michael_nielsen

@michael_nielsen pls advise

The reasons are completely different. In some small(!) but important parts of physics, things have gone mind bogglingly successfully. The Standard Model and General Relativity are just too damned good. That's at the root of the problem...

Consider that LIGO measured fluctuations in spacetime accurate to better than 1 part in 10 to the 22. I.e., better than measuring the distance to the Sun to the diameter of a hydrogen atom. That's the kind of place you need to go looking to find exceptions to GR. And it works...

By way of contrast, it's pretty obvious some huge things people could do in, say, social psych, & immediately get much, much better results. In fundamental physics, it's easy to point to social problems, but those aside: there's no obvious way of making progress.

Put another way: improve the social processes in social psych => way better science, immediately; improve the social processes in fundamental physics => no idea if anything changes at all. I hope it would.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts about this.

An important thing I forgot to say: the problems Sabine is talking about are most problematic in a small (but important) part of physics. Areas like condensed matter physics are vastly larger than quantum gravity research, say.