<story><title>Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years</title><url>https://iai.tv/articles/why-physics-has-made-no-progress-in-50-years-auid-1292</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cletus</author><text>Does anyone else feel like the abstractions and models in physics have gone passed the point where the casual outsider (even a technically and scientifically minded one) can no longer intuitively understand it?&lt;p&gt;Because that&amp;#x27;s how I feel. There are so many things I just don&amp;#x27;t understand now like:&lt;p&gt;1. I originally thought the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle was a natural consequence of using particles (photos) for measurement. Instead however it seems to be a fundamental property of the universe, which I only learned after finding out most of the mass of hadrons comes from the relativistic motion of quarks and it explains why hadrons don&amp;#x27;t collapse to a point.&lt;p&gt;2. What does it even mean to create more space? The universe is expanding. Ok, I can accept that. But what does it &lt;i&gt;mean&lt;/i&gt;?&lt;p&gt;3. I find the models for dark matter and dark energy to be... &lt;i&gt;unsatisfying&lt;/i&gt;. I realize there&amp;#x27;s experimental evidence for unobservable mass but it &lt;i&gt;feels&lt;/i&gt; like a fudge.&lt;p&gt;4. Of course we still have no quantum model for gravity.&lt;p&gt;5. I don&amp;#x27;t really understand what a fundamental force really is. Like why does electromagnetism have a repulsive opposite but gravity doesn&amp;#x27;t? When I tried to look into this I ended up down some rabbit hole of &amp;quot;gauge forces&amp;quot; and got completely lost. Why is the Higgs Field not a force?&lt;p&gt;6. Why are some predictions of the Standard Model so incredibly accurate (like the magnetic moment of an electron IIRC?) while others are so incredibly inaccurate (eg IIRC the QFT prediction of vacuum energy is off by 120 orders of magnitude).&lt;p&gt;7. Why are there exactly three generations of particles (ignoring the Higgs)? What does a generation even mean?&lt;p&gt;I could go on. I don&amp;#x27;t for a second mean to suggest any of these notions are wrong. It&amp;#x27;s just that the models have gotten so complex (it seems?) that it just feels like something huge is missing, something that will eventually seem obvious in hindsight. Or am I just a lemur trying to figure out how an airplane works?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ProblemFactory</author><text>&amp;gt; Or am I just a lemur trying to figure out how an airplane works?&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately yes, all of us are.&lt;p&gt;This is not a problem with physics or abstractions. It&amp;#x27;s a problem with our intuition. Our intuition is based on evolution and life experience, which is all formed based on mostly solid objects from 1cm to 100m moving at 1m&amp;#x2F;s to 100m&amp;#x2F;s.&lt;p&gt;The universe however does not care what meatbags can experience with our senses. It doesn&amp;#x27;t mean that our complex math abstractions are necessarily correct - but they are more correct than casual intuition. You can train that intuition with enough work with the maths.&lt;p&gt;For example, you can map most of basic electricity to water flow and pressure, and some electromagnetic waves to waves in water - but you need to make a small jump to abstraction  to combine both, and a large jump to get a gut feeling for special relativity to &amp;quot;feel right&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;The crazy part is really that mathematical abstractions exist for all these things at all. There seems to be no natural reason that physics should be describable by small elegant formulas at all, let alone our experience of throwing rocks into a pond. Why isn&amp;#x27;t particle physics as messy as organic chemistry?</text></comment>
<story><title>Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years</title><url>https://iai.tv/articles/why-physics-has-made-no-progress-in-50-years-auid-1292</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cletus</author><text>Does anyone else feel like the abstractions and models in physics have gone passed the point where the casual outsider (even a technically and scientifically minded one) can no longer intuitively understand it?&lt;p&gt;Because that&amp;#x27;s how I feel. There are so many things I just don&amp;#x27;t understand now like:&lt;p&gt;1. I originally thought the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle was a natural consequence of using particles (photos) for measurement. Instead however it seems to be a fundamental property of the universe, which I only learned after finding out most of the mass of hadrons comes from the relativistic motion of quarks and it explains why hadrons don&amp;#x27;t collapse to a point.&lt;p&gt;2. What does it even mean to create more space? The universe is expanding. Ok, I can accept that. But what does it &lt;i&gt;mean&lt;/i&gt;?&lt;p&gt;3. I find the models for dark matter and dark energy to be... &lt;i&gt;unsatisfying&lt;/i&gt;. I realize there&amp;#x27;s experimental evidence for unobservable mass but it &lt;i&gt;feels&lt;/i&gt; like a fudge.&lt;p&gt;4. Of course we still have no quantum model for gravity.&lt;p&gt;5. I don&amp;#x27;t really understand what a fundamental force really is. Like why does electromagnetism have a repulsive opposite but gravity doesn&amp;#x27;t? When I tried to look into this I ended up down some rabbit hole of &amp;quot;gauge forces&amp;quot; and got completely lost. Why is the Higgs Field not a force?&lt;p&gt;6. Why are some predictions of the Standard Model so incredibly accurate (like the magnetic moment of an electron IIRC?) while others are so incredibly inaccurate (eg IIRC the QFT prediction of vacuum energy is off by 120 orders of magnitude).&lt;p&gt;7. Why are there exactly three generations of particles (ignoring the Higgs)? What does a generation even mean?&lt;p&gt;I could go on. I don&amp;#x27;t for a second mean to suggest any of these notions are wrong. It&amp;#x27;s just that the models have gotten so complex (it seems?) that it just feels like something huge is missing, something that will eventually seem obvious in hindsight. Or am I just a lemur trying to figure out how an airplane works?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>effie</author><text>Yes. First, intuition depends on your experience. If you never studied physics, most things will be nonintuitive (heavy bodies don&amp;#x27;t fall faster than light ones? really?)&lt;p&gt;Second, modern 20th century physics education (courses, textbooks) suffered sustained corruption of methodology by scientific authorities, where the quest for understanding was renounced in favor of &amp;quot;modelling&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;prediction&amp;quot; (e.g. authors of orthodox quantum theory and their less bright pupils perpetuating that attitude) and later by institutionalized system of university research which propels tweaking and applying old ideas to detriment of trying new ones or questioning past ideas that are too ingrained.&lt;p&gt;This leads to a large portion of theoretical physics publications being more and more about complex calculations where most applicators do not even try to understand &amp;quot;what is going on&amp;quot;, they just assume the same quantum methodology with some tweaks (i.e. different configuration spaces, more dimensions, different Lagrangians, new fields that fix problems of the previous ones, tricks  with removing some ugly series terms etc).&lt;p&gt;Sometimes these tweaks get fancy names (superstrings, loops, dark matter) but they are really an additional concept that needs to be put in to save the edifice from those radicals who would like to try actually new and incompatible ideas.&lt;p&gt;When you study 20th century physics yourself from original sources, you&amp;#x27;ll find the stuff taught currently actually has highly varying degree of credibility. Some stuff is rock solid, such as relativity, molecular theory and chemistry, nuclear physics and solid state theory, and some stuff is ... well, more unfinished and less credible - such as standard model, force unification, quantum gravity, dark matter, etc.).&lt;p&gt;If you want to get some solid ground on which to build intuition, start with the rock-solid physics as known till 1905, then after that makes sense, learn about its problems (explanation of emission spectra, inconsistency of EM theory with Newtonian mechanics), then after that take a deep breath and read original papers on quantum theory and particle&amp;#x2F;nuclear physics.&lt;p&gt;This will take years to understand. The later theoretical stuff around Standard Model details (lepton generations, stability of particles, unification of gravity and QFT) is a decades old project that nobody knows how to finish. It is stuck for now, and has little relevance for understanding those previous things.</text></comment>