The Hierarchical Nature of the Particle Physics Community

The high energy or particle physics community works in a very different way from communities corresponding to other sub-fields of physics, for example, the condensed matter community. The fact that experiments in the particle physics community cost millions or billions of dollars implies that theories cannot be tested in a short span of time. For instance, the Large Hadron Collider cost around a billion dollars and the total cost for finding the Higgs boson was around 13 billion dollars. It took around 50 years to test the theory of supersymmetry and the lack of its signatures has lead the field into a deadlock.

As a result of this lack of experimental tests over large spans of time there is a natural implication on the nature of how the community functions. What happens is that the smartest people in the best  institutes naturally settle on the top of the hierarchical structure of the community. They mainly decide which ideas will be the most intriguing ones and the rest of the community follows them because they do not have any experimental benchmark to follow. Having a PhD in this field I experienced how jobs are so easy to find if you are working on the popular ideas in this field. During my PhD, I came up with an idea on my own and published a single author paper. I was quite excited at first and thought that my job prospects will increase significantly. But it turned out that this paper of mine had almost no benefit in my job search, only because the community was not working on such ideas.

I further got a better understanding of this hierarchy after reading Lee Smolin's book "The Problem with Physics". He points out in his book that few years back not working on string theory or something close to it meant an end to your career in particle physics. Another physicist who frequently writes about such ideas is Sabine Hossenfelder. She recently wrote a book "Lost in Math" that is on my to-read list. I strongly recommend these two books to the readers.

On the other hand, the other fields of physics such as condensed matter physics, Earth physics, Plasma physics, etc are much more progressive fields. This is because theories can always be tested with experiments and you do not see such hierarchies there.

Is there a way to deal with this problem? I am not sure. Lee Smolin has addressed some solutions in his book. I think one way out of this problem is for the particle physics community to be open to ideas from condensed matter physics. For example, a mechanism that the particle physics community adopted from condensed matter physics led to the discovery of the Higgs boson. Contemporary condensed matter physics is progressing at a very rapid pace whereas particle physics has reached a deadlock. This is however difficult because in most of the cases particle physicists look down upon this field of physics and I have seen particle physics joke about condensed matter physics. Well I guess the arrogance of the leaders of this community may keep it in a deadlock for a long time until young particle physicists realize that they have to find their own ways!

One of the Most Ignored Equations in Physics

We have all heard of the Schrodinger, Dirac and Klein Gordon equations and these equations are extensively used in modern physics. In addition, almost every book on non-relativistic and relativistic quantum mechanics discusses these equations. There is however one equation that is rarely discussed in contemporary modern physics literature and that is the Levy-Leblond equation [1]. The only well known book that, in my knowledge, introduces this equation is Greiner's advanced quantum mechanics book. In this article, I intend to highlight how important this equation can be in contemporary physics.

I claim this because I did not know about this equation as well until I discovered it myself [2]. During my PhD, I went on a quest to discover new ideas and this equation was one of the ideas I discovered and got the paper published as well. It was after around two years of publishing this idea and a follow up paper when I came to know that this equation was proposed around 50 years ago by Prof. Levy-Leblond. My approach in the paper, however, was quite different and, in particular, I solved a well known problem in quantum mechanics namely the step potential problem which was not done by Prof. Levy-Leblond in his original paper. More interestingly, the editor of the journal I published in was a well known Nobel laureate in physics. One of the referees was so excited about the equation that he/she called it something new after a 100 years. I contacted several well known physicists and they all suggested new insights that I can get from these equations but none of them knew about the Levy-Leblond equation.

After finding out about Levy-Leblond's equation I contacted Prof. Levy-Leblond and he acknowledged in his reply that independent discoveries are always made in science. He was also amazed that the editor and the referees did not know about this equation. This experience taught me the political dynamics of the physics community and how the community can have its own biases. Its amazing that equations such as the Schrodinger, Dirac and Klein Gordon equations are so popular and frequently appear in lists of beautiful equations in physics, whereas the Levy-Leblond equation is rarely mentioned. In my view, I think one of the reasons physicists and in particular particle physicist ignored it was that it is not Lorentz invariant.

The Levy-Leblond equation introduces spin in the non-relativistic limit and can lead to several new insights as I have shown in my papers. It is the analog of Dirac equation for non-relativistic quantum mechanics. I believe that this equation may be useful in contemporary fields like spintronics which focus on manipulating the spin of non-relativistic electrons. I have continued to work on this equation [3,4,5] and keep coming across referees who do not know about this equation and think that the calculations have already been explored without giving any strong references. I hope that this article brings attention to this beautiful equation as well and we as physicists learn to avoid such mistakes in the future! 

[1] https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.cmp/1103840281

[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10701-015-9944-z

[3] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0256-307X/34/5/050301/meta

[4] http://www.ijqf.org/archives/3574

[5] https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.10409