6 ms·

Well if we ever experience another big bang, electroweak will help us understand why we are being vaporized.

• drran 7y ago
  Big Shrink. Universe expands into itself, which is equivalent to our shrinking.
• exmadscientist 7y ago
  Your 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 ago
    We 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 ago
      In 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 ago
        I dare you to calculate the double slit experiment on the assumption light is a particle.
        • Koshkin 7y ago
          But electrons, being particles, exhibit the same behavior.
          • aeternum 7y ago
            This 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.
            • Koshkin 7y ago
              > useful Indeed - non-relativistic quantum mechanics does explain the double-slit experiment and does not use the notion of a field.
        • maxnoe 7y ago
          The assumption is wrong, plain and simple. Nothing behaves like the classical concept of particle or wave. There are edge cases where this is the case, and this is the reason the classical theories were and are still successful. And then there are cases where this breaks down catastrophically, like the double slit experiment. Which are the very reason we had to look for new theories. In this case, it is Quantumelectrodynamics, which perfectly explains the double slit and everything else concerning electromagnetic force. It is the most precise theory in any scientific field, with theoretical predictions matching measurements to 13 significant digits. Feynman, Schwinger and Tomanago got the Nobel in 1965 for this.
      • ssivark 7y ago
        Well, isn’t the UV catastrophe very similar in spirit to the renormalizability of quantum gravity? :-) They both correspond to UV behavior of the only massless degrees of freedom possible. Due to electromagnetism being a free theory, we don’t need to worry about loops, and the particle nature provides the UV cutoff for on-shell/external photons. Gravity, being nonlinear, has loops with off-shell graduations which need to be handled consistently. Also, I would put IR problems on similar footing as UV (soft photon theorems, transformations at infinity, etc.) If we reason strictly by analogy (with the UV catastrophe being considered relevant to the observable word), quantum gravity has such a gaping loophole that it cannot explain how we can have simple empty space — the kind we see all over the place! Otherwise largely agree with your previous point about the lack of easily measurable effects pointing to the low likelihood of technological consequences. It’s an under-appreciated intuition! Oh, btw (as a fellow physicist) what did you work on? Inspire link? :-)
    • CamperBob2 7y ago
      A better example might be superconductivity. The math behind the double slit experiment is pretty well understood, seemingly to the point where it can model or predict any desired experimental outcome. We get quantum physics. We don't like it, but we get it. There is still some debate about how superconductivity really works, though, and how it's connected with other branches of the physical sciences. When/if we come to understand everything there is to understand about superconductivity, I'd venture to say "better gadgets" will be the least of the benefits.