Lessons from failures to achieve what was possible in the twentieth century physics

In recent years physicists have started to express publicly their concerns that not everything has been quite fine with the advancement of physics in the last several decades [1]. Although not all agree with such concerns I think it is an undeniable fact that in this period there has been no revolutionary breakthrough in fundamental physics of the type of relativity and quantum physics. A convenient answer might be that more experimental evidence is required to make a breakthrough possible. But what if it turns out that all conditions necessary for a new physical theory have already been present but physicists have been failing to process successfully the existing theoretical and experimental evidence? A concise analysis of several missed opportunities in the twentieth century physics due to what I think are inadequate views on doing physics seems to suggest that this possibility should be taken seriously. Physicists generally agree that physics describes and tries to explain the world. However, this appears to be the only consensus. Physicists’ views on the nature of physical theories vary widely but I think the views which might prevent physicists who hold them from arriving at new results are those that regard our theories only as good descriptions of the world and that insist on not considering the “most successful abstractions to be real properties of our world” [2] (one can even come across extreme views that physics tells nothing about the existence of what it describes). I think these are unproductive views negatively affecting not only the advancement of physics, but also the physicists who share them and who often pay a high personal price. Here are two examples from the history of the twentieth century physics. It was precisely the view, that successful abstractions should not be regarded as representing something real, that prevented Lorentz from discovering special relativity. He believed that the time t of an observer at rest with respect to the aether (which is a genuine example of reifying an unsuccessful abstraction) was the true time, whereas the quantity t′ of another observer, moving with respect to the first, was merely an abstraction that did not represent anything real in the world. Lorentz himself admitted the failure of his approach [3]: