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!