Your title should read "Is Particle Accelerator Physics Dead?"

The rest of physics is very much alive, some of it driven by the ongoing revolution in Astronomy, the original driver of theoretical physics. And there is a ton of largely unnoticed progress in "mundane" physics, investigating things like surface tension, phase transition, dynamical systems, etc... old fashioned lab-bench stuff that's gotten a huge boost from advances in computational capacity.

The recent change in outlook for particle physics comes not from a lack of rapid progress in the last few decades, but because of a specific experimental result.

The LHC has had a null result that doesn't get mentioned much in the popular press. It has observed no new particles other than the Higgs. This constrains any possible supersymmetry down to a point where the most plausible/promising variants of String Theory have to be abandoned (there are other longstanding critiques of String Theory, but in science evidence -- or lack of it -- speaks louder than epistemology).

Hossenfelder and other practicing physicists who have long been skeptical of String Theory, e.g. Woit and Smolin, stand vindicated by this result. But none of them think theoretical work in particle physics or quantum mechanics is dead, far from it. All of them advocate (and some do research in) quantum gravity, which has been a neglected backwater for nearly a century. All advocate work in fundamentals of quantum mechanics, a field so wide-open that even people who don't seem to think it needs to be worked on, like Nima Arkani-Hamed, are dabbling in it.

A few of the String-Theory skeptics do think that construction of a very large, enormously expensive higher-energy accelerator (not "accelerators" -- nobody seems to think we can or should build more than one anymore) should be put on hold until we've got a better idea of what we'd use it for. This is hotly contested though, for reasons political as much as scientific. Hossenfelder, fwiw, was in favor of building bigger cyclotrons until quite recently.

Quantum Mechanics, famously, was born of fitting mathematical models to the available evidence, first by Heisenburg, then by Schroedinger (whose formulation was and still is preferred) and then by Dirac (who, characteristically, first proved Heisenburg's and Schroedinger's models to be mathematically equivalent before extending Schroedinger's model with Einstein's General Releativity). But there is no story behind the formal structures, no first principles from which the mathematics can be derived, a radical departure from nearly every other established theory in physics.

For decades this was considered a non-problem, "shut up and calculate" was the answer to anyone who asked what was behind the math, and "the model is the reality" was the essence of the interpretation Bohr and his institute favored in Copenhagen, and which Einstein objected to so strenuously. But we seem to have reached a limit to what we can learn from just doing more calculations, at least for now, so the problem of foundations is no longer obscured by head-spinning experimental progress. It's almost respectable to talk about it again.

@1 Hossenfelder is a respected physicist doing research in quantum gravity, with a long list of peer-reviewed papers and fellowships at well-known academic institutions. She is neither a pseudoscientist nor a crackpot, as a simple Google search will show you. If Our Bumbling Mudede is misusing her arguments to buttress his own ongoing hostility to science, he's at least picked his source well.

@3 You really should read her stuff. She isn't parroting anything. She is trying to defend her particular corner of physics against other physicists who have said that experimental validation of theoretical constructs is overrated, and that the esthetic appeal of the underlying mathematics is sufficient justification for sticking with hypotheses that have made no experimental predictions, and have no prospect of making experimental predictions. Experimental GR and solid state are indeed doing fine, but since the Large Hadron Collider failed to find evidence of Super Symmetry not a few physicists are afraid that the standard model of particle physics has come to a cliff in terms of its predictive power.

@3

Lots of entirely respectable working scientists are also popular science writers. Hossnfelder is one of them.

She is not "parroting' anyone, she makes her own closely-argued, scientifically sound case against String Theory (and other untestable conjectures in modern physics-- the many-worlds hypothesis in this case).

The only person here who's looked at one or two sentences she wrote in an informal context and then drawn utterly unjustified conclusions from them is GermanSausage.

It's not anyone else's problem that you've put the defend-all-STEM stick so far up your own butt that you can no longer tolerate the comparison of an untestable hypothesis to a religious tenet.

Let me know if you’d like to drop a lobster into God’s Fish Tank and play with k frames within the framework of the general theory, Sausage.

I don't know shit about physics, but common sense and the age of reason are both dead and gone in the Err of Trump.

For centuries, physicists struggled to detect and measure the "caloric" they believed was responsible for the existence of heat. They never were successful. Eventually, atoms and molecules were discovered, and heat became explained in terms of the vibrations of them. Caloric couldn't be detected because it didn't exist.

In the 19th century, physicists tried to detect the "luminiferous ether" that was responsible for allowing light waves to propagate through apparently empty space. They never were successful. Relativity and quantum mechanics ended up providing the explanation for light. The ether couldn't be detected because it didn't exist.

Physicists tend, in other words, to hypothesize hidden matter when their existing theories fail to adequately explain all observable phenomena. Now, this doesn't prove dark matter does not exist, but I rather suspect it does not, and that the solution to the problems dark matter was hypothesized to explain will be found in newer, better theories instead.

@8

A lot of physicists shared that view of Dark Matter for a while, and developed theories like Modified Newtonian Dynamics that would explain observations without introducing any new "mystery stuff."

But then more observational evidence came in.

CMB variation (first mapped in the '90s) and the discrepancy in distribution of mass in the bullet cluster in visible vs. gravitationally lensed mass strongly suggest that there really is something with mass out there that doesn't interact electromagnetically with currently known forms of matter, and is diffuse (i.e. lots of small particles, or a superfluid-like thing, or something, but not big lumps of stuff like planets or "dark stars" or the like).

There are still physicists working on Modified GR in various forms, but these days they have to add enough extra stuff onto their theories that the models are a) incomplete, and b) a lot more complicated than just proposing real extra mass floating around in space.

Dark Energy, though, is an entirely different story-- it's much less constrained by observation to date, and there are some fun things suggesting that it could very easily be a problem with our theories rather than a some new force imparting a real negative pressure that's prying everything in the universe apart (see the wonderfully named "vacuum catastrophe," for example).

I was reading this article the other day, and I wondered and asked myself who on earth could possibly write such a biased article about physics without even doing some research on the subject he/she is writing about? If the author do some research about the scientific contributions of modern physics—which he clearly did not—he will definitely see that:

First, theoretical particle physics just makes a very, very, very small portion of the physics, in general! Physics, as the science that describes the ‘whole natural phenomena’ in the universe, is divided into many subdivisions, including condensed matter physics, astrophysics, atomic-molecular-optical physics, applied physics, plasma physics, biophysics, medical physics, engineering physics, etc.

Second, most experiments and research in many subdivisions of physics, including condensed matter physics (one of the largest branches of physics that is responsible for revolutionizing and advancing the whole semiconductor industry, computers, and all electronic devices we use today, including the laptop the author has used to justify his argument against physics! and the foundation of biology he mentioned in his article) are not even publicized because they are so specialized, and they might not be perceived as much interesting as the wonders of black holes for the general audience (after all, black holes seem more interesting than the superconducting effects in metals, just as learning about dinosaurs is more delightful than studying the molecular structure of a biological compound, although we know both are important as well).

Third, Physics is not a theoretical science at all; in fact, it is purely experimental since our first interaction with the universe is through performing experiments, observing the natural phenomena, and making models of things directly, and theories are just for us to better understand, predict, analyze, connect, and keep track of things in a more efficient way!

Finally, since many discoveries and inventions in biology, chemistry, engineering, medicine, other natural scientific disciplines, and even mathematics ‘depend’ on the physical research, physics was not, is not, and will not be dead! Physics, this oldest natural science we have been using to investigate the universe and our surrounding environments for centuries, shall remain alive and will expand itself into the mankind’s future civilization by providing technological solutions and revealing astonishing discoveries that will help us to better understand our place in the universe.

long live Physics!