Comment by xoa

>Physics has a surprising amount of drama for such a hard science, and I have a theory about that: Physicists, more than chemists or biologists, need more of a solid foundation in logic (of the Aristotle kind), and they really don't have it.

I'm afraid I think your hypothesis is entirely off base. Physicists do not need an ounce more or less "foundation in logic" than chemists or biologists, they all need the exact same thing: hard experiments testing existing hypothesis and theories and provide fresh data for new ones. The problem vs biology or chemistry is simply that we've picked all the low hanging (=low energy) experimental fruit. To probe deeper simply requires access to energies that are far from readily available and thus extremely expensive and complex. This is true for both the fully artificial and natural+instrument potential approaches. The former is clear enough, the US killed the super collider and has had nothing similar even on the drawing board since, and the LHC was already a big challenge to get done and seems further than ever from being replaced with something another order of magnitude or more up. One workaround is the second approach via astronomy, trying to get more info from natural ultra high energy events. But as well as being hard to do certain careful precise experiments with, even there to get more data requires bigger instruments. The JWST for example, but that itself was an enormously expensive and time consuming project, like the LHC there is just one that has to time share for everyone, and there is no prospect for what's next. There at least more cause for optimism exists because of plummeting launch costs with the real prospect for more. Starship and similar efforts should ultimately open up a lot of new potential. But it's still going to be a haul. One can envision advancements in automated construction someday resulting in major cost decreases for new accelerators, or a further future space economy also making it possible to do cheaper big ones constructed completely in space (or on the moon or something). But that could be many decades, if it happens.

I think that's the real root, all science needs the constant iteration against the actual real universe to make forward progress and avoid going insular. Hard results ultimately trump all, even if it takes many years. But for physics the cost increases have been non-linear, and could costs tens of billions a pop going forward. So a whole field is being left for the first time really grinding away over comparative scraps. During the Cold War there was a period of time where by happy coincidence physics aligned with hard results, geopolitical struggles and a lot of low/med hanging fruit and a bunch of other spheres such that it got big budgets while delivering rapid leaps forward, many of which directly fed back into valuable tech too. That has long since broken down.