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Who’s killing physics?

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C C Offline
https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/physi...g-physics/

EXCERPTS (Sabine Hossenfelder): . . . in the foundations of physics, this virtuous cycle broke in the mid 1980s. Since then, we have been in a phase of stagnation.

This stagnation has befallen not only cosmology but also the rest of the foundations of physics: quantum gravity, particle physics, and quantum foundations. You have certainly noticed this yourself: popular science articles that cover these areas just regurgitate the same topics.

[...] Nowadays, headlines covering the foundations of physics won’t tell you about new discoveries, but merely what “might be” or “could be”. The phrase “physicists say” is all too frequently followed by speculations about multiverses, non-existent particles, or fifth forces that we have no evidence of. Sometimes I’m embarrassed to be associated with this discipline.

But the worst part is that most of my colleagues think this situation perfectly okay.

For starters, they would probably disagree that we have a problem in the foundations of physics at all. They’d tell you about lots of exciting papers that have been published in recent years. [...] But this illusion of progress is the minor problem...
Those working in the foundations of physics believe that whatever is left to find, it’ll be irrelevant to everyday life. I think they’re wrong – but I’m afraid their belief might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s why I want to tell you why I think they’re wrong.

[...] Quantum mechanics has been remarkably successful. But ever since its conception a century ago, quantum mechanics has given headaches to philosophers for screwing up our notion of reality. The central ingredient of quantum mechanics – the “wave-function”, which supposedly describes everything we can possibly observe – can’t be observed itself. An entire research program of “foundations of quantum mechanics”, populated mostly by philosophers, sprung up and offered various ways of interpreting quantum math to make more sense of it.

Physicists ignored the philosophers [...] But in the past 10 years or so, physicists themselves have put forward a flood of new arguments, theorems even... The most remarkable of those recent arguments is perhaps the Frauchinger-Renner paradox, which demonstrates that quantum mechanics cannot consistently describe the use of itself. ...

Another milestone has been a no-go theorem for theories that may underlie quantum mechanics. In 2012, Matthew Pusey, Jonathan Barrett, and Terry Rudolph proved that certain completions of quantum mechanics – that is, theories from which quantum mechanics might derive – are impossible...

[...] The misgivings that philosophers had about quantum mechanics, it turned out, weren’t entirely irrelevant after all. If physicists hadn’t been so dismissive of philosophy, they might have seen that sooner.

In quantum mechanics, the outcome of a measurement cannot be predicted with certainty. [...] The problem is that a theory which describes nature on the fundamental level shouldn’t rely on vague terms like “measurement” – it should instead explain what a measurement is.

[...] At last, it seems the “shut up and calculate” doctrine, which has dominated quantum mechanics for half a century, is losing its grip on the community. And this is why I am more optimistic today that we will finally make progress in the foundations of physics than I was 10 years ago. ... the physics books of today will be in dire need of revision... (MORE - missing details)
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