[Mugwort]

Physics doesn't need another Einstein. Einstein explained Brownian motion, the Photoelectric effect, created special relativity and general relativity, the cosmological constant, helped found quantum mechanics, served as an invaluable critic of quantum mechanics. Then he foundered. Einstein never accepted particle physics, refused to follow new developments and became a dinosaur. This sadly is what most "physicists" are doing today, the followed in Einstein's footsteps, mostly the dinosaur part.

What does physics need? The world doesn't know. Nobody knows but someone will do it, someday in a manner no one else thought possible or could really anticipate. In fact, that's not entirely true but new developments will happen and only a handful of people will be in the loop. Lorenz, Poincare etc. e.g. laid some vital groundwork for relativity.

My own two cents on the matter is that we really don't understand our theories well enough and are badly in need of a firmer foundation. The situation is analogous to calculus before Weierstrass, Cauchy, Dedekind and Cantor.

Of course, mathematics wasn't completely stuck just because calculus wasn't fully developed. Probability and non-Euclidean geometry were stunning developments which predated a truer understanding of real numbers.

So it is with physics right now. Unification, strings, etc. isn't working out so well right now. Quantum computing is now a thing and Quantum mechanics is enjoying a second revolution not unlike the General Relativity Renaissance led by Penrose, et. al.

We can't predict the future. We don't know the sequence things we need to take the next step in AI or even if there is one. Will some form of deep learning be all we need? Probably not but possibly yes.

Physics is right where it should be. Frustration is part of the process. We're feeling some pain because our approach isn't working. Instead of having answers to everything maybe we should focus on better questions.

[canofbars]

I'm not a physicist or even a researcher of anything but I sometimes watch youtube videos of people experimenting with material sciences and chemistry and a trend I have seen is that even things that we consider to be very basic have a huge lack of good quality information available.

One youtuber I saw spends time looking at new research papers for ideas and has found that they are just impossible to reproduce. Following the steps exactly as well as every possible variation doesn't produce anything close to the results described in the paper. In another video [0] he attempts to make glass and finds that almost all of the information available on the internet about making glass is not enough to actually make glass since they contain only enough information to register a patent but not enough to make from scratch.

I wonder if we will see huge gains by just making complete and unobfiscated information available to the public since it looks like even the foundations of society are secret company internal information.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUcUy7SqdS0

[sph]

The world should have a "crafting" wiki, which explains how to build anything from scratch.

From how to make glass from sand to how to build a quantum computer.

[foobar1962]

Would the crafting wiki contain instructions for crafting the wiki itself?

(An attempt at humour referencing the "set of all sets" paradox. That is all, as you were.)

[phobosanomaly]

The Whole Earth Catalog ceased publication in 1971. The Whole Mars Catalog however............

[BeetleB]

> Physics doesn't need another Einstein. Einstein explained Brownian motion, the Photoelectric effect, created special relativity and general relativity, the cosmological constant, helped found quantum mechanics, served as an invaluable critic of quantum mechanics. Then he foundered. Einstein never accepted particle physics, refused to follow new developments and became a dinosaur.

If you measure a scientist not by what they accomplished, but by what they got wrong, you'll quickly find that there are no good scientists.

[captain_price7]

> What does physics need? The world doesn't know. Nobody knows but someone will do it, someday in a manner no one else thought possible or could really anticipate.

I think that is precisely what the professor meant when he talked about Einstein, not the person himself with all his brilliance and mistakes, but someone capable of revolutionary way of thinking to jolt physics out of it's current stagnant state. Which is specially important since, physicists have turned into almost religious believer of their own, untestable theories, and incapable/unwilling to think outside of that narrow box.

[willis936]

Something important to know about Einstein: he was a patent clerk. He didn’t have much in the way of original revolutionary ideas. He read what other physicists had submitted patents for and combined the work. Without a doubt he did good work and all of mankind greatly benefited from it, but it goes a bit too far to claim all of the revolutionary ideas that came out of him were original.

The most important work, relativity, should be credited to Lorentz and Poincaré.

[BlueTemplar]

Einstein was only human... doing "better" and never get stuck on some pet theories might not be humanely possible.

[stephenwinter2]

To dimm willis936's post (cancel culture) is an example for the cause physics is stuck. Here is another try to give a reason to dimm:

"Density of mass is _not_ the source of gravity. A difference in density is. There is no difference in density of the Universe (as a whole) compared to 'outside the Universe' since there is no 'outside the Universe'. And therefore gravity does _not_ dominate the Universe. More precisely: there is no gravity of the Universe (as a whole) at all. - To apply the field equations to the Universe as a whole (Friedmann) is nonsense."

It is simple and well known in Germany for years (of course it is still under the regime of U.S.-cancel culture). It doesn't need another Einstein to know his cosmology was wrong. http://www.hashsign.eu