245 | Solo: The Crisis in Physics
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll | Wondery
4.8 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 31 July 2023
⏱️ 262 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Physics is in crisis, what else is new? That's what we hear in certain corners, anyway, usually pointed at "fundamental" physics of particles and fields. (Condensed matter and biophysics etc. are just fine.) In this solo podcast I ruminate on the unusual situation fundamental physics finds itself in, where we have a theoretical understanding that fits almost all the data, but which nobody believes to be the final answer. I talk about how we got here, and argue that it's not really a "crisis" in any real sense. But there are ways I think the academic community could handle the problem better, especially by making more space for respectable but minority approaches to deep puzzles.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-solo-the-crisis-in-physics/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. |
| 0:04.3 | Physics. It is in a crisis. We are told this. I've been told this on the internet, on podcasts, |
| 0:12.0 | even in books, the crisis that we're in in physics right now. And that's sad to me to hear |
| 0:18.3 | the physics is in a crisis. I grew up wanting to be a physicist. I am now a physicist, |
| 0:24.1 | among other things. Physics is my life. I love it very much. It makes me worry to hear. |
| 0:29.8 | That the field would be in a crisis. What does that mean? Did the laws of physics stop working? |
| 0:34.3 | Did physicists go on strike? What exactly is going on? So I am here to do the solo podcast |
| 0:40.5 | to tell you my particular views on the crisis in physics, which is that there is not a crisis |
| 0:47.2 | in physics. That is what I think anyway. I will give you my reasons for thinking that you can |
| 0:52.2 | make up your own mind. I first want to say though that it makes me sad that I have to be on that |
| 0:58.4 | side. You know, while I was growing up thinking about being a physicist, I certainly imagined |
| 1:03.4 | that in the fantasy future life I had for myself, I would be a radical physicist, a heretic, |
| 1:10.0 | right, tearing down the stuffy establishment notions and replacing them with my own creative |
| 1:15.4 | impulse and so forth. And it took quite a bit of education and years and thinking to realize |
| 1:22.1 | that being a heretic is super hard work. It's really, really very difficult. You know, the heretics |
| 1:28.2 | who are out there will often point to people like Galileo and Einstein as their predecessors in |
| 1:35.0 | heresy. What they don't tell you all the time is that nobody understood the physics of their time |
| 1:44.7 | better than Galileo and Einstein. These people maybe had opposition from the establishment |
| 1:51.0 | absolutely. No doubt about that. They would grumble about that opposition sometimes. But if they |
| 1:56.9 | did overthrow the established view, it was very much from working inside the system. They first |
| 2:03.8 | mastered what everyone else understood and they built upon it and building upon it sometimes |
| 2:09.1 | means tearing something down and building something better. It's not that they just wandered in |
... |
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