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Where do discoveries about quantum mechanics come from? My understanding is that we've had the laws written down pretty much in their entirety for a while now.

• cheese_van 4y ago
  The discoveries come from inferring,and calculating, from those laws, what is possible. What do those laws really mean? If the law is true, then it follows that this other thing must be also be true because the law expressly says it is true (or the law allows it).
• jfengel 4y ago
  In this case, it's mostly about headline writers coming up with new ways to be misleading. Buried a few paragraphs in, it says "The energy wasn’t free; it had to be unlocked using knowledge purchased with energy in a far-off location." In other words, the opposite of the headline. That doesn't mean it isn't nifty. It is, however, just what you said: "people doing calculations that hadn't been done before". People shove the equations around until they get a result that strikes their fancy, and then (ideally) goes off to perform an experiment that confirms it. New discoveries are made every day, just by converting the equations into a form you haven't seen before. Most are boring. Some are interesting, and those make journal articles. Some are then exaggerated to make them seem more interesting than they really are, because what everybody wants is a once-in-a-century revolution to occur every week.