alt Hacker NewsYes, there's definitely some interesting fields that are making progress that are still in the purview of "physics". Materials science, or condensed matter physics, is doing a lot of fascinating work with quasiparticles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasiparticle There's a number of fields you could call "quantum engineering" where physics and engineering work together on the cutting edge. Some of the output of that is why our TVs are so good.
There's a lot of work to be done on how big systems, where "big systems" can be as small as hundreds or even dozens of atoms, behave, where you can't "just" throw the whole wavefunction into a computer and crunch away on it.
It's particle physics that seems to be stuck in a rut. Fundamentally, they're starved for useful data. Until that is resolved, the science really isn't going anywhere. Since people on the internet frequently seem to operate on the silly theory that someone pointing out a problem has some sort of obligation to propose a solution, let me say outright I have no more clue how to resolve this than anyone else does, except to hope that some sort of other progress in other fields creates new opportunities for new experiments.
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> Since people on the internet frequently seem to operate on the silly theory that someone pointing out a problem has some sort of obligation to propose a solution
The issue with Sabine is she tends to yell about anyone proposing any solution. CERN would like to build a bigger particle accelerator, but since it's not her favored variant of accelerator they are obviously lying to the public and wasting your tax payer dollars which could be spent instead on the (implied) guaranteed discoveries if people would just listen to her.
(note also that this is a false dichotomy: any realistic analysis any set of potentially competing projects would generally conclude they're unlikely to be in competition if they are in fact viable - we usually have plenty of money to do both things provided they're likely to pay off. But the under-developed, under-timelined thing is a lot easier to promise the world with, yet far more likely to wind up just as "clearly blown out it's budget!" as the project being built).
> It's particle physics that seems to be stuck in a rut.
You could look at the discovery of tetraquarks and pentaquarks, and high precision tests of the standard model though as a lot of progress.
What it hasn't done though is create some sexy upending of our current models of physics, we keep asking questions and mostly the responses coming back are in line with theories that we knew 40 years ago. But that's still a lot of experimental progress. There just isn't any useful theoretical physics progress. All the beyond-standard-model theories that might have been useful have been falsified, and the ones that remain can be made to predict anything and aren't useful. But we wouldn't know that if there hadn't been a lot of experimental progress. The LHC was an exceptionally useful experiment. It destroyed more dreams of physics theories than any single experiment ever before. Someone should go back and mark up all the published articles and preprints that were falsified by the LHC.