The Ant Mill: How theoretical high-energy physics descended into groupthink

There are pathological things about theoretical physics culture but the dominant problem in the field is the lack of decisive experimental results. When the system is working properly the gap between theory and experiment can be upwards of 50 years -- so a young theoretical physicist just can't pull off a coup like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_experiment

In a world of massive PhD overproduction there is no way to prove your merit independent of your ability to play the politics.

It is possible theoreticians are missing something but the problem is not that we can't think up possible dark matter particles but rather that we can't do any experiments that distinguish one from the another.

If you're looking for where the rot started I think it goes back before the string theory bubble: inflation and GUTs were always fishy. I remember reading articles about inflation in Scientific American circa 1981 that seemed strangely confused, like they couldn't tell the difference between the inflaton and the Higgs mechanism. I see that rot in cosmology too. When I worked at arXiv I had a coworker who was a recent astro-ph PhD who thought that a few old men were promoting a false consensus about how accretion disks and I couldn't help but think this was going on when The New York Times ran their first article about Λ-CDM and about a decade later it's starting to look like I was right.