Physics is Not Dying
A Myth Controlling Our Field Should Be
Food for Thought
“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” These are the words quite famously attributed to one William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin (with many more titles and distinctions). These words, if they are truly his, are over a hundred years old and could not have been more wrong in predicting what was to come next in the world of physics. In the last century alone, physics went from Newtonian Mechanics and Maxwellian Electromagnetism—the two great pillars of 19th-century physics—to Einstein’s General Relativity, the rather spectacularly strange world of Quantum Mechanics, the Nuclear Age, Semiconductors, the Standard Model of Particle Physics, Supercomputers and many more things poor Lord Kelvin couldn’t have even fathomed in his lifetime. Setting aside the uncertain origins of the quote above, it raises an interesting question: they represent an interesting question: how does one predict the future? How will a field of human endeavor develop with time? What differences do we see within the history of a certain discipline and will those differences persist or die out in the future? Is that field even the same entity after undergoing so many changes?
A popular opinion amongst the general public and some physicists is that the current state of physics is stagnating, just as Lord Kelvin predicted; the quote conveys a consensus shared by most scientists towards the mid and late 19th century. Newton’s work showed us how things moved about and put science behind gravity: the force that makes you fall from a tree (if you are careless enough) and the force that makes the planets go around the Sun are one and the same. Michael Faraday allegedly threw a magnet through a circular coil of wire in a fit of frustration and saw a momentary current produced in the wire, hence showing that a changing magnetic field produced an electric voltage and vice versa– if only every fit of frustration was so revolutionary! Most things were fine and comfortable in this picture of the world except for one small bump: light. Scientists wondered how it interacted with and traveled through objects. Such questions led to Einstein’s theories of Special and General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics which in turn led to the birth of modern Cosmology, Nuclear Physics, Particle Physics, Space travel, the GPS in your car, the microwave in your kitchen, and even the smartphone or laptop you might be reading this on. All these discoveries and inventions find their roots in people attempting to answer these two ‘simple’ questions about light: how it travels through and interacts with all forms of matter. Of course, generalizations have been made in my short description; the entire history of 20th-century physics would be too ambitious for this article alone and would be more suited to a 500-page Tolstoy-esque historical epic.
Nonetheless, questions like those that once surrounded our understanding of light may seem obvious now, but even asking these questions in the first place required the intellect of some of history’s greatest minds. We today find ourselves in a similar situation; the time of superstar, ‘lone’ geniuses of the likes of Feynman, Fermi, Dirac, and Curie seem to have gone extinct. The great, earth-shattering, perception-shifting discoveries that were produced every few years in the first half of the 20th century seem to have devolved into painstakingly small steps towards some desired refinement of an already existing theory. One might be led to one of two dangerously naive conclusions: that physics is totally finished or only more and more precise measurements are left to be discovered. Some also claim the field requires a savior (a favorite claim of many a science magazine due to its almost biblical narrative): the next big pioneer like Einstein or Bohr, who can miraculously see beyond anyone else’s horizon and who will drive forward the next ‘Golden Age’ of physics. On closer inspection, one finds that both these ideas represent a fundamental misunderstanding of how science is done and how it progresses.
Science isn’t linear, its development has peaks and valleys and branches. Sometimes a branch grows a great deal in a short span only to stop growing for years at a time because either all that development was theoretical and not viable experimentally, as all the resources for developing the branch were exhausted, or perhaps because the development of that branch became strongly correlated, thus absorbing another branch, etc. Science today, and physics in particular, has become very collaborative. The development of physics depends on many talented folks, such as scientists, engineers, chemists, and electricians. Carrying out increasingly larger experiments to confirm predictions developed by more sophisticated theories requires a respective increase in collaboration. Despite a new growth in cooperative work, it is important to note that science has always been collaborative. Indeed, all the famous geniuses needed help exploring their ideas. Einstein needed 15 years to develop the General Theory of Relativity. He was only able to accomplish this with the help of many mathematicians who worked tirelessly beside him. Collaborations then were also far more restricted back then due to the false ideas surrounding race, sex, nationality, and religion.
History remembers Einstein and willfully forgets those who worked with him, such as Hilber, Grossman, Schwarzschild, and many others. This represents a fundamental flaw in how we view physics and science as a whole. The lone genius is a myth. Great minds with dazzling capacities obviously do exist, but no man is an island and every idea needs both theoretical and experimental verification, questioning, development, and refinement. These tasks are beyond the undertaking of a single person. The myth of one great mind is always a spectacular story to tell: it is easy to spread as it always sells well. If you ignore the implications, one might argue that such a narrative is harmless, yet I argue that such a fairytale may lead a young girl to be discouraged from pursuing a career in science. After all, most of the greats of the field she reads about were well-to-do white men because we have decided to tell a more convenient, dishonest story glossing over the far more interesting reality: teamwork, collaboration, societal progress, and how they relate to the pursuit of knowledge.
Even the Nobel Prize reinforces this troubled idea, only rewarding the prize to three people for a discovery, when so many more individuals were critical to its development. In 2013, the Nobel prize for physics went to Francois Englert and Peter Higgs for theoretical work predicting the existence of the Higgs Boson: the so-called ‘God Particle’. The bitter reality was that many others published their theoretical work on the Higgs Boson at the same time as Englert and Higgs and hundreds were involved in its experimental discovery. This applies to the nature of all discoveries in the modern day. Discoveries take immense amounts of time and the rate at which they are made has little to do with one physicist being sharper than the next. We are dealing with different problems now, problems that need large human and scientific resources. Physics isn’t dead, nor is it in any trouble from a scientific perspective. In moments where a fellow colleague or aspiring scientist may be discouraged by how high the mountain we are all climbing seems to be, I encourage them to remember the wise and honest words of Marie Curie, in which I often find refuge: “I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.”
