Or is it the same crossroads, circumnavigated any number of times?
Scientific American’s May edition will feature “Supersymmetry and the Crisis in Physics”:
For decades physicists have been working on a beautiful theory that has promised to lead to a deeper understanding of the quantum world. Now they stand at a crossroads: prove it right in the next year or confront an epochal paradigm shift – By Joseph Lykken and Maria Spiropulu More. (paywall)
This seems to be a way of getting around to saying now what Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong (and others) have been saying for at least a decade: These new cosmologies are not supported by evidence and are not advancing our understanding.
Betting here is: They won’t really confront any “epochal paradigm shift” no matter what happens because the standard is subtly changing. In cosmology, evidence matters less now and conformity with other naturalist theories matters more. If that were not so, this stuff would have been abandoned a while back. It’s always about to be abandoned, and then they remember.
See also: Multiverse cosmology: Assuming that evidence still matters, what does it say?
and
In search of a road to reality
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