim of my own comment since I can really only speak authoritatively for the UK and there is a much wider world out there.

 

That is not to say I think everything in the garden is rosy, but there are also external factors in play, the largest being political interference.

[Markus Hanke]

40 minutes ago, studiot said:

I don't agree with her premise that there has been no progress in the last 50 years. Just that she is looking in the wrong place for it.

 

My understanding of this was that she meant progress specifically in the foundations of physics - we are still essentially using the same fundamental models (GR and SM) we did back in the 1970s, and the fundamental issues associated with these models still remain unresolved. This isn’t to say that these models don’t work (they clearly do), but that the approach we take towards the known issues with them doesn’t seem to be working.

Of course, much progress has been made on the finer details, but not on the overall paradigms.

48 minutes ago, studiot said:

but there are also external factors in play, the largest being political interference.

Could you elaborate on this a bit more?

[StringJunky]

3 hours ago, Markus Hanke said:

This is with reference to the following recent short video by Sabine Hossenfelder:

I must say that, while I don’t necessarily share all of her pessimism, I do find myself agreeing to some of what she says here. My problem though is that I have never myself worked in professional academia, and have only a peripheral awareness of how exactly funding, the “paper mill” etc work when it comes to research in the foundations of physics. I also haven’t read her book Lost in Maths. I am thus curious to hear from those on this forum who do work in professional academia - what do you think about her comments? Is there any merit in the notion that there are systemic issues in academia, specifically in physics?

She does have a good point though in that we have made little progress in the foundations of physics since the ~1970s, and that much of current work feels a lot like people randomly and blindly groping in the dark by inventing maths that don’t seem to be motivated by any real-world data points, hoping to just stumble across that next breakthrough. This isn’t really how science should work.

Comments, anyone?

Would a good analogy of what she's saying is like learning the etymology and structures in a language in order to understand the intentions of Shakespeare? What I'm saying is that you can have all the mental and physical tools at your disposal, but you still need insight and intuition. What is missing is someone having a paradigm-changing insight  these last 50 years. It might not be a fault of science per se, just that we need the next Newton, Einstein, Galileo et al to move things forward.

[swansont]

42 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

What is missing is someone having a paradigm-changing insight  these last 50 years.

You also need the experimental tools to test ideas. At what scale does the next fundamental layer live? It took decades to scale up particle colliders to confirm the standard model. We know there’s physics beyond that, but if you don’t want the math to lead the way (though I disagree with Markus that this isn’t how it should work) you need to scale up the capability to probe higher energies.

Similarly for length and time scales. If the new physics doesn’t manifest at the scale we can probe, we’re out of luck hoping for experiments to lead the way.

(and atomic clocks have gained several orders of magnitude in precision the last ~30 years, so my colleagues and I in that community have done our part)

So it may be like going to the north pole and complaining that you can’t see any penguins. They don’t live where you’re looking.

[studiot]

18 minutes ago, swansont said:

You also need the experimental tools to test ideas.

 

Quote

Meat Loaf

You took the words right out of my mouth

 

 

58 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

What is missing is someone having a paradigm-changing insight  these last 50 years. It might not be a fault of science per se, just that we need the next Newton, Einstein, Galileo et al to move things forward.

 

Newton and Einstein had the advantage of practical work already done by someone else.

The point of this practical work was that it did not conform to the then thinking.

The influence of both their insights not only answered the original problem that arose from observation not matching theoretical expectation, but spread far and wide into many other disciplines. That is why they were so important.

The practical came first the insight followed on.

So there is little point complaining that theorists have not come up with anything new.

 

1 hour ago, Markus Hanke said:

Could you elaborate on this a bit more?

 

Again from the UK point of view.

A century and more ago the UK government began creating research establishments at University and above level.
These embraced diverse subjects from agriculture and forestry to hydraulics research to military to building and many more.

In the last 50 or so years, successive governments have been busy closing them down and/or selling  them off but generally pulling out of this sort of thing.

We are steadily loosing the capability to do the experiments that throw up the big questions of "why does this happen this way, and what else can I do with it. ?"

 

 

53 minutes ago, swansont said:

So it may be like going to the north pole and complaining that you can’t see any penguins. They don’t live where you’re looking.

Love it. +1

[joigus]

1 hour ago, swansont said:

So it may be like going to the north pole and complaining that you can’t see any penguins. They don’t live where you’re looking.

Exactly. The most significant critical experiments are far fewer and farther between. This gives more than enough time for people to fall into what I would call theoretical "bubbles" of (perhaps) unnecessary hidden assumptions. You could call this "theoretical daydreaming". After a while a dangerous area of misleading terrain forms. People involved embrace theoretically very promising, very interesting ideas, but with a lot of semi-digested ancillary junk that maybe shouldn't be there in the first place.

Good topic. I did notice Hossenfelder's pessimism too.

[sethoflagos]

The thought that struck me in this presentation was the distinction between theoretical research that is observation driven and that which is not.

Clearly, the twin pillars of GR and QM arose out of trying to resolve observed phenomena that did not agree with the prevailing concensus theory of the time (eg photoelectric effect, orbit of Mercury etc)

Today, attempts to resolve the Hubble tension perhaps falls into the same category.

It seems that Sabine's issues are more associated with the the various "What If?"-type explorations that have little to no observational justification. Such as "What if the universe isn't flat" in advance of any clear observational evidence that it isn't. Similarly, what observed failing of GR is the quest to quantise gravity actually trying to address?

There's no denying that such questions are interesting to speculate on. In much the same way as "What if ancient Egyptians were educated by aliens?" 

[swansont]

1 hour ago, sethoflagos said:

Clearly, the twin pillars of GR and QM arose out of trying to resolve observed phenomena that did not agree with the prevailing concensus theory of the time (eg photoelectric effect, orbit of Mercury etc)

It’s not clear to me that GR was a response specifically to observed anomalies - not in the same manner as e.g. proposing an undiscovered planet (Vulcan) was - rather than there being the issue of not knowing how gravity worked and knowing there must be something beyond Newton. Others worked the problem, too. Einstein happened to be right. The other efforts were abandoned.

But we’re in the same boat now, since we know there must be physics beyond the standard model. We have to figure out dark matter and dark energy. 

[MigL]

It seems the problem is easily recognizable, and has been known about.
We have even discussed it on this forum.
Up until a century ago, Physics was done by taking experimental evidence, and 'fitting' a theory to it.
Sometimes things progressed smoothly, such as Faraday's work leading to Maxwell's, which ultimately led Einstein to SR and GR.
And sometimes WAGs had to be resorted to when unsurmountable blocks were encountered, such as Plank's resolution of the UV catastrophe or deBroglie's wave nature of matter that allowed progress from the Bohr atom to the wave formulation of QM. But these were still easily verifiable with experiment.
Since those times, theoretical Physics has vastly outpaced experimental Physics, maybe it's just more 'glamorous'. or , maybe the cost of the experimental work has sky-rocketed, I don't know, but the costs involved with LHCs, Space telescopes, LIGO, etc. that are needed to verify our theories will only grow, and the result is theory and experiment diverging even more.

We have no way of testing theories involving String theory, or LQG for that matter, dark 'stuff', nor the interior of Black Holes or the universe before the recombination era, but we might someday, and it will necessitate a possible large 're-structuring' of the Physics we take for granted, as by then, theoretical work will have gone even further.

So, while we all recognize the problem, no solution is forthcoming. Should we stop theoretical work until experiment catches up ?
I don't think so. Who knows, some of these 'outlandish' theories, and their beautiful math, might be 're-purposed for more 'mundane' Physics.

Edited November 5 by MigL

[Mordred]

While I agree with the comments above a couple other considerations in the past few decades several milestone advances have been reached.

Examples being discovery of the Higgs boson this has the effect of causing a rather large paradigm shift.

Detecting gravity waves

Confirming neutrino mass 

Improved measurements of the CMB.  Reduced number of possible geometries of the universe significantly. 

Those are just some examples  in many ways were still catching up to those new available findings listed above.

 

Edited November 5 by Mordred

[swansont]

Gravitational waves were part of GR, though. Confirming a prediction. But as more data comes in, it might reveal a lot.

Neutrino mass, OTOH, is not part of the SM AFAIK. So theory lags there.

[Markus Hanke]

Some very goods point made here by @studiot, @swansont, @joigus, @Mordred and everyone else. Thanks for all your input.

For me as an interested amateur who isn’t entirely ignorant of modern physics, it’s just that I think I’m going to scream if, on my daily arXiv check, I see one more paper of the type “Dark Matter as weakly interacting pink-flavoured superaxions with fractional charge and complex-valued spin. And they make coffee too”. So much of what is written in modern papers just seems like straight-out WAGs to me, and I find it frustrating. The impression I’m getting is that people write papers just for the sake of having publications to their name (which is presumably connected to research funding), and not for their scientific value. And I think that’s at least part of what Prof Hossenfelder is saying.

PS. Just for the record, I’m not especially fond of her rhetoric either, but I think some of her points are worth talking about.

[Mordred]

Lol Though I never push personal favorite theories most my studies revolve around sterile neutrinos being a viable possibility. I do see a ton of lousy examinations of that possibility though.

 Part of attraction in that regards is that anti-neutrinos have never been detected though predicted by the models.

That aside I find all the push of seeking "new physics" support articles rather annoying. I feel in those cases one should only look for "new physics " once all  possibility of mainstream or current physics is clearly evident. 

I recall all the different Universe geometry papers prior to WMAP and Planck datasets the variations of possible geometries were staggering. 

 So I tend to think of the current craze topic articles rather normal, as they've been around for pretty much any physics topic particularly when describing dynamics etc poorly understood or has a good body of clear evidence.

Something that is oft overlooked in physics though is the mathematical developments finding ways to reduce computations of complex systems or finding means to organize all the possibilities such as through the use of gauge groups is oft never a big media blitz so you rarely hear of them.

 Yet they directly relate to development of fundamental physics . Too often it's the big media hits that get recognized rather than all the seemingly little discoveries or improved methodologies yet the little improvements could very well have a far greater range of applicability across other theories where they can be deployed.

Edited November 6 by Mordred

[Genady]

5 hours ago, Markus Hanke said:

So much of what is written in modern papers just seems like straight-out WAGs to me, and I find it frustrating.

I understand your frustration, but you don't think that such papers hinder a progress of foundational physics, do you?

[swansont]

6 hours ago, Markus Hanke said:

Some very goods point made here by @studiot, @swansont, @joigus, @Mordred and everyone else. Thanks for all your input.

For me as an interested amateur who isn’t entirely ignorant of modern physics, it’s just that I think I’m going to scream if, on my daily arXiv check, I see one more paper of the type “Dark Matter as weakly interacting pink-flavoured superaxions with fractional charge and complex-valued spin. And they make coffee too”. So much of what is written in modern papers just seems like straight-out WAGs to me, and I find it frustrating. The impression I’m getting is that people write papers just for the sake of having publications to their name (which is presumably connected to research funding), and not for their scientific value. And I think that’s at least part of what Prof Hossenfelder is saying.

PS. Just for the record, I’m not especially fond of her rhetoric either, but I think some of her points are worth talking about.

The thing is, some of these models are being eliminated or constrained by experiment. I recall seeing axion and dark matter talks at conferences, where atomic clocks played a role in the experiments.

This is kinda the norm. There were e.g. a bunch of models of the atom back in the day, but we don’t learn about them because they lost out once there was enough data to test them. There are competing hypotheses everywhere that get forgotten because they ended up being wrong. ArXiv just makes it easier to notice the current ones.

 

[DanMP]

2 hours ago, swansont said:

I recall seeing axion and dark matter talks at conferences, where atomic clocks played a role in the experiments.

Interesting, please elaborate, or offer a link.

[swansont]

2 minutes ago, DanMP said:

Interesting, please elaborate, or offer a link.

Searching for topological dark matter with atomic clocks

https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys3137

Axions

https://inspirehep.net/literature/1736720

[studiot]

9 hours ago, Markus Hanke said:

Some very goods point made here by @studiot, @swansont, @joigus, @Mordred and everyone else. Thanks for all your input.

For me as an interested amateur who isn’t entirely ignorant of modern physics, it’s just that I think I’m going to scream if, on my daily arXiv check, I see one more paper of the type “Dark Matter as weakly interacting pink-flavoured superaxions with fractional charge and complex-valued spin. And they make coffee too”. So much of what is written in modern papers just seems like straight-out WAGs to me, and I find it frustrating. The impression I’m getting is that people write papers just for the sake of having publications to their name (which is presumably connected to research funding), and not for their scientific value. And I think that’s at least part of what Prof Hossenfelder is saying.

PS. Just for the record, I’m not especially fond of her rhetoric either, but I think some of her points are worth talking about.

But is it proper Barista coffee ?

😀

 

But seriously one further point occurs to me.

When I was at university they were predicting the next major 'explosion' in Science would be in the Biosciences, not the older physical ones.

Well of course they were right and pqarticularly in the last 20 years or so the biosciences have changed out of all earlier recognition.

Look at biophysics and biomaths to see this.

Note this is not 'applications of ..'  with biology as the subsidiary subject.

It is now truly the other way round.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biophysics

 

 

[Markus Hanke]

13 hours ago, studiot said:

But is it proper Barista coffee ?

No lol +1

It’s cheap freeze-dried instant, that requires the addition of liberal doses of dihydrogenmonoxide

16 hours ago, Genady said:

I understand your frustration, but you don't think that such papers hinder a progress of foundational physics, do you?

You see, this is what I’m unclear about. Could someone explain to me how the research funding process actually works? If I’m a random academician somewhere who needs funds to perform an experiment (or simply further my research in other ways), how would I go about this? And how does my track record of published papers (number of them, referenced by others etc) play into this? Have I got better chances the more I have published?

I never fully understood this process, tbh.

[swansont]

21 hours ago, studiot said:

When I was at university they were predicting the next major 'explosion' in Science would be in the Biosciences, not the older physical ones.

Well of course they were right and pqarticularly in the last 20 years or so the biosciences have changed out of all earlier recognition.

But, to the point of the OP, was this an advance of the foundations of biology? Or was it the exploitation of new tools that became available after the new foundational issue had been discovered (DNA) . I’d argue the latter, much like the last 100 years of physics have seen an exploitation of QM after its discovery, expansion (e.g. QED, QCD) and refinement. 

[Mordred]

9 hours ago, Markus Hanke said:

 

You see, this is what I’m unclear about. Could someone explain to me how the research funding process actually works? If I’m a random academician somewhere who needs funds to perform an experiment (or simply further my research in other ways), how would I go about this? And how does my track record of published papers (number of them, referenced by others etc) play into this? Have I got better chances the more I have published?

I never fully understood this process, tbh.

The funding aspect of papers do help establish expertise on a given topic provided they are well done. Typically ones that are extremely well done will get higher citations.

These type of papers would make getting further research grants easier however it's not particularly based on sheer number of articles but rather quality of said article in the potential of advancing a particular field of study.

 Articles that examine previous written paper by other authors also count. In many ways those articles serve as a portfolio to eventually gaining the funding to get test equipment etc to test a given theory but that takes time and will require establishing expertise which papers can be useful in doing.

However papers are not the only means. Work history at research facilities also count for much.

In many ways getting grants is much like applying for a job. Research papers and work history makes the process easier by establishing your a good investment. 

Though both can also hinder through too many poorly written papers (tends to establish the author as a crank)  or poor work history record.

Edited November 7 by Mordred

[studiot]

37 minutes ago, swansont said:

But, to the point of the OP, was this an advance of the foundations of biology? Or was it the exploitation of new tools that became available after the new foundational issue had been discovered (DNA) . I’d argue the latter, much like the last 100 years of physics have seen an exploitation of QM after its discovery, expansion (e.g. QED, QCD) and refinement. 

Both.

Just as new tools have advance Physics, Chemistry and Maths and other sciences.

But since they were already more advanced than Biology perhaps the effect was less.

 

Other Sciences with new paradigms include Astronomy, Geology and Cosmology.

 

Equally the successful search for the background radiation is a good example of Theory predicting something and then experiment eventually confirming it. Although not quite as expected as that has led in turn to new questions.

[Mordred]

One of my favorite cases of a study that led to development in a completely different field is Parker radiation.

Originally Parker radiation was virtual particles formed by curvature terms through expansion. However it found its uses in MRI's Which is where it's primarily used now and is largely completely forgotten about for its Cosmology application which it was originally developed for.

Obviously the 2 cases are distinctive but involve similar processes 

 

Edited November 7 by Mordred

[Markus Hanke]

Ok, thanks for the explanations, everyone.

So is the general consensus here that Hossenfelder’s points (rhetoric aside) aren’t really valid criticisms of current academia at all?