The Multiworse Is Coming
It&#x27;s worth considering the cultural context in which high-end physics operates, at least within the United States.<p>The U.S.&#x27;s greatest military victory--the last time we can cleanly call ourselves heroes--was World War II. The Nazis were an awful regime who did horrific things that no one can defend. And Japan directly attacked us. We had good reasons for fighting and we (with our allies) conclusively won.<p>And there is broad public sentiment that we won because of physics. High-end theoretical physics gave us futuristic tools like radio, radar, and of course the nuclear bomb. Lower-end physics gave us the tools for engineering the incredible machines we fought with, like airplanes, bombs, tanks, and ships.<p>So, in minds of U.S. citizens, and more importantly in the halls of U.S. government, discussions of high-end physics come with an implicit promise of military applications. Maybe we could figure out anti-gravity, people think, or ray guns, or teleportation, or force fields--if we only understood the particles and fields a bit better.<p>Physicists do not promise any of this, of course. But at least IMO it is a real phenomenon. I went to see Interstellar with someone who had worked in and with Congress for a long time. After we left, she said &quot;do you think it&#x27;s true that once we understand gravity, we&#x27;ll be able to manage gravity and create antigravity?&quot; I had to explain that just understanding a phenomenon does not grant magical powers over it.<p>But that has been the experience of the U.S. government! They gave money so physicists could better understand particles, and in return the scientists gave the government seemingly magical powers, like seeing in the dark (radar) and city-destroying explosions (nuclear fission and fusion).<p>So what happens when physics stops delivering military leaps forward? Or when the physics is superseded by another discipline that delivers military applications?<p>It looked like chemistry and biology might do that, but then the world managed to collectively decide that those should be illegal tools of war. But it seems totally obvious that the current top priority for military application is information technology.<p>So, I think the author is correct that particle physics faces a looming crisis, at least in funding and public confidence.