One way to think about physics is as the pursuit of an all-encompassing model that forecasts the phenomena of physical reality based on the smallest number of principles. This model would reflect only one out of many possibilities, most of which could have been more challenging to figure out. Currently, the Standard Model of Particle Physics has 19 parameters with specific values whose origin is unknown. 19 may sound like a large number. Indeed, many physicists, including Albert Einstein and Paul Dirac, attempted to derive these parameters from an underlying theory that has fewer degrees of freedom.
But Nature could have been far more challenging. Humans are different from each other but electrons are all described by the same quantum numbers, with not much wiggle room for them in the fundamental Dirac equation of quantum-mechanics. Imagine an alternative counterfactual Universe in which each electron exhibited free will. In that Universe, the atoms would not obey a universal Dirac equation. As a result, the evolution of stars and the chemistry of life would show vast unpredictability. Needless to say, there would be no way of relating the current state of that Universe to its initial conditions.
Gladly, the Standard Model of our Universe can be summarized on a T-shirt. We tend to admire the pioneers of modern physics who discovered the notes on this T-shirt, but if not for these individuals — other physicists could have surely figured out the underlying model from the related experimental data.
This perspective can be tested by comparing the similarity between our Standard Model and the one developed by scientists on exoplanets. If they are more advanced than we are, then their Standard Model would be simpler than ours and they would be able to account for more phenomena than we can. They might be able to tell us whether a Planck-density star lies at the center of each black hole instead of our imagined singularity. They might also tell us if dark matter is a mix of weakly-interacting elementary particles that are beyond the reach of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider or perhaps a mix of primordial black holes of asteroid masses.
With this perspective, the difficulty we currently encounter in advancing the frontiers of physics is simply because past generations of terrestrial physicists picked the low-hanging fruits. How can we accelerate the rate of progress without the help of exo-scientists?
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