That’s an inference, presumably Adam believes that for object-level reasons, which could be supported by eg looking at the age at which physicists make major advancements[1] and the size of those advancements.
Edit: But also this wouldn’t show whether or not theoretical physics is actually in a rut, to someone who doesn’t know what the field looks like now.
Adjusted for similar but known to be fast moving fields like AI or biology to normalize for facts like eg the academic job market just being worse now than previously.
I am not going to spend more than a few minutes here or there to give “speaking as a physicist” takes on random LW posts; I think convincing people that my views are correct in full detail would require teaching them the same things that convinced me of those views, which includes e.g. multiple years of study of QFT.
Instead, I tend to summarize what I think and invite people to ask specific questions about e.g. “why do you believe X” if they want to go further down the tree or test my beliefs more aggressively.
“That doesn’t answer the question because I am not convinced by everything you said” is not really a helpful way to do that imo.
To spell out my views: there has been a bit of a real slow-down in theoretical physics, because exploring the tree of possible theories without experiment as a pruning mechanism is slower than if you do get to prune. I think the theory slowdown also looks worse to outsiders than it is, because the ongoing progress that does happen is also harder to explain due to increasing mathematical sophistication and a lack of experimental correlates to point to. This makes e.g. string theory very hard to defend to laypeople without saying “sorry, go learn the theory first”.
This is downstream of a more severe slowdown in unexplained empirical results, which results from (imo) pretty general considerations of precision and energy scales, per the modern understanding of renormalization, which suggest that “low-hanging fruit gets picked and it becomes extremely expensive to find new fruit” is a priori pretty much how you should expect experimental physics to work. And indeed this seems to have happened in the mid 20th century, when lots of money got spent on experimental physics and the remaining fruit now hangs very high indeed.
And then there’s the 90s/2000s LHC supersymmetry hype problem, which is a whole nother (related) story.
This doesn’t seem to address the question, which was why do people believe there is a physics slow-down in the first place.
Isn’t the answer that the low hanging fruit of explaining unexplained observations has been picked?
That’s an inference, presumably Adam believes that for object-level reasons, which could be supported by eg looking at the age at which physicists make major advancements[1] and the size of those advancements.
Edit: But also this wouldn’t show whether or not theoretical physics is actually in a rut, to someone who doesn’t know what the field looks like now.
Adjusted for similar but known to be fast moving fields like AI or biology to normalize for facts like eg the academic job market just being worse now than previously.
I am not going to spend more than a few minutes here or there to give “speaking as a physicist” takes on random LW posts; I think convincing people that my views are correct in full detail would require teaching them the same things that convinced me of those views, which includes e.g. multiple years of study of QFT.
Instead, I tend to summarize what I think and invite people to ask specific questions about e.g. “why do you believe X” if they want to go further down the tree or test my beliefs more aggressively.
“That doesn’t answer the question because I am not convinced by everything you said” is not really a helpful way to do that imo.
To spell out my views: there has been a bit of a real slow-down in theoretical physics, because exploring the tree of possible theories without experiment as a pruning mechanism is slower than if you do get to prune. I think the theory slowdown also looks worse to outsiders than it is, because the ongoing progress that does happen is also harder to explain due to increasing mathematical sophistication and a lack of experimental correlates to point to. This makes e.g. string theory very hard to defend to laypeople without saying “sorry, go learn the theory first”.
This is downstream of a more severe slowdown in unexplained empirical results, which results from (imo) pretty general considerations of precision and energy scales, per the modern understanding of renormalization, which suggest that “low-hanging fruit gets picked and it becomes extremely expensive to find new fruit” is a priori pretty much how you should expect experimental physics to work. And indeed this seems to have happened in the mid 20th century, when lots of money got spent on experimental physics and the remaining fruit now hangs very high indeed.
And then there’s the 90s/2000s LHC supersymmetry hype problem, which is a whole nother (related) story.