Today We Have a Renaissance in Theoretical Physics. Join the Party!

It’s a great time to go into theoretical physics.  We’ve just passed through a period which was not such a good time to be a theoretical physicist in which we had several decades in which theory got way ahead of experiment.  And it took experiment a while to catch up.  

Now that we have the Large Hadron Collider and we have planck on the scale of cosmology – and we have actually many other new experiments which are not so famous – we’re able to check many of the spectors of ideas of the last 30, 40 years.  And so far none of them turn out.

The lesson of the experiments of the last few years is that the standard model of particle physics as it was in the mid 70s is perfectly adequate.  The Higgs has been discovered. And so there’s a kind of clearing the table for new ideas which should come from new people.

60 Second Reads is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

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