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Ah thanks, a comment that makes sense to me (and doesn't require too much insight into the esoteric particle physics terms like 'Naturalness' :-P ). Agree, a b

Ah thanks, a comment that makes sense to me (and doesn't require too much insight into the esoteric particle physics terms like 'Naturalness' :-P ). Agree, a break-through like the harnessing of nuclear energy was doesn't seem to be on the horizon (but who knows what we don't know?). And it might affect the perceived utility of physics by the military. But i'm wondering if there isn't a more menacing threat looming for these advanced sciences. We could actually be hitting a hard wall in our understanding of nature. We are using instruments created for us in our dimension to probe worlds that might be much too small (or large) for us to make any serious sense of, at least for the next millennium (maybe). Maybe it's time we accept that we can't understand everything, only a little more at the time, maybe (probably) in infinity. Meanwhile, there are a vast number of insights pertinent to the human scale waiting to be found.

sampo 9y ago
At the end of the 19th century [...] it was generally accepted that all the important laws of physics had been discovered and that, henceforth, research would be concerned with clearing up minor problems and particularly with improvements of method and measurement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_physics
Tuna-Fish 9y ago
> esoteric particle physics terms like 'Naturalness' It just means "numbers involved in physics are short and simple". From wikipedia: > In physics, naturalness is the property that the dimensionless ratios between free parameters or physical constants appearing in a physical theory should take values "of order 1" and that free parameters are not fine-tuned. That is, a natural theory would have parameter ratios with values like 2.34 rather than 234000 or 0.000234. And the reason physicists tend to expect their theories to be natural is that in the history of physics uncovering new things, most things have been natural, to the point where significant amounts of knowledge has been derived based on the expectation of naturalness -- that is, when something could be natural or not, and we couldn't properly test it yet, we just assumed it was natural and went on to research other things. And then, possibly decades later, when it's finally possible to test the theory, the test just confirms that yes, it was natural.

sampo 9y ago

At the end of the 19th century [...] it was generally accepted that all the important laws of physics had been discovered and that, henceforth, research would be concerned with clearing up minor problems and particularly with improvements of method and measurement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_physics

Tuna-Fish 9y ago

> esoteric particle physics terms like 'Naturalness' It just means "numbers involved in physics are short and simple". From wikipedia: > In physics, naturalness is the property that the dimensionless ratios between free parameters or physical constants appearing in a physical theory should take values "of order 1" and that free parameters are not fine-tuned. That is, a natural theory would have parameter ratios with values like 2.34 rather than 234000 or 0.000234. And the reason physicists tend to expect their theories to be natural is that in the history of physics uncovering new things, most things have been natural, to the point where significant amounts of knowledge has been derived based on the expectation of naturalness -- that is, when something could be natural or not, and we couldn't properly test it yet, we just assumed it was natural and went on to research other things. And then, possibly decades later, when it's finally possible to test the theory, the test just confirms that yes, it was natural.