Modern physics has been stagnant for so long that some physicists wonder if it is the end of physics, as maybe:
“… for the first time in the history of science, we could be facing questions that we cannot answer, not because we don’t have the brains or technology, but because the laws of physics themselves forbid it.” (Cliff, 2015).
The laws of nature don’t forbid questions but dogmas do, and physics today follows the canon of materialism that only matter exists. No-one has proved it, so it’s an assumption, but it is said to be self-evident, so it is odd that our modern world of transistors, satellites, and cellphones is based on equations about immaterial waves. We say they don’t exist but nature disagrees, as empty space produces a pressure and it isn’t matter. If it can have a physical effect, why not quantum waves? Relativity and quantum theory began with unseen causes, like curved space and quantum waves, so what stops us investigating them further? The answer lies in choices made long ago.
Last century, physics left the safe haven of classical mechanics for the promised land of quantum theory, to discover how light moves in a vacuum and gravity acts from afar. Wandering in the desert of materialism, they found the quantum jungle, a strange place where the laws of matter didn’t seem to apply. Those who entered it returned with strange stories, like that it caused everything (Bohm, 1980), so the expedition leaders fenced it off with equations, called it a mythical place, and banned any discussion of it. With nothing else to do, their followers built the Standard Model castle. It dominates the land but nothing grows where the water of knowledge is absent.
The fizz has gone out of physics because what baffled Einstein and Feynman seventy years ago still baffles us today. Theories like supersymmetry predicted new particles but the large hadron collider didn’t find any of them. Instead of predicting results for experiments to confirm, theories were fitted to the data, so as a physicist observed, the trouble with physics is that it isn’t producing anything (Smolin, 2006). For example, string theory has made no predictions at all, and the multiverse is an untestable speculation that isn’t even wrong (Woit, 2007). Even the weeds of error don’t grow in the sematic desert where physics has settled.
Speculating on bad theories is bad but speculating with no theory at all is worse, because it leads nowhere. Just as people in a desert see mirages after a while, physicists in a semantic desert are starting to see mirages, like:
- We may have spotted a parallel universe going backwards in time. (Cartwright, 2020).
- Neutrinos may explain why we don’t live in an antimatter universe. (Crane, 2020).
The key word is “may”. Fifty years of physics have produced maybe WIMPS, maybe strings, maybe time travel, maybe supersymmetry, maybe a multiverse, and so on, one mirage after another. There are papers on white holes, large extra dimensions, time travel, closed time loops, WIMPs, wormholes, heavy sterile neutrinos, and super-particles, all hoping for the next revolution in physics, but it never came, because nothing grows here. In 2018, the authors of a cover story speculated that axiflavons from a hypothetical flavon field might solve the problems of physics, and concluded:
“It’s thrilling stuff, if for the moment it is only conjecture”, New Scientist, August, 2018, p31.
Yet years later, nothing has changed. Physicists in the desert of materialism are dreaming theories, and if they stay there, the next fifty years will be as barren as the last. Searching for answers to the quantum jungle in the desert of matter is like looking for the keys you lost in a forest under a lamp post because “The light is better here.” When physics decided that quantum waves don’t exist, it rejected humanity’s greatest discovery, that quantum waves really do cause physical events. The answer to this stagnation is a new methodology, as Hossenfelder says:
“The major cause of this stagnation is that physics has changed, but physicists have not changed their methods… Instead of examining the way that they propose hypotheses and revising their methods, theoretical physicists have developed a habit of putting forward entirely baseless speculations.”
Speculating without theory is like throwing mud at a wall and hoping for a portrait, and string theory is a castle drawn in the air with no base, as no data supports it’s 10500 rooms, despite thousands of papers on it. So, is physics helpless when facing what makes no physical sense? How can it approach the quantum mystery if matter can’t explain it? Luckily, science has met this problem before. When other disciplines face what they can’t explain by conventional means, they use grounded theory. It works when conventional methods fail but to use it, physics would have to abandon its assumption that the universe is nothing but matter particles.