https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-rise-of-conspiracy-physics/ar-AA1MlQLJ

As with other kinds of authorities, there are reasonable criticisms to be made of academic physics. By some metrics, scientific productivity has slowed since the 1970s. String theory has not fulfilled physicists’ early dreams that it would become the ultimate explanation of all forces and matter in our universe. The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, has delivered fewer breakthroughs than scientists expected when it turned on in 2010.

But even reasonable points become hard to recognize when expressed in the ways YouTube incentivizes. Conspiracy physics videos with titles like “They Just Keep Lying” are full of sour sarcasm, outraged facial expressions and spooky music. “String theory is not dead, it’s undead, and now walks around like a zombie eating people’s brains,” said Hossenfelder.

 

I think she is correct about the slowdown in new discoveries in physics, but Sabine is most assuredly correct when she examines the complete rot in academia where the wrong objectives are incentivized.

 

I think she is correct about the slowdown in new discoveries in physics,

As I have said many times before, all of the big open questions when I got my physics degree 54 years ago are big open questions today.

 

54 years ago

In the great expanse of history 54 is nothing.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-rise-of-conspiracy-physics/ar-AA1MlQLJ

As with other kinds of authorities, there are reasonable criticisms to be made of academic physics. By some metrics, scientific productivity has slowed since the 1970s. String theory has not fulfilled physicists’ early dreams that it would become the ultimate explanation of all forces and matter in our universe. The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, has delivered fewer breakthroughs than scientists expected when it turned on in 2010.

But even reasonable points become hard to recognize when expressed in the ways YouTube incentivizes. Conspiracy physics videos with titles like “They Just Keep Lying” are full of sour sarcasm, outraged facial expressions and spooky music. “String theory is not dead, it’s undead, and now walks around like a zombie eating people’s brains,” said Hossenfelder.

It's not just physics, almost every area of human knowledge is descending into sensationalism, where the effects of one's words far outweighs the truth of one's words. This is enabled by social media and phones, more and more people get their view of reality from their phones and that is often based on the personality of the people they choose to follow.

Like politics today, people effectively see their world as a sports game, where they support their favorite team and cheer them on whenever there's a perceived point scored, the point scoring is the sole objective, screw reality, screw facts.

The fact that so many hitch their wagons to internet personalities who then serve as the source of truth, is going to destroy this world, no doubt, I have absolutely no doubt we're headed to destruction.

I swear, as each year goes by I feel more and more like this fine gentleman:

 

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/update-millennium-problems-physics/
25-year update on the “Millennium problems” in physics
In the year 2000, physicists created a list of the ten most important unsolved problems in their field. 25 years later, here’s where we are.

The fact that even one of these “Millennium Problems” has fallen in just the first 25 years of the 21st century should give us hope for pursuing the rest of them. It’s often by “attempting the impossible” that we wind up achieving the remarkable, and in that regard, fundamental physics is no different than any other human endeavor.