Sabine Hossenfelder: Looking in the Wrong Places

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.

She discusses possible reasons for this, putting a lot of the blame on the lack of stable funding for long-term risky projects. I doubt that this is the problem. There are many institutes funded by wealthy individuals to address just this shortcoming of government funding, yet we don’t see fundamental breakthroughs coming out of them. When you fund researchers who resist paradigm change, use the same techniques, and work with the same theories as before, it isn’t going to help if you gather them in institutes, however much money you throw at them.

So what’s the answer? This blog, of course, is about a new spacetime model that offers the new paradigm needed to break the current theoretical logjam. For the complete story, I suggest reading the posts in chronological order, starting at the beginning. It’s OK to cherry pick just the ones that look interesting, too. Or you can take a look at my website here.