(The following is the perspective of an outsider enthusiast, please disregard or correct me where needed)
Physics has plateaued somewhat, as well. Part of it is just the scale. It’s difficult to learn things about particles that are smaller than the equipment you’re using to measure things. It’s also hard to justify the funding, too. “Hey, give us blempty hundred thousand dollars to disprove a hypothesis.” Not quite as sexy or thrilling as the venture capitalists’ pie in the sky.
…but… I also wonder if maybe… maybe we’ve gotten into a bit of a rut with established physics. Like for example, I don’t understand wave-particle duality. The bit I specifically don’t understand is the particle. Waves make sense, we can see interference patterns, light ever-so-slightly bends round corners, different wavelengths translate to different amounts of energy. But. The fuck is a particle. It really seams like it’s just a neat trick to make the sums easier.
It really seams like it’s just a neat trick to make the sums easier.
Part of what’s weird about fundamental physics is that it is, in a sense, all just tricks to make the math easier. When you get below the level of non-relativistic QM (and even, arguably, at that level), the distinction between the mathematics of the theory and the theory itself starts to collapse. Some of this is probably just due to the fact that events and patterns at that scale are just so unfamiliar to us and our everyday experience: we can make intuitive sense of things like forces, acceleration, mass, and other stuff that’s in the ontology of classical mechanics because we live in that world. Fields, Lie groups, fiber bundles, and other essential bits of the formalism at the QFT level are much harder for us to understand, because they can only roughly be mapped onto things that are familiar from our lived experience. This is part of why things like QFT, QED, and other candidate “fundamental” theories just seem like bags of mathematical tricks: in a very literal sense, those theories are telling us that the world just is a set of formal relationships and interdependent patterns. When you ask something like “well what is the theory really telling us, beyond the math?” for classical mechanics, I can give you a story–a narrative–about the world that maps the mathematics onto familiar concepts. When you ask the same question about QFT, there’s no easily accessible metaphor or story: it’s structure all the way down. Statements like “light sometimes behaves like a particle” means nothing more or less than “it’s useful to think of light as being quantized in some contexts, because the mathematics seems to work that way.”
I feel like unless we figure out an extremely clever trick, we need just gigantic particle accelerators or quantum computers orders of magnitude better than we can currently conceive of to make substantial steps forward in physics anymore. Like, we’re not even talking “Well, the USSR/China could do it because they weren’t/aren’t as beholden to the profit motive”, we’re talking particle accelerators the size of fucking countries, and helium liquid cooling on large scales to maintain quantum coherence unless we figure out more room-temperature shit.
String theory is a neat idea and I do genuinely find it interesting and have read books on it, but at the end of the day it’s just a giant “so what” to me. Not “what’s the point of making physics advancements” obviously, but “what’s the point of creating these massive, complicated theories if we need a particle accelerator the size of the solar system to prove them right or wrong”.
(The following is the perspective of an outsider enthusiast, please disregard or correct me where needed)
Physics has plateaued somewhat, as well. Part of it is just the scale. It’s difficult to learn things about particles that are smaller than the equipment you’re using to measure things. It’s also hard to justify the funding, too. “Hey, give us blempty hundred thousand dollars to disprove a hypothesis.” Not quite as sexy or thrilling as the venture capitalists’ pie in the sky.
…but… I also wonder if maybe… maybe we’ve gotten into a bit of a rut with established physics. Like for example, I don’t understand wave-particle duality. The bit I specifically don’t understand is the particle. Waves make sense, we can see interference patterns, light ever-so-slightly bends round corners, different wavelengths translate to different amounts of energy. But. The fuck is a particle. It really seams like it’s just a neat trick to make the sums easier.
Part of what’s weird about fundamental physics is that it is, in a sense, all just tricks to make the math easier. When you get below the level of non-relativistic QM (and even, arguably, at that level), the distinction between the mathematics of the theory and the theory itself starts to collapse. Some of this is probably just due to the fact that events and patterns at that scale are just so unfamiliar to us and our everyday experience: we can make intuitive sense of things like forces, acceleration, mass, and other stuff that’s in the ontology of classical mechanics because we live in that world. Fields, Lie groups, fiber bundles, and other essential bits of the formalism at the QFT level are much harder for us to understand, because they can only roughly be mapped onto things that are familiar from our lived experience. This is part of why things like QFT, QED, and other candidate “fundamental” theories just seem like bags of mathematical tricks: in a very literal sense, those theories are telling us that the world just is a set of formal relationships and interdependent patterns. When you ask something like “well what is the theory really telling us, beyond the math?” for classical mechanics, I can give you a story–a narrative–about the world that maps the mathematics onto familiar concepts. When you ask the same question about QFT, there’s no easily accessible metaphor or story: it’s structure all the way down. Statements like “light sometimes behaves like a particle” means nothing more or less than “it’s useful to think of light as being quantized in some contexts, because the mathematics seems to work that way.”
I feel like unless we figure out an extremely clever trick, we need just gigantic particle accelerators or quantum computers orders of magnitude better than we can currently conceive of to make substantial steps forward in physics anymore. Like, we’re not even talking “Well, the USSR/China could do it because they weren’t/aren’t as beholden to the profit motive”, we’re talking particle accelerators the size of fucking countries, and helium liquid cooling on large scales to maintain quantum coherence unless we figure out more room-temperature shit.
String theory is a neat idea and I do genuinely find it interesting and have read books on it, but at the end of the day it’s just a giant “so what” to me. Not “what’s the point of making physics advancements” obviously, but “what’s the point of creating these massive, complicated theories if we need a particle accelerator the size of the solar system to prove them right or wrong”.
particle accelerators the size of countries would be trivial under international communism tho