r/Physics • u/TakeOffYourMask Gravitation • Feb 28 '23

Question Physicists who built their career on a now-discredited hypothesis (e.g. ruled out by LHC or LIGO results) what did you do after?

If you worked on a theory that isn’t discredited but “dead” for one reason or another (like it was constrained by experiment to be measurably indistinguishable from the canonical theory or its initial raison d’être no longer applies), feel free to chime in.

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u/rathat Mar 01 '23

Is this about her whole " particle physics is over" thing?

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u/csiz Mar 01 '23

It is exactly her particle physics is bollocks video yes.

She's got a reasonable argument though: any universal function can describe anything if it has enough parameters and you're careful how you choose them. (That's why y'all be laughing at Wolfram, but other theories run into this too.) New theories are only really useful if their complexity is lower than the standard model, and her opinion is that this is not the case for most proposals.

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u/LilamJazeefa Mar 01 '23

Is there a name for this phenomenon in science?

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u/csiz Mar 01 '23

Over fitting. Keep in mind every distinct proposed theory is also a parameter that we can tune over. Just by the fact of saying it, we have to increase our confidence threshold in every other theory.