I agree, but also, physics can be verified by a layman easier. For example, you can measure the wavelength of light with a strand of hair and a laser pointer, you can use kitchen supplies to estimate molecular sizes, etc. Modern tech also gives you hard to fake measurement tools, like diffraction gratings or cameras or laser pointers. The paranoid physicist is in a much better spot than the paranoid biologist. Flat Earthers seem even sillier than antivaxxers. Even if you don’t want to read some textbooks, you can have a friend that does help you.
The theory is also easier:
It’s easier to know what it really predicts, so you have less fear of post facto confabulation. Often they are based on a few fundamental assumptions, each of which must withstand the scrutiny of every prediction. In other words, it’s more unified. For example, special relativity is mostly based on the assumptions that the speed of light is constant in every (inertial) frame and that physics should work the same too.
Relatedly, we expect to have better tests. In physics people are desperate for apparent violations of the standard model (besides the very big intractable unsolved ones).
There are more mutual consistency checks. Since there’s more unification and simpler generators, you expect the sanity checks on official numbers to check out. Fermi estimates should work. For example, famously the pion’s mass was found to be pretty close to what a simple estimate from the range of the nuclear forces would get you.
There’s a… thing about them… that you can pick up on intuitively and that’s harder to fake—though I’m not sure how much of this is selection bias from the bad theories dying. It also seems that fundamental physics nowadays has plenty of (mutually contradictory) “nice” proposals. So either the niceness heuristic was too weak to begin with or has gotten weaker.
I agree, but also, physics can be verified by a layman easier. For example, you can measure the wavelength of light with a strand of hair and a laser pointer, you can use kitchen supplies to estimate molecular sizes, etc. Modern tech also gives you hard to fake measurement tools, like diffraction gratings or cameras or laser pointers. The paranoid physicist is in a much better spot than the paranoid biologist. Flat Earthers seem even sillier than antivaxxers. Even if you don’t want to read some textbooks, you can have a friend that does help you.
The theory is also easier:
It’s easier to know what it really predicts, so you have less fear of post facto confabulation. Often they are based on a few fundamental assumptions, each of which must withstand the scrutiny of every prediction. In other words, it’s more unified. For example, special relativity is mostly based on the assumptions that the speed of light is constant in every (inertial) frame and that physics should work the same too.
Relatedly, we expect to have better tests. In physics people are desperate for apparent violations of the standard model (besides the very big intractable unsolved ones).
There are more mutual consistency checks. Since there’s more unification and simpler generators, you expect the sanity checks on official numbers to check out. Fermi estimates should work. For example, famously the pion’s mass was found to be pretty close to what a simple estimate from the range of the nuclear forces would get you.
There’s a… thing about them… that you can pick up on intuitively and that’s harder to fake—though I’m not sure how much of this is selection bias from the bad theories dying. It also seems that fundamental physics nowadays has plenty of (mutually contradictory) “nice” proposals. So either the niceness heuristic was too weak to begin with or has gotten weaker.