A deepening crisis forces physicists to rethink the structure of nature’s laws
Prof. Sabine Hossenfelder has a great article on the lack of progress in fundamentals of physics: "The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal " [1]Choice quotes:>We know this both because dark matter is merely a placeholder for something we don’t understand, and because the mathematical formulation of particle physics is incompatible with the math we use for gravity. Physicists knew about these two problems already in 1930s. And until the 1970s, they made great progress. But since then, theory development in the foundations of physics has stalled. If experiments find anything new now, that will be despite, not because of, some ten-thousands of wrong predictions.>Ten-thousands of wrong predictions sounds dramatic, but it’s actually an underestimate. I am merely summing up predictions that have been made for physics beyond the standard model which the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was supposed to find: All the extra dimensions in their multiple shapes and configurations, all the pretty symmetry groups, all the new particles with the fancy names. You can estimate the total number of such predictions by counting the papers, or, alternatively, the people working in the fields and their average productivity.According to her, and many other physicists, there hasn't been any major progress in phenomenology since 1970s when Higgs boson was postulated.[1] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-present-phase-...