<story><title>The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal</title><url>http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-present-phase-of-stagnation-in.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>letitgo12345</author><text>Well considering that we know everything pretty much about most of everyday physics and new physics requires energies that are almost unreachable and billions of dollars in experimental investment and&amp;#x2F;or  years and decades to collect sufficient data, it&amp;#x27;s not a surprise at all that foundations of physics progress has slowed. I don&amp;#x27;t think the physics community is to blame here. Just the nature of reality</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danbruc</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Well considering that we know everything pretty much about most of everyday physics [...]&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s true and also not true. Yes, we have a working theory that explains essentially everything with unprecedented accuracy as long as you don&amp;#x27;t wander too far outside of everyday length and energy scales. But on the other hand we still do not really understand basic quantum mechanics almost a century after its discovery or at the very least there is no consensus about what the theory actually says. Quantum mechanics is not even self-consistent.</text></comment>
<story><title>The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal</title><url>http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-present-phase-of-stagnation-in.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>letitgo12345</author><text>Well considering that we know everything pretty much about most of everyday physics and new physics requires energies that are almost unreachable and billions of dollars in experimental investment and&amp;#x2F;or  years and decades to collect sufficient data, it&amp;#x27;s not a surprise at all that foundations of physics progress has slowed. I don&amp;#x27;t think the physics community is to blame here. Just the nature of reality</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rossdavidh</author><text>I agree, although I think it could be argued that a logical outcome of this fact, is that most (although hopefully not all) of the physicists should go work on other things, like maybe the physics of planet formation, where we are getting new data all the time.  Or maybe in areas outside of physics altogether, like the social sciences, where again we have orders of magnitude more data than we once did.  If the low-hanging fruit is all gone, move on.  That&amp;#x27;s hard news if you&amp;#x27;ve sunk two or three decades into becoming an expert in a particular niche.</text></comment>