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There’s a ton of things we have no explanation for — superconductors, how protons collide, a ton of things about material science, we’re still not great at non-

There’s a ton of things we have no explanation for — superconductors, how protons collide, a ton of things about material science, we’re still not great at non-local effects, etc. That’s setting aside the doozy of “gravity and particle physics say wildly incompatible things, and we’re not sure how to fix that”. And when I say “how protons collide”, I mean numbers from existing accelerators don’t match predictions and they’re having to change models — and all the fixes they can come up with (eg, elaborate swarms of virtual quarks) still don’t fix the collision numbers. There’s still a pretty poor understanding of 4D topology, and the effects and possible knotting states play in non-local interactions. Microsoft for instance theorizes that you can have 4D anyons, but no one is sure how to build them. And it comes into play in more mundane ways when talking about plasma physics or fluid dynamics, since the same mathematics governs stability there. You seem to be wildly overstating the success of science.

acqq 8y ago
And then I'd claim you wildly understating the success, of course. Superconductivity is not an effect that involves any "new physics" in the sense of the necessity of changing the underlying theories: it's the typical "emergent" property, and we know that modeling many of the "emergent" properties is far away from our possibilities. Ditto with the material science, or any other observations where "too many of the stuff known to us interacts at the same time." It's not "we don't know" in the sense that the basics will have to change it's "we don't know because there's too much to model at once" like we can't reliably predict the weather 2 weeks in advance, even if we understand the nature of the particles that produce the weather. Edit: to answer your response below this post: It's a [Citation needed] for you that the fundamentally "new physics" is needed instead of reaching the limits of our instruments or the modeling capability. The second you mention is not something that contradicts what we measure, it just that naively trying to combine the provably successful models that match our measurements to produce "something more" outside of their domain really doesn't work: and that of course doesn't have to work to claim that the models do work for the things that they actually model, and which independently correspond to the things we can "observe" (where "observe" includes using our best measuring devices).
- FakeComments 8y ago
  I disagree: I don’t think we know what features of the underlying model lead to the emergence of things like superconductivity, and having to account for that explicitly will demonstrate a new paradigm for analyzing the base mechanics — which is likely to lead to a new interpretation and “new physics”. I’ll also note you didn’t reply to two big ones: They can’t predict proton on proton collisions in a hyper controlled tube accurately. They can’t predict how the two most established theories, each boasting dozens of orders of magnitude of accuracy, interact.

acqq 8y ago

And then I'd claim you wildly understating the success, of course. Superconductivity is not an effect that involves any "new physics" in the sense of the necessity of changing the underlying theories: it's the typical "emergent" property, and we know that modeling many of the "emergent" properties is far away from our possibilities. Ditto with the material science, or any other observations where "too many of the stuff known to us interacts at the same time." It's not "we don't know" in the sense that the basics will have to change it's "we don't know because there's too much to model at once" like we can't reliably predict the weather 2 weeks in advance, even if we understand the nature of the particles that produce the weather. Edit: to answer your response below this post: It's a [Citation needed] for you that the fundamentally "new physics" is needed instead of reaching the limits of our instruments or the modeling capability. The second you mention is not something that contradicts what we measure, it just that naively trying to combine the provably successful models that match our measurements to produce "something more" outside of their domain really doesn't work: and that of course doesn't have to work to claim that the models do work for the things that they actually model, and which independently correspond to the things we can "observe" (where "observe" includes using our best measuring devices).

FakeComments 8y ago
I disagree: I don’t think we know what features of the underlying model lead to the emergence of things like superconductivity, and having to account for that explicitly will demonstrate a new paradigm for analyzing the base mechanics — which is likely to lead to a new interpretation and “new physics”. I’ll also note you didn’t reply to two big ones: They can’t predict proton on proton collisions in a hyper controlled tube accurately. They can’t predict how the two most established theories, each boasting dozens of orders of magnitude of accuracy, interact.