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The difference between the problems physicists were tackling at the turn of the 20th century and the ones we're trying to tackle today is that we don't have the

The difference between the problems physicists were tackling at the turn of the 20th century and the ones we're trying to tackle today is that we don't have the technology or the resources required to build the kind of experiments that would allow us to study these phenomena at a meaningful scale and test out our hypotheses. E.g. https://gizmodo.com/we-could-solve-the-mysteries-of-time-and-space-if-we-ha-1829207595 https://gizmodo.com/we-could-solve-the-mysteries-of-time-and... "We Could Solve the Mysteries of Time and Space—If We Had a Particle Accelerator the Size of the Solar System" That's the problem. Our collective civilization will need to move a few levels forward before we can afford to tackle these problems.

cosmodisk 7y ago
But the same was 100,200,300 and so years ago. Thete were always some sort of limitations, mostly technological. I'm not saying that we'll build solar system size colliders any time soon, however 50-100 more years and we should be much much more sophisticated in terms of what we can do in space and back on the earth.
- Koshkin 7y ago
  Linear extrapolation is not always adequate. I tend to agree with GP that we may be close to a saturation point.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    We're possibly within a few orders of magnitude of the saturation point, wielding the resources of a single planet. Which leaves the obvious path forward...
ivalm 7y ago
This is not clear to me at all. I don't think "bigger particle accelerators" is what we need, and lots of the questions I posted are not necessarily solvable by particle accelerators. We do need new experiments, but probably in a sense of "new ways to observe the universe" rather than "old ways to observe the universe scaled bigger."