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by dyukqu
2918 days ago
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Hey, thank you for your time and effort for putting all the links and information on your comments. Firstly, I'm not against experimentalists and/or experiments and the money spent for them - it's not even "peanut" compared to military projects all around the world, as you stated. What I wanna say is that (to a curious outsider) it looks like there are so many experimentalists (and physicists-turned-to-pop-sci-writers) than theorists so physics suffers from the lack of beautiful power of imagination of human mind. True, I'm not a perfectly-informed one about all the things going on in the filed, of course, but I'm not completely uninformed one too, I guess. Secondly, I'm not a native English speaker so I thought about the tone of my comment after I finished writing it and read it couple times and asked myself "Does it sound harsh or something like that to...anyone?". So I put down those "2 cents" and "humble" things at the bottom of my comment trying to show that I'm not an insider and I'm not trying to pick on anyone personally. Pardon me if it looked like the opposite. |
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Analyzing that claim of yours that you specially marked:
"there are so many experimentalists" ... "than theorists so physics suffers from the lack of" "power of imagination."
It is simply a "non sequitur."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_fallacy
There's no any support for any claim that "more theorists" than "experimentalists" are even needed for anything, especially that such a ratio means anything about presence or "lack" of "power of imagination" in physics.
> but I'm not completely uninformed one too, I guess.
Nobody ever said "completely." However I sincerely wish you to be a little more informed about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
I really believe that once you understand that you will have more chance for your own personal improvement and I wish you luck in that. Maybe you'll even make a contribution to some important discovery. But you'll surely have to have more insight that others, being satisfied with being "not completely uninformed" to think that you even understand the basics of something won't bring you much, at least in the areas that we touch in our discussion.
Regarding the state of physics, I've already explained that nobody can even claim that there has to be anything "revolutionary" possible (in the naive sense, the way you expect it) based on the information available to us as the result of all experiments done. From my perspective, there were a lot of amazing discoveries in the last any N years of physics, and they are always result of the new information we experimentally obtain. But we already know so much, and measured so much with such an astonishing precision that there is not even place for some "big" changes affecting the formulas we already have. All better measurements will need always more investment from us, and will involve always the areas of the universe that are less affecting us directly (in the physical sense, I don't speculate about the state of mind).
Just to get you started thinking: some ancient Greek and Hellenistic scientists (who at that time weren't called so) already quite correctly knew how distant is the Moon measured in the number of Earth radii more than 2000 years ago. Do you know that simple number? Were you aware that if was possible to measure that at that time? Would you be able today to repeat that measurement? How much effort would you have to personally invest to repeat all the steps? Second, one Hellenistic scientist again more than 2000 years ago measured the radius of Earth also amazingly precise. Would you be able to repeat all the steps of his experiment? Are you able even to figure them out just by your own thinking?
The humanity knows about the telescopes only for 400 years. Galileo was one of the first scientists using it to figure more about the universe, but he also made the experiments on Earth, being among the first who properly described the properties of gravitation. Newton published his "Principia" only 100 years after Galileo's "On Motion" and only 80 years after the discovery of telescope and based on the enough observations happening even before the telescope existed: Tycho Brahe was the first scientist on the west who measured precisely enough the movements of the planets to make Newton's conclusions even possible, and his measurements were again available only some 80 years before Newton's "Principia." Not to mention that Kepler was already able to figure out the formulas nobody before him had based on these very measurements.