What's up in the foundations of physics? As some of you may know, Sabine Hossenfelder published Lost in Math in which she argued that the foundations of physics has gotten hung-up in math and has lost touch with the physical world. We have lots of fancy math and to observational verification of any of it. The book is coming out in paperback this week and she's written a blog post reflecting on what's happened in the last two years. Here's a few of the opening paragraphs:
...if we do not make progress understanding nature on the most fundamental level, then scientific progress will eventually be reduced to working out details of applications of what we already know. This means that overall societal progress depends crucially on progress in the foundations of physics, more so than on any other discipline.
I know that a lot of scientists in other disciplines find that tremendously offensive. But if they object all I have to do is remind them that without breakthroughs in the foundations of physics there would be no transistors, no microchips, no hard disks, no computers, no wifi, no internet. There would be no artificial intelligence, no lasers, no magnetic resonance imaging, no electron microscopes, no digital cameras. Computer science would not exist. Modern medicine would not exist either because the imaging methods and tools for data analysis would never have been invented. In brief, without the work that physicists did 100 years ago, modern civilization as we know it today would not exist.
I find it somewhat perplexing that so few people seem to realize how big of a problem it is that progress in the foundations of physics has stalled. Part of the reason, I think, is that physicists in the foundations themselves have been talking so much rubbish that people have come to believe foundational work is just philosophical speculation and has lost any relevance for technological progress.
Indeed, I am afraid, most of my colleagues now believe that themselves. It’s wrong, needless to say. A better understand[ing] of the theories that we currently use to make all these fancy devices, will almost certainly lead to practical applications. Maybe not in 5 years or 10 years, but more in 100 or 500 years. But eventually, it will.
It does seem, though, that, in the wake of the fact that Large Hadron Collider failed to find fundamental particles other than the Higgs boson, physicists have begun to realize that something is indeed wrong.
But physicists still have not done anything to fix the problem. [...] The key is to have a look at what has historically worked. Where have breakthroughs come from in the foundations of physics? Historically a lot of breakthroughs were driven by experimental discoveries. But the simple things have been done and new experiments now are so costly and take such a long time to build, that coincidental discoveries have become incredibly unlikely. You do not just tinker around with a 27 kilometer particle collider.
What has worked is seeking to resolve inconsistencies in current theories.
Some of the inconsistencies in the current theories are the missing quantization of gravity, the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, some aspects of dark energy and dark matter, and some issues with quantum field theories. [...]
But what I have found very encouraging is the reaction of young physicists to the book, students and postdocs. They don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past, and they are frequently asking for practical advice. Which I am happy to give, to the extent that I can. The young people give me hope that things will change, eventually, though it might take some time.
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I seems to me that Hossenfelder's as some implications for the study of innovation. For she's not claiming that the foundations of physics has lacked new ideas over the last 40 years, only that those new ideas haven't advanced our understanding of the universe. They don't represent intellectual progress. Assuming that she proves correct – and she's not the only one who's argued that the foundations of physics has proven sterile – what does that imply about the relationship between innovation and progress?
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