3 ms·
This is pure speculation on my part so take it for a grain of salt. But I generally don't find that fields just stop advancing or go cold. It seems to me that u
by DubiousPusher 7y ago
This is pure speculation on my part so take it for a grain of salt. But I generally don't find that fields just stop advancing or go cold. It seems to me that usually what is happening is there is a lot of work going on at a level that does not make a lot of sense to report to a lay audience or at leas the media which covers the subject does not think a lay audience could understand or would be interested in it.
Co Sider biology. What is the last major biology idea that made a huge public splsh? DNA? The human genome sequence? But are biologists stuck the world round? Of course not there have been hundreds if not thousands of notable biology findings in the past 20 years.
Theoretical physics probably simply appears stuck to us because as lay people we focus on a couple of large scale questions that for now are probably out of reach. But we don't consider the hundreds of theoretical physics refinements and observations that need to go into the development of the LHC or LIGO or James Webb etc.
Anyway, that's just like my opinion man.
- meowface 7y agoTrue, there probably have been some important refinements, but part of the issue is that a lot of that work has been done along very long, sometimes many-decades long, paths that so far have had zero experimental validation. Basically, people have been building giant ladders and constantly improving them, but we don't know if any of the ladders were put up against the right wall. We have no idea if these theories actually correspond to reality or not. For example, string theory and supersymmetry. The LHC was created partly with the goal and expectation of detecting particles that would validate supersymmetry, but so far it hasn't, and many are beginning to believe the theory may be flawed or wrong. In some sense that is a bit of a theoretical advancement, but so far, supersymmetry theorists don't appear to have a popular alternative they're considering instead. If they fail to find evidence for it in the next 10 or so years, it's probably just a total dead end. And string theory has been at it for even longer.
- avaldeso 7y ago> Co Sider biology. What is the last major biology idea that made a huge public splsh? DNA? The human genome sequence? But are biologists stuck the world round? Of course not there have been hundreds if not thousands of notable biology findings in the past 20 years. Human genome editing using CRISPR-Cas9 a few years ago was pretty big tbh. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4417674 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4417674