Does anyone who follows physics doubt it is in trouble? When I say physics, I don’t mean applied physics, material science or what Murray-Gell-Mann called “squalid-state physics.” I mean physics at its grandest, the effort to figure out reality. Where did the universe come from? What is it made of? What laws govern its behavior? And how probable is the universe? Are we here through sheer luck, or was our existence somehow inevitable?
Wow. Way to back-handedly imply that condensed matter physics is not grand or truly important. The frustrating thing is that Horgan knows perfectly well that condensed matter physics has been the root of multiple of profound ideas (Higgs mechanism, anyone?), as well as shaping basically all of the technology he used to write that review. He goes out of his way here to make clear that he doesn't think any of that is really interesting. Why do that as a rhetorical device?
8 comments:
The guy is a journalist, not a physicist. I don't see why anyone should take his opinion seriously about which parts of physics are important.
StevenG, sure, except that he's widely read, and widely journalists have a lot of influence on the public narrative about our discipline. His bully pulpit lets him influence other media outlets, and in turn the broader public attitude.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/tag/condensed-matter-physics/
Quanta is better than Scientific American. Just can't imagine once great " Scientific American" has fallen so low in standards.
To be fair, this is in part condensed matter physicists' fault for not putting more effort over the decades to convince the general public of the fundamental importance and excitement of our field. Not saying that doing so would have necessarily change Horgan's mind, but at the very least, it would have made the average lay person more aware of how ridiculous his opinion is.
Well, you are evading his point. It hardly invalidates his first sentence. Namely, physics is in crisis. It is a gradually fading out field and it will remain so until another Einstein emerges and comes up with an entirely new paradigm. General public wants and needs to see a tantalizing breakthrough like relativity or quantum physics. An anti-gravity device, a technology to go to the stars, a light saber etc. Nothing less than that.
Dear John Horgan, all of physics, including squalid-state, and in fact all of science, is in crisis! Watch for the quantum computing bubble to burst.
When I read the quotes I don't feel any hostility to the journalist. Probably most of us who eventually fell for the fresh challenges of condensed matter were inculcated with that point of view as undergraduates. We accept the situation as one that can only change over generations. As an undergrad I for one thought condensed matter is a mess of approximations and hand waving (which it is). I now tell myself it is a more refined taste that takes longer to acquire ...
Yes, it's partly our fault for not telling the public often enough that the transistor and the laser are just as much physics as the Higgs, much better physics than the multiverse (a low bar), and obviously a trillion times more useful than either.
We should thank Doug for being one of very few to do more than just complaining. A pity there are no Sean Carroll, Peter Woit and Sabine Hossenfelder of condensed matter.
Horgan would sound less elitist if he included nuclear physics and astrophysics among the nonfundamental physics fields. In contrast to those fields, which are just a type of applied physics, condensed matter has introduced truly novel concepts that the fundamentalists didn't even know they needed.
"... squalid-state physics ..." In terms of explaining dark matter, is string theory in a squalid-state? I have suggested to the string theorists the Milgrom Denial Hypothesis: The main problem with string theory is that string theorists fail to realize that Milgrom is the Kepler of contemporary cosmology. Google "kroupa milgrom" and "mcgaugh milgrom". Is supersymmetry empirically valid?
Consider the Chinese proverb:
树倒猢狲散 (Shù dǎo húsūn sàn) "When tree falls, monkeys scatter."
I now suggest a new proverb:
When one supersymmetric tree falls, the superstring theorists scatter and climb another supersymmetric tree.
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