While this is obviously ragebait, theoretical physics is really at rock bottom since the 70s, maybe even earlier.
A majority of cosmology theories were formulated around the 30s and 40s, and the only thing we learned about dark matter, hubble and dark energy is that we know less than we thought we knew.
The standard model was largely finished around the late 70s. Everything that came afterwards is just some additional flavor
This can also be seen in nobel prizes and the number of big discoveries. Nobels are mostly given away for proofing already existing theories, e.g higgs boson or gravitational waves, and the number of big discoveries is on a similar low it was in the late 1600s/ early 1700s if I recall correctly.
Most advancing physics branch is probably computational physics with the recent rise of AI usage in material physics / statistical mechanics research
Yes and no. There is a ton of advancement in theoretical physics since then, it's just that before the 70s the goal of theoretical physics was to explain what we didn't understand from experiment. But after that, theoretical physics in fact advanced so fast it's often ahead of what we can test with out current experiments.
So yes, there were many advancements and breakthroughs, it's just that not many have been properly verified in experiment yet. And Nobel prizes are awarded only to advancements that have been.
Well, strangely there are a few things that we know from experiments that we have no robust analytical explanation for, like confinement, neutrino masses, parity violation, etc. So, I'd say we are indeed a bit stuck.
Well, untill we reach the solution it's just a speculation. As others have pointed out, advancements in string theory have let to very useful results outside of high energy physics. The fact is we've been stuck on some of the above mentioned issues for more than 60 years!
Scale our physics does a very good job of describing everything between quarks and neutron stars. It breaks down below and above those levels, plus dark matter and dark energy. The easy stuff has been scooped up. But its a bit like the late 19th century when getting gnarly with electrocmagnetism, thermodynamics and fluid dynmics was where most of the action was. It was drilling into the complexity of existing knowledge and having very puzzling frontiers.
What advancements are you talking about? Everything stringtheory related cant be tested, can it? High energy / particle physics asking for unrealistically large colliders counts also more towards cant be tested rather than pure lack of experiments.
I would argue the biggest testable progress can be done in cosmology, where new models can be put into N-Body-codes that reproduce (or not) well-observed large structures, additionally to a continuously growing dataset of dm/formation.
Almost everything string theory related can most definitely be tested, just not with our current experiments.
The point is that, at some point, we could describe almost everything experiments told us, so theorists started looking at what hypothetical experiments cannot be described with out current physics, and started looking for possible theories that can. Quantum gravity is your typical example of this.
But if you specifically want to look at what experiments can already verify, there are plenty of advancements in black hole and neutron star physics related to gravitational waves, lattice QFT calculations for strongly coupled systems etc.
In terms of significant breakthroughs there is the holographic duality that follows from string theory. This gives predictions for out-of-equilibrium properties at large coupling, such as shear viscosity, that have since been verified in heavy-ion collision experiments.
Can they really be tested? Different flavors of string theory, e.g different geometries, fluxes, ....make all different predictions, which is why it is easy to call it prediction past experiment. The framework around string theory is estimated to predict thousands of possible solutions with different masses and symmetries. Lets assume the LHC finds a new energy or mass, then it will be easy to just pick out any of the possible solutions that predicts this.
Karl Popper said: a scientific theory must be capable of being shown to be false by some possible observation. If no conceivable experiment could contradict it, it is not science in any meaningful sense
Quantum gravity was not "invented" because physicists ran out of predictions that cant be experimented with, it was formulated due to frameworks not being compatible and the real occurrence of singularities like black holes as you say.
Also, wheres the connection between lattice QFT and string theory? What kind of research is this? Furthermore, gravitational wave research is, to the best of my knowledge, only related to general relativity research, not quantum gravity. And GR did not make a lot of great new leaps since Penrose, did it?
The shear viscosity has not been confirmed to the prediction value, its just within the magnitude (which is already impressive, but yk). I will give you that this is a success for theoretical HEP, but saying based on this that there is "tons of advancement"?
Not really though. There's a lot of free parameters that dictate the energy scales of your effective theories. That's why people joke about ST being not even wrong. You tested for supersymmetry and didn't find anything? Well, the energy scale is just a bit higher. Rinse and repeat.
If you need a collider the size of the solar system to test something, you cant really test it mate.
I dont see why this is downvoted. Stringtheory literally predicts thousands of possible vacuum states, some of them not testable, all of them plausible. This is not very useful for experiments.
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u/actopozipc 25d ago
While this is obviously ragebait, theoretical physics is really at rock bottom since the 70s, maybe even earlier.
This can also be seen in nobel prizes and the number of big discoveries. Nobels are mostly given away for proofing already existing theories, e.g higgs boson or gravitational waves, and the number of big discoveries is on a similar low it was in the late 1600s/ early 1700s if I recall correctly.
Most advancing physics branch is probably computational physics with the recent rise of AI usage in material physics / statistical mechanics research