I have so many problems with the physics status quo that it's hard to know where to begin. But here are a few code smells:
* The strong force probably doesn't exist. It's an empirical description of what happens in the nucleus around 10^-15 meters. But due to stuff like gluon self-interaction, it's difficult to analyze. I suspect that it's related to the curvature of space around mass and is probably connected to neutron star and black hole math. But as long as it's portrayed as unified with the electromagnetic and weak forces, I just don't see us gaining a better understanding of it anytime soon. Also the description of the force between quarks increasing with distance, enough to concentrate enough energy to create more quarks (like how a high-energy photon can split into a particle and antiparticle), feels more like epicycles than deep understanding.
* Physics right now seems more obsessed with mathematical elegance than application. Normally I prefer theory and abstraction over implementation, but what's the point of discovering a Higgs boson if we can't modulate it? It's nice to know it's there, but what are the chances of using energy to manipulate an object's inertia? I suspect that it's more of a clever mathematical construct than a force we will ever manipulate in our daily lives. Actually, re-reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism#Simple_explana... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_generation it sounds like the Higgs mechanism is more about explaining the masses of particles than how to manipulate mass. The problem might be in how long range and short range forces (carried by massless gauge bosons and massive gauge bosons respectively) are treated differently. That's almost certainly not the final model of reality, and writing this out, I bet it's one of the main reasons that string theory tries to add so many dimensions that maybe aren't there. But since I'm not literate in this, I can't dig into the code.
* Physics education is just.. bad. Understandably so, because so much of this is so fringe and so new that only a handful of people in the world actually understand it at a deep level. Which is why I think videos like this are so important: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b05IeSlMMDw . Notice how she skips over notation pedantry and calls the bracket notation vectors. She also isolates entanglement as the key mechanism of quantum computers (at the 4:21 mark). I've read countless articles on that for YEARS that never stated what's going on with such clarity. So if we can't simulate entanglement inside a classical computer, then we can't simulate reality in them, because we wouldn't be able to build a quantum computer within The Matrix. So are we living in a simulation? Probably not.
I bring this stuff up because the problem is probably in my own lack of understanding, not physics itself. So more budget needs to go to education and refactoring the existing physics "codebase" to use better notation and terms. Maybe you all have insights that invalidate my concerns. Those insights should be at the forefront of every Wikipedia article, not buried inside somewhere.
* The strong force probably doesn't exist. It's an empirical description of what happens in the nucleus around 10^-15 meters. But due to stuff like gluon self-interaction, it's difficult to analyze. I suspect that it's related to the curvature of space around mass and is probably connected to neutron star and black hole math. But as long as it's portrayed as unified with the electromagnetic and weak forces, I just don't see us gaining a better understanding of it anytime soon. Also the description of the force between quarks increasing with distance, enough to concentrate enough energy to create more quarks (like how a high-energy photon can split into a particle and antiparticle), feels more like epicycles than deep understanding.
* Physics right now seems more obsessed with mathematical elegance than application. Normally I prefer theory and abstraction over implementation, but what's the point of discovering a Higgs boson if we can't modulate it? It's nice to know it's there, but what are the chances of using energy to manipulate an object's inertia? I suspect that it's more of a clever mathematical construct than a force we will ever manipulate in our daily lives. Actually, re-reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism#Simple_explana... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_generation it sounds like the Higgs mechanism is more about explaining the masses of particles than how to manipulate mass. The problem might be in how long range and short range forces (carried by massless gauge bosons and massive gauge bosons respectively) are treated differently. That's almost certainly not the final model of reality, and writing this out, I bet it's one of the main reasons that string theory tries to add so many dimensions that maybe aren't there. But since I'm not literate in this, I can't dig into the code.
* Physics education is just.. bad. Understandably so, because so much of this is so fringe and so new that only a handful of people in the world actually understand it at a deep level. Which is why I think videos like this are so important: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b05IeSlMMDw . Notice how she skips over notation pedantry and calls the bracket notation vectors. She also isolates entanglement as the key mechanism of quantum computers (at the 4:21 mark). I've read countless articles on that for YEARS that never stated what's going on with such clarity. So if we can't simulate entanglement inside a classical computer, then we can't simulate reality in them, because we wouldn't be able to build a quantum computer within The Matrix. So are we living in a simulation? Probably not.
I bring this stuff up because the problem is probably in my own lack of understanding, not physics itself. So more budget needs to go to education and refactoring the existing physics "codebase" to use better notation and terms. Maybe you all have insights that invalidate my concerns. Those insights should be at the forefront of every Wikipedia article, not buried inside somewhere.