Don’t get me wrong. As a retired physics teacher, I enjoy these kinds of articles. But I miss the days when physicists mainly investigated practical things, like voltage differences and bond strengths.
Now it seems like they’re all obsessed with science fiction stuff, like parallel universes and string theory. The math might work, but there is no hard experimental evidence. And in the case of string theory, it’s thought that there can never be any hard experimental evidence.
Maybe there’s nothin practical left to investigate.
Thank you for touching on something that I've been wondering about for a while. I've never studied physics (or other hard sciences) but I've been forming the impression for a while that much of what gets publicized as "scientifically possible" is merely "not mathematically impossible" and that the two concepts, which to me seem far apart, get blurred, and that it's not by accident.
“Now it seems like they’re all obsessed with science fiction stuff, like parallel universes and string theory.”
Well, that’s progress. Remember, before Newton and Galileo and Copernicus and the intrepid mariner explorers the world was...different.
Voltage differences are the source of all energy and bond strengths are the source of all material matter. There are very few 'scientists' left among the human population.
As an aside, I'd love to find a book on the history of Bell Labs. As the story was told to me, Bell Telephone had a deal with the government that they wouldn't be broken up as a trust but they had to invest a significant portion of their profits into research and development. That translated into massive budgets for Bell Labs and an attitude of 'do whatever you want, we have to spend all this dough'. Yes they did things like look into how to make switches work better but a lot of fundamental basic research.
A lot of people know they came up with the transistor (and what has shaped society more than that?) But they did a lot of other things too. For example they were the first to demonstrate the wave nature of electrons, they invented the concept of radio astronomy, the foundations of digital signal sampling / encoding / processing, physics of materials, so much more. Overall to date NINE Nobel prizes in Physics or Chemistry came from this corporate lab. They produced a unique combination of totally practical yet revolutionary engineering innovations and leading edge physics and chemistry discoveries.
But eventually Bell telephone did get broken up and the lab, which still exists, isn't quite as 'anything is up for study, money is no object' is used to be. But they literally changed the world over and over and over.
I read somewhere that Einstein was explaining one of the more far out points of his theory of relativity to another scientist. Who was shocked at what he was hearing and asked something like “if that’s true how would we know anything is real?”. Einstein replied you’d know what’s real if I got up and hit you in the face. I always loved that and compared it to the great Mike Tyson quote “ Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”. So it’s nice to know that Einstein and Mike Tyson think alike.
That’s the point.
It’s easy to get grants when you don’t have to actually preform or provide evidence.
Another casualty of Liberalism.
in the case of string theory, it’s thought that there can never be any hard experimental evidence.
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This makes my brane hurt.
I’m sure you recall what Feynman had to say about quantum mechanics. Until we really understand QM at least to a level comprehensible by the great Richard Feynman, there is plenty to investigate.
The author's CV suggests a teacher who could not cut it on the Engineering side of Physics: an 'associate professor' from Australian Catholic University, which has never produced a Nobel or even a Laurentz or Fields candidate.
My biggest problem with 'string theory' is that it pretty much can't be falsified.
"It's Not Even Wrong!" - can't remember who said that.
There is a lot of practical stuf to investigate even if it means we are validating excepted facts in physics. the reason why theoretical physics is popular is that it allows for statements that can’t be understood or proven true or false unless you are in the field and are in the top 1 percent in that field. something like voltage differences can be understood by just reading up on the subject. Stuff like this article might be interesting but as a layman I will never understand in a way that is useful in how I live life and interact with anything. This might as will be Magic.
You can’t get grant money for stuff we already know is correct.