How I became the #1 enemy of particle physics theorists (Sabine Hossenfelder)

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https://youtu.be/XqoyTSAF5g0

VIDEO EXCERPT: For almost 50 years, they built new experiments because they wanted to test some shiny new theories. Ideas like Grand Unified Theories that predicted proton decay, supersymmetry that predicted all sorts of new particles, extra dimensions that predicted black holes at the Large Hadron Collider, and many other things. They didn’t find any of those. Why? Because these ideas are mathematical fiction, they’re not proper science.

In the foundations of physics, you find tens of thousands of such “predictions” for stuff that they just made up. And this story isn’t over, it’s still going on, as we speak. They’re now talking about entire “dark sectors” of particles that you can’t measure. And a new branch of nonsense production that I have to talk about more at some point is all sorts of modified gravities. The arxiv is now full of those.

But we know that, historically, new theories in physics have been successful if they solved a problem with the existing theories. [...] A new theory in physics needs to solve a problem. Either an internal problem in the theories, like Einstein’s theories did, or how the Higgs-boson did. Or a tension with experiment, like quantum physics.

These new ideas are not of this type. Axions, supersymmetry, grand unification, extra dimensions, and hundreds of dark matter particles and weird fields. They don’t solve any problems. They only solve “problems” that physicists have made up in the first place.

These so-called problems are all aesthetic -- misgivings about the current theories. And so, based on historical precedents, this means they are very unlikely to be correct.

This is the conclusion that I arrived at a few years after my PhD. Theoretical physicists in the foundations are using the wrong methods of theory development. The methods that they currently use have zero chance of succeeding. By the current standard, there are infinitely many theories that are acceptable. So the chance that any one of them is correct is one over infinity.

You can see new examples of this almost every day in some press releases...

Why they don't like me ... https://youtu.be/XqoyTSAF5g0

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/XqoyTSAF5g0
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