9 ms·
Well we will soon be approaching a CENTURY without any significant advances in physics or our understanding of the universe...no wonder they are desperate.
by tus88 7y ago
Well we will soon be approaching a CENTURY without any significant advances in physics or our understanding of the universe...no wonder they are desperate.
- kurthr 7y agoI'd say that fuse/splitting the atom counts as a significant advancement in physics whether weapons or power generation. Next, I'd say solid state transistor physics (not to mention Lasers, LEDs, OLEDs) also count as significant advances. I guess we're APPROACHING a century, but we're no where near it yet... maybe another 30 years? If we're talking about understanding the universe, strong/weak force (also Neutrinos have mass), dark matter/energy (and Cosmic Microwave Background), gravitational waves (and black holes) all seem pretty significant and happened after 1920. What has happened is that the advances have gotten harder to explain and more ubiquitous in their effects. So maybe it feels like there's not advancement, because we're soaking in Moore's law and post WW2 economic growth?
- tus88 7y agoYour talking about applications not theory. And the new theories you mention (dark energy/matter) are right at the heart of the current crisis in physics.
- kurthr 7y agoNone of those issues were even known of 100 years ago. We barely had the photo-electric effect much less the Copenhagen interpretation (1925) and they weren't fully accepted. Even so theory isn't much (see Strings) without application and experiment. Nobel prizes are given for things that have consequences rather than just seem interesting.
- tus88 7y agoGeneral relativity - 1915 Schrodinger equation - 1925 Theory is good when it explains observations, no application necessary. The latter is mostly engineering challenge, how do we refine uranium for example.
- kurthr 7y agoObservations sensitive enough to really confirm general rel weren’t possible until the 50s although the precession test in ‘19 was useful.
- exmadscientist 7y agoJust off the top of my head, at the very least, electroweak unification (1970s to 80s depending on where exactly you describe it as "understood") was a major advance in our understanding. Now if you had said "half century" instead of "century", I would be more inclined to agree with you. Neutrino oscillations are a more recent phenomenon, but they fit relatively cleanly into the Standard Model and have little effect on the fundamentals. You say that "dark matter/energy" are problematic, but I would argue that no serious physicist thinks they are anything like "confirmed". (The DAMA/LIBRA collaboration aside, since no one else believes them.) They are just the best available ideas to explain things; the hope for a better explanation or experimental evidence for a particular direction remains strong. Back when I worked in this area, I was fond of pointing out that there hadn't been much progress in fundamental theory since the '70s or so, then asking when LSD was banned....
- tus88 7y agoWell if we ever experience another big bang, electroweak will help us understand why we are being vaporized.
- drran 7y agoBig Shrink. Universe expands into itself, which is equivalent to our shrinking.
- exmadscientist 7y agoYour dismissive attitude implies that you think there are fundamental discoveries waiting to happen that will affect our lives in the same way as the great discoveries of classical and modern physics. There are not. At energy scales up through electroweak unification and the Higgs mechanism (~10^2 GeV), the known forces of nature are basically completely understood at the fundamental level. There are many applications yet to be invented -- basically, solving the equations is really hard for anything more complicated than a hydrogen atom -- but the fundamental theory? It's done. But what about quantum gravity? Dark energy? All those other weird things? Well, the simple fact that we do not have experimental evidence to guide the development of these theories is prima facie evidence that they are not important at everyday energy scales. If we could access the requisite domains, we would have that evidence! Yes, these theories are important cosmologically or for true "fundamental" understanding, but so was electroweak unification. They will never help us build better gadgets, full stop.
- mhh__ 7y agoWhat was the last significant advance then? There's this big tube in Switzerland and France that potentially could be worth looking into
- tus88 7y agoQuantum mechanics. And lots of potential in physics, that's for sure.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoA lot of people don't seem to appreciate how fundamentally QM and GR changed physics, and how everything that has happened since has been about details, not equivalently transformative fundamentals. So it's completely true there haven't been any equivalent game-changer advances since then. GR and QM were philosophical revolutions which changed the kinds of thoughts that were possible in physics and engineering. So I have a suspicion that the next revolution will be a similar game-changer. I.e. no grand unification of this with that, no more fundamental model of particles and fields, and no gentle expansion of GR and QM; more likely a new world view that completely tips over the table of existing descriptions, and makes everyone think very differently about how reality works.
- alister 7y ago> approaching a CENTURY without any significant advances in physics If we changed that to 60 years, I'd make an even stronger statement. It seems that all the great theories and discoveries in all scientific fields happened more than 60 years ago: Evolution, Big Bang, special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, Godel's incompleteness theorem, continental drift, asteroid death of dinosaurs (K-T extinction event), fission/fusion, germ theory, etc. Certainly there has been great advances in technology (semiconductors, superconductors, quantum computing, etc.) But the great theories on which those are based happened before most of us here were even born. You'd think that with scientific knowledge supposedly doubling every 7 years that we'd have many new important discoveries and groundbreaking theories. We don't.
- claudiawerner 7y agoOther sciences have a more varied history, even recently. Economics: Despite Jevons at the turn of the 20th c., Marx's theory of value still wasn't "dead" by 1970 when Samuelson decided it was relevant enough to publish several articles on how bad he felt it was - some economists still uphold it. Computer science doesn't need explanation. Sociology and modern psychology really got going with empirical methods in the last 60 years.
- drran 7y agoGravitational waves (c≠const!), hydrodynamic analogs of quantum physics: https://imgur.com/a/7My12e7 https://imgur.com/a/7My12e7 .