It is also not true that no progress has been made in the understanding of String Theory in the last 40 years and it still seems like the best bet that could eventually generate a fundamental theory. What is missing is still a lot though:
- We don't seem to possess the correct mathematics to develop a non-perturbative formulation of String Theory and there are too many potential string backgrounds that we could expand around.
- It is also hard to derive the matter content of low energy effective actions from most brane configurations.
String theory provided major insight into non-perturbative quantum field theory as well. There is tons of examples, let me highlight one of them: The discovery of the Amplituhedron (Arkani-Hamed et al., 2012) was preceded by the discovery of the BCFW recursion relation (Britto et al., 2005), which in turn was motivated a relationship between perturbative Yang-Mills theory and the instanton expansion of a certain string theory in twistor space (Witten, 2003).
No, it doesn't. The original Standard Model from the 1970s did, but then neutrino masses were discovered and the Standard Model was modified to include them.
I have no firmly held answer to the question of whether it is.
”I have said many times that looking at the history of physics teaches us that resolving inconsistencies has been a reliable path to breakthroughs, so that’s what we should focus on."
And given that she has written at least one book on this general subject, I would guess that idea is elaborated in much greater detail there or on her blog.
K.
Take for example the idea that a photon is both a particle and a wave. This dogma has been force fed to students for decades without the glaring inconsistency being resolved, or even pointed to as a thing that needs resolving — something is either a particle or it’s a wave; if we observe properties of both, then we need a physical explanation for how one becomes the other. Something can’t be two distinct things. Logically, all I’m pointing out is that “A is A”.
Yet my perspective that there is an unsolved inconsistency here is considered heretical. “Shut up and calculate” is the reigning dogma.
But physicists have given up on figuring out what it IS. They have decided that having math that can predict the outcome of experiments is enough. They're not wrong, but it feels rather unsatisfying. IMHO there have been a couple avenues worth exploring that are being largely ignored.
It depends on what you mean by that. What they've given up on is trying to find some sort of anthropocentric analogy. It's understandable that this is unsatisfying, since analogies are fundamental to how we understand things. Unfortunately, there's no reason to believe that a good analogy will exist.
That's no reason not to try. If there IS an objective reality I think it deserves a better description than just the math which characterizes its behavior.
Why should we assume that the contradictions in contemporary theories are of this special, inexplicable type? Every era has contradictions, before they are resolved... But they'll only ever be resolved if people are trying to resolve them, meaning that they haven't resigned themselves to the idea that our minds haven't been gifted with the capacity to make sense of our experience.
One of my favorite books is called "Architecture of Matter", it's a history of ideas about matter. One early idea was that matter is made of little tiny bits of stuff and that qualities of these little bits (such as being smooth or spikey) leads to macroscopic phenomenon (like spikey bits being acidic.)
The problem with this idea (and almost all others) is that it's just pushing the problem down a level: If matter is made out of little bits of matter, what are the little bits of matter made of?
FWIW, the wave-particle duality gets around this self-reflexive problem. Matter is made out of some other kind of stuff. But then, as you say, we still have the essential problem of "wtf is this stuff?" but we don't worry about that so much as long as our math describes the behavior of the stuff.
> They're not wrong, but it feels rather unsatisfying. IMHO there have been a couple avenues worth exploring that are being largely ignored.
What avenues? (Genuinely curious, not trolling.) It seems to me that the ultimate, existential question of what "stuff" actually is, is unanswerable (within the logical/scientific framework.)
Pilot wave theory is one. The other was a paper - forgive this explanation - the found equivalence between particle physics and fluid dynamics. Suggesting the objects in physics might be modeled as say vorticies in some kind of fluid (aether). The equivalence was IIRC only to first order, but the work to get there must have been a lot. I'm sure there are others.
And the criticism of mainstream thought in physics would be: its wrongfully dismissive of my question, and ignoring the important job of looking for the answer.
Electromagnetic filed is mathematical model of what?
Let's talk about nature of EM force.
Analogy: look at a typical tropical cyclone. It rotates. Is it rotating because a unknown property of an air molecule? No. It rotates because our planet rotates, while air molecules are just trying to keep their positions. I.e. it's rotation of planet + inertia of molecules.
Is it possible that EM force is happens because our local space is moving trough global space by non-linear trajectory, so it just non-linear trajectory of local space + inertia of rotating and vibrating particles?
Physical things are real. Mathematical abstractions are not. OpenGL is not real too, but it looks very real and accurately predicts reality. In OpenGL, field is array, e.g. "float[][][] field;".
Better examples would be the inconsistencies between general relativity, which demands curved spacetime, and quantum mechanics, which prohibits curved space. This is a very real inconsistency at the heart of modern physics. Many, many people are actively working on solutions for it. Search for Grand Unified Theory or Theory of Everything for more information. Candidate theories include string theory and its derivatives, loop quantum gravity, etc. There are plenty more.
The problem is that designing experiments for these theories is Hard. Big-O Capital H Hard. My flight's about to board, maybe I can expand on it during my layover.
Dark matter is another example. Observations of the speeds and orbits of stars in galaxies and galaxies in galactic clusters are not consistent with our measurements of their masses. Plenty of candidates for dark matter have been and are continuing to be tested.
Candidates include MOND, which supposes that our theories of gravity need to be modified when acceleration is astronomically low. We have designed experiments to support or disprove these theories and most of the results have landed on the side of disproving them. (search for "bullet cluster" or "dark matterless galaxies")
Another candidate is MACHOs. ("MAssive Compact Halo Object") Basically the universe is teeming with small black holes, brown dwarfs, loose planets unassociated with any star, basically a lot of stuff we can't see. We have designed and executed experiments to search for these, but the results have concluded that there are insufficient such objects to explain the inconsistency.
The third candidate with traction is WIMPs, or "weakly interacting massive particle". Basically theorizing that there are other types of unobserved particles that have mass but do not interact via the electromagnetic force, which makes them very difficult to observe. There was hope that neutrinos could explain all these, especially when it was demonstrated that neutrinos have mass. However, experiments trying to bound the mass of the neutrino have shown they are not nearly massive enough to explain the observations. Experiments are ongoing to find these particles, but have yet not discovered anything we can't already explain. However, there's a problem: maybe they're just too difficult for any experiment to observe. In that case, we might be SOL.
These are just two examples. All of science are all the other examples.
The idea that this person is the only person probing inconsistencies is pure hubris. It's not a useful starting point for a conversation, unless the point of the conversation is to talk about how awesome you are and how much everyone else sucks. Which is all I got from this article.
That's not inconsistent [as you've framed it]: curved time.
In the double slit experiment, if you rotate the slit 90 degrees, the interference pattern is rotated 90 degrees in the same direction. Doesn't this prove there is no wave involved?
If you make the slits larger, the pattern changes, and then vanishes.
If you make the slits circular, the interference pattern becomes circular.
If you make the slits triangular, the inteference pattern becomes triangular itself.
All these things tell me that particles are not waves at any point, they just bump to something and take a different trajectory.
When, in the same experiment, a light detector is placed, and the interference pattern disappears, this does not mean the wave goes away and there is a collapse to a single particle; it means the detector produces particles that don't bounce off something. What if the detector is placed near the particle beam emitter? has it ever been tried? I don't know. If placing the detector near the emitter makes an interference pattern reappear, then we certainly have no collapsing of any wave.
What if we put the slits very close to the emitter? do we get the same inteference pattern? what if we put the slits further away from the emitter? does the interference pattern change? if yes, then we certainly have no wave.
And something else regarding quantum entanglement: how can we be sure that the particles are not created with their properties in such a state that they appear entangled when they are measured? why do we assume there is a communication between the particles on the fly rather than the two particles having relatable but not connected properties? we just assume that due to the other assumption that particles are waves and they collapse.
Finally, how do we know that matter attracts matter and it is not the void that pushes matter into clumps? how do we know that the actual distance between the furthest points in the universe is the same as it ever was, and simply new positions are created within the same distance? and these positions are what push matter to clump together?
I'd love to sit down with an honest physicist to research these types of questions, a physicist that cares more about answering these types of questions than hunting for grants and fearing to go against the status quo, but it seems only crackpots are willing to do that.
"But for all I can tell at this moment in history I am the only physicist who has at least come up with an idea for what to do."
make it hard for me to share her point of view, especially as these ideas are not mentioned.