Comment by tiborsaas
7 years ago
> a lot of pop-science articles suggest that the foundations of natural sciences are so shaky that a new finding can turn them upside-down
Dark matter, Dark energy, The cosmological constant problem [1], Quantum entanglement, Quantum gravity...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem
The foundations are shaky. Of course it's an easy rhetoric tool to use by journalists, but often they are not wrong, if those claims turn out to be true.
That's not so much a crack in the foundation as it is a patch of dirt next to the foundation.
To get an idea of what happens to old physics when new physics is discovered, realize that Newton's laws are still correct, and can be derived from QM. That's what you get when you do a good job of actually checking the truth with experiments. All theories have implicit tolerances embedded within the known precision of the experiments used to confirm them, and with these tolerances you can say "Newton's laws are right" without denying other, finer details. Similarly, scientists 1000 years from now will agree with everything we presently know about the Standard Model, because all of our beliefs are tempered by how closely we know our experiments are looking.
>Quantum entanglement
I should add that entanglement isn't "shaky" at all, it was predicted from the start and has been observed in countless experiments to date.
Borrowing from an a old comment of mine:
On one hand, on some scales, Newtonian mechanics is correct "enough" to give results that work, and so in that sense it is just incomplete in that its domain is restricted. On the other, relativity and QM change everything. These new theories may reduce to Newtonian mechanics given certain assumptions, but Newtonian physics assumes things about the structure of spacetime that are fundamentally incorrect (e.g. velocity is not additive). In this sense, one can fairly say that Newton's mechanics are not just incomplete or missing some fine details, but wrong.
I think there is more to the foundations than just the best numbers we can come up with for a given experiment. Our numbers for the gravitational constant, for example, are pretty similar (if more precise) to the numbers in 1891, but the setting in which that number is completely changed. There is no aether, no absolute space, velocities don't add (even though it's "mostly" right on most scales we experience and measure, it is false), space and time get mixed up, etc. Those were all pretty foundational ideas just over a hundred years ago.
>There is no aether, no absolute space, velocities don't add
There are two categories of things in that list: statements that had implications beyond what they had confirmed (the medium of light, the absoluteness of space) and an approximation (the addition of velocities.) Unsurprisingly the metaphysical interpretation of physics has not stood up to refinements in physics. The physics, however, remains true to within the bounds they knew. Likewise, the interpretation of physics is likely to change quite a bit over the next 1000 years, even 100. That's why you should never put too much stock in pop-sci articles that try to tell you that the universe is made of this-or-that. Fortunately on the philosophical side we now all realize that the interpretations are just humanizations of the knowledge itself, and are not knowledge themselves.
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All models are wrong. Some models are useful.
The standard model is anything but shaky at the moment.
It's very successful, but It's known to be incomplete, so this is why this article is interesting because it can point to a new theory that alter or event replace the standard model. Also, I linked to the cosmological constant problem, which to me looks like a gaping hole in the theory.
It's amazing that all this math can describe the world we live in and help build us all the modern gadgets we see:
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-deconstructed-s...
But on the other hand it looks like spaghetti code written in APL and needs some refactoring :)
It's not exactly known to be incomplete although everyone hopes it is, there are a few theoretical extensions to it like SUSY but currently all of them have failed to produce any tangible experimental results.
We thought that the LHC would quickly find physics beyond the standard model but alas it has found nothing which is a problem for many theories that want to replace or even substantially expand on it as many of their prediction were proven to be false.
At this point i would find it very unlikely that we will replace the standard model completely most likely scenario is that we will find an extension to it which will be proven correct and at this point it seems the model we have will not be extended as much as it was thought so previously.
It would require an extremely drastic discovery to essentially push the standard model out of it's current generalised state.
And the cosmological constant is not a gaping hole in any theory it's a problem for some its not a huge or (even a small) problem in the standard model if you want to find the biggest true problem with it currently you should look into neutrinos which are supposed to be massless according to the standard model but have a small non-zero mass in reality.
There are a few solutions to this problem both within the current model as well as extensions which range from a massless sterile neutrino to super symmetry and to a secondary mechanism through which particles may gain mass other than the Higgs field.
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