If you mean by "real scientist" that they are doing real work that advances the field, some of them are and, yes, some of them aren't. I don't mean that as a criticism, because there is real value in being a PR person for science. (Some danger if they do it poorly, but a lot of value, too.) Hawking, for instance, was certainly a real scientist by any measure, right up until his unfortunate passing, but also did good PR and wrote some very popular books. And not to pick on him, but according to his CV [1], Neil deGrasse Tyson hasn't published a paper in a decade, and if you skip three related papers in 2007-2008, hadn't published prior to that since 1998. Doesn't mean he's not doing useful stuff, or that he wasn't at least a scientist in the past, but he's certainly not on the same sort of track as Hawking was.

When a large fraction of the population has frankly anti-scientific beliefs and when funding for continued scientific endeavor depends on votes, science needs to continually justify and promote itself in the public eye.

Are there dangers to that? Yes. But it's worse than holing up in the ivory tower to only quietly do research.

This has been said for thousands of years. Socrates/Plato was complaining about how writing weakens the human memory.

We need to accept that human minds are limited and technology is meant to extend them. Science has advanced considerably due to computers despite the appearances.

The way out of the current “impasse” is through even more technology. We might not be able to solve all the mysteries of the universe without intelligence augmentation or superintelligent AI.

Sadly, not humble, and, from my point of view, uninformed, that is, exactly what would be expected from an otherwise uninformed reader of the newspaper articles about the topics touched, especially from one not understanding how science actually works.

In reality, the "failed" fulfillment of some expectations when the best experiments up to now are performed is also what advances our knowledge, greatly, you can read, for an example, here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17363056

Look from this perspective: not only that what some theoretical scientists whose direct "expectations" came to be unconfirmed by the LHC experiments "expected" would remain just a "plain imagination" without a huge investment in extremely advanced experiments, the same would remain for any scientist having some other ideas.

We need so advanced experiments because anything else is already known. And what we know today we wouldn't without the experiments, especially such producing "unexpected" results. There's is not an actual "crisis" in science advancing, exactly by doing experiments never before done the science does advance. The experiments like LHC are indeed a precondition for any new advancement.

For every complex problem there exists a nice and easily understandable solution... that is wrong. Even the basic explanation in many articles written about the science the authors get wrong, and the casual readers get even more wrong.

The typical complaint is that the experiments "cost much" and then the wishes of some aren't "confirmed"? Well they cost peanuts compared to the investment in military.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...

"Program cost US$1.508 trillion (through 2070 in then-year dollars), US$55.1B for RDT&E, $319.1B for procurement, $4.8B for MILCON, $1123.8B for operations & sustainment (2015 estimate)"

Compare with the total budget of LHC experiment of just €7.5 billion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider

You'd get surely more than 200 LHCs for just one type of a military plane.

Also, the expected cost of measuring gravitational waves from space, the way that would also give us a new and otherwise inaccessible information about the Universe is 1000 times smaller than the cost of the above military plane.

The typical complaint goes on with the idea that the if scientists work on something, and it's unconfirmed by the experiment, it was unnecessary work. That's also not true at all. Most of hypotheses of what is behind the limits of our current experiments will not be confirmed by definition. If we knew, we wouldn't need to perform the experiments.

And you take an extremely condescending tone while addressing OP's lack of humility while making statements attacking him for "especially from one not understanding how science actually works."

How does science actually work? Are we supposed to follow Popper? Or Kuhn? Or Feyerabend? Should we go with logical positivism or empiricism?

There is no problem with, to use your words, unification of classical mechanics and quantum theory

Classical Mechanics is recovered from Quantum Mechanics in the limit of h-bar (Planck's constant) goes to zero. In our day to day experience, Planck's constant is so small as to effectively be zero. The non-intuitive effects of Quantum Mechanics occur when we probe areas where the non-zero value of Planck's constant cannot be ignored.

There has been enormous progress in the last 100+ years in understanding how the world is described by Quantum Theory. In some ways, the so-called Standard Model of Particle Physics can be seen as the crowning achievement of that work.

The only remaining question on that front is the absence of a testable theory that describe gravitation as a quantum theory. String Theory appears to be a leading candidate for this, but it has not, so far, made any testable prediction outside of what we already know from other theories.

I'm trying to explain that it is not "stuck" in the sense in which the casual readers tend to perceive it. The scientists actually have what to do, and will have what to do, no problem with that. It's just that it's harder to get the budget for the kinds of investigations that extend the area of our knowledge. And that some "pet hypotheses" of some scientists remained unconfirmed.

What is currently written in the news about is that some specific hypotheses that intended to "deduct" what can be measured by the most advanced experiments humanity ever done weren't confirmed (or even more exactly, not most obviously confirmed) once the said experiments are made.

But that doesn't devalue the work done in making the hypotheses or the experiments themselves.

Or if I have to explain you "like you're five":

- For Newton to be able to make a theoretical "breakthrough" in 1700 the actual experiments before him were needed to provide all the facts from which he was able to develop his theory. Moreover, the conditions of stability in the dissemination and accessibility of the results of the experiments were needed.

- The same goes for Einstein. All the work of science between 1700 and 1915 was actually needed to make Einstein's "breakthrough," including the famous 1887 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper... which also didn't "confirm" the expectations of the most of the scientists of that time.

- That experiment was really immense breakthrough itself: the principles of it are even used to measure the gravitational waves today, which was achieved for the first time in 2015.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gravitational_wave_obs...

- But our discovery of the principles of electromagnetic radiation also made in 19th century was necessary too.

- In short, science needs the experiments, needs a lot of approaches from the different sides before some "breakthrough" happens and even "not confirming" expectations is a necessary part of the process.

- And even not having a new "breakthrough" of the kind the Einstein's was or of the kind of our quantum physics discoveries is also part of the process. The nature doesn't "have" to have "more unifying" laws than the ones that we already have, at least not at the level reachable by our technological limits. The nature simply is. We can learn more only by pushing the limits, making even more advanced experiments.

- At the time the experiments with the particles started, the "expectations" were exactly the opposite than now: then producing some new particles "wasn't expected." (E.g. around the middle of the 20th century the famous quip of one scientist was "who ordered that?" for the newly discovered particle -- it wasn't expected by the hypotheses of the time). Now some are "disappointed" that even newer particles don't "easily" appear. Well that is what it is. Support the science, learn how it really "works" from the actual history of actual discoveries, and if you aren't able to understand enough the discoveries themselves, do spend more energy on that before you make some claims. There are too many wrong "explanations" in the circulation, and many of those even have an agenda to be such.

Firstly, I'm not against experimentalists and/or experiments and the money spent for them - it's not even "peanut" compared to military projects all around the world, as you stated. What I wanna say is that (to a curious outsider) it looks like there are so many experimentalists (and physicists-turned-to-pop-sci-writers) than theorists so physics suffers from the lack of beautiful power of imagination of human mind. True, I'm not a perfectly-informed one about all the things going on in the filed, of course, but I'm not completely uninformed one too, I guess.

Secondly, I'm not a native English speaker so I thought about the tone of my comment after I finished writing it and read it couple times and asked myself "Does it sound harsh or something like that to...anyone?". So I put down those "2 cents" and "humble" things at the bottom of my comment trying to show that I'm not an insider and I'm not trying to pick on anyone personally. Pardon me if it looked like the opposite.

Analyzing that claim of yours that you specially marked:

"there are so many experimentalists" ... "than theorists so physics suffers from the lack of" "power of imagination."

It is simply a "non sequitur."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_fallacy

There's no any support for any claim that "more theorists" than "experimentalists" are even needed for anything, especially that such a ratio means anything about presence or "lack" of "power of imagination" in physics.

> but I'm not completely uninformed one too, I guess.

Nobody ever said "completely." However I sincerely wish you to be a little more informed about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

I really believe that once you understand that you will have more chance for your own personal improvement and I wish you luck in that. Maybe you'll even make a contribution to some important discovery. But you'll surely have to have more insight that others, being satisfied with being "not completely uninformed" to think that you even understand the basics of something won't bring you much, at least in the areas that we touch in our discussion.

Regarding the state of physics, I've already explained that nobody can even claim that there has to be anything "revolutionary" possible (in the naive sense, the way you expect it) based on the information available to us as the result of all experiments done. From my perspective, there were a lot of amazing discoveries in the last any N years of physics, and they are always result of the new information we experimentally obtain. But we already know so much, and measured so much with such an astonishing precision that there is not even place for some "big" changes affecting the formulas we already have. All better measurements will need always more investment from us, and will involve always the areas of the universe that are less affecting us directly (in the physical sense, I don't speculate about the state of mind).

Just to get you started thinking: some ancient Greek and Hellenistic scientists (who at that time weren't called so) already quite correctly knew how distant is the Moon measured in the number of Earth radii more than 2000 years ago. Do you know that simple number? Were you aware that if was possible to measure that at that time? Would you be able today to repeat that measurement? How much effort would you have to personally invest to repeat all the steps? Second, one Hellenistic scientist again more than 2000 years ago measured the radius of Earth also amazingly precise. Would you be able to repeat all the steps of his experiment? Are you able even to figure them out just by your own thinking?

The humanity knows about the telescopes only for 400 years. Galileo was one of the first scientists using it to figure more about the universe, but he also made the experiments on Earth, being among the first who properly described the properties of gravitation. Newton published his "Principia" only 100 years after Galileo's "On Motion" and only 80 years after the discovery of telescope and based on the enough observations happening even before the telescope existed: Tycho Brahe was the first scientist on the west who measured precisely enough the movements of the planets to make Newton's conclusions even possible, and his measurements were again available only some 80 years before Newton's "Principia." Not to mention that Kepler was already able to figure out the formulas nobody before him had based on these very measurements.

>I have been thinking of how very gently I have always been dealt with. I have never so much as had a violent shove in my entire life

-Maxwell

Also: do we need monks in other places? In the courts--removed from the carrots and sticks society can throw at them?

Ayn Rand identified Kant's error in his Critique of Pure Reason and destroyed his program, she rejected Hume's rank skepticism (which Kant was answering) and showed Descartes how to validate reason (i.e. to be certain) without being omniscient. Descartes was the intellectual who started this ball rolling by turning reason unto itself and asking how does it work. He was not up to the task and injected a crude circularity at the base of reason, i.e. "I think therefore I am", which Rand identified and fixed but she is now completely ignored.

Huh? Philosophy books all list Pragmatism as a major philosophy, and it is far more elaborate than that. "Shut up and calculate" is not at all what the philosophies of Dewey, Peirce and James are about, it is far more elaborate.

>By holding philosophy in disdain and not studying it the physicists leave themselves vulnerable (due to ignorance) and absorb the bad philosophies I mentioned by osmosis.

I am referring to how they actually practice science, not their possibly quite inaccurate philosophical explanations of what they are doing. I am sure you are familiar with the phenomenon of someone loudly claiming they follow a certain set of principles, but then when you observe them you see they are actually doing something quite different.

What I am saying is that if you observe how scientists actually do science, it fits the philosophical principles of Pragmatism, whether the scientists realize it or not. And I am saying that as someone with a background in both the sciences and philosophy.