alt Hacker NewsI'm not hot on what fundamental physics looks like now or in the future, but there's an attitude that Sabine promotes that I see echoed in a lot of comments here which feeds into problems with research.
I don't think the work put into studying fundamentals was "a waste of time" thus far. It's dangerous to label experiments and ideas that were acted on in good faith as the best options at the time but didn't yield positive results as missteps.
Scientists need to be allowed to do work like this without fear because to do so otherwise leads to perverse incentives and you end up with things like lots of studies that can't be reproduced because of p-hacking or worse.
Arguing bad faith after the fact is awfully hard without real evidence and if you're going to discount anyone with enthusiasm for their research proposal based on enthusiasm alone you're not going to be left with a healthy program. I don't blame anyone who supported things like supersymmetry as an example for something which hasn't panned out. we're still left with a major mystery and big questions and it says we need to rethink things in more difficult directions.
Replies
I'm not in any way an expert in this area, but here is what I see. I don't think the argument is that it's being said as "bad faith after the fact". I think the argument is that the approach was told it had fundamental flaws. Those were ignored / denied. People continued to invest in it and suck up all of the research and bright minds in the field. Decades later it still has those fundamental flaws and has taken over all other possible avenues of progress as it has all grant money and and the majority of all departments working on it.
It's more "you were told this is broken before. It's decades later and it's broken in the same way. At what point to you admit that this approach isn't working so try something else?" And the answer is "No, we're going to keep digging deeper".
Fundamentally, approaches need to be falsifiable. If your theory is "falsifiable" in the small scale but ultimately unfalsifiable in the large scale then it's is fundamentally unfalsifiable and we can't use it to lead experimentation.
It's a breadth vs depth search question. We've lost all breadth of search in physics, because a little ways back we stumbled upon a branch that happened to have a (for practical purposes) infinite number of subbranches relating to ways to roll up string dimensions. So physics is stuck exploring all of those sub-branches instead of backtracking one level and exploring any other parts of the tree.
The argument is that everyone is looking under the lamppost for the keys. After 4 decades of searching there, maybe it's time to search somewhere else. And the argument is made even strong when decades back they were told, "Hey, I didn't drop by keys by the lamppost. I dropped them somewhere else". And yet most people keep looking there.
The whole of human society is a combustion engine for life, barely held from going full self destruction by a science driven economy consuming resources in a unsustainable way. Science is what kept us peaceful and nice since WW2. And the breakthroughs are needed not some time far far away ,they are needed now. This is not about the purity of approach or some hypocritical game. This is a dependancy of life and death on the results ..