The Big Bang Theory has been aptly described as “nerd culture in blackface”. That is, it’s written by people who aren’t nerds and don’t really know that much about science, but the people it’s aimed at wouldn’t know the difference, anyway. But, before familiarity bred contempt via endless re-runs, and before it jumped the shark, The Big Bang Theory occasionally had some decent science-related jokes.
The spherical chicken in a vacuum punch-line for instance. Or the time Leonard confesses that nothing really radically new has happened in physics since the twin formulations of relativity and quantum physics in the first decades of the 20th century. Even the last great theory, string theory, can only really say, “At least my theory is logically internally consistent.”
That’s not entirely fair, of course. Still, the fact remains that string theory mostly remains a combination of extremely clever maths and wishful thinking.
It has become common among physicists to invent new particles for which there is no evidence, publish papers about them, write more papers about these particles’ properties, and demand the hypothesis be experimentally tested. Many of these tests have actually been done, and more are being commissioned as we speak. It is wasting time and money.
Harsh, but not entirely unfair.
But, you will no doubt say, what about the Higgs boson? All those quarks, gluons and so on?
In the past, predictions for new particles were correct only when adding them solved a problem with the existing theories. For example, the currently accepted theory of elementary particles – the Standard Model – doesn’t require new particles; it works just fine the way it is. The Higgs boson, on the other hand, was required to solve a problem. The antiparticles that Paul Dirac predicted were likewise necessary to solve a problem, and so were the neutrinos that were predicted by Wolfgang Pauli.
String theory was likewise formulated to solve a problem: unifying the otherwise incompatible models of relativity and quantum physics, and come up with a model for quantum gravity. Whether it ever successfully solves the problem remains to be seen, but at least it exists for a reason.
Even supposed dark matter particles are postulated to solve a problem.
All experiments looking for those particles have come back empty-handed, in particular those that have looked for particles that make up dark matter, a type of matter that supposedly fills the universe and makes itself noticeable by its gravitational pull. However, we do not know that dark matter is indeed made of particles; and even if it is, to explain astrophysical observations one does not need to know details of the particles’ behaviour. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) hasn’t seen any of those particles either, even though, before its launch, many theoretical physicists were confident it would see at least a few.
Talk to particle physicists in private, and many of them will admit they do not actually believe those particles exist. They justify their work by claiming that it is good practice, or that every once in a while one of them accidentally comes up with an idea that is useful for something else.
Which is part of the reason entire careers continue to be founded on unsuccessfully chasing after almost-certainly-imaginary new particles.
Experimental physicists may pooh-pooh theorists for trying to count angels dancing on the head of a pin, but the fact is that it keeps the experimenters in a job, too. Maybe the angels – or particles – don’t exist, but as long as there’s government funding rolling in to build colliders to look for them, the experimenters aren’t going to rock the boat too much.
It’s good for a scientist’s career – but is it good science?
I believe there are breakthroughs waiting to be made in the foundations of physics; the world needs technological advances more than ever before, and now is not the time to idle around inventing particles, arguing that even a blind chicken sometimes finds a grain. As a former particle physicist, it saddens me to see that the field has become a factory for useless academic papers.
The Guardian
But doesn’t that describe the majority of academia, these days?
