Re: Most of physics fields are dead. Proof: 2024 Nobel on AI

rhertz:

I've been sustaining for years that what is known as physics is DEAD, at
least since the 70s.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBIvSGLkwJY
 
I want to share this video that Google presented to me (very new), with
a rant of Sabine Hossenfelder about the current state of physics.
 
I invite reading some of the 9,000+ comments, many of them made by
physicists very critical of what physics means today and in the last 50
years.
 
Also, as a proof of the confusion (and corruption) in physics, the fact
that the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to two pioneers in
neural networks (the foundation of OpenAI, ChatGPT, etc.) BECAUSE it
used tools of STATISTICAL PHYSICS, among many other branches, in their
work.
 
 
Relativity: DEAD by corruption of mathematical physics, since 1905.
Cosmology: DEAD by corruption of mathematical physics, since 1922.
Astrophysics: DEAD by corruption of mathematical physics, since 1952.
Particle Physics: DEAD by corruption of mathematical physics, since
1960.
Quantum Physics: DEAD by corruption of mathematical physics, since 1925.
Many other branches (too long to cite).
 
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Some comments on the video link:
 
I am an astrophysicist.  When I was in graduate school in the early '90s
it became apparent to me that the theorists were doing exactly what this
video says.  They were using mathematics to "explain" some idea they had
with absolutely no interest or ability for this idea to be tested in the
real universe.  In many cases their ideas inconsistent with observations
(after all astronomy is primarily an observational science) and they
didn't care.  They often didn't bother to claim the observations were
erroneous.  They just didn't care.
 
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As an applied physicist, something that constantly irks me is when
people say "physics" and what they mean is one this one sub-discipline
of fundamental theoretical physics. Plenty of physics is working
perfectly fine and not at all dying:  optics, plasma physics, materials
physics, nano-physics, biomedical physics, geophysics to name but a few
- all alive and kicking thanks - don't lump us all in with these guys.
 
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Prof here. I work in a fairly applied area of plasma physics and even
we've seen a significant slowdown in progress. This discussion is
something that affects both the applied and fundamental areas.
 
From our end its the need for "risk management" and "predefined impact"
in grant funding. In short, we basically need to already know the
outcomes of our grants in order to have any chance of getting any
funding... So we apply for incremental projects that don't really
provide real insight. If you buck this trend you get no money, lose
respect, and fall out of the system within a few funding cycles.
 
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"I don't know how it ever became accepted that inventing some math and
insisting that its real counts as theoretical physics. It's insane,
they're all crazy." The most accurate statement about the sad state of
theoretical physics over the past couple of decades.
 
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Sabine I left theoretical physics around 1979 because of this very virus
that’s been damaging physics for over 40 years, keep working to keep
physics alive it feels like it on respirators.
 
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If only this was limited to physics...
 
Academia as a whole has become widely corrupted with self-interest,
prideful self-indulgence and outright greed. Science "journalism" isn't
helping at all either, as they can take perfectly reasonable research
and spin it into something sensationalized. Because of course,
self-interest, prideful self-indulgence and outright greed is not
limited to scientists.
 
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It seems ironic to post this here, but the problem with Physics is the
problem we have now with everything:  Everything must be monetized.  The
goal is to make money, not science, and this extends to every other
area.  Computer Science is dominated by the creation of toys for people
to play with on phones.  Finance is a quagmire of invented technical
terms and convoluted systems meant to be mind-boggling to the average
person in order to allow specialists to dominate a field that should be
much simpler.  The legal system got there first by using a dead language
for their technical terms and establishing procedures based on tradition
rather than the actual written law.  "Stare Decisis" anyone?
 
Funding comes from people who do not understand a technical field, so it
is not necessary to be right in order to win.  All one has to do is to
impress the right people.  Many of us have had the experience of being
in a room with someone that was full of crap but had funding behind them
and so ended up in charge.  I've literally heard the owners of a company
react to a presentation by saying that they couldn't understand most of
what the presenter was saying but they could tell he was a genius.
 
When you use a system of rewards and penalties to guide an endeavor, you
don't get what you intended, you get what you get.  For example, simply
making something illegal does not usually get rid of that thing. Instead
it spawns a system of workarounds.
 
If you want a better building you need better bricks.  If you want
better systems, it seems we need better people.
 
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As others have pointed out, the issue is that the mathematics of physics
got so hard there was an influx of mathematicians who started thinking
that if something was mathematically sound it must reflect reality (of
course they don’t always get the mathematically sound bit right).
 
Perhaps Paul Dirac can be blamed for mathematically predicting
antimatter by accident and being right! If Dirac could do it, then why
can’t they? One big difference is Dirac doubted his result and was
reluctant to discuss it until Carl Anderson showed the existence of the
positron in his cloud chamber experiments in 1932.
 
So we had a theoretical physicist being humble about a prediction until
an experimental result demonstrated the existence of one particle that
was consistent with the theory. Today we have theoreticians boldly
claiming their mathematical proofs say something about reality and
telling the experimentalists to hurry up and spend billions to show the
world that they are right.
 
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Thank you for your rant....it's very much needed.  I'm a retired,
blue-collar physicist.  By that I mean, I was an experimentalist working
in, for that realm, high energy ion-molecule collisions; a field far
from the so-called "frontier" of quantum gravity.  Nonetheless, I've
watched our beloved field fall into the irrelevancy that you point out.
It started with fusion, and now has moved into high energy and quantum
theory.  I blame the money....stop funding this increasingly silly
research and maybe we can get back to reality.  The good news is that
this period of stagnation may find someone who can break through to a
new paradigm.  Probably after I die.
 
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Business schools repeat stuff they know is wrong because it's what
business wants their employees to practice. It boils down to 2 words
"money corrupts."
 
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You are absolutely right. Physics used to be about explanations of
observations. And when new observation invalidated the explanations, new
explanations were developed to factor in the new observations.
Once particle physics got under way the game flipped around: theories
were developed abstractly and then observations sought to validate the
theories. The Hicks Boson was an observation that came along after the
theory to validate it, so this entirely abstract new discipline,
strangely still called physics, worked in this single instance. I
remember being surprised and impressed. But many more of these abstract
theories have been developed and no doubt some will never achieve
validating observations.
 
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In the interest of fairness, there was a time in physics where theorists
were predicting the existence of particles before they were discovered
in the particle accelerator. It was a small parenthesis in the history
of science. The issue is that a whole generation of physicists got
convinced this is how science was done, and in my humble opinion is how
we ended up in this situation where theories don't require being
falsifiable....
 
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This is what mostly disillusioned me with physics academia. We spend
endless time and effort going down math's rabbit holes, with zero
insight of what it actually means in terms of physics. Practically all
the great breakthroughs in Physics have come from realizations about the
physics, and we have then built a math's framework around that. But in
my experience, universities are so focused on pure mathematics. I saw so
many brilliant people that had great insights into the physics just
getting worn down and forced out, while people with no clue how the
physics worked were elevated because they could just memorize standard
problems.
 
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A very good video that gets to the heart of the problem. I did my PhD in
theoretical particle physics in 2004 and then left science for exactly
those reasons. I looked at a theoretical small part that probably had
nothing to do with reality, while people added more dimensions and
particles to the theory or screamed for a larger LHC, which should prove
it. Even Sheldon Cooper in TBBT quit String Theory 🙂

Interesting, very interesting video report! Also, a very useful summary
of the comments. Thanks @rhertz for posting this.

Sabine needs to step back a little further and she'll realize that her
idol, Einstein himself, is original source of the rot in physics.

By the way, what is the ToE proposed by Peter Woit, the Langland's
program that he keeps going on and on about?