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

mathgenius | 251 points

Love this comment left on the post by Peter Shor (of Shor's algorithm--the algorithm that kicked off the quantum computing frenzy). I assume it's him and not an imposter.

"It's not just that scientists don't want to move their butts, although that's undoubtedly part of it. It's also that they can't. In today's university funding system, you need grants (well, maybe you don't truly need them once you have tenure, but they're very nice to have).

So who decides which people get the grants? It's their peers, who are all working on exactly the same things that everybody is working on. And if you submit a proposal that says "I'm going to go off and work on this crazy idea, and maybe there's a one in a thousand chance that I'll discover some of the secrets of the universe, and a 99.9% chance that I'll come up with bubkes," you get turned down.

But if a thousand really smart people did this, maybe we'd actually have a chance of making some progress. (Assuming they really did have promising crazy ideas, and weren't abusing the system. Of course, what would actually happen is that the new system would be abused and we wouldn't be any better off than we are now.)

So the only advice I have is that more physicists need to not worry about grants, and go hide in their attics and work on new and crazy theories, the way Andrew Wiles worked on Fermat's Last Theorem."

(new comment right below)

"Let me make an addendum to my previous comment, that I was too modest to put into it. This is roughly how I discovered the quantum factoring algorithm. I didn't tell anybody I was working on it until I had figured it out. And although it didn't take years of solitary toil in my attic (the way that Fermat's Last Theorem did), I thought about it on and off for maybe a year, and worked on it moderately hard for a month or two when I saw that it actually might work.

So, people, go hide in your attics!"

tylermw | 5 years ago

Well considering that we know everything pretty much about most of everyday physics and new physics requires energies that are almost unreachable and billions of dollars in experimental investment and/or years and decades to collect sufficient data, it's not a surprise at all that foundations of physics progress has slowed. I don't think the physics community is to blame here. Just the nature of reality

letitgo12345 | 5 years ago

I think this is excessively harsh.

The only guarantees made about the LHC were, that it would prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs Boson.

Believe me, experimental physicists are desperate to find the slightest deviation from the standard model. I spent 2 years on one such 'stab in the dark' rare decay analysis!

The SM's predictions have been tested to a rigor unparalleled in history. It predicts stuff like mass of W & Z bosons, fine structure constant, the measurements of which exceed an accuracy of 1 part per billion in some cases.

walrus1066 | 5 years ago

While I don't like this ~guy's~ woman's disdainful, superior tone, I do think his complaint has merit. Physics is notoriously bad at having curiosity about strange, unconventional, or truly novel ideas. I just finished reading What is Real? by Adam Becker-- a history of modern physics-- and am astonished at how aggressively physicists resisted and suppressed "unconventional" interpretations of quantum mechanics (like the many worlds interpretation) in favor of the obviously-wrong Copenhagen interpretation. There was a taboo for decades around even discussing quantum foundations, and people's careers were ruined simply for trying to publish papers about it.

Physics got stuck for a short while on the understanding of QM, and then promptly went into sour grapes mode and decided that it was meaningless to ask any deep questions about what QM actually meant. Since then it has been focused on mathematical formalisms and smashing particles instead of deep questions about what it all means.

The stagnation is real, and it's the physics community's own fault.

tbabb | 5 years ago

I suppose this is as an appropriate time as any to ask for advice: I am a multimillionaire from inheritance, and am about to complete my masters in physics. I wish to work on long term theoretical physics problems that do not seem to be possible under the current publish-or-perish academic system. The plan was to complete a PhD, then leave academia, but lately I have been having severe doubts about continuing onto a PhD, partly due to the cruft that comes with academia. Obviously, future employability due to financial reasons is completely irrelevant to me.

I would greatly appreciate any advice.

cli | 5 years ago

... I have spelled out many times very clearly what theoretical physicists should do differently. It’s just that they don’t like my answer. They should stop trying to solve problems that don’t exist. That a theory isn’t pretty is not a problem. Focus on mathematically well-defined problems, that’s what I am saying. And, for heaven’s sake, stop rewarding scientists for working on what is popular with their colleagues.

It seems that some examples might be useful here.

Which specific groups are trying to solve problems that don't exist?

What are some mathematically well-defined problems that aren't getting enough attention?

As for rewarding scientists for working on what's popular, that's a science-wide problem that stems from the way that science is funded and decades of inbreeding. Still, examples of how to break physics out of its funk on this score would also be useful.

apo | 5 years ago

Btw, something to think on. Consider this slowdown in physics, and the oft-repeated ideas that we'll sure to colonize not just the solar system, but eventually even the galaxy...

E.g.: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...

coldtea | 5 years ago

I'm no physicist but this leaves me scratching my head.

You have some people saying the university funding system is to blame by not accepting crazy ideas but we have all sorts of ideas in physics like:

- String theory. As best as I can tell the only reason string theory exists is because if dimensions=11 the equations for general relativity pop out. Importantly though string theory has made no testable predictions and it's unclear when or even if that will be the case.

- Supersymmetry. Interesting idea but no evidence of this yet.

Other more interesting ideas to me at least (again, as non-physicist):

- Octonion Math underlying the standard model (maybe) [1]

And some interesting experimental work:

- Possible violations of lepton universality from the LHCb detector [2]. This was, last I heard, still well below statistical significance (5-sigma) and could well disappear (as other bumps have eg at 750GeV) but it's interesting nonetheless.

And there are host of open problems with otherwise successful theories.

My favourite extremes here is the prediction of magnetic moment of an electron, which is ~12 significant digits in agreement with experimental results. At the other end is QFT predicting the energy density of a vacuum, which is ~120 orders of magnitude off [3].

Anyway, a lot of this exists in the current academic system.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-octonion-math-that-could-...

[2] https://cerncourier.com/beauty-quarks-test-lepton-universali...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem

cletus | 5 years ago

Once upon a time, researchers were independently wealthy

https://nadiaeghbal.com/independent-research

adamnemecek | 5 years ago

I kind of like the model of the turn of the 19th century where you had great geniuses like Tesla who would just get funding to create whatever kind of cool crap they could think of. Are there still any people like that in physics? Legendary scientists/engineers who run there own lab and just make cool stuff?

narrator | 5 years ago

This criticism may have some merit on the particle physics side of things, but from the 'gravity' side I see exciting recent progress. In particular, the AMPS firewall and literature that followed, including the introduction of computational complexity into physics, ER=EPR etc. With LIGO and various space telescopes soon coming online, the experimental future looks bright too.

beefman | 5 years ago

The stagnation become with the end of the USSR. No need for physics anymore, no one was building missiles, or going to space. Then the Internet happened and smart people made money off that. Looks like the wages for developers is going down. China, Japan, etc., art going to space. Physics will pick up again.

mymythisisthis | 5 years ago

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/24/7426

It is proven that physicists are in fact, the most ignorant folks of all scientists. Real, proper physical models are always interdisciplinary, unified theories. The most ignored category of all.

I can assure everybody, that the model that might get accepted in 100 years is already here. As I'm personally using one of those fringe models, I can assure you that using this in public will get you mostly negative points online and quite interesting conversations offline. Nice side-note: You will be able to filter out non scientific thinkers quite easily and I can assure you, there are lots of them in the "scene". Interestingly chemists are much more open to different models, in fact, most of them know that our models are rough approximations at best.

It is funny when you think in models that explain everything, but are quite far from the standard perspective. It becomes hard to explain effects because the details obviously start to diverge the closer you look. On the other hand, I think every adolescent is capable of thinking the model I'm using. (PS: I'm not the origin of the model I'm using, I seriously would have never been able to come up with such a minimal, absolute logical and elegant solution)

poelzi | 5 years ago

Two earlier posts of hers that got a lot of commentary on HN (2016).:

Why not string theory? Because enough is enough. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11885036

and

The LHC “nightmare scenario” has come true. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12238197

Very similar theme of lack of verifiable theories.

I wonder what the experimental physicists have to say about this topic? I feel like theories are also driven by new observations. However the observations that the theorists have to go on are very indirect compared to those of 100 years ago. "The mass of this galaxy is out by x percent" isn't doesn't give many clues as to what's wrong.

Compare that to observations of Mercury's orbit that happened 2 centuries before Einstein published his Relativity theories. ( http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/Cyberia/NumRel/EinsteinTest... )

kristianp | 5 years ago

As an outsider, I wonder, what happened to Nima Arkani-Hamed and his new ideas about the nature of spacetime? That seemed pretty interesting.. even just as a strategy of what should be researched.

js8 | 5 years ago

Nobody has mentioned John Horgan's book "the end of science" yet, so I figure it is time to do so. It's even more relevant now than when he wrote it in 1996.

scottlocklin | 5 years ago

Maybe physics is suffering from the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect. Colliders used to produce helpful results for fundamental physics, but maybe it is time to look somewhere else.

amai | 5 years ago

Is there an element to this that the problems left are simply harder than the ones solved by previous generations?

xupybd | 5 years ago

If you are doing theoretical research all your really need is an office, a computer and a basic salary; it's not like university pay is great.

If the need for funding from existing sources is hindering your research, try to find another way to support it, like by freelancing 20% of the time or Patreon.

akvadrako | 5 years ago

clearly it's the sophons.

(reference to the Three Body Problem, an awesome book)

enjalot | 5 years ago

Isn’t she just complaining that nobody is listening to her? That sounds a lot like a crackpot to me. Instead of complaining she should better work on a useful new theory explaining the masses of neutrinos or dark matter and dark energy. But of course this is much harder than writing blog posts.

amai | 5 years ago
[deleted]
| 5 years ago

I wish physicists would dare blame themselves for (insufficiently dis)trusting their statistician, mathematician & philosopher colleagues.

The reason for physics research becoming more wide, limited & shallow instead of more narrow, broad & deep seem to stem from the foundations of mathematics.

See here for the foundations of math itself: https://mathoverflow.net/a/25385

http://math.andrej.com/2016/10/10/five-stages-of-accepting-c...

(If you struggle with comprehending the above, try drawing Venn diagrams of the logical operations involved to gain a geometric understanding of the matter.)

And here for the foundations of probability theory:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-88-470-2107-... Gian-Carlo Rota - Twelve Problems in Probability Theory No One Likes to Bring Up, The Fubini Lectures, 1998 (published 2001)

Two decades old, but the title still rings as true today as it did twenty years ago, unfortunately.

And here, for the obligatory philosophy slap fight abound in statistics:

https://www.quora.com/For-a-non-expert-what-is-the-differenc...

The philosophical solution to which basically boils down to this image macro:

https://i.imgur.com/MPAntbK.jpg

But for which we lack a sufficiently advanced & logically consistent mathematical formalism, both due to people mostly ignoring, out of ignorance [because from where else do you get the action of ignoring!], the philosophical solution, and, more importantly, because we lack a sufficient mathematical formalism for it due to, among other things, the issues with probability theory.

And here, a small shimmer of hope in the foundations of statistics:

http://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/phofstra/Simpson.pdf

There exists another, unrelated to the above presentation, avenue of highly interesting research out of Brazil, but their results haven't yet reached a stage of maturity where people throw together easily understandable powerpoint slides, which I'll neglect mentioning here for now, because I'd consider that bad etiquette.

Personally, I feel partial to blaming all of this on this Euclid translation error, albeit I say that in partial jest:

http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/teaching/dm-reading-assign...

...which people still fall for, even in 2018, as exemplified in quite a few papers on the foundations of geometry published in recent years.

In closing:

Physicists don't stand the furthest to the right in this xkcd comic, and out of frame, even further to the right from the already left out philosopher, there exists a recursive boxing match between numerous fields of science conveniently left out of the graphic to maintain a sense of strict hierarchy & order in a reality that lacks such hierarchy:

https://xkcd.com/435/

Also, I'd like to point out that the title of that blog post technically represents a statistically testable hypothesis.

no_identd | 5 years ago

We need young people to start their careers with knowledge that only 50+yo physicists have currently. Is such a curriculum possible?

swerveonem | 5 years ago

Surprised no one mentioned that Einstein’s concept of space-time is wrong which makes me believe the Universe is electric http://www.indjst.org/index.php/indjst/article/view/30369

i6mi6 | 5 years ago

The truth is, that science empowers the common men- every device crafted giveth more power to the capable individual. And that scares the upper crust. Thus, knowledge must be reduced and separated, and the increasing of dangerous potential must be subverted. If everyone owns a flying car with a fusion reactor- everyone owns the means to eliminate a city.

So, here we are, with leaders who praise innovation, while doing everything they can to sabotage it. And after 9/11 one would be tempted to call them not completely wrong. The human environment altogether is deteriorating so fast that this sabotage will have to cease very soon, or else, there might not be a surveillance state left to protect with a science ban.

Pica_soO | 5 years ago

Breakthroughs are not produced by the scientists produced and favored by the current system of inkremental research. For a breakthrough you need the ability to step back from the paradigm without any investment in it.. Thus only academic beginners and outsiders are even incentivized. then you need a miracle, the miracle usually beeing a wrong analogy beeing made and thought to the very end. So you need people who by accident of birth can't stop analogizing.. aka people on the schizophrenic spectrum. Needless to say that integrating chaotic people, who constantly recombine, are notorious bad at planning projects and who perceive normal social interaction as a spy novel they want to run away from - is a challenge. Even worser when they have success and the world worship them for it, while the pursuit the laser eyed pigeons. It's a doable job, as any theater Regisseur will tell you, but the Leviathancyberitics of this kind are definitely not comfortable.

picsao | 5 years ago

> That a theory isn’t pretty is not a problem

On what premise? 'Theories' are human constructs, hence why physicist are so adamant about their Truth and Beauty. It's wrong to say that, when most sciences rely heavily on Occam's principle (an aesthetic argument) for reasons unknown. It's pretty likely that the human brain is guided by both principles to model the world, and that should be reflected in the formulation of our theories.

buboard | 5 years ago

We’re stuck in a paradigm that doesn’t result in any valid fundamental predictions. The idea that running the expanding universe backward makes everything denser and hotter in the past is just dumb.

The universe is not like a loaf expanding from dense batter to fluffy bread.

Instead, the chaotic vacuum produces, for want of a more accurate concept, particle-antiparticle pairs at random that exert a “pressure” seen as the Casimir Effect and a force that underlies the expansion of space-time.

These pairs are mostly ephemeral, but under certain conditions they can randomly transition to a stable state. This eventually results in matter. (It results in a lot of things, but we’re biased toward the minor component, matter, because we’re made of it.)

The process happens a lot in very empty space, and almost not at all in space that is constrained by the existence of matter already. This is why “dark matter” exists out there and not down here. The Casimir Effect will give this to you; constrain the available space and some wave equations are excluded, resulting in a measurable inward pressure.

Run the expanding universe backwards: space-time contracts and we have exactly what we have right now. Run it forward and space-time expands, again giving us exactly what we have right now. Of course, things are different, but the physics is unchanged. The universe doesn’t get hotter or cooler, there’s no era of total ionization or inflation.

The fundamental ground state of the universe is chaos. Anything can arise out of that chaos, but specific events are constrained by probability: some are so unlikely that we never see them; some are so likely that they are certain and they happen all the time.

Mathematics, so useful a tool in the past, cannot describe this situation. The only way to describe this system is by using the system itself; there are no shortcuts.

Math, philosophy, reason and order are inapplicable because they are only rules-based approximations of a chaotic state.

ackfoo | 5 years ago