alt Hacker News> 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.
Replies
> What it hasn't done though is create some sexy upending of our current models of physics
which is fine imho. It's only been around 100 years since that happened last time! Far too short to have another one.
I think this guy has hit the nail on the head: https://energywavetheory.com/subatomic-particles/
Take a look at how stupidly complex the standard model is compared to the other: https://energywavetheory.com/equations/theory-comparison/
Everything in the universe on that site is eloquently and simply explained, including gravity as a shading effect (think an eclipse/water waves acting on an obstacle: https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/attachment.php?attachmentid...) ie. When a large mass causing the shading effect (eg earth) absorbs energy waves acting on us it causing less energy to reach you from the earth's direction and that means energy from above us pushes us down to Earth. All the math checks out too.
Yes, the entire theory is based on the fact that aether exists, which has supposedly been disproved, but what if that's incorrect and launched an entire wild goose chase of alternative physics (string theory, standard model) all based on a flawed assumption.
I think this reddit comment describes the situation beautifully:
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/comments/14o41lc/why_doe...
There hasn't been a total lack of progress by any means.
Unfortunately, "confirming the standard model again in some new way", while good science, also does nothing to get particle physics out of its rut.
I originally wrote "useful" science when I first wrote that sentence, but... it's debatable how useful it is, actually. People have been taught that measuring the utility of science is heresy, but I find that insane. It is completely possible to have science that isn't that useful, even to other science, let alone to any other purpose. Confirming the standard model yet harder isn't really useful. Of course, you have to run the experiments to confirm the standard model, in the hopes that maybe it won't, I'm saying the result of confirming the standard model is of debatable utility.