Intro

I'm studying physics at MIT right now. My two favorite professors are David Pritchard and Alan Guth. They're 84 and 76 years old, respectively.

At one of the dinners I attended with a big-shot Harvard Professor he shared his scientific journey to particle physics.

He started doing physics research in undergrad, then went to the Institute for Advanced Study for PhD in physics. He spent 10 years doing physics. Then he came to Berkeley, met some experimentalists and realized that he wasn't doing physics, he was just doing math. 10 years.

He told us that he was coming up with fun extensions of string theory that had "interesting correspondence with the standard model" and now thinks it was all "bullshit".

What I conclude is:

1. Physics faculty at Institute for Advanced Study have literally no idea what "physics" is. They're mathematicians.
2. Big-shot Harvard faculty have no inborn intuition for what physics is and will gravitate towards meaningless research, unless something *special* happens.^[a]

Most seminars I go to contain no physics content. They're engineering, data fitting, endless complicated extensions of existing models, things somehow inspired by physical phenomena that devolve into just doing math, and so on.

As far as I can tell, nobody finds this problematic. Moreover most of the physicists at Harvard and MIT don't even realize that what they're doing is not physics at all, not even science, really.

LARPing science

How come?

People naturally gravitate towards the most fun research, which is math, not physics. Real research is punishing, usually doesn't work, and makes it much more difficult to get tenure. Research will be about fun math and not about science, unless it must. Glass Bead Game ^[b]was about that.

The current generation of theoretical physicists never made a real physical discovery and neither did their mentors. They're working on external data, never talk to experimentalists, or just do math.

The Center for Theoretical Physics Department at MIT literally has its own building, removing them from even accidentally interacting with experimentalists.

When I go to experimentalist seminars, there are no theoretical physicists there. When I go to theoretical seminars, there are no experimentalists there.

Experimentalists don't usually think about science -- they do engineering and without theoretical guidance produce no progress (market competition with more technologically advanced competitor could help them, but this is academia).

Outro

Unless something changes, theoretical physics might forever remain extensions to the Standard Model (they very misleadingly call this "Beyond Standard Model" research -- it's not) and fun math.

Bottom line is: if you never had the experience of discovering new knowledge about the world OR had a mentor who had it, you literally won't know what science is or how to do it. After 2-3 generations, this experience simply gets lost, and people doing "science" don't know what science is. Again, this has already happened at IAS and is happening very quickly at Harvard and MIT.

So what happens if we run out of frontier on Earth and either get no major scientific discoveries for 2-3 generations or get majorly disruptive, as happened to civilization multiple times over the last 5,000 years?

I think we might very well not recover the idea of progress for a very long time (I wrote 1,000 years in my notes but who knows). We've already seen this happen with space 1970-2000, until Musk came along – technology was literally declining.

Appendix

1. most graduate students seem to not understand any physics. The only questions the professor gets in my graduate level astrophysics class at MIT are about equations being miswritten or smth, never about the physical meaning of equations.
2. Intro QM is taught terribly at MIT. I'm not sure if the professor himself understands what it actually means. All the extra brain power MIT and Harvard get ends up spent on putting more and more mechanical recipes into their heads, not on understanding.

Further reading

1. What Does Any of This Have To Do with Physics?

I only would have appreciated more how Rajeev and I hadn’t come any closer to The Grail. This was yet another surprise: that not every part of the frontier is equally earthshaking and that some are sort of trivial. Despite how knotty our project seemed to me, our conclusions were of extraordinarily limited scope.

“Quantum Gravity on a Circle …”

The paper we wrote did indeed flesh out a consistent theory of quantum gravity, one in which the concept of distance is defined by the phase of a quantum mechanical wavefunction. It even predicted black holes. But—and this is a very big but—the theory could only be true in a hypothetical one-dimensional universe that’s shaped like a ring, in other words a world nothing at all like the three-dimensional one in which you and I live, pay taxes, and die.

What we’d created is called a “toy model”: an exact solution to an approximate version of an actual problem. This, I learned, is what becomes of a colossal conundrum like quantum gravity after 70-plus years of failed attempts to solve it. All the frontal attacks and obvious ideas have been tried. Every imaginable path has hit a dead end. Therefore researchers retreat, set up camp, and start building tools to help them attempt more indirect routes. Toy models are such tools. Rajeev’s river almost certainly didn’t run to The Grail. The hope was that some side stream of one of its many tributaries (Virasoro, Yamabe …) would.

Actually that was my hope, not Rajeev’s. Rajeev, I believe, just liked doing the math. The thing was a puzzle he could solve, so he solved it. For him that was enough.

Comments

Neutral

1. David Chapman:

1. "Brief, provocative, plausible rant by @alexeyguzey. I've no idea whether it's accurate.
   
   I'm guessing that this doesn't apply to condensed matter physics, and people there are doing genuine science. At MIT, at least, that may be in the materials science department, rather than the physics department, though."

For

1. PereFouan:

1. "Short answer: this is correct. I studied plasma physics (controlled fusion) and within a year of grad school I realized that the field of magneto-hydrodynamics was incapable of predicting anything about confined plasmas."

2. 💧:

1. "It's not surprising to see HEP turn into math, given the impossibility of experiments at the GUT energy scale
   
   But we've known for decades that HEP isn't practical, the acid test is whether it's good math, and Ed Witten's Fields Medal suggests it is — at least, some of the time…"

3. Ptolemy Ocelot:

1. "Yes.
   
   Theoretical sciences are indistinguishable from fantasy until an engineering application integrates it into reality.
   
   Without that integration, "scientists" can larp with endless complexity. No different than the encylopedic lore of, say, the Star Trek universe."

Against

1. flux:

1. "None of this rant really reflects how high energy theory, pheno, or experiment is done. There are several instances of these fields talking to one another and just because theory has gotten math heavy, does not make mathematical physicists mathematicians."
2. also flux replying to someone else in the thread:

1. "“Mathematical physics is quite far from anything experimental”
   
   Not true. As an example, recent literature in mathematical physics around combinatorial algebraic geometry have led to easier calculations for scattering amplitudes and emergent topologies in QCD interactions."

2. Holly Elmore:

1. "On priors this sounds extremely implausible, especially given Guzey’s reputation as a dilettante critic of many fields
   
   After reading seems to rest facilely on the meaning of “real physics”"

3. Tailcalled:

1. "Guzey's critique is ~entirely based on abstract words like "physics", "math" and "engineering". Unclear what his theory of the distinctions between them is.
   
   Somehow "data fitting" is considered distinct from "real physics", but while I can see lots of contexts where data fitting is unhelpful, I feel like my image of physics-as-a-discipline would include some data fitting.
   
   This sort of rant would work better with a sketch of a project he'd consider "real physics".
   
   That said I disagree with priors that it sounds implausible, my impression is a lot of places are just fumbling around."

4. David Riley:

1. "It's inaccurate. He doesn't seem to know what he wants physics to be. If we work on theoretical models, we aren't doing physics, but if we design experiments and extract the parameters of the models we have, we're just doing data science and engineering.
   
   I'll ask  @alexeyguzey what do you want physics to be? What used to be physics that you don't see currently?
   
   I see theorists doing the best they can with the experimental constraints BSM that they have, and experimentalists pushing the boundaries of what the universe can tell us."
2. My response:

1. "I don't know enough physics to have specific takes on what i'd like to see yet (I know that I don't know enough because during the seminars I go to I don't manage to come up with interesting specific questions for presenters).
   
   I do still think the weird feeling I have while talking to physicists and listening to the seminars and the conclusions I reached in the doc are justified for a lot of physics and many physicists (especially theoretical).
   
   I studied much more econ in the past and have seen dynamics that are extremely similar to what i'm now seeing in physics.
   
   That is, of researchers essentially pretending to care about the subject matter while instead just trying to have fun/advance career/doing math & doing research that doesn't contribute to our knowledge about how the world actually works.
   
   I want to keep learning physics over the coming years to develop specific interesting questions and directions of research.

5. T. Marshall Eubanks:

1. "It's certainly not true in gravitational theory & observational science. There are real advances there, such as LIGO and PITA gravitational wave detection & EHT / ngEHT / BHEX observations of black hole event horizons. It's just that very little of it comes from particle physics
   
   And, if you doubt this is fundamental, the LIGO/Virgo multimessenger data absolutely _slaughtered_ "heavy gravity" type theories. A whole raft of popular theories died overnight.
   
   And then there is dark matter / dark energy / cosmological constant.
   
   What does seem like a dead end is string theory, but, well, that's definitely not all of physics, even fundamental physics."