〈 Berger | Dillon 〉

Maybe it's linguistics, I am just questioning "fundamental" being firmly pinned to the study of the most elementary constituents of matter known to date. Surely, it is important, but quarks and gluons will not help me solve problems about topological spin current, will they?

If you don't like "fundamental" being used as the technical term for whatever the Standard Model + general relativity are trying to do, please make up a less loaded term and popularize it. Until that replacement catches on, people will use "fundamental".

Well, that then might be a good time indeed, as @skdh argues, to step back and think what it is they are trying to do. I don't know any examples of someone setting out (literally) to discover the "fundamental laws of the universe" and succeeding.

are you purposing that science is the endeavor of pursuing what's already successfully been done? you could have said to Newton 'i don't recall any stories of anyone successfully figuring out how the moon goes goes round the earth' that's not a very good argument..

"How the Moon goes round the Earth" is a reasinably well defined problem.

so are 'why do hadrons form?' , 'what is dark matter?' .. If you want a success story about discovering a new fundamental law look at the SM gauge group

to say all particle physicists do is 'discover the fundamental laws' is just building a straw man to blow it down .. do you really think that every paper we write is just some muse on a philosophical abstraction?

I am not dismissing anything here. There is this statement that the subject might be at a standstill. I am trying, like the others, to think why that could happen. All I am saying is that, drawing on history, it's problem solving that seems to win over "healthy speculation".