[sdenton4]

Hope the air's good in the tower...

Good science has often proceeded from 'weird' observations, leading to experiments trying to isolate the weirdness. The weird is necessarily outside the zone of existing theory, and requires experimentation to recreate the effect reliably and quantifiably. Once that's done, you can iterate on conjectures and experiments to try to get to the bottom of what's going on.

In reality, I suspect that the divide between theorists and experimentalists is really only a fundamental physics thing. And physics has been more-or-less at an impasse for the last thirty years, so that there are relatively few experiments worth running, and the bulk of the theorists are just (making stuff/rebranding as mathematicians) up because they don't know what else to do.

In other areas, there's so much weird still untouched that you don't get the same division of labor. Take a look at CRISPR - there was a lot of bench work and curiosity-driven exploration involved, simply because there was no theory describing what they were discovering... Or machine learning - the theory is still quite tenuous and mainly follows the experimental results.

[tdehnel]

To consider an observation “weird” you need a theory about what a normal observation looks like.

Additionally, all observations require baked in theories about the observation being accurate.

Btw, I didn’t appreciate your insulting first sentence.

Edit: here's a decent writeup to show what I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness

[sdenton4]

If we are sufficiently expansive in our definition of what theory is, then sure, there is no experiment without theory, and experimentalists only discover things by being secretly theorists who occasionally stop thinking long enough to get their hands dirty. But I don't think this is typically what is meant by 'theory.'

CRISPR is again a good example - the initial 'weirdness' was an observation of lots of long-ish palindromic subsequences in bacterial DNA. To my knowledge, there was no pre-existing theory on the preponderance of palindromic subsequences in DNA.

Now, we could say that these researchers were proceeding from a theory that there's no easily discernable combinatorial macroscopic structure in DNA sequences, but I think that this would stretch the idea of 'theory' beyond common usage or even usefulness: There's no theorem or axioms of DNA sequencing being violated here.

In fact, I would expect that weirdness is a good sign of missing theory - a repeatable observation which is unsupported by existing theory. For perturbations in the orbit of Mercury, we see an explicit violation of Newtonian mechanics, but in many other cases (like CRISPR and palindromic subsequences) we have observations of structure in areas where theory simply does not yet exist.

(Apologies for the harsh first sentence; FWIW, your comment seemed belittling of the work of a large fraction of important scientists.)

[tdehnel]

i see what you mean, i suppose my concept of “explanation” could be closer to what you mean by theory

[blueprint]

how exactly has physics been at an impasse? this trope is so common now. did you hear it from Weinstein? we've had a metric ton of mindblowing theory emerge in the past 30 years. do you even study physics?

[sdenton4]

I was careful to say fundamental physics - there's great stuff happening in materials science.

We are in a world where exponentially growing amounts of energy are needed to confirm/deny an increasingly small slice of the standard model. We still don't know what dark matter or energy is (almost literal holes in theory), we haven't figured out how to scale up quantum computers, and we don't have scalable fusion reactors. The cost of progress is growing and the rewards are diminishing; I call that an impasse.

(Arguably we could call the ongoing advances in materials science cases of applied quantum mechanics, with some blurry line with fundamental physics.)

You are right that I'm not a physicist - I'm trained as a mathematician, and these days work in the intersection of machine learning, acoustics, and ecology. Having looked around a lot with impact-colored glasses, I don't see the argument for fundamental physics, but am happy to be wrong.

[blueprint]

none of the things you listed have anything to do with fundamental or theoretical physics. It also seems that you don't know about some of the recent advances. we don't need to deny the standard model. Nature has already shown us proof that it's not sufficient. but the standard model is not actually fundamental physics. It's basically just a mash up of a bunch of aspects of particle systems. There's, again, a ton of work on alternatives. and I would have to disagree, it would seem that we do know how to scale, quantum computers, but we're still doing the material science for it. Physics is probably far more advanced than almost anyone really realizes... and that is the bigger issue. We are still working out what advances to pay attention to. Yet what we do know about , if the engineering work were done, is enough to get us "free" energy, for example.

[mrguyorama]

Call me when someone finally schedules a test to possibly disprove string theory. It's been stuck in "The math works but we haven't solidified it" for like decades. It makes testable predictions right?

[blueprint]

i'm not talking about string theory anyway

[ethbr0]

Comment would have stood on its own, without that first sentence.