You shouldn't pay too much attention to the hate, what you find interesting is intensely personal and few others will ever understand. Foundations is in a much better spot than it was 50 years ago, and you can definitely succeed in it.
Having said that, as someone outside the field who peeks in every once and a while, it does seem like a lot of foundations research (that gets noticed at least) is about constructing flashy abstracts out of simple linear algebra. The interesting stuff always seems to belong to another field, like computation, error correction, encryption, etc. Combine this with many physicists' distaste for philosophy, and you'll get the current attitude towards foundations.
Scientist isn't a job title or a qualification, it's a word for someone doing science. Some philosophers working in quantum foundations deserve to be called scientists, as much as any theorist from the physics department in the field. Price may not be in this category, you certainly would know better.
This is not entirely correct. I can't say on this "retrocausality" stuff in particular, but more generally in quantum foundations, there are a lot of philosophers with a very solid physics/math background who have a better understanding of quantum than most physicists. I find quantum foundations to be not very interesting personally, and I doubt it will have much relevance 20 years in the future, but some philosophers working in it are definitely worth taking seriously.
I read it in high school and quite liked it then, now I am worried that if I revisit I would find it too simplistic how it handles the relationship between science, politics, and religion. The last chapter, which was left out of the movie, really blew my mind back then (very Greg Eganesque).
I can tell you from personal experience working in these barns that it really is that crowded, and it isn't pleasant in there for either chickens or humans.
Maybe you were thinking about this science studies work [0]? Not a journalist, but a sociologist, who became something of an "expert" in gravitational waves.
This joins a growing list of other anomalies in the standard model, such as muon g-factor, neutron lifetime, and W boson mass. The problem is that these anomalies don't seem very useful for actually building new theories, since they involve complicated interactions of beyond-the-standard-model physics in the 10th decimal place. Contrast with a collider experiment, where there is a very clear signal of which new particles exist.
It's the difference between a number being wrong, and seeing an entirely new phenomenon which we didn't expect. To move beyond the standard model, we may need experiments that can give us the latter.
If we knew what to expect, it would be engineering not science. The fact is, we have tried having expectations, most notably supersymmetry, and those haven't turned out very well because we are literally venturing into the unknown. Part of the fun is that sometimes a wild theory works out (GR, Higgs) and sometimes it doesn't.
I think if we push the energy frontier one more time, there's no real reason to expect us to find anything -- but there's also no reason for us not to find anything.
The state of physics these days is we have 100 physicists of Einstein's calibre alive right now, but not enough experimental data for them to make any headway on fundamental questions. For all we know, someone already published the theory of everything, but because there was no way to test it, it got ignored completely.
I would have to look up Maxwell's equations right now if I needed them. Nevertheless, I am confident I have a good understanding of them. What I have in my head are important relationships (conservation laws, symmetries, wave solutions, etc.), not the exact mathematical formulas.
In all of my physics classes (high school, undergrad, grad), we were allowed to have a formula sheet with whatever we wanted written on it. Furthermore, important equations would just be given to us on the test, in case you forgot to write it. Even so, test scores were usually below 50% (corrected by curving after). Memorizing formulas to study would have been a laughable waste of time, the better approach is to practice a wide variety of problems.
Silly question: will the Waymo AV use the horn? I see a few parking lot incidents where another driver backed into the front of a stationary Waymo AV at ~2 mph. I think a human driver might have tried honking at the other driver, on seeing a slow-motion collision about to occur.
To my knowledge, what's happening here is that there is a single phenomenological input, the equation of state, which is relevant in both neutron stars and heavy ion collisions. Different theories will predict different equations of state, but you can experimentally constrain it either through astrophysical observations of neutron stars, or through smashing gold atoms.
It isn't just a guess that these things have some similarity, our theories very confidentally tell us that both situations are best described as QCD matter. The properties of this QCD matter, including the equation of state, is the fundamental science question that is of interest here.
Could you briefly summarize one of the reasons you think QM is incomplete? I would agree with you that there is no reason to expect coherence to scale, but I don't know of any reason for it not to scale either.
If you were to ask experts in a given subfield which papers are reliable, I'm sure they would be able to tell you. The problem is that there's no process in science for expert consensus to make it to out to doctors/laypeople.
People assume that peer review means a paper is good, which couldn't be farther from the truth. Science journalists aren't any better, they care more about hype than consensus. Honestly, it's dangerous to give a random peer reviewed article to someone who doesn't have broad knowledge of the field.
Maybe we need middle-ground journals that publish review articles at the level of a Scientific American reader?
This is a good summary. Only thing to add is that the Higgs particles are basically oscillations on top of the background value of the Higgs field, just like photons are oscillations of an EM field. In both cases, the field is the more fundamental object, so your question at the end is backwards :)
These are what originally got me into physics. For physics enthusiasts who have exhausted most pop physics content but aren't looking to get a full degree, there isn't much better than Susskind's lectures.
Having said that, as someone outside the field who peeks in every once and a while, it does seem like a lot of foundations research (that gets noticed at least) is about constructing flashy abstracts out of simple linear algebra. The interesting stuff always seems to belong to another field, like computation, error correction, encryption, etc. Combine this with many physicists' distaste for philosophy, and you'll get the current attitude towards foundations.