The Importance of Working on Your Favorite Ideas

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A lot of the arguments given by people who claim there's a crisis in physics come down to other people aren't working on my favorite ideas, which is fine. But if you're honest about the health of the field as a whole, then you should hope that the field works on many different things because you don't know what the right answer is. People are supposed to work on different ideas. And this whole situation is very hard because we have more than one theory that is plausibly doing the job.

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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