Comment by ajam1507
24 days ago
This assumes that what's holding back solving hard problems is designing experiments to get novel data. Einstein's though experiments were very productive despite not taking place in a lab.
24 days ago
This assumes that what's holding back solving hard problems is designing experiments to get novel data. Einstein's though experiments were very productive despite not taking place in a lab.
Einstein and SR is an interesting case.
Nearly the entirety of the theory had already been laid out before Einstein.
Lorenz transforms contain the length contraction and local time, Poincaré had already written about E=mc^2 for radiation, he'd also set out the idea of relativity. All this before 1905.
Einstein's revolution was in turning that patchwork into a self contained theory with a couple postulates.
He had all the data he could want most of it from decades earlier.
We have approximately 0 experimental evidence at the GR/QFT boundary.
The best we have is Hawkings radiation something we currently can't possibly observe experimentally.
If we wanted to study the GR/QFT with a particle accelerator it would need to be the size of the Milky Way.
Again, this is all assuming that we have formulated the problem correctly. So much of the value of experiments in solving hard problems is not so much the results, but in how those results steer the formulation of a theory. It's hard to know how much evidence we might already have for resolving GR/QFT without the benefit of hindsight.