In this kind of physics, everybody is always looking ... to the smart people and what is everybody else working on. - Peter Woit

How did particle physics get itself into its current state where some of its most prominent practioners question whether their colleagues have given up on science?

The standard model is just too good. It's too hard to find an experimental result that disagrees with it, and too hard to come up with theoretical advances that will address some of the things it leaves unexplained.

It has always seemed to me that the hard thing to understand is not quantum mechanics, but where classical mechanics comes from (in the sense of how it emerges from a “measurement”).