Parsimony
What’s the word count for the theory of evolution? Four. Random mutation, natural selection.
Einstein’s Special Relativity? By my measure, it had negative word count. The genius wasn’t what he added; it was what he threw out: the ether.
Once you take out the ether, the rest of Special Relativity was already on the table before Einstein stepped in. Maxwell’s equations had the speed baked in. Lorentz (and Poincaré) had already written down the transformations under which those equations keep their form. The math of Lorentz invariance was sitting there, humming, while people kept trying to staple it to a preferred ether frame. The idea of relativity itself goes back to the time of Newton and Galileo.
Progress often comes as subtraction, not addition.
Ambition
If all we expect from physics is answers about scattering amplitudes, that is all we will receive.
Einstein expected to use geometry to explain gravity—and he got his palace of gold.
At Gμν, we expect physics to explain why many subjective realities share a single objective world.
Stuck? Take a step back.
I remember this was the golden rule when working on problem sets in graduate school. Imagine physics as a large decision and conception tree of what positions you take and what fields and subfields you work on.
There are two problems with where we are in this tree:
- We are very deep in the tree. How many physicists today work on the idealism vs materialism node of the decision tree?
- We’re very concentrated: most of us work on a handful of branches.
Never mind about taking that one step back… take 1000 steps back.