The Unsolvable Question

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The reason why people working on these things is because they think that they're plausibly correct. If you had an alternative to these ideas that had all of the promising features that the existing ideas have would be very, very welcomed. It turns out that it's hard to come up with truly good new ideas. Some people are trying, right? But it is hard to do. Progress is slow. Nature is not being helpful at the moment.

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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