Five Brilliant Ideas For New Physics That Need To Die,…

Five Brilliant Ideas For New Physics That Need To Die, Already

“ 4.) Technicolor: We all now know that the Higgs gives rest mass to the particles in the Universe. But what if there hadn’t been a Higgs; could there have been another way to get mass? There sure is: technicolor! Instead of the Higgs boson, additional gauge interactions provide another mechanism for giving mass to particles and, incidentally, avoid the hierarchy problem. But in theory, they should have produced new physics at the electroweak scale that wasn’t seen and flavor-changing neutral currents (a certain type of particle decay) that also isn’t seen. But the nail in the coffin was the experimental confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson, rendering the idea of technicolor moot. Nevertheless, work continues on this discredited idea. ”

The history of physics is littered with brilliant ideas that have revolutionized how we look at the Universe… and have been discarded entirely because they’ve failed to describe reality. Theories like the Tired-Light alternative to relativity, the Steady-State alternative to the Big Bang, and even the Sakata Model alternative to the quark model of particles have come and gone, with practically no one working on them today. As it should be. But many ideas that the science has overwhelmingly spoken against continue to linger on, as their adherents continue to double down on investing in them, despite failure after failure after failure. At the end of the day, physics is an experimental science, and no matter how beautiful, elegant, or compelling your theory is, if it fails to have its predictions borne out by experiment and observation, it must be set aside as unsuccessful.

Here are five of the most popular, worked-on theories of today that have no business sucking up the time and talents of physicists interested in unlocking the deepest mysteries of nature.