The Problem With Conservatism in Physics

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There's a lot of structural reasons why things are conservative. And they conservative in the sense that they're going to hire people who are working in the areas that are sort of the shore things rather than the gambles. The Priminer Institute is one of the world's greatest physics institutes right now, but when it started out, it was much quirkier. It's a part of the life cycle of a physics department or institute. You have a plucky band of rebels and they kind of equilibrate and become more normal and traditional.

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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