Comment by ur-whale
3 years ago
Not sure why you would bring that up.
I never said quantum mechanics was useless.
That's actually specifically why I mentioned transistors.
However, I don't believe QCD has yet produced anything tangibly usable to do stuff in the world.
The proof is in the pudding: if QCD ever does produce something useful, I'll happily recant.
But my general point was that as we dig deeper and deeper, what we get is exponentially diminishing returns, up and until the point when we'll research stuff that's maybe logically coherent, intellectually satisfying but plainly useless, just like string theory currently seems to be.
Ah, I misunderstood and phrased it badly.
My point was that when quantum mechanics first was proposed early last century, I can’t imagine anyone would have even considered LEDs as a thing even in their wildest dreams, yet it was obvious once further progress occurred, and was key in understanding and developing them past the initial ‘that’s odd….’ stages.
We don’t know yet if something similar will come out of QCD (understandable and usable ‘high temperature’ superconductors? Quark matter computers? Super high strength materiel derived from some kind of degenerate matter?) but it definitely seems less likely by the day.
It does at least have falsifiable predictions, so it’s about a billion miles ahead of string theory!
It’s also possible we’ll need another 50 years of engineering or a world war (I hope not) to dig deep enough into areas to discover another, simpler, way to think about it that is more useful.