John Carlos Baez on Nostr: By 2000 the Great Stagnation in fundamental physics was well underway. Yes, the ...
By 2000 the Great Stagnation in fundamental physics was well underway.
Yes, the discovery of the Higgs boson was a great triumph of experimental physics. But in the grand scheme of things, it was like finding your wallet on your desk where you knew you must have left it.
I didn't even list the detection of gravitational waves by LIGO and Virgo in 2016. This is a bit brutal, but I already listed 1981 as the year when Hulse and Taylor discovered that a binary pulsar is emitting gravitational waves just as predicted by Einstein's theory. So by 2016, we all knew gravitational waves *existed*. The interesting part was becoming able to detect them well enough to start using them as a tool in astronomy! And this has been great: we're discovering a lot of surprises. But not - yet - new fundamental laws.
I also haven't listed all the new observations concerning dark matter, or whatever is making galaxies spin faster than we'd expect. The original discovery goes back to 1933. What we are doing now is collecting more and more data... which so far is making the mystery ever more intriguing and mysterious. So this is not stagnation by any means. But we have not found the fundamental laws that explain what's going on.
What does it all mean? I have plenty of thoughts, but today I just wanted to review the arc of fundamental physics since 1897, in a very crude outline.
(7/n, n = 7)
Yes, the discovery of the Higgs boson was a great triumph of experimental physics. But in the grand scheme of things, it was like finding your wallet on your desk where you knew you must have left it.
I didn't even list the detection of gravitational waves by LIGO and Virgo in 2016. This is a bit brutal, but I already listed 1981 as the year when Hulse and Taylor discovered that a binary pulsar is emitting gravitational waves just as predicted by Einstein's theory. So by 2016, we all knew gravitational waves *existed*. The interesting part was becoming able to detect them well enough to start using them as a tool in astronomy! And this has been great: we're discovering a lot of surprises. But not - yet - new fundamental laws.
I also haven't listed all the new observations concerning dark matter, or whatever is making galaxies spin faster than we'd expect. The original discovery goes back to 1933. What we are doing now is collecting more and more data... which so far is making the mystery ever more intriguing and mysterious. So this is not stagnation by any means. But we have not found the fundamental laws that explain what's going on.
What does it all mean? I have plenty of thoughts, but today I just wanted to review the arc of fundamental physics since 1897, in a very crude outline.
(7/n, n = 7)