[sharikone]

Let's be real. There are more physicists than fitting research problems. That's why your average physics PhD graduate is typically employed outside of the field they learned and earns less than an average React programmer.

That said, theoretical physics has the goal of understanding reality from a reductionist point of view. At the scales that goes from the nucleus to the Solar system there are few questions left. We know the Standard Model and GR and they fit the data perfectly. Of course some questions remain for how things interact when there are many of them (e.g. warm superconductivity) but there are few questions about fundamental laws

You can think about it like bootstrapping an open source system (it was in the homepage today). There are still many technical hurdles downstream but we are interested in reducing the binary blob from which all starts to its perfect minimal form. And the only places we still have not figured out well are things at the limit of our instrument capacity. Black holes (GR and relativity, we still cannot figure out that and proving black hole seems experimentally challenging), exotic particles (what are quarks composed of?), dark matter (why far away galaxies seem to rotate so quickly?), dark energy, inflation, that stuff.

I think physics should be smaller, it has too many graduates. But actually these problems should be researched. They are the fundamental questions that remain and there is a reason that the layman considers this stuff to be "real physics" and not origami folding

[lumost]

It’s quite likely that the oversupply of physicists is paradoxically shrinking the space of what can be researched.

More physicists mean more competition, more physicists mean more people to convince that a radical idea is worth pursuing, and even more so more people to convince that a radical result is true.

If the field was smaller and those in it had more freedom, we might see more interest in exploring new areas. Right now it’s hard to see many people in the field with enough freedom to do anything that isn’t the prevailing orthodox view.

[__MatrixMan__]

I blame Gödel's platonism. He showed us that our theories will always have limits, which is true. But there are two ways to confront this problem:

- Incrementally improve the existing theory, knowing that some of your goals are impossible and hoping that you don't get stuck on one of these.

- Develop as many inconsistent-but-locally-useful theories as possible along a method for selecting the right one in the right situation.

The latter didn't sit right with him or his contemporaries--more for gut-feel reasons than anything practical--so many of us are stuck in this rut where we just compete for opportunities to participate in the former.

[pas]

But .. but ... sure, science as a whole has that particular moby dick, but even when it comes to particle physics there there are many theories (models) side-by-side. Some useful for this, some for that. Grand unified theories (and any theory of everything) will only cover the fundamentals. It's not a coincidence that structural engineers don't have to whip out the Einstein Field Equations when they want to check for resonance, and so on.

And very likely we'll always have competing theories/models at the extremes and they might be inconsistent but they might simply turn out to apply in different regimes, etc.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism (coined by Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow)

[whatshisface]

If there's a method for selecting the right one for the situation, it's all one self-consistent theory

[simonh]

Would you recommend using Newton’s laws to model the behaviour of colliding toy trains at a few feet per second, or Relativity?

[whatshisface]

Newton's laws are a part of relativity, in the way a map of California is a part of a map of the US.

[__MatrixMan__]

I don't see why the two should be connected. Consistency and utility are somewhat orthogonal.

Here's a counterexample:

Einstein chose hyperbolic geometry for arguments about space ships traveling near light speed, but we use spherical geometry for arguments about the shortest path an airplane should take. Those theories disagree about the playfair postulate, so they're inconsistent. Yet we can pretty reliably pick the right one for the job.

[baetylus]

Really interesting take. Now I wonder myself if the smaller sizes of fields in the 1800s to late 1930s enabled the great discoveries then.

[pas]

Also the cost of experiments. You can't build a gravitational wave detector in your backyard. You can't do the data processing on your abacus.

[Retric]

Everything is physics. We break apart chemistry as it’s own subject not because there is a clean line separating protean folding etc, but rather for historical reasons. Stick a lead bar in a particle accelerator and it’s Physics stick a hand in and it’s Radiology.

Material science, Chemistry, and Astronomy really cover most of the obvious areas physics could expand into.

[lumost]

There’s a lot of relatively unexplored ground regarding macro phenomena such as fluids, and molecular dynamics, as well as a lot of open ground in alternate approaches to most common theoretical frontiers.

We’ve barely touched alternatives to tokamaks and string theory. Blending classical and quantum molecular dynamics simulations is under explored. Improving the efficiency of simulating large scale dynamical systems is under explored.

These are the areas I know offhand, I’m sure every working physicist has ideas they think are worthwhile that they seemingly don’t have time for/can’t get funding for.

[avmich]

> That's why your average physics PhD graduate is typically employed outside of the field they learned and earns less than an average React programmer.

Ha, I used to think that a big chunk of physicists by education are employed outside of the field they learned and earn top 10% salary of the industry doing software in financial companies.

Heard more than once that computer science is easier than physics. Physical background helps hugely with software.

[porknubbins]

How would physics help with software though? My impression from trying physics is that its just that if you are smart enough to do physics you are smart enough that software engineering is not really hard but at most merely complicated.

[whatshisface]

Physics teaches people how to work with emergent properties of simple systems, something with applications in software wherever the typical industry case analysis + ontology* paradigm is not the right way to work.

(*This used to be case analysis + object oriented ontology, but now there are other language features to map ontologies on to.)

[wanderingmind]

While the goal of theoretical physics is to have a reductionist approach to understanding reality, it looks like most of this is being spent on sub-nuclear particle physics and extreme astronomical situations. There are many real life situations that can be explained and understood better with branches of theoretical physics such as dynamical systems, condensed matter, statistical physics and others. There needs more funding so more people can solve problems that are of direct societal interest which in turn can attract more funding and students.