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I think the mistake is to say physics has hit rock bottom: more correctly i'd say it has hit a brick wall, an impasse. The future of physics, the really wild theories that will be the bedrock of science say 200 years from now, are IMHO hiding in some of what most people would consider the bizarre stuff.

An example is Roger Penrose's ideas, or Hameroff of the U of Arizona's theories on who the brain works... very elegant theory that ties in a lot of really esoteric stuff!

I've thought about these things alot. As a result, I'm never surprised when we get another "New particle discovered in Tokyo" thread.

As long as they look for new particles, they will find new particles. Of course some of them may turn out to be the same old particles that seem to appear different because we're looking at them in a new way.

For most of my life, I held great hopes that physics could really tell us about the nature of reality. Those hopes have decreased very greatly.

Remember Newtonian mechanics? The clockwork universe ideas? The concept that if we knew all the particles positions and velocities, we could deduce what had happened in the past and predict what will happen.

While Newtons theories have been somewhat supplanted by Einstein et al, there is still a kind of "truth" to them as what science is really all about is cause and effect.

Imagine by some miracle we woke up tomorrow with reems and reems of paper in front of us, each particles position and velocity printed on it. The whole universe.

So we start looking at it.. and looking... and looking. Doesn't make much sense.

We look for evidence of anything we know about. A sunset. A tear. A planet or waterfall.

Nothing. Nada. No way can we relate any of the info on the pages to what we experience in normal life.

Because what the universe is about is PATTERNS not BUILDING BLOCKS.

Here's another example. We've all heard the "butterfly" theory that says that a butterfly somewhere either decides to take of or not, and his decision effects the weather somewhere distant.

I do no dispute this theory AS A THEORY.

But if it rains some afternoon, and two raindrops hit me in the head, then where is the butterfly? Is there one? I defy anyone to give me any evidence whatever that a butterfly had anything to do with it. And when you inspect things closely, you start to wonder whether the butterfly effect may in fact BE A MYTH.

Why?

Because any effect it might have is probably lost in the thermal and quantum "noise".

Physics needs a much bigger picture of the universe.