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'There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.' --Albert Michelson 1894
by arcanus 8y ago
'There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.'
--Albert Michelson 1894
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Voloskaya 8y agoAnd he was very wrong.
- chrisweekly 8y agoI took that as GP's point.
- sidcool 8y agoTo better my understanding, what new discoveries were made post 1984? Few I can recollect: 1. Higgs 2. Gravitational Waves 3. ???
- andyjohnson0 8y ago1894, not 1984.
- qwerty456127 8y ago> 2. Gravitational Waves You probably mean Narendra Modi Waves[1] :-) [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-46778879 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-46778879
- krastanov 8y agoA lot of stuff in cosmology about the curvature of the universe, dark energy, expansion. Some of the quarks were not observed until after. Observation with high beam neutrinos. Controllable quantum systems were barely imagined in 84, and now they are "common" and we might even be able to scale them to sizes necessary for quantum computing in the next decade.
- Iwan-Zotow 8y ago3. Neutrino mass (NP 2015) 4. Accelerated expansion of the Universe (NP 2011)
- throwawaymath 8y agoThis quote has nothing to do with the article's point. The article is not making a claim that there are no open questions remaining in particle physics.
- eitland 8y agoHe was a bit more nuanced it seems: https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_A._Michelson https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_A._Michelson
- jschwartzi 8y agoYeah, the context of the quote is that he's making the argument that more exact measurements are enabling us to measure deviations between physical theory and reality, and that these deviations are where new science lies. In other words, having already determined in broad strokes how the mechanics of the world work(conservation of mass, conservation of energy, thermodynamics, etc.) it now falls to us to make increasingly precise measurements of physical systems. Assuming that these laws always apply, we then need to figure out why our precise measurements do not match up with the predictions of our science. He's not talking about the end of science at all, and it's pretty uncharitable to think Michelson would ever say such a thing.