Some people are disappointed in physics. Shocking, I know!
Those people, when careful enough, clarify that they’re disappointed in fundamental physics: not the physics of materials or lasers or chemicals or earthquakes, or even the physics of planets and stars, but the physics that asks big fundamental questions, about the underlying laws of the universe and where they come from.
Some of these people are physicists themselves, or were once upon a time. These often have in mind other directions physicists should have gone. They think that, with attention and funding, their own ideas would have gotten us closer to our goals than the ideas that, in practice, got the attention and the funding.
Most of these people, though, aren’t physicists. They’re members of the general public.
It’s disappointment from the general public, I think, that feels the most unfair to physicists. The general public reads history books, and hears about a series of revolutions: Newton and Maxwell, relativity and quantum mechanics, and finally the Standard Model. They read science fiction books, and see physicists finding “theories of everything”, and making teleporters and antigravity engines. And they wonder what made the revolutions stop, and postponed the science fiction future.
Physicists point out, rightly, that this is an oversimplified picture of how the world works. Something happens between those revolutions, the kind of progress not simple enough to summarize for history class. People tinker away at puzzles, and make progress. And they’re still doing that, even for the big fundamental questions. Physicists know more about even faraway flashy topics like quantum gravity than they did ten years ago. And while physicists and ex-physicists can argue about whether that work is on the right path, it’s certainly farther along its own path than it was. We know things we didn’t know before, progress continues to be made. We aren’t at the “revolution” stage yet, or even all that close. But most progress isn’t revolutionary, and no-one can predict how often revolutions should take place. A revolution is never “due”, and thus can never be “overdue”.
Physicists, in turn, often don’t notice how normal this kind of reaction from the public is. They think people are being stirred up by grifters, or negatively polarized by excess hype, that fundamental physics is facing an unfair reaction only shared by political hot-button topics. But while there are grifters, and people turned off by the hype…this is also just how the public thinks about science.
Have you ever heard the phrase “a cure for cancer”?
Fiction is full of scientists working on a cure for cancer, or who discovered a cure for cancer, or were prevented from finding a cure for cancer. It’s practically a trope. It’s literally a trope.
It’s also a real thing people work on, in a sense. Many scientists work on better treatments for a variety of different cancers. They’re making real progress, even dramatic progress. As many whose loved ones have cancer know, it’s much more likely for someone with cancer to survive than it was, say, twenty years ago.
But those cures don’t meet the threshold for science fiction, or for the history books. They don’t move us, like the polio vaccine did, from a world where you know many people with a disease to a world where you know none. They don’t let doctors give you a magical pill, like in a story or a game, that instantly cures your cancer.
For the vast majority of medical researchers, that kind of goal isn’t realistic, and isn’t worth thinking about. The few that do pursue it work towards extreme long-term solutions, like periodically replacing everyone’s skin with a cloned copy.
So while you will run into plenty of media descriptions of scientists working on cures for cancer, you won’t see the kind of thing the public expects is an actual “cure for cancer”. And people are genuinely disappointed about this! “Where’s my cure for cancer?” is a complaint on the same level as “where’s my hovercar?” There are people who think that medical science has made no progress in fifty years, because after all those news articles, we still don’t have a cure for cancer.
I appreciate that there are real problems in what messages are being delivered to the public about physics, both from hypesters in the physics mainstream and grifters outside it. But put those problems aside, and a deeper issue remains. People understand the world as best they can, as a story. And the world is complicated and detailed, full of many people making incremental progress on many things. Compared to a story, the truth is always at a disadvantage.
4 gravitons 
What physics researchers are facing is a failure to educate the general public about the nature of physics research. Too much of basic physics is based on positivism — the laws of inertia, of conservation of momentum, of electrodynamics, of gravity, etc. This was an ideology of science as absolute universal truth, a relic of struggles against the intrusion of religious belief into the understanding of nature.
But scientists today are constrained by the enormous scope of existing knowledge. Theoretical proposals are vetted by a wide range of theorists and tested by experimentalists using multiple techniques. Instead of finding universals, they seek to create theory-driven models of particular phenomena at defined scales in defined conditions. Scientific advances consist of models that are more accurate, applicable in more general or more particular environments, and more capable of contributing to the explanation of related phenomena; for the most part, they do not overthrow existing models but incorporate them as special cases.
This leads us back to basic science classes, where the battle against the intrusion of religious belief continues to be fought with the textbook industry and basketball coaches teach math. The various professional societies need to be more active promoting modern ideas about science and math to junior and senior high school students. Unfortunately, these efforts tend to be of the whizbang school of NASA “firsts”.
The “war on cancer” suffers from a different problem, the popular belief that cancer is a single disease. We now know that cancer is any genetic mutation that can establish itself within the body with injurious effects to other life processes. Thus we have a multitude of enzymes necessary to life with a multitude of possible mutations which interfere with their functioning, some of which can establish themselves. Although there has been vast improvement in the techniques for investigating life processes and the effects of mutated enzymes in the late XX and early XXI centuries, the number of contributing factors to cancerous growth needing investigation has also increased as our knowledge becomes more sophisticated. Even though many battles remain to be fought and successful strategies remain to be devised, that there has been progress in the war on cancer is shown by the number of products to treat particular cancers which have been found to be sufficiently safe and effective to be advertised on television.
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Re. progress in fundamental physics. I, for one, couldn’t possibly blame those who work on grand unified theories and quantum gravity for not making satisfactory progress. Current theory works too well, and experiment has thus far provided no solid clues about what should come next.
What I could say is for most of my adult life the field has been guided by certain naturalness arguments, which have proven thus far to be unreliable. Some have advocated alternatives to explain this failure, which could be lumped together generically as “multiverse theories”. Whether practical means to test such ideas could ever be realized is very much an open question.
So a lay person like me might ask: How do I know you are making progress? The answer often seems to be that I lack the expertise to make an informed judgment. My reply is: Exactly. If experiment or observation could settle the matter, I can trust nature. But what is being asked of me is that I trust human judgement, possibly indefinitely. This is a bold request for a scientist to make, I think.
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I’m not going to try to convince you that there has been progress on every question of interest. Naturalness is quite tightly tied up with a particular kind of “big question”, that of what happens next after the Standard Model. People hoped to make progress on that question, they felt they had good reason to expect they were going to make progress on that question, they got the public excited by telling them they were going to make progress on that question. And in the end, they haven’t made that progress.
The thing is, when scientists aren’t making progress on a question, they work on a different question instead. For the last ten years or so, there has been rather little work proposing new attempts at natural SUSY models. There has never been any meaningful amount of work on the multiverse in the particle physics context: it’s a few gimmick papers at most. Instead, the people who were working on those things left for areas where they expected to make more progress.
I suspect that your feeling, that you are being asked to trust in naturalness or the multiverse indefinitely, is a relic of pop science: a consequence of the fact that scientists are not storytellers by training, but are often asked to tell stories to the public anyway, so lazy copies of old evocative narratives live much longer than the science they were designed to promote. I think if you look at your closest university, you’ll find few people there who still are using naturalness as a guiding star in their professional work in the way that they were in 2011.
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