4 ms·
Just 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 ad
by exmadscientist 7y ago
Just 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.
- tus88 7y agoWe can't even explain the double slit experiment. We are Neanderthals. And you say there is nothing coming that could affect our day to day life...they might have said that in 1901. Who knows what might unfold...
- exmadscientist 7y agoIn 1901 there were major "catastrophies" all around, the ultraviolet catastrophe being one of the best examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_catastrophe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_catastrophe By 2019 we have exquisite verification that we do, in fact, understand things at "everyday" energy scales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_tests_of_QED https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_tests_of_QED I do not claim there is no new physics to be found.(In fact, the process of renormalization used in modern field theories explicitly parameterizes our ignorance of very high energy scales.) I merely claim there is no new physics to be found that can impact anything already constrained by a precision measurement, and that such precision measurements cover the entire spectrum of everyday phenomena. (And just because you don't like some of the metaphysical interpretations of the double-slit experiment doesn't mean we don't know how to calculate it... very, very accurately. That, to me, suggests some level of understanding surpassing a Neanderthal!)
- tus88 7y agoI dare you to calculate the double slit experiment on the assumption light is a particle.
- Koshkin 7y agoBut electrons, being particles, exhibit the same behavior.
- aeternum 7y agoThis is looking at the problem in the wrong way. Quantized fields are the fundamental building blocks of our reality. Everything else builds from that. The entire concept of a particle is a useful but flawed model, similar to newtonian gravity.