It is getting hard to keep up with the ever-evolving particle physics lately. Recent experimental studies and a great deal of highly inconclusive literature have followed these advancements. You might be thinking it means we are making progress and these inventions and discoveries will help us in the future, but you couldn’t be more wrong.
According to former particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, the answer, sadly, is wrong.
“It has become common among physicists to invent new particles for which there is no evidence, publish papers about them, write more papers about these particles’ properties, and demand the hypothesis be experimentally tested,” Hossenfelder, who now works as an astrophysicist, argued in an excoriating essay for The Guardian. “It is wasting time and money.”
She says that everyone is following the leader. People are getting money and funds for research and testing which is encouraging such advancements.
Everyone is competing for particle discovery: particle physicists have “misconstrued” Karl Popper’s philosophy of falsifiability, incorrectly interpreting it to mean, as she writes, that “any falsifiable idea is also good science.”
“I believe there are breakthroughs waiting to be made in the foundations of physics; the world needs technological advances more than ever before,” the astrophysicist explains, “now is not the time to idle around inventing particles, arguing that even a blind chicken sometimes finds a grain.”
“It saddens me,” she added, “to see that the field has become a factory for useless academic papers.”