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Thinking outside the simulation box

Nature Physics volume 9, pages 384–386 (2013)Cite this article

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Any ambitious construction project requires architects and engineers. As research shifts towards large groups that focus on the engineering aspects of linking data to existing models, architectural skills are becoming rare among young theorists.

Albert Einstein once said: “If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.” Indeed, too few theoretical astrophysicists are engaged in tasks that go beyond the refinement of details within a commonly accepted paradigm. It is far more straightforward today to work on these finer points than to review whether the paradigm itself is valid. Although there is much work to be done in the analysis and interpretation of experimental data, the unfortunate by-product of the current state of affairs is that popular, mainstream models with which data are interpreted are rarely challenged. Most cosmologists, for example, lay one brick of phenomenology at a time in support of the standard (inflation + cosmological constant Λ + cold dark matter, or LCDM) cosmological model, resembling engineers that follow the blueprint of a global construction project, without pausing to question whether the architecture of the project makes sense when discrepancies between expectations and data are revealed.

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  1. Abraham Loeb is in the Department of Astronomy and the Institute for Theory & Computation, Harvard University, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA,

    Abraham Loeb

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  1. Abraham Loeb
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Correspondence to Abraham Loeb.

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Loeb, A. Thinking outside the simulation box. Nature Phys 9, 384–386 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2679

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