[Jensson]

Like Einstein or Newton? Theoretical physics tends to be way ahead of experimental physics, it took 50 years from higgs boson existing as a theory to finding traces of the higgs boson in the LHC etc.

Physics is done using the true scientific method. First you make a theory, then you make experiments to test the theory. Theoretical physicists made a theory and proposed some possible experiments to test it. Then 50 years later data was found in those experiments to match the theory. What we lack today to further physics isn't experiments, we lack theories that are well formed enough that we can perform experiments to test them.

[labcomputer]

"The fasted way to get the right answer is to post the wrong one on the internet"

Actually, Kepler came before Newton. Kepler's laws of planetary motion were derived from observations of others. They also follow straightforwardly from Newton's laws of motion. In particular, Kepler's second law is equivalent to conservation of angular momentum. Kepler's third law is equivalent to "Newton's universal gravitation + conservation of angular momentum". And Kepler's first is a consequence of Newtonian kinematics. That is to say, Newton generalized Kepler's laws.

The order is:

1. Astronomical observations (Brahe et. al.) 2. Kepler's laws 3. Newton's laws + universal gravitation.

Similarly with Einstein: His theoretical treatment of Brownian motion was based on observations by... Robert Brown half a century ealier. The photoelectric effect (for which Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize) was an extension of theoretical work by Plank, who started theorizing to explain observations made by Hertz.

Special Relativity resolved a conflict between E&M and Mechanics, but it was really needed to explain why the Michelson-Morley experiment couldn't find a difference in the speed of light, despite increasingly-sophisticated apparatus (which was an unsolved paradox for a quarter of a century before SR was invented).

And, while not on your list, quantum theory had many experimental inspirations. The Millikan oil drop experiment, for one. And spectral lines in stellar observations, for another.

[kragen]

Yes, like Einstein or Newton.

Einstein's work on relativity (01905) was inspired by the Michelson-Morley experiment (01887), less than 20 years before, and its many improved replications. His work on the photoelectric effect was inspired by Hertz's experimental discovery of it (also 01887), followed by numerous further experiments which clarified the nature of the effect. Although Brownian motion had been observed, in some sense, since Lucretius (00060 BCE), Brown's 01827 observations under a microscope less than a century before were crucial to Einstein's theorizing about it.

Newton's work on orbital mechanics, which gave rise to understanding of universal gravitation (published 01687 but finished years earlier), derived from Kepler's laws of planetary motion (01621, say) and his published tables of planetary observations (01627), the Tabulae Rudolphinae. Not coincidentally, Kepler is also known for his dramatic improvements in the tele-scope, but much of the improvement in the Tabulae was actually due to the meticulous work done at the pre-telescope observatory of his predecessor Brahe, a huge stone structure.

Certainly the traffic between theoretical physics and experimental physics is not entirely a one-way flow from experiment to theory; that would lead only to the sort of overfitting we find in Ptolemy. But neither is it, as you paint it, entirely a one-way flow from theory to experiment.

It's probably true that we aren't going to resolve the problem of quantum gravity, dark matter, or consciousness with experiments, because our theories aren't good enough to design the experiments yet. But turbulence, magnetohydrodynamics, and especially quantum computers are eminently subject to experiment.

(Although I disagree with your comment, it certainly seems to be made in good faith, so I deplore the knuckle-draggers who are downvoting it.)

[ntr--]

I'm curious about your reasons for prefixing years with an additional 0 in all your posts.

[njarboe]

This notation is encouraged by the Long Now foundation which promotes long term thinking in various ways.

[gaze]

No. No no no. It’s extremely standard to measure a material that’s known to be “weird” and not know what you’re going to see.

[hoseja]

There's no Einstein without the Ultraviolet Catastrophe.

[Jensson]

The Ultraviolet Catastrophe was discovered immediately after theoretical physicists derived the radiation law, the limit was theory and not experiments there as well. And the most important part here is that another physicist had already derived an alternative radiation law at the time that fit perfectly with the observed deviation and had a good explanation for it: Quantum Physics.

Edit: The problem with physics today is exactly like back then, we have no predictions to test. If someone comes up with a new theory that joins quantum physics with gravity in a way that is consistent with all past experiments, then we can test that. But there is no such theory today, nobody has figured out a way that the domains can work together.

[kragen]

In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29144119 I listed a lot of the big unsolved problems in physics, though many would argue that the question of how consciousness arises isn't part of physics. In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29153894 I also listed a lot of recent advances, many of which came from experimental physics. Some of those problems are susceptible to experimental investigation even with the theories we have.

But, aside from these big problems, many smaller problems are susceptible to experimental investigation. You may not create an Einstein-style paradigm shift by detecting CNO-fusion neutrinos from the sun, observing Higgs decay, improving quantum-dot solar cells, fabricating nanotube rope whose strength approaches that of a single nanotube, understanding the lubricity of BAM well enough to design more similar materials, deriving useful energy from the fission of lithium, making a metamaterial with a higher Young's modulus than diamond with negative-elasticity inclusions, constructing logic gates out of fluid vortices, building a usable hypersonic plasmoid pistol (one that doesn't require explosive flux compression pumping!), building transistors that function at 800 degrees, finding a SHS route to cubic boron nitride, making a 50-tesla magnetic field in the lab, finding a way to construct quantum-dot solar panels that's cheap and scalable enough to undercut poly-Si, confining a particle of gold in a stable minimum of the Casimir potential, or finding a way to fabricate high-quality optics apparatus rapidly out of aluminum foil; but the obstacles to these problems are (or were) mostly not that we don't have any useful hypotheses to test.