the current generation of physicists seems to have lost the way in some important (but hard to pin down) sense
My impression of physics (1) post-1970-or-so is that it’s lost the balance between theory and experiment that makes science productive. Hypotheses like “superstring theory” or “dark matter” are extremely difficult to test by experiment (through no fault of the physicists’ own). Physicists have tried to to make up for it with improvements in theory, but without experiments bringing discipline to the process it doesn’t quite work.
In one sense, this is good news. Physicists have reached the point where it is extremely difficult to observe a physical phenomenon they can’t predict, which is very similar to saying the project is almost complete.
(1) Here I’m speaking mostly of particle physics. Condensed-matter physics has been much more successful over the past 50 years or so. Other disciplines may vary.
the current generation of physicists seems to have lost the way in some important (but hard to pin down) sense
My impression of physics (1) post-1970-or-so is that it’s lost the balance between theory and experiment that makes science productive. Hypotheses like “superstring theory” or “dark matter” are extremely difficult to test by experiment (through no fault of the physicists’ own). Physicists have tried to to make up for it with improvements in theory, but without experiments bringing discipline to the process it doesn’t quite work.
In one sense, this is good news. Physicists have reached the point where it is extremely difficult to observe a physical phenomenon they can’t predict, which is very similar to saying the project is almost complete.
(1) Here I’m speaking mostly of particle physics. Condensed-matter physics has been much more successful over the past 50 years or so. Other disciplines may vary.