First physics post of 2019

Gee, Bee Hossenfelder feels pretty triumphant about how arguments from "naturalness", which predicted the Large Hadron Collider would surely find some sign of new physics, have hit the wall hard since it appears very likely that that only thing the LHC will be good for is finding the Higgs boson. 

Here's her post: How the LHC may spell the end of particle physics. 

I see she has also just posted against panpsychism - the somewhat silly idea that all matter is conscious, just some of it more conscious than others.  Not a bad read.

Before Christmas, I noticed a paper on arXiv called Non Locality versus Modified Realism: Convivial Solipsism. 

I see that the author - who I have never heard of before - has been plugging away at this idea for some time now.   It's a somewhat intriguing proposal, I think - hard to describe, but much of the paper was able to be followed.   I may be wrong, but I had the feeling that it was more sensible than Many Worlds interpretation - although still weird.  This particular paper was about its usefulness in restoring "locality" to quantum mechanics.    The abstract:

A large number of physicists now admit that quantum mechanics is a non local theory. EPR argument and the many experiences (including recent loop-hole free tests) showing the violation of Bell's inequalities seem to have confirmed convincingly that quantum mechanics cannot be local. Nevertheless, this conclusion can only be drawn inside a standard realist framework assuming an ontic interpretation of the wave function and viewing the collapse of the wave function as a real change in the physical state of the system. We show that this standpoint is not mandatory and that if the collapse is no more considered as an actual physical change, it is possible to recover locality.