The current state of physics and comparing it with the past

[LCSphysicist]

Hello. As time goes by, and as i got more near to "moderns problem of physics", i have been noticing something about it. More specifficaly, the vision of the theoretical physicist that i always had is changing.
This is not necessarily bad. But here is this: While my initial vision was of someone, usually isolated in an office, thinking about a problem for a long time until he had mathematical insight and struggling with paper to write equations. As I mature, it seems to me that this vision is very romanticized.
My current vision is more or less like this: a hole group, with people around all the world working together with great machines simulating a lot of situations. I mean, the paper of before has become the computer of today, and the mathematics has become programming. The insight of write the equations mathematically has become the insight of construct a simulation that reveals something that current physics can't explain.
Also, i can't see someone coming with a new equation. At leats to me, seems that what is left is just to arrange up the already written equations, adding terms or things like this.
Of course i am still too away from what we could call the last line of the physics, where you start to make contribuition, so maybe i need to walk more to conclude something.
Anyway.
What do you think? Do you agree with my vision? You, that is already formed and is a professional physicist, is this really like the things work?

 

[DaveC426913]

While my initial vision was of someone, usually isolated in an office, thinking about a problem for a long time until he had mathematical insight and struggling with paper to write equations. As I mature, it seems to me that this vision is very romanticized.
My current vision is more or less like this: a hole group, with people around all the world working together with great machines simulating a lot of situations.

Today they collaborate by email. In days of yore, they collaborated by written letter.

I mean, the paper of before has become the computer of today, and the mathematics has become programming. The insight of write the equations mathematically has become the insight of construct a simulation that reveals something that current physics can't explain.

Sure. Disciplines change the tools they use as the tools and technology advance. But there's no qualitative change, only a quantitative change (in terms of speed).

Also, i can't see someone coming with a new equation. At leats to me, seems that what is left is just to arrange up the already written equations, adding terms or things like this.

“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.”
- Lord Byron**, five years before Einstein discovered the photoelectric effect, kicking off the quantum mechanical revolution

“Neither the balloon, nor the aeroplane, nor the gliding machine will be a practical success”.
- Lord Byron**, two years before the Wright Brothers flew.

**The veracity of both these quotes is disputed. But the point is, you're in good company. :)

 

[Twigg]

“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.”
- Lord Byron**, five years before Einstein discovered the photoelectric effect, kicking off the quantum mechanical revolution

Michelson is said to have claimed that the future of physics would be measuring fundamental constants to the sixth decimal place and so on. Then he stumbled on relativity. Whoops.

 

[LCSphysicist]

So i hope i am wrong with my earlier conclusions too :D

 

[hutchphd]

There is never anything new. Until there is.
The truly iconoclastic changes are, by their lack of imprimatur, unknown almost by design.
But this should not diminish the slow and steady efforts of scientists to fortify and secure the edifice. It is very difficult to do field theory without food.

 

[weirdoguy]

five years before Einstein discovered the photoelectric effect

He did not discover it, he gave us quantitative description of it.

 

[EigenState137]

Ed Witten would say hello but he is busy writing equations.

 

[PeroK]

“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.”
- Lord Byron**, five years before Einstein discovered the photoelectric effect, kicking off the quantum mechanical revolution

“Neither the balloon, nor the aeroplane, nor the gliding machine will be a practical success”.
- Lord Byron**, two years before the Wright Brothers flew.

It must have been the ghost of Lord Byron, as he died in 1824!

This was one of his:

Sorrow is knowledge: those that know the most must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.

​

 

[DaveC426913]

It must have been the ghost of Lord Byron, as he died in 1824!

Oops! Lord Kelvin.

He did not discover it, he gave us quantitative description of it.

Well I did say "The veracity of both these quotes is disputed", so...

 

[PeroK]

Oops! Lord Kelvin.

The last time someone posted this, I had a root around the Internet and it seems to be a false attribution. E.g.

https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/sci...-the-end-of-physics-which-he-never-predicted/

 

[BWV]

No new physics in 50 years, despite far more people and resources employed in the search. The results speak for themselves don't they? Sure one can argue that people thought the same at the end of the 19th century, but the known unknown phenomena like black body radiation or how the speed of light changes with moving observers was testable with available technology. I am a big fan of John Horgan, who sums it up:

Our descendants will learn much more about nature, and they will invent gadgets even cooler than smart phones. But their scientific version of reality will resemble ours, for two reasons: First, ours… is in many respects true; most new knowledge will merely extend and fill in our current maps of reality rather than forcing radical revisions. Second, some major remaining mysteries—Where did the universe come from? How did life begin? How, exactly, does a chunk of meat make a mind?--might be unsolvable.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/was-i-wrong-about-8220-the-end-of-science-8221/

 

[BillTre]

How did life begin? How, exactly, does a chunk of meat make a mind?--might be unsolvable.

I disagree with this part.
I fully expecct that an extension of physics, through chemistry and biology, involving a lot of complex systems type mechanisms (physics or not? I don't know), to provide a reasonable explanation of these phenomena.

 

[Vanadium 50]

No new physics in 50 years, despite far more people and resources employed in the search.

If you discount high TC superconductivity, quarks, CP violation, topological insulators, gravitational wave astronomy, dark energy, neutrino oscillations, graphene...

 

[BWV]

If you discount high TC superconductivity, quarks, CP violation, topological insulators, gravitational wave astronomy, dark energy, neutrino oscillations, graphene...

Quarks , superconductivity, CP violation, gravitational waves, graphene, neutrino oscillations > 50 years old. at ;east according to Wikipedia

give you dark energy, topological insulators. But that hardly compares to the advances over 1920-1970

 

[DaveC426913]

The last time someone posted this, I had a root around the Internet and it seems to be a false attribution. E.g.

https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/sci...-the-end-of-physics-which-he-never-predicted/

Yeah. That's the exact page I got the quote from. But I've known it was likely apocryphal.

 

[Vanadium 50]

"High TC superconductivity" is not the same as "superconductivity". It may not even be entirely BCS. But you're setting a high bar for 1970+ and a lower bar for 1920-1970 (and a high bar again for 1865-1915).

 

[BWV]

"High TC superconductivity" is not the same as "superconductivity". It may not even be entirely BCS. But you're setting a high bar for 1970+ and a lower bar for 1920-1970 (and a high bar again for 1865-1915).

So do you believe the number of new fundamental discoveries in physics from 1920-1970 is comparable to 1970 to the present?

 

[BWV]

Another take by Peter Woit

Contemplating the End of Physics​

Posted on November 24, 2020 by woit
In a remarkable article entitled Contemplating the End of Physics posted today at Quanta magazine, Robbert Dijkgraaf (the director of the IAS) more or less announces the arrival of the scenario that John Horgan predicted for physics back in 1996. Horgan argued that physics was reaching the end of its ability to progress by finding new fundamental laws. Research trying to find new fundamental constituents of the universe and new laws governing them was destined to reach an endpoint where no more progress was possible. This is pretty much how Dijkgraaf now sees the field going forward:

Confronted with the endless number of physical systems we could fabricate out of the currently known fundamental pieces of the universe, I begin to imagine an upside-down view of physics. Instead of studying a natural phenomenon, and subsequently discovering a law of nature, one could first design a new law and then reverse engineer a system that actually displays the phenomena described by the law. For example, physics has moved far beyond the simple phases of matter of high school courses — solid, liquid, gas. Many potential “exotic” phases, made possible by the bizarre consequences of quantum mechanics, have been cataloged in theoretical explorations, and we can now start realizing these possibilities in the lab with specially designed materials.
All of this is part of a much larger shift in the very scope of science, from studying what is to what could be. In the 20th century, scientists sought out the building blocks of reality: the molecules, atoms and elementary particles out of which all matter is made; the cells, proteins and genes that make life possible; the bits, algorithms and networks that form the foundation of information and intelligence, both human and artificial. This century, instead, we will begin to explore all there is to be made with these building blocks.

In brief, as far as physics goes, elementary particle physics is over, from now on it’s pretty much just going to be condensed matter physics, where there at least is an infinity of potential effective field theory models to play with.
Dijkgraaf ends with an argument indicating that human intelligence is outmoded, artificial intelligence is our future:

Science concerns all phenomena, including the ones created in our laboratories and in our heads. Once we are fully aware of this grander scope, a different image of the research enterprise emerges. Now, finally, the ship of science is leaving the safe inland waterways carved by nature, and is heading for the open ocean, exploring a brave new world with “artificial” materials, organisms, brains and perhaps even a better version of ourselves.

Along the same lines, today also brings an article in the New York Times by Dennis Overbye, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/science/artificial-intelligence-ai-physics-theory.html The article discusses the new MIT Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions and Max Tegmark’s hopes that AI will “discover all kinds of new laws of physics”. My guess is that this will work just fine if you give up on the 20th century understanding of what a “law of physics” is and follow Dijkgraaf’s lead. The problem then may be not so much “will we understand the new laws of physics found by AI?”, but rather that of them not being interesting enough to be worth understanding…

Update: To clarify the point I was trying to make about the Dijkgraaf piece arguing against the “end of physics”, compare it to the similar 1996 piece Gross and Witten published in the Wall Street Journal (a summary is here, an extract here). Gross and Witten were strongly disagreeing with Horgan, whereas it seems to me that Dijkgraaf implicitly agrees with Horgan that fundamental physics has hit a wall and theorists are moving on to do something else.

 

[weirdoguy]

Horgan argued that physics was reaching the end of its ability to progress by finding new fundamental laws.

Since when "progress of physics" means ONLY finding new fundamental laws?

No new physics in 50 years

Again - QFT and high energy physics is not the whole physics.

 

[BWV]

Since when "progress of physics" means ONLY finding new fundamental laws?
Again - QFT and high energy physics is not the whole physics.

per Woit above, the goalposts have been moved over the past 30 years, as the realization has set in that the golden age is over. Back in the 90s when confidence in string theory was higher, I think progress in physics would be defined as finding new fundamental laws on par with GR or QM.