Hype to justify a new particle collider

Physicist Bee explains how theoretical particle physicists are making a phony push for funding billions of dollars for a new collider:

You haven’t seen headlines recently about the Large Hadron Collider, have you? That’s because even the most skilled science writers can’t find much to write about. ...

It’s a PR disaster that particle physics won’t be able to shake off easily. Before the LHC’s launch in 2008, many theorists expressed themselves confident the collider would produce new particles besides the Higgs boson. That hasn’t happened. And the public isn’t remotely as dumb as many academics wish. They’ll remember next time we come ask for money. ...

In an essay some months ago, Adam Falkowski expressed it this way:

“[P]article physics is currently experiencing the most serious crisis in its storied history. The feeling in the field is at best one of confusion and at worst depression”

At present, the best reason to build another particle collider, one with energies above the LHC’s, is to measure the properties of the Higgs-boson, specifically its self-interaction. But it’s difficult to spin a sexy story around such a technical detail. ...

You see what is happening here. Conjecturing a multiverse of any type (string landscape or eternal inflation or what have you) is useless. It doesn’t explain anything and you can’t calculate anything with it. But once you add a probability distribution on that multiverse, you can make calculations. Those calculations are math you can publish. And those publications you can later refer to in proposals read by people who can’t decipher the math. Mission accomplished.

The reason this cycle of empty predictions continues is that everyone involved only stands to benefit. From the particle physicists who write the papers to those who review the papers to those who cite the papers, everyone wants more funding for particle physics, so everyone plays along.

So all this hype about multiverse, susy, naturalness, strings, etc is a hoax to get funding for a new collider?

Theoretical physics peaked in about 1975. They found the Standard Model, and thus had a theory of everything. Instead of being happy with that, they claimed that they need to prove it wrong with proton decay, supersymmetry, grand unified field theories, etc. None of those worked, so they went on to multiverse, black hole firewalls, and other nonsense.

How much longer can this go on? Almost everything theoretical physicists talk about is a scam.

Stephen Hawking was a proponent of all this string theory, multiverse, supersymmetry, black hole information nonsense. I don't think that he did much in the way of serious research in these topics, but he hung out with other theoretical physicists who were all believers.