I'm no physicist but this leaves me scratching my head.
You have some people saying the university funding system is to blame by not accepting crazy ideas but we have all sorts of ideas in physics like:
- String theory. As best as I can tell the only reason string theory exists is because if dimensions=11 the equations for general relativity pop out. Importantly though string theory has made no testable predictions and it's unclear when or even if that will be the case.
- Supersymmetry. Interesting idea but no evidence of this yet.
Other more interesting ideas to me at least (again, as non-physicist):
- Octonion Math underlying the standard model (maybe) [1]
And some interesting experimental work:
- Possible violations of lepton universality from the LHCb detector [2]. This was, last I heard, still well below statistical significance (5-sigma) and could well disappear (as other bumps have eg at 750GeV) but it's interesting nonetheless.
And there are host of open problems with otherwise successful theories.
My favourite extremes here is the prediction of magnetic moment of an electron, which is ~12 significant digits in agreement with experimental results. At the other end is QFT predicting the energy density of a vacuum, which is ~120 orders of magnitude off [3].
Anyway, a lot of this exists in the current academic system.
Depending on how strict you are, you can trace string theory all the way back to the 1940s, or at the very least to the late 60s [1]. Supersymmetry is from the early 70s [2]. They are exactly the mainstream kind of thing which Hossenfelder is referring to when she writes about "physics beyond the standard model which the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was supposed to find". For every lone wanderer exploring a long shot like octonion math, there are thousands writing yet another paper on some variation of the old theme.
> As best as I can tell the only reason string theory exists is because if dimensions=11 the equations for general relativity pop out.
This gets at the essential feature that seems to be driving string theory research (or at least a major one), but I think it's an overstatement as you state it. String theory is popular because it appears to hold out the hope of a theory of quantum gravity. But to my knowledge nobody has shown that the equations of general relativity pop out from an 11-dimensional string theory model; that is still vaporware. There are results which suggest (at least to string theorists) that that should be possible, but nobody has actually done it yet.
You have some people saying the university funding system is to blame by not accepting crazy ideas but we have all sorts of ideas in physics like:
- String theory. As best as I can tell the only reason string theory exists is because if dimensions=11 the equations for general relativity pop out. Importantly though string theory has made no testable predictions and it's unclear when or even if that will be the case.
- Supersymmetry. Interesting idea but no evidence of this yet.
Other more interesting ideas to me at least (again, as non-physicist):
- Octonion Math underlying the standard model (maybe) [1]
And some interesting experimental work:
- Possible violations of lepton universality from the LHCb detector [2]. This was, last I heard, still well below statistical significance (5-sigma) and could well disappear (as other bumps have eg at 750GeV) but it's interesting nonetheless.
And there are host of open problems with otherwise successful theories.
My favourite extremes here is the prediction of magnetic moment of an electron, which is ~12 significant digits in agreement with experimental results. At the other end is QFT predicting the energy density of a vacuum, which is ~120 orders of magnitude off [3].
Anyway, a lot of this exists in the current academic system.
[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-octonion-math-that-could-...
[2] https://cerncourier.com/beauty-quarks-test-lepton-universali...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem