321 | David Tong on Open Questions in Quantum Field Theory

Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Uh, in the last AMA, the last Ask Me Anything episode, we touched on an issue that is talked about a lot in the set of online discourse involving um people who care about physics and people who p care about science, which is the rate of progress. in physics? Are we making progress as fast as we should, or in science more generally? Personally, I think that in science more generally or even in physics outside fundamental theoretical physics, the rate of progress is really, really good. And we have nothing to complain about, although people will complain just because they don't have their flying cars.

There is something to be said about the rate of progress in modern fundamental physics. From the inside, it just makes perfect sense that the rate of progress is not as big now as it was in the nineteen twenties, a hundred years ago, or even in the nineteen sixties, because you have to deal with the hand nature deals you, right? You have to play with the hand nature deals you. You don't get to pick your cards. Um, we don't have as much experimental input and puzzles to solve, and we have a really mature theory that works too well. Et cetera, et cetera, there's a whole bunch of things to say about why we're not having earth shattering discoveries in particle physics and gravity as frequently now as we did a hundred years ago. There's a counter way of thinking about it that it's all because of sociology and groupthink, and there are powerful personalities who are Keeping good ideas down, which is

I mean, I wanna say it's nonsense, but it's not A hundred percent nonsense. It's like 98% nonsense. You know, physicists are people, some of them do have strong personalities and strong opinions, and others will say, like, yeah, if that person thinks it's a good idea, maybe it is a good idea. But it's really hard sometimes to explain what theoretical physicists are spending their time doing. in this world where we have a pretty good theory already. So today's podcast in part addresses that question. David Tong is a very distinguished Theoretical physicist, quantum field theorist in particular, uh at Cambridge University. And we're actually talking about two separate things. One is that David has launched on an incredibly ambitious

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