Adam Brown

Yeah.

There are even perfectly respectable people who are professors at prestigious universities who have very different opinions about what is and isn't a worthwhile

direction to be exploring.

Eventually, you hope that this gets grounded in experiment and various other things.

But the distance between starting the research program and the community reaching consensus based on data and other considerations can be a long time.

So yeah, we definitely don't have a good verifier in physics.

I don't think there's reason.

I don't think we should be pessimistic about that.

I think there could easily be room for completely new conceptualizations that change things.

I don't think it's just turning the crank going forward.

I think new ways to think about things have always been extremely powerful.

Sometimes they're fundamental breakthroughs.

Sometimes they are breakthroughs in which you even take regular physics.

This is a story to do with renormalization that maybe is a little too technical to get into, but there was a sort of

amazing understanding in the 1970s about the nature of theories that have been around for forever, or for years at that stage, that allowed us to sort of better understand and conceptualize them.

So I think there's good reason to think that there's still room for new ideas and completely new ways of understanding the universe.

Well, if you take particle physics, I think it's because we were a victim of our own success, is that we wrote down theories in the 1970s, and those theories were –

It was called the Standard Model.

And those theories were too good in the sense that we won, in the sense that we could predict everything that would come out of a particle accelerator, and every particle accelerator that's ever been built, and every particle accelerator that's likely to be built

given our current boundary constraints.