The Power of Effective Field Theory

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Fermi didn't know about quarks and gluons in the 1930s. His theory is valid up until you get to the scale of the W. Boson, which is 80 billion electron volts. The low energy visible nature of reality will still be very well described by quantum field theory. That's exactly what Fermi had stumbled upon.

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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