No one in physics dares say so, but the race to invent new particles is pointless | Sabine Hossenfelder

In private, many physicists admit they do not believe the particles they are paid to search for exist - they do it because their colleagues are doing it

Imagine you go to a zoology conference. The first speaker talks about her 3D model of a 12-legged purple spider that lives in the Arctic. There's no evidence it exists, she admits, but it's a testable hypothesis, and she argues that a mission should be sent off to search the Arctic for spiders.

The second speaker has a model for a flying earthworm, but it flies only in caves. There's no evidence for that either, but he petitions to search the world's caves. The third one has a model for octopuses on Mars. It's testable, he stresses.

Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Germany. She is author of Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions and creator of the YouTube Channel Science Without the Gobbledygook.

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