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zarzavat10/12/20242 repliesview on HN

IANAP but it seems that fundamental physics suffers from a lack of monotonicity of knowledge. Although physics does its best to explain things, those explanations are more like guesses than known facts. A theoretical physicist can have their life's work undone simply because someone else comes up with a better guess, or experiment says no. You spend your life working on SUSY and then... nope. Even very established knowledge can be overturned.

People will say "that's science" and indeed that's fundamental physics, but other fields don't really work like that.

In chemistry and biology, certainty isn't in such short supply. Nobody is asking "but is DNA a double helix?" Researchers take a problem, they attack it, then they publish the results, it gets replicated (or not), and the set of knowledge grows.

Mathematics is more similar to chemistry and biology insofar as mathematical knowledge takes the form of an ever-growing set of proven facts generated by research. Take a problem, prove it, other mathematicians check it, the set of knowledge grows.

Fundamental physics has issues because the "check" stage now often costs millions or billions of dollars (build a particle accelerator, neutrino detector, gravitational wave detector, satellite, etc), and even then it might not give a definitive answer. Just look at the g-2 situation where they notice a discrepancy, they spend millions of dollars trying to determine if this single discrepancy is real, and then someone publishes a paper "haha I recalculated it, you just wasted your time".

Not a criticism of fundamental physics because clearly that's just how it is. I'd rather have guesses than ignorance. The gravitational wave research seems to be doing okay at least.


Replies

pfdietz10/12/2024

SUSY was never "established knowledge". It was a stack of increasingly baroque theories that had little or no experimental justification.

empiko10/12/2024

ELI5 what is the G2 situation?

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