Last century, the equations of physics were one-liners, like E=mc2, but the equations of string theory today fill books. The low-hanging fruits of nature’s tree of knowledge have been plucked it seems. The ladder of machine learning was expected to help, but thirty years of data crunching didn’t alter the situation. Meanwhile, the theory front produced one wrong prediction after another, for as a physicist notes:
“Ten thousand wrong predictions sounds dramatic but its actually an underestimate… all the extra dimensions … all the pretty symmetry groups, all the new particles … They were all wrong. Even if the LHC finds something new in the data that is yet to come, we already know that the theorist’s guesses did not work out. Not. A. Single. One. How much more evidence do they need that their methods are not working?” (Hossenfelder, 2018).
Fifty years without progress in physics is unprecedented, so it’s time for a change. The change proposed now is to stop spinning what Hossenfelder calls theory-tales, and re-engineer physics from the data ground up.
QR2.5.1 The End of Physics?
QR2.5.2. Grounded Physics
QR2.5.3. Reality Is Quantum
QR2.5.4. A Quantum Model