{"id":7864,"date":"2013-04-10T09:11:03","date_gmt":"2013-04-10T13:11:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=7864"},"modified":"2013-04-10T09:11:03","modified_gmt":"2013-04-10T13:11:03","slug":"the-trouble-with-physics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2013\/04\/10\/the-trouble-with-physics\/","title":{"rendered":"The Trouble With Physics"},"content":{"rendered":"

For something related to the book-in-progress, I was reading Raymond Chandler’s classic essay “The Simple Art of Murder”<\/a> last night, and stumbled across the following quote, where he laments the number of stories in print in the mystery genre in 1950:<\/p>\n

\n

In my less stilted moments I too write detective stories, and all this immortality makes just a little too much competition. Even Einstein couldn\u2019t get very far if three hundred treatises of the higher physics were published every year, and several thousand others in some form or other were hanging around in excellent condition, and being read too. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The graph that’s the “featured image” for this post (which I’ll also reproduce below, for those reading via RSS) is from the arxiv preprint server’s statistical reports<\/a>, showing the number of new submissions annually from its launch in 1992 through the start of this year. The scale is a little hard to read, sized down for this blog, but each box on the vertical scale is 10,000 new submissions.<\/p>\n

Now, not all of these are physics, and you could quibble about which of them count as “the higher physics,” but surely the high-energy physics category should count for that. The hep-* category on the arxiv is represented in the darker blue, and by itself accounts for better than 10,000 submissions\/year at present.<\/p>\n

And thus, we see the trouble with physics these days, as pointed out by a writer of private-eye stories 63 years ago: we haven’t had a “new Einstein” emerge because not even the original one could get very far under these circumstances. In fact, he could get approximately 1\/30th of not very far, given the statistics above…<\/p>\n

\"New<\/a>
New submissions to the arxiv, from http:\/\/arxiv.org\/help\/stats\/2012_by_area\/index<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

(Because the Internet is designed to be impervious to irony, I feel compelled to note that this is not a serious post. We kid because we love.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For something related to the book-in-progress, I was reading Raymond Chandler’s classic essay “The Simple Art of Murder” last night, and stumbled across the following quote, where he laments the number of stories in print in the mystery genre in 1950: In my less stilted moments I too write detective stories, and all this immortality… Continue reading The Trouble With Physics<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7865,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,18,7,37,140,11,138],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academia","category-books","category-physics","category-pop_culture","category-publishing","category-science","category-theory","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}