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Has Physics Gotten Something Really Important Really Wrong? (npr.org)
Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes an article from NPR:
Some researchers now see popular ideas like string theory and the multiverse as highly suspect. These physicists feel our study of the cosmos has been taken too far from what data can constrain with the extra "hidden" dimensions of string theory and the unobservable other universes of the multiverse... it all adds up to muddied waters and something some researchers see as a "crisis in physics."
The article quotes Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin, the authors of a new book arguing that "Science is corrupted when it abandons the discipline of empirical validation or dis-confirmation. It is also weakened when it mistakes its assumptions for facts and its ready-made philosophy for the way things are." And according to this analysis of the book, what they're proposing is "to take a giant philosophical step back and see if a new and more promising direction can be found. For the two thinkers, such a new direction can be spelled out in three bold claims about the world. There is only one universe. Time is real. Mathematics is selectively real."
The article quotes Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin, the authors of a new book arguing that "Science is corrupted when it abandons the discipline of empirical validation or dis-confirmation. It is also weakened when it mistakes its assumptions for facts and its ready-made philosophy for the way things are." And according to this analysis of the book, what they're proposing is "to take a giant philosophical step back and see if a new and more promising direction can be found. For the two thinkers, such a new direction can be spelled out in three bold claims about the world. There is only one universe. Time is real. Mathematics is selectively real."
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We are already doing it. But not in fundamental particle physics. It is in applied physics where the massive progress is being made. There are a huge range of problems in biology, geology, chemistry, mechanical engineering, nanoscience, neuroscience, and even sociology and economics to which the rigorous, empirical traditions of physics are making major contributions. Last decade we finally solved the problem of transition to turbulence in pipe flow. A more than 100 year old problem with deep mathematical challenges and practical implications on top. But it likely will not receive a nobel prize because of the deep inertia in the dead end idea that physics is reductionist physics. It turns out that it is going to be very slow going to make further improvements in reductionist particle physics. So many people have been told that the "real physics" problems are reductionist problems, so they go to making up philosophical questions they can talk about when they run out of empirical problems they can solve. Physics will experience a renaissance when it finally embraces the empirical study of emergent phenomena for which there are a large number of problems that society really needs physicists to contribute to solving.