The causes of stagnation in physics

According to Sabine Hossenfelder, stagnation in physics is partly caused by groupthink and an unwillingness to reconsider how to do science.

This reminds me of Kegan’s five stages of individual psychological development. Here, the difficulty is in moving from a Stage 4 rational system to a Stage 5 meta-rational system, where you are able to rethink your own axioms and methods. Stage 3 is associated with groupthink. I will discuss how this model links to Metasophism in Chapter 12, but for now if you are interested in reading more about how this applies to academia, David Chapman has a very good piece here.

Here are the key quotes from the Hossenfelder piece:

• And so, what we have here in the foundation of physics is a plain failure of the scientific method. All these wrong predictions should have taught physicists that just because they can write down equations for something does not mean this math is a scientifically promising hypothesis.

• They do not think about which hypotheses are promising because their education has not taught them to do so. Such self-reflection would require knowledge of the philosophy and sociology of science, and those are subjects physicists merely make dismissive jokes about.

• Why don’t physicists have a hard look at their history and learn from their failure? Because the existing scientific system does not encourage learning. Physicists today can happily make career by writing papers about things no one has ever observed, and never will observe.