4 ms·

I almost had the same reaction, but technically they didn't say anything about cosmology not making progress. It's entirely reasonable to assume a scientificall

I almost had the same reaction, but technically they didn't say anything about cosmology not making progress. It's entirely reasonable to assume a scientifically minded person describing a field as "piling up question marks" means they think it's making a LOT of progress. Imagine a field that answers questions more often than it finds new ones; that'd be a pretty stagnant field to be in.

sho_hn 4y ago
This is how I understood OP, too. Last time we had a "crisis in physics", it was the early transition from classical physics to quantum mechanics, when some good new ideas had been coinceived of, but trying to reconcile them with the classical way of thinking and with experimental evidence required increasingly convoluted hacks in the models to make it all work - until folks like Heisenberg, Born, Jordan and Dirac found more holistic and clean ways to approach the problem space. The number of question marks piling up in cosmology does feel similar. It will help to shape new theories that reconcile all this experimental evidence.
- dylan604 4y ago
  Sometimes the questions keep piling up until someone happens up on just the right question. That question itself wouldn't have been thought of except for the thinking of all of the previous unanswered questions. Then the big Eureka!! moment and someone gets a Nobel prize 20 years later.
hutzlibu 4y ago
"Imagine a field that answers questions more often than it finds new ones; that'd be a pretty stagnant field to be in." Funnily enough, that's what the science community of the ending 19. century thought about physics, before they started to look deeper. Max Planck was advised against a career in physics, because: "In this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes." He rather found some more holes.

4 ms·

I almost had the same reaction, but technically they didn't say anything about cosmology not making progress. It's entirely reasonable to assume a scientificall

by teawrecks 4y ago

sho_hn 4y ago
This is how I understood OP, too. Last time we had a "crisis in physics", it was the early transition from classical physics to quantum mechanics, when some good new ideas had been coinceived of, but trying to reconcile them with the classical way of thinking and with experimental evidence required increasingly convoluted hacks in the models to make it all work - until folks like Heisenberg, Born, Jordan and Dirac found more holistic and clean ways to approach the problem space. The number of question marks piling up in cosmology does feel similar. It will help to shape new theories that reconcile all this experimental evidence.
- dylan604 4y ago
  Sometimes the questions keep piling up until someone happens up on just the right question. That question itself wouldn't have been thought of except for the thinking of all of the previous unanswered questions. Then the big Eureka!! moment and someone gets a Nobel prize 20 years later.
hutzlibu 4y ago
"Imagine a field that answers questions more often than it finds new ones; that'd be a pretty stagnant field to be in." Funnily enough, that's what the science community of the ending 19. century thought about physics, before they started to look deeper. Max Planck was advised against a career in physics, because: "In this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes." He rather found some more holes.