Hope

Those who read this blog, or my papers, know that the King of Science, physics, is in deep trouble. [In case you wonder, the Queen of Science is math.]

The problem is rather serious: a lack of credibility. It would kill any other business, but things work differently in academics. The question is this: how many professional physicists would admit this? An even more important question is: how many of those who admit this, would try to do something about it?

We hope the proportion of both is increasing – so we can trust that at least the dynamics of all of this are OK. I am hopeful – but I would not bet on it.

Post scriptum: A researcher started a discussion on ResearchGate earlier this year. The question for discussion is this: “In September 2019, the New York Times printed an opinion piece by Sean Carroll titled”Even Physicists Don’t Understand Quantum Mechanics. Worse, they don’t seem to want to understand it.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/opinion/sunday/quantum-physics.html) Is it true that physicists don’t want to understand QM? And if so then why?” I replied this to it:

“Sean Carroll is one of the Gurus that is part of the problem rather than the solution: he keeps peddling approaches that have not worked in the past, and can never be made to work in the future. I am an amateur physicist only, but I have not come across a problem that cannot be solved by ‘old’ quantum physics, i.e. a combination of Maxwell’s equations and the Planck-Einstein relation. Lamb shift, anomalous magnetic moment, electron-positron pair creation/annihilation (a nuclear process), behavior of electrons in semiconductors, superconduction etc. There is a (neo-)classical solution for everything: no quantum field and/or perturbation theories are needed. Proton and electrons as elementary particles (and neutrons as the bound state of an proton and a nuclear electron), and photons and neutrinos as lightlike particles, carrying electromagnetic and strong field energy respectively. That’s it. Nothing more. Nothing less. Everyone who thinks otherwise is ‘lost in math’, IMNSHO.”

Brutal? Yes. Very much so. The more important question is this: is it true? I cannot know for sure, but it comes across as being truthful to me.