Quote:
Originally Posted by bartman
I'm not sure if 'someone' took a wrong turn, but maybe 'an approach' that "best fit" the knowledge at that time. "lets go this direction and see where it leads us...." ......and there were enough like minded people( with scientific back up) to follow and corroborate. Thats not to say that that direction needed pot hole fixing.
I have wondered sometime ( after watching some of the docos....thaars thee anchor to this thread...  ) that some of the theory ( not that i comprehend it all like you two  ) can and could be debunked over the next few years as they have said, due to experiments not producing the results they/we are expecting.
I lie in bed pondering sometimes after watching SH,LS, BC, BG, LK or NdT et al video lectures/talks and wonder if soooon there will be another ground breaking theory that will stun the scientific world, if they dont come up with the results they expected.
One of these people ( or me ....   yeah right  ) will come up with a new theory of how we will get to the number 42......
I, for one, believe ( no, not have a belief) someone will....if not me....
mwahahah mwahahaha mwahahaaaaaa  
Cheers
Bartman |
I'll add my 2 cents to this.
If I'm understanding the point correctly (apologies if not), it is that what we currently think we understand in science could turn out to depend on an old and fundamental error, and at any point someone could come up with a theory or experiment that requires large sections of science to be re-written. I've encountered this view quite a few times, often attached to a dislike of the inherent randomness / unreality of quantum mechanics.
In principle, I don't disagree at all. Keeping an open mind is important, and scientists do actually revisit 'established' truths from time to time. A classic example is the occasional repetition of the Eotvos experiment, showing that inertial and gravitational mass are empirically equal (somthing largely undisputed). Of course some people then turn around and accuse these scientists of 'wasting their time' 'proving the obvious' (can't win, can you).
BUT
Too open a mind ignores a couple of points that I think are often not realised by non-scientists (being often poorly communicated by scientists). (Not all scientists have this top-of-mind, either.)
Firstly, science is an
integrated body of knowledge. That is, almost all the bits of science are connected to almost all the other bits, and then through to engineering. For example, physics and chemistry are fundamentally connected through quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics. That means that each understood thing in chemistry supports corresponding understood things in physics. Conversely, if you are going to question one of those things in physics, you have to accept that you are questioning the chemistry too. Further, they all connect to stuff that actually works in practical engineered applications. The huge extent to which this is the case across science means that the idea that the accepted fundamentals might wrong, while not 'disproved', is extremely difficult to give much credence.
Secondly, some physicists have done a lot of very profound mathematics on some of these fundamentals. I'm thinking Hawking/Penrose on relativity, Bell on quantum mechanics and Emmy Nother on symmetry and conservation laws. Again, these don't necessarily 'disprove' the possibility that we might have something wrong, however they narrow down the wiggle-room to very little indeed.
The fact that we really are so certain of so much is actually (IMO) why testing the remaining stuff (that we don't) is so difficult and expensive. It's because of the level and breadth of certainty about QM and particle physics generally that we need the LHC to create situations extreme enough that we don't already understand them.
. but in truth they were meaningless ..if I had pointed to a specific ie the road and perhaps the wrong turn meaning could be taken but the beauty of non specific metaphor is that folk can read into it what they want. 
