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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

"Today we have plenty of data that isn't explained by physics. It's just that it isn't important enough to lead to new things."

Bollocks. Particle physicists and cosmologists are intensely aware of the need for new theories. They are, as near as I can tell, scrounging in every corner they can find for explanations, including a lot of corners that don't really even exist. It's just about the only thing they've got to talk about right now, and so it is just about the only thing they talk about, not something they think "isn't important". But we either don't have the brains to put together the data we have, or lack the data to figure out what the answer is.

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Funny thing is that the biggest experimental problem if particle physics is that there should be some big experimental problem somewhere around, but there isn't. Both bariogenesis and the simplest particle models of dark matter require deviations from the Standard Model that should have already been detected.

Cosmologists by their turn have plenty of empirical problems to solve, but keep dismissing them as "probably just a particle we didn't see yet", and "yes, that's just a fundamental property of space (that no theory depends upon... applications?!? what do you mean by applications? it's too fringe to be usefull)".

As it is, we don't have any "important" empirical problems that we expect to completely rewrite theory. What's completely fair because most of the time what looks like "just another particle that we didn't see yet" is indeed just another particle that we didn't see yet. But completely dismissing all known problems is wrong.

In a sense you are both right, and in relation to what I wrote, it is hidden in my sentence:

"There are some exceptions to these, but I will exclude these for now, since they are a bit technical."

Take for example the Anomalous magnetic dipole moment of the muon [1], it is a measurement that do not agree with theory, but it is far from being the centre of attention for physicists (certainly some people do have that as their main goal to explain, but in general).

So indeed, there are things that do not match up, as well as the need to find a new experiment that gives something new (in the sense: The anomalous magnetic dipole moment of the muon is not enough of a hint to find the "new theory" (it seems).)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p... The 11th point under that section of that article.

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