The first entry on this blog was 20 years ago yesterday, first substantive one was 20 years ago tomorrow (first one that drew attacks on me as an incompetent was two days later). Back when I started this up, blogging was all the rage, and lots of other blogs about fundamental physics were starting around the same time. Almost all of these have gone dormant, with Sabine Hossenfelder’s Backreaction one notable exception. She and some others (like Sean Carroll) have largely moved to video, which seems to be the thing to do to communicate with as many people as possible. There are people who do “micro-blogging” on Twitter, with the descendant of Lubos Motl’s blog StringKing42069 on Twitter. I remain mystified why anyone thinks it’s a good idea to discuss complex issues of theoretical physics in the Twitter format, flooded with all sorts of random stupidity.
Looking back on what I was writing 20 years ago it seems to me to have held up well, and there is very little that I would change. The LHC experiments have told us that the Standard Model Higgs is there, and that supersymmetry is not, but these were always seen as the most likely results.
My point of view on things has changed since then, especially in recent years. When I started the blog I was 20 years past my Ph.D., in the middle of some sort of an odd career. Today I’m 66, 40 years past the Ph.D., much closer to the end of a career and a life than to a beginning. In 2004 I was looking at nearly twenty years of domination of fundamental theory by a speculative idea that to me had never looked promising and by then was clearly a failure. 20 years later this story has become highly disturbing. The refusal to admit failure and move on has to a large degree killed off the field as a serious science.
The technical difficulties involved in reaching higher energy scales at this point makes it all too likely that I’m not going to see any significant new data about what the world looks like above the TeV scale during my lifetime. Without experiment to keep it honest, fundamental theory has seriously gone off the rails in a way which looks to me irreparable. With the Standard Model so extremely successful and no hints from experiment about how to improve it, it’s now been about 50 years that this has been a subject in which it is very difficult to make progress. I’ve always been an admitted elitist: in the face of a really hard problem, only a very talented person trained as well as possible and surrounded by the right intellectual environment is likely to be able to get somewhere.
My background has been at the elite institutions that are supposed to be providing this kind of training and working environment. Harvard and Princeton gave me this sort of training in 1975-1984 and I think did a good job of it at the time, but from what I can tell things are now quite different. 40 years of training generations of students in a failed research program has taken its toll on the subject. I remember well what it was like to be an ambitious student at these places, determined to get as quickly as possible to the frontiers of knowledge, which in those times meant learning gauge field theory. These days it unfortunately means putting a lot of effort into reading Polchinski, and becoming expert in the technology of failed ideas.
One recent incident that destroyed my remaining hopes for the institutions I had always still had some faith in was the program discussed here, which made me physically ill. It made it completely clear that the leaders of this subject will never admit what has happened, no matter how bad it gets. Also having a lot of impact on me was the Wormhole Publicity Stunt, which showed that the problem is not just refusing to face up to the past, but willingness to sign onto an awful view of the future, as long as it brings in funding and can be sold as vindication of the past. Watching the director of the IAS explain that this was comparable to the 1919 experimental evidence for GR surely made more than a few of those in attendance at least queasy. This particular stunt may have jumped the shark, but what’s likely coming next looks no better (replace quantum computing with AI).
The strange thing is that while the wider world and the subject I care most about have been descending into an ever more depressing environment of tribalistic behavior and intellectual collapse, on a personal level things are going very well. In particular I’m ever more optimistic about some new ideas and enjoying trying to make progress with them, seeing several promising directions. Whatever years I have available to think about these things are looking like they should be intellectually rewarding ones. Locally, I’m looking forward to what the next twenty years will bring (if I make it through them…), while on a larger scale I’m dreading seeing what will happen.
Update: For a place with extensive comments about this blog posting, see Hacker News.
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