[cm127]

I'm starting to become skeptical of our understanding of quantum mechanics because we completely discredited a common theory with only one experiment over a hundred years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper...

We never recreated the experiment again until Ernest Wilbur Silvertooth did about one-hundred years later in the 1980s. He found a possible connection to the Ether, but by this point every scientist in the world committed to thinking the opposite; they didn't care for his findings.

People say GR works, but they keep running into weird situations where they have to keep fudging their mathematical models -- none of the equations work together, i.e. no unified field theory, -- and everyone is too afraid to suggest we've been approaching it all wrong.

God, I love how political science has become: funding, faith, pride... The world didn't care for Galileo's theories, either: it turned their whole world upside-down.

[timmaxw]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_special_relativity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity

[cm127]

Is that where they explain particle-wave duality, or is that where they pretend it's not an issue?

[gipp]

If you regard particle-wave duality as an "issue" that needs to be "solved," (other than perhaps "duality" being a poor choice of term) you're really approaching this from a strange and incorrect perspective.

[patall]

The wikipedia article you link tells the exact opposite story, with more than 30 (did not count) experiments that followed until 2009.

[acqq]

The information present in your writing doesn't show the basic understanding of the topic, as soon as you claim that Michelson-Morley wasn't repeated many times.

Ever tried to grasp how the detection of the gravitational waves already worked?

[andylei]

the article you linked says the experiment has been "repeated many times with increasing sensitivity" in the early 1900s

[cm127]

The point is so much of our conclusions are based off of these null hypothesis. It's like saying the iPhone will never succeed because so many other "smart" devices at the time were terrible.

[jcranmer]

> The point is so much of our conclusions are based off of these null hypothesis.

Quantum mechanics, special relativity, and general relativity (I'm not sure which ones you're objecting to here) all have strong predictive power. The fact that we can build extensions of these theories and see experimental validation of those theories is itself support for the underlying principles. With quantum mechanics, you can explain atomic spectra, crystal field splitting, aromaticity and antiaromaticity, vagaries of chemical bonding--and that's only in the domain of chemistry. Special relativity can also explain, say, why there is a stable Pb²⁺ ion.

[cm127]

That's like saying computers and laptops are so great -- we'll never need smart phones. Sure, classical devices / models are great and proven true, -- but that's still a limited view based on previous biases.

I know that's a terrible analogy, but proving GR kinda works doesn't really disprove the Ether, either.

[jcranmer]

The value of scientific theories is their ability to make accurate predictions. Their reflection of the underlying physics and mechanics of the universe is a secondary concern--and indeed, most likely all of our theories are wrong by that metric. But if we can't tell that our theories are wrong by experiment, then the fact that they are wrong is only of philosophical importance.

Quantum mechanics is an ur-example. Fundamentally, it's a set of mathematical equations only some of which have clear physical interpretations. What does the wavefunction actually represent, for example? To make matters worse, it also relies on mathematics that are well outside the comfort zone of most lay people--complex probabilities and renormalizable groups, for example (the latter caused consternation even within the physics community before the underlying mathematical basis was more rigorously developed). That leads popular description to rely on analogy that is at times more obfuscatory than helpful. But the underlying mathematics is quite well-understood, and we've built successful validations across chemistry, physics, and biology. As Feynman said, it's the most well-validated theory in history.

If you want to get a new scientific theory established, you need to do one of two things. The more common scenario is that you explain something that wasn't explainable beforehand. This is basically what quantum mechanics did. The less common scenario is that you find a much simpler but equally powerful explanation--this is what special relativity was.

The point of the Michelson-Morely experiment was to find the Earth's motion relative to the inherent reference frame of the universe (the ether). With the discovery of Lorentz invariance, Einstein's relativity theory basically said "it doesn't matter, any reference frame will do." Given also the many wavelength-dependent properties of light meant that you couldn't reuse the wave equations to explain electrodynamics, there was no reason to keep the ether around. Sure, you can build theories on the ether, but you're not getting anything simpler or more accurate by doing so, so what's the point?

[cm127]

What's the point? It's about understanding the universe! If the ether exists then it could mean an open-system exists in the universe, i.e. the big bang is still happening, -- or the laws of thermodynamics, i.e. entropy, are not set in stone because structure can be created with an open-system, -- or even general laws of physics: free energy because an open-system exists.

The implications are phenomenal, -- we could be in the presence of something HUGE, -- but people seem to rather "know for a fact" that we live in an empty vacuum devoid of anything but relics of a big bang.

[openasocket]

We have evidence showing General Relativity is true, we have the Michelson–Morley experiment showing that there is no "aether wind" predicted by the Ether theory. Do you have any experiments supporting the Ether?