358 | Solo: Vacuum Energy and the Cosmological Constant
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. In physics, which is a very broad field, includes, you know, atomic physics, plasma physics, condensed matter physics, biophysics, particle physics, gravity, cosmology, all these things. Different fields, of course, have different rates of progress, both because of theoretical ideas and experimental input. If you focus just on fundamental physics and let's not argue about what that means or should mean I take it to mean figuring out the most fundamental laws of nature the best we can.
So not including things like biophysics and kines matter physics, not because they're not important. It's just a different thing. I once tried to get the field to change the name fundamental physics to the name elementary physics, the most elementary laws of physics being the idea. But no one agreed with that. That's okay. Fundamental physics is here to stay. In this subfield of fundamental physics, uh, which includes sort of particle physics and gravity, things like that, There haven't been a lot of helpful experimental surprising discoveries in the past several decades, arguably since the nineteen seventies. There have been a few here and there, masses of neutrinos, things like that.
Also things that we expected like the Higgs boson, gravitational waves, but in in terms of true surprises It's been few and far between. That makes it hard. To make progress in fundamental physics because Experiments are what drive us to great ideas, and And there's one, of course, shining counterexample to this idea that there haven't been many surprises, which is the acceleration of the universe.
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