What this article fails to take into account is the underlying politics at play here. You might think of all places, that science would be "politics free" but it's not. Far, <i>far</i> from it.<p>For example, people working on string theory and people working on say, quantum loop gravity are somewhat at odds with one another. String theory may not see the QLG people as a direct threat but the QLG people <i>certainly</i> sees string theory as competition. Now you may wonder, "In competition for what?" and the answer to that is a bit more obvious: Funding (money for research and their very own paychecks) and attention from their peers/media/press/etc. These people's very livelihoods are at stake.<p>If QLG was proven wrong tomorrow, it's not like the people who were doing that for the last 15 years can just jump into another field. There's plenty of incentive for "hostile science" as I like to call it. There have been some well-known physicists who have written entire books bashing their competition for this purpose (See: Peter Woit's "Not Even Wrong", which incidentally, is chuck full of so many inaccuracies someone else wrote a book disputing his book...)<p>So when I see articles like these, I like to check out who the author is. Do they have a reason to write this piece? In this case, it's Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser. Both are coincidentally astrophysicists at very respected universities. I wonder what they're working on?<p>It appears Marcelo Gleiser, one of the authors, just published an anti-String theory book which claims that "We don't need a Theory of Everything".
The article fails to clearly distinguish two issues: what we take to be true, and what we choose to work on for the moment.<p>We need evidence backing up what we take to be true.<p>But we can and must be able to work on ideas without evidence for their truth. We must be given time to flash them out, to try and find ways to get evidence for them.<p>Wanting to pursue a possible explanation is not the same as believing that it's true.
This is mostly a problem with string theory. Here's a popular version of a critique.[1] Smolin's 2006 "The trouble with physics" is a book-length critique of it. Peter Woit' s "Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory & the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics" is even more critical.<p>It's been a decade since that, and the experimental evidence for string theory remains nonexistent. As Fred Hoyle once wrote, "Science is prediction, not explanation". A theory with no experimental support cannot lead to usable technology, either.<p>Fundamental physics is currently stuck. There's a lot of denial about this. There's a whole generation of string theory faculty in senior positions. That's the problem.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/2006/oct/08/research.highereducation" rel="nofollow">http://www.theguardian.com/science/2006/oct/08/research.high...</a>
This article strikes me as having lost its focus in editing somehow.<p>One can hardly blame theoretical physicists for exploring above and beyond what the experimentalists are doing. It's not like there's a large body of more practical, down-to-earth problems being ignored in favor of these sexier, Nobel-bait questions.<p>I believe the point is that we are in trouble if something exciting doesn't happen at LHC; in this case, getting the <i>planet</i> to fund an O($1T) accelerator to probe higher energy levels seems far-fetched. Theorists know this. This is a closely related point to the comment about the politics of theory.<p>I don't know that this automatically spells crisis. There are plenty of problems out there that require the mathematical talent of folks that can perform at this level. Eventually, when more data is available, the pendulum will swing back towards interesting theory.<p>After all, it's not the case that if there isn't some rush to a GUT before 2020, the human race loses.
This is very frustrating for those of us that see the rather large problem in front of us - our apparent total inability to move around the stars, and only feeble ability to move around our solar system. This caps the lifespan of humanity (and most of the life we know) at about 500k years at best. So, even if we succeed wildly at our environmental and social problems, we'll end up with a single beautiful world getting smashed to bits by a meteor, gamma burst, or other uncontrollable, unavoidable cosmic event.<p>Physicists need to get their heads out of their political/philosophical asses and start earning their bread - which is nothing less than to justify our technological existence by discovering the knowledge that will help our species live longer. If not for this, I think we'd all be better off living on a planet of 200M people living in rural villages, leading simple lives that are as happy and fair and erudite as fate and culture allows.
There's a difference between the epicycles and the multiverse (assuming we're talking about quantum decoherence, I don't really know about the others). See, the epicycles really were additional entities, and therefore a problem, with respect to Occam's razor.<p>Quantum decoherence is different: it merely follows the equations, and do <i>not</i> posit any additional entity on top of them (such as a collapse). The consequence of removing that entity is multiple universes, but so what?<p>The problem with science is that it tends to favour the <i>first</i> theory that fits the fact. Instead, it should favour the <i>simplest</i> theory that fits the fact. <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/qa/the_dilemma_science_or_bayes/" rel="nofollow">http://lesswrong.com/lw/qa/the_dilemma_science_or_bayes/</a>
I wonder if our understanding of the universe will ultimately exceed our ability to reason about it. Complexity can increase without bound but our brain's capacity to understand and model isn't increasing at all. Maybe we should find some way to make smarter physicists.