Browse a shelf of popular science books in physics and you’ll often find a similar theme. Whether offering insights into The Hidden Reality (2011), Something Deeply Hidden (2019) or Our Mathematical Universe (2014), these books hint at an underlying, secret world waiting to be unravelled by physicists – a domain beyond our sensory perception that remains their special purview.

Over its history, physics has delivered elegant and accurate descriptions of the physical Universe. Today, however, the reality physicists work to uncover appears increasingly removed from the one they inhabit. Despite its experimental successes, physics has repeatedly failed to live up to the expectation of delivering a deeper, ‘final’ physics – a reality to unify all others. As such, physicists appear forced to entertain increasingly speculative propositions.

Yet, with no obvious avenues to verify such speculations, physicists are left with little option but to repeat similar approaches and experiments – only bigger and at greater cost – in the hope that something new may be found. Seemingly beset with a sense of anxiety that nothing new will be found or that future experiments will reveal only further ignorance, the field of fundamental physics is incentivised to pursue ever more fanciful ideas.

I argue that the pursuit of unity and dominance of a more fundamental reality presents itself not as physicists’ unique prerogative, but instead as an impossible burden placed on their shoulders by the modern world. I suggest that we should embrace a more pluralist and nuanced understanding of what comprises the cosmos, an understanding that not only accepts but invites criticism from other practices, disciplines and realities into its current predicament.

My time spent in physics, both as an aspiring theoretical physicist and later as a sociologist studying the practices of fundamental physics, has left me to wonder to what extent narratives of unity and finality continue to serve the communities that proliferate them. And, further, to what extent does achieving greater fidelity towards what comprises existence, to what reality is, and to the constituents of the cosmos require that physics give up the mantle as reality’s primary purveyor?

On a rainy day in central London, I sat down to interview a professor of astroparticle physics. At that point, I had spent just over a year observing weekly meetings of his research group: part of a collaboration constructing a large-scale experiment to detect dark matter.

During the interview, I noticed something that had until then passed me by. Far removed from the technical discussions on experiment modelling and data processing that often occupied group meetings, I became aware of a sense of anxiety, not just in this group, but in the wider particle-dark-matter community and fundamental physics at large.

It was an anxiety fed by the realisation that they had been at this a long time, and it had begun to make them wonder what they had to show for it. As the professor told me: ‘We keep getting bigger and building better. But maybe it’s none of this.’ In our interview, he spoke repeatedly about what he would do differently if new to the field, of the money spent on these experiments, and on the responsibility he felt for those early career researchers he’d enlisted for this task. It was clear that this was as much a personal concern as a professional one.

My path to this dark matter group had begun years earlier. After I graduated in astrophysics and applied mathematics, hoping to study reality at its most fundamental, I considered offers to pursue doctoral research in theoretical cosmology. However, when asked to choose from speculative projects that held little to no hope of observational verification, I left the field, disillusioned, realising that I would not find a greater understanding of reality there.

‘It’s akin to knowing everything about sand dunes … but not knowing what a grain of sand is made of’

Instead, I was drawn to sociology, which offered insight into a seemingly more real world – that of the everyday – and the opportunity to explore phenomena otherwise dismissed as unquantifiable, messy and subjective. Whereas the natural sciences primarily seek to make the unfamiliar familiar, the critical humanities often operate from the opposite impulse – to make the familiar unfamiliar. Their ambition is to interrogate matters taken for granted, and to see how given discourses, knowledges and even realities are mobilised politically.

Eventually, my research would bring me back to cosmology. I wanted to understand how the cosmos had become synonymous with the world beyond Earth and considered the exclusive preserve of physics. So, I decided to conduct ethnographic work with physicists investigating dark matter and other problems of cosmology.

Ask a physicist to list the big open problems of fundamental physics and cosmology and it is likely that the dark matter problem will be among them. Thought to comprise more than 85 per cent of all matter in the Universe, its presence is inferred but remains undetected. As the astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan succinctly explained at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2019:

That’s why, for the past four decades, particle physicists have built multiple detectors hoping to find those ‘grains’. Still more are planned, with each generation larger and more sensitive than their predecessor. Recently, however, a disquiet has begun to emerge. Despite all the investment of time and money, the likeliest candidates for dark matter, once so promising, have had their ‘moment of truth’ and have fallen short. Some physicists are........

© Aeon