The crisis in physics is not only about physics but also about snake oil selling whites

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The CRISIS in Physics is NOT ONLY about physics but also about SNAKE OIL
SELLING WHITE CHRISTIANS.

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http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-crisis-in-physics-is-not-only-about.html

Wednesday, October 30, 2019

The crisis in physics is not only about physics

In the foundations of physics, we have not seen progress since the mid
1970s when the standard model of particle physics was completed. Ever
since then, the theories we use to describe observations have remained
unchanged. Sure, some aspects of these theories have only been
experimentally confirmed later. The last to-be-confirmed particle was
the Higgs-boson, predicted in the 1960s, measured in 2012. But all
shortcomings of these theories – the lacking quantization of gravity,
dark matter, the quantum measurement problem, and more – have been known
for more than 80 years. And they are as unsolved today as they were then.

The major cause of this stagnation is that physics has changed, but
physicists have not changed their methods. As physics has progressed,
the foundations have become increasingly harder to probe by experiment.
Technological advances have not kept size and expenses manageable. This
is why, in physics today we have collaborations of thousands of people
operating machines that cost billions of dollars.

With fewer experiments, serendipitous discoveries become increasingly
unlikely. And lacking those discoveries, the technological progress that
would be needed to keep experiments economically viable never
materializes. It’s a vicious cycle: Costly experiments result in lack of
progress. Lack of progress increases the costs of further experiment.
This cycle must eventually lead into a dead end when experiments become
simply too expensive to remain affordable. A $40 billion particle
collider is such a dead end.

The only way to avoid being sucked into this vicious cycle is to choose
carefully which hypothesis to put to the test. But physicists still
operate by the “just look” idea like this was the 19th century. They do
not think about which hypotheses are promising because their education
has not taught them to do so. Such self-reflection would require
knowledge of the philosophy and sociology of science, and those are
subjects physicists merely make dismissive jokes about. They believe
they are too intelligent to have to think about what they are doing.

The consequence has been that experiments in the foundations of physics
past the 1970s have only confirmed the already existing theories. None
found evidence of anything beyond what we already know.

But theoretical physicists did not learn the lesson and still ignore the
philosophy and sociology of science. I encounter this dismissive
behavior personally pretty much every time I try to explain to a
cosmologist or particle physicists that we need smarter ways to share
information and make decisions in large, like-minded communities. If
they react at all, they are insulted if I point out that social
reinforcement – aka group-think – befalls us all, unless we actively
take measures to prevent it.

Instead of examining the way that they propose hypotheses and revising
their methods, theoretical physicists have developed a habit of putting
forward entirely baseless speculations. Over and over again I have heard
them justifying their mindless production of mathematical fiction as
“healthy speculation” – entirely ignoring that this type of speculation
has demonstrably not worked for decades and continues to not work. There
is nothing healthy about this. It’s sick science. And, embarrassingly
enough, that’s plain to see for everyone who does not work in the field.

This behavior is based on the hopelessly naïve, not to mention
ill-informed, belief that science always progresses somehow, and that
sooner or later certainly someone will stumble over something
interesting. But even if that happened – even if someone found a piece
of the puzzle – at this point we wouldn’t notice, because today any drop
of genuine theoretical progress would drown in an ocean of “healthy
speculation”.

And so, what we have here in the foundation of physics is a plain
failure of the scientific method. All these wrong predictions should
have taught physicists that just because they can write down equations
for something does not mean this math is a scientifically promising
hypothesis. String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There’s math for
it, alright. Pretty math, even. But that doesn’t mean this math
describes reality.

Physicists need new methods. Better methods. Methods that are
appropriate to the present century.

And please spare me the complaints that I supposedly do not have
anything better to suggest, because that is a false accusation. I have
said many times that looking at the history of physics teaches us that
resolving inconsistencies has been a reliable path to breakthroughs, so
that’s what we should focus on. I may be on the wrong track with this,
of course. But for all I can tell at this moment in history I am the
only physicist who has at least come up with an idea for what to do.

Why don’t physicists have a hard look at their history and learn from
their failure? Because the existing scientific system does not encourage
learning. Physicists today can happily make career by writing papers
about things no one has ever observed, and never will observe. This
continues to go on because there is nothing and no one that can stop it.

You may want to put this down as a minor worry because – $40 billion
dollar collider aside – who really cares about the foundations of
physics? Maybe all these string theorists have been wasting tax-money
for decades, alright, but in the large scheme of things it’s not all
that much money. I grant you that much. Theorists are not expensive.

But even if you don’t care what’s up with strings and multiverses, you
should worry about what is happening here. The foundations of physics
are the canary in the coal mine. It’s an old discipline and the first to
run into this problem. But the same problem will sooner or later surface
in other disciplines if experiments become increasingly expensive and
recruit large fractions of the scientific community.

Indeed, we see this beginning to happen in medicine and in ecology, too.

Small-scale drug trials have pretty much run their course. These are
good only to find in-your-face correlations that are universal across
most people. Medicine, therefore, will increasingly have to rely on data
collected from large groups over long periods of time to find
increasingly personalized diagnoses and prescriptions. The studies which
are necessary for this are extremely costly. They must be chosen
carefully for not many of them can be made. The study of ecosystems
faces a similar challenge, where small, isolated investigations are
about to reach their limits.

How physicists handle their crisis will give an example to other
disciplines. So watch this space.