Modern physics has been stagnant for so long that some physicists predict 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).
Yet in the history of science, it wasn’t the laws of nature that forbade questions but the laws of people, their dogmas. The main dogma of modern physics is physicalism, the idea that everything is physical. No-one has ever proved it, so it’s just an assumption, but it is said to be self-evident. Even so, the world of transistors, satellites, and cellphones we have today is based on equations about waves that aren’t physical. According to physicalism, quantum waves don’t exist, but how then does light travel? And if empty space can have a physical effect, why not quantum waves? Relativity and quantum theory began with causes that aren’t physical, like curved space and quantum waves, so why don’t we study them further? It isn’t nature that is stopping us, but our own dogma.
Last century, physics left the safe haven of classical mechanics, hoping to discover how light moves in a vacuum, and how gravity acts from afar. Wandering in the desert of physicalism they found not a promised land but the quantum jungle, a weird place that seemed to ignore physicalism laws. Those who entered it returned with strange stories, like that it guided matter (Bohm, 1980), so the expedition leaders fenced it off with equations, calling it mythical, and banned discussion of it. With nothing else to do, their followers built a great castle called the standard model, which today dominates a barren landscape because theories can’t grow in a semantic desert.
Sitting in their castle, physicists invented theories like supersymmetry that predicted new particles, so they built a big machine to find them, called the large hadron collider, but even its “God particle” led nowhere. Theories that didn’t work were altered to fit the data, but they still didn’t predict much. As one physicist observed, the trouble with particle physics is that it isn’t producing new knowledge (Smolin, 2006). For example, string theory makes 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 desert of physicalism. Today, the fizz has gone out of physics because what baffled Einstein and Feynman seventy years ago still baffles physics today.
Speculating based on bad theories is bad but it still tells us what doesn’t work. In contrast, speculating with no theory at all is worse because nothing is learned. Just as people stuck in a desert start to see mirages after a while, physicists are now just imagining things, as these paper titles illustrate:
- 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 in the above titles is “may”. Fifty years of physics can be described as 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, wormholes, heavy sterile neutrinos, and super-particles, all hoping to be the next revolution in physics, but they weren’t. In 2018, a New Scientist cover story speculated about axiflavons from a hypothetical flavon field and concluded:
“It’s thrilling stuff, if for the moment it is only conjecture”, New Scientist, August, 2018, p31.
It was a thrilling conjecture but years later, nothing has changed! Physicists sitting in a semantic desert are dreaming theories and if they stay there, the next fifty years will be as barren as the last. Trying to explain quantum theory based on physicalism is like looking for the keys you lost in a jungle in the desert around it because it is easier to look there. When physics quarantined the quantum jungle, it turned its back on the greatest discovery of humanity, that quantum events really do cause physical events.
The way out of this stagnation is to change the methods of physics, 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 speculating based on invalid axioms is like designing castles the air with no foundations. For example, string theory has 10500 rooms based on no data, despite thousands of papers. So, is physics helpless before what makes no physical sense? How then can physics study the quantum mystery if physicalism can’t?
Luckily, science has a precedent. When other disciplines face what their conventions can’t explain, they use grounded theory. It works when other methods fail because it isn’t based on any assumptions at all, just the data. To use it, physics would have to abandon the axiom of physicalism, but it is leading nowhere so what is the loss? That particles can’t explain everything isn’t the end of physics, but a new beginning.