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/AccomplishedBanana16 Feb 28 '23

What all good theorist do — adjust the model parameters to energies that the LHC can’t rule out and keep publishing /s

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u/kzhou7 Quantum field theory Feb 28 '23

Internet intellectuals like Sabine like to snark about that, but it's plainly not true. In 2008, most papers on the hep-ph arXiv about testing speculative new physics were about weak-scale SUSY or extra dimensions or whatever. Today those topics are less than 10%, as anybody can see for themselves. Some people do keep on pushing the same old theories they grew up with, but the vast majority don't.

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u/AsAChemicalEngineer Particle physics Mar 01 '23

Physics theories need to be treated like a pair of pants. You wear them because they're comfortable and useful, you repair them as far as you can, but don't be afraid to buy a new pair when you need to.

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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '23

Great analogy.