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I think that in many ways, physics today is in a similar place to where it was before relativity and QM; it's almost entirely explained, which just a few naggin
by 1053r 16y ago
I think that in many ways, physics today is in a similar place to where it was before relativity and QM; it's almost entirely explained, which just a few nagging anomalies around the edges. Today we have QM and relativity, which contradict each other but are very complete, and just a couple nagging issues of matter vs. antimatter and how gravity, inertia, time, and subatomic particles interact. Back then they had a couple issues with the speed of light and a couple other minor details, and famous physicists were quoted publicly as saying that a grand theory of everything was just around the corner. And then along came Michelson and Morley and Einstein and Planck and Heisenberg and blew our understanding of the universe wide open.
Sadly, since we've explored domains with sane timescales and mass / energy levels pretty thoroughly, it's unlikely that new physics will result in anti-gravity hovercars or vacuum energy devices or starships or time machines any time soon. But it might make something we haven't thought of yet, like understanding of time dialation and the speed of light gave us GPS!
- hartror 16y agoI disagree, there aren't just a couple of nagging issues there are a myriad of issues of which this list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_ph...) just covers the most publicised ones. You ask any specialist in any field if they feel they are running out of problems to tackle and they will just laugh at you. Any discovery we make tomorrow is just going to create more questions than answers. Though I do agree with your implication that we can't guess what the technologies the study of our universe will bring about, which is the greatest reason for funding basic research (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_research).
- retube 16y agoTotally disagree. If anything, our voyage of discovery/understanding has just begun.
- wlievens 16y agoIs time dilation essential to GPS? I know the satellites' clocks have to compensate for time dilation, but that's not the same thing. Or am I too simplistic? I just figured that, if the engineers who built the GPS hadn't accounted for time dilation, we'd just see the error range on GPS expand, and would have to resynchronize the clocks every once in a while.