Given the tendency in these fora for folk to do physics without the mathematical background, this might be of use. It is a large survey conducted by the American Physical Society’s Physics Magazine, and apparently published in August 2026 form data collected in 2024-5. n=1,675
I’m somewhat pleased at the fairly steady 17% “No opinion”.
The upshot? On many issues there is no consensus:
In summary, the Big Mysteries Survey suggests that physicists are more divided on many foundational questions than popular accounts often imply.
Worth keeping handy when folk say “But science says…”
The paper is probably of use in the sense you mentioned—a handy reference point to undermine those falsely claiming to be on the side of established scientific fact.
But I can’t help but find myself a bit underwhelmed. The researchers picked topics at the edge of scientific knowledge that there is no consensus on and then discovered there is no scientific consensus on them. The claim seems to be most people do not know this. The big mystery is why that should be a big mystery. You could probably do much the same thing in any field at all. Most people are not familiar with the nuances of academic debate.
I suppose the difference is that most people can at least formulate an answer to what they think to be the consensus on questions such as “How did the universe begin?” whereas they may not even get that far with a question like “What is society?”
Lol. In philosophy, talking about physics is not about solving equations. Or coming up with one. So no, if you mean by mathematical background that we have studied higher maths. But learning the concepts helps.
A physicist says that, beyond what’s known, if there are other particles, they’re too short-lived, and if there are other forces, they’re too weak. He caveats that with physics still has plenty of work left that needs to be done. Questions the survey’s results but I’m not a physicist and so.
A year or so ago there was much song and dance about Bose-Einstein condensate. It must’ve been a major discovery but likely not comparable to relativity.
These surveys are probably conducted by statisticians and not physicists. The latter are fully in the know about what physics is. The absence of much wailing and gnashing of teeth speaks volumes.
I’m reminded of a radio broadcast conversation I heard once between Lawrence Krauss and Sydney’s Richard Glover. Glover remarked ‘so we could be surrounded by dark matter and not even know.’ Krauss said ‘yeah, maybe’ and the conversation moved on. Whereas it struck me as spooky. And dark matter is said to comprise, I don’t know, 10 percent of the Universe (or something). But it’s not floating around in space like some interstellar oil-spill which you could motor up to and capture for analysis. It interpenetrates.
Dark matter is 70% of known matter (?), which does put us in the minority. Physicists are hoping that DM particles will interact with ordinary matter, like neutrinos do, once in a blue moon. The extra gravity in galaxies requires it. Is this relativity’s Mercury moment?
As I understand it (which is not much), more than 90% of the universe’s total mass-energy budget is thought to consist of dark matter (27%) and dark energy (68%). Although looking at the survey, MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics, which says that gravity behaves differently at cosmic scales to what Newton’s laws predict) still gets a respectable 12%.
Philosophy says logic is not challenged by the fact that science says how the rocket made it to the moon even though it does not say where the moon came from.
Neutrons are easy, LHC can find them any time. Although an interesting point is that a neutron, one of the constituent particles of atomic nuclei, can remain stable as part of a stable nucleus for indefinitely long periods, potentially for the entire age of the Universe. But a free neutron is unstable. Once separated from its nuclear environment, it undergoes beta decay into a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino, with a half-life of about ten minutes. Outside a broader nuclear architecture, the so-called “indestructible particle” loses its capacity to persist. A pristine example of ‘top-down constraints’.
Neutrinos are a different beast. There’s trillions of them passing through the earth every minute. That’s what someone just won the Physics Nobel for detecting. Took some doing - drilling kilometeres down into the Antarctic ice. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2026/press-release/
(Sabine Hossenfelder asks, if the Nobel is ostensibly awarded to discoveries which have positivie significance for humanity, how come this one? Neutrinos apart from being nearly undetectable are entirely and utterly useless so far as we can tell.)
I vageuly recall some basic nuclear physics we were taught. However it was touch and go, no landing or sightseeing in the program.
Neutrinos popped out of the equations Pauli was manipulating. It must be very satisfying to see theory and reality align like that.
As far as I can tell, modern physicists are left scraping the bottom of the barrel. There’s not much left to investigate. We’re still drinking what was poured into our cups by the attendees of the Solvay conference. A new bar, a new keg, when’s that going to happen?
Einstein managed to pull off his feat because the error in Mercury’s precession was significant. Now precision has reached the 16th decimal place per some quarters. We’ll do just fine with the the older models.
Of course, GPS is Einstein’s showpiece, along with the 1919 eclipse photographs and gravitational lensing and the fact that particles live longer when they’re traveling at relativistic speeds. That’s why dark matter.
Newton was what in music is called a soloist. He wasn’t a people person and was known to be someone you didn’t want to be on the wrong side of. Einstein, on the other hand, had a way with the ladies, was good friends with another great, Gödel.
