Crisis in Physics Spurs Spirited Dialogue

As a solid-state physicist, I suggest an alternative interpretation of the changes that Nagel portrays as the lost hegemony of high-energy particle physics. That hegemony was always at least partly in the imagination of the high-energy community, and the community’s change in perception may reflect a loss of rose-colored glasses now that its funding situation is tight.

I recently spent a few years teaching in a small four-year college, and I can affirm the continued existence of common ground among physicists. The school combined all the natural sciences into one department, and it became reasonably clear that even a nuclear theorist and a solid-state experimentalist share some important views of science. That level of agreement is less common between life scientists, chemists, and geologists. The strong mathematical emphasis of a physics education promotes a quantitative, analytical approach to problem solving. Also, although Nagel is correct that the reductionist approach to science no longer goes unchallenged, it is still a strong enough feature of the physicists’ worldview to provide some “family resemblance” among most physicists. In facing the fractures in the physics community, we would do well to remember that we do indeed have much in common.