Looking in the Wrong Places is a
new Edge essay by prominent theoretician
and prolific writer/blogger Sabine
Hossenfelder. It’s basically a lament about the lack of progress that’s
hampered theoretical physics for a long time, as summarized in the following
paragraph.
The
field that I mostly work in is the foundations of physics, which is, roughly
speaking, composed of cosmology, the foundations of quantum mechanics,
high-energy particle physics, and quantum gravity. It’s a peculiar field
because there hasn’t been new data for almost four decades, since we
established the Standard Model of particle physics. There has been, of course,
the Higgs particle that was discovered at the LHC in 2012, and there have been
some additions to the Standard Model, but there has not been a great new
paradigm change, as Kuhn would have put it. We’re still using the same
techniques, and we’re still working with the same theories as we did in the
1970s.
