The bias is very simple and straightforward and obvious. Work on the thing that everyone else is working on, right? Because when you're a young person, there's always going to be some rogue genius doing whatever they want by. Most people are who are trying to be professional academics. They know that most people in their positions are not ultimately going to be tenured faculty members. So this is just a very natural, again, it's not evil or pernicious. It's just avery natural feature of the system.
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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