X-Message-Number: 19160 From: "Brett Bellmore" <> Subject: Re: Why no fundamental advances in physics? Date: Mon, 27 May 2002 14:37:55 -0400 David: "It could be argued that the advance of physics is accelerating, as it has thru its entire period of development. The question of what is a *fundamental* advance, however, depends upon your point of view." True. In my opinion, there are two types of genuine advances in physical theory. The first is when the theories more accurately predict experimental results. Seen much of that lately? The second is when a theory, without any loss of predictive power, becomes substantially *simpler*. I haven't seen much of that, either, recently. "The theoretical ability to create universes "in the lab" strikes me as a pretty fundamental advance, or could certainly lead to one." Yeah, that would be, if it could be experimentally verified. Big if, at this moment. Me: "Based on this, physics should pick up again when we can get at those bits of the universe we can't currently observe." David: "This is fundamentally a political question. To investigate the unification of gravity with the other fundamental forces requires an increase in energy in experiments of about 20 orders of magnitude. This means big bucks for *big* machines. However government funding for physics, and basic research in general, is dropping." I think you're rather over-impressed with the capabilities of our government, and our engineers, if you think that only political will stands between us and particle accelerators which can achieve 20 orders of magnitude higher energies. "Political leadership today seems to have about a two year vision, the time to the next election. You can't do physics today on this kind of time line. This is also why the Soviet Union beat the vastly more technically advanced USA into space. Probably it will be the Chinese next time, they aim to be on the Moon permanently by 2010." Beat us into space, and subsequently collapsed, achieving less in the end. I expect that the Chinese, too, will either economically collapse, or give up the totalitarian capacity to devote disproportionate amounts of resources in to politically favored goals, at the cost of basic support systems. Me: We've got monkey brains David: "This notion was firmly rejected at a recent physics lecture at the Univ. of Copenhagen, "A theory of everything." New graduate students in physics are not having any more problems understanding the latest theories than their predecessors did." Ah, but the ability to understand new theories, (On the part of people who are already the cream of the crop, yet.) and the ability to originate them, are quite different matters. I had no problem understanding calculus, but would I ever have invented it, myself? If there is a biological limit to current human intelligence, barring technological intervention, it seems clear that we must bump up against it eventually. I think we're starting to. Brett Bellmore Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=19160