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Nobody here is going to like this comment but I recommend you look into Electric Universe theory and Plasma Cosmology.
Nobody here is going to like this comment but I recommend you look into Electric Universe theory and Plasma Cosmology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Physics
Smolin makes a sosiological-historical argument, that from the 20s to 70s, the development in theoretical particle physics was done by trusting the "mathematical intuition", if the math was beautiful and predicted the existence of some particles, a bit later usually the experimental physicists found those particles. And the rewards and Nobel prizes went to those who did the math the fastest.
So the whole theoretical physics adopted this style of work, when someone proposes something new that looks interesting, everyone tries to do the math as quickly as possible, to be the first to get the results.
But then from the 70s to 00s, this flocking attitude was applied to string theory, and people just developed string math furiously, and it was left unnoticed that the theory was totally unrelated to any experiments.
So, Smolin suggests, for 30 years the best of theoretical physics went into a direction that may be totally separated from experiments. If this turns out to be true, theoretical physics pretty much lost 30 years.
Has software technology gotten much advanced in the last 20 years yet? It became a lot bigger, yes, and now we have GC or type inference if you're lucky. But I'd be still afraid of writing a mission-critical part of software as well as I would in 80s. Also things like Heartbleed happened. In terms of the quality/correctness, the progress of the software industry has been disappointing to me.
Has software technology gotten much advanced in the last 20 years yet? It became a lot bigger, yes, and now we have GC or type inference if you're lucky. But I'd be still afraid of writing a mission-critical part of software as well as I would in 80s. Also things like Heartbleed happened. In terms of the quality/correctness, the progress of the software industry has been disappointing to me.
Regarding now vs. the 80s, we have much better tools for making assurance cases for critical software. So much progress has been made in both specification correctness and implementation correctness that I think the only way you could compare the two and say there hasn't been improvement is if you haven't tried to see what we can actually do now vs. then...
Nobody here is going to like this comment but I recommend you look into Electric Universe theory and Plasma Cosmology.
As a PhD in physics - progress in pure physics is slowing down (or at least progress per scientist). The delay between a discovery in physics and a Nobel prize is getting bigger and bigger [1]. It's true for all fields, but the effect is particularly strong for physics. '''It is safe to say that late 1920s and early 1930s were the “Golden Age” of 20th century physics, when the progress was lightning-fast and new disc…
I do not disagree that things feel slower to some degree, but I'd also bet absolutely anything that 100 years from now people will look at our time and say "Can you believe they didn't understand X? There was so much low hanging fruit in 2015." The issue is that what appears simple, 100 years from now, takes a significant shift in how we're currently thinking. The problems are complex and the prior knowledge needed t…
Economics is a good example as well I believe... Up until the second half of the 20th century many economists were not basing their theories on data but rather under assumptions that we are all "rational" actors. I will concede that the 'data' was not really available until the last 50yrs anyway but the 'behavioral' movement has hopefully set Economics as a whole on a 'straight' path and no doubt the next 100yrs will show the low hanging fruit which now dangle above us.
How poetic.
EDIT - The economics example I gave was very sweeping. Just an example.
As someone who's been in physics for much of the last twenty years, I'd guess that things are going at about the same rate. I don't think that the rate is "crawling", though. If you look on log plots of parametrized experimental progress, progress remains linear, so it's a Moore's law like improvement on many fronts. The emergence of precision cosmology has really transformed astrophysics in the last twenty years. Th…
This depends on your definition of "advances in physics". "New physics", physics that we don't already have an explanation for, is becoming increasingly rare. Our definition of "new physics" is also expanding to including things that aren't fundamentally new, just small holes in our understanding of the equations. The flip side of this is that while we already know the broad strokes, there is still a lot of work to b…
We don't understand why galaxies rotate the way they do, as the visible mass does not correspond to the rotation according to known laws of gravity. The solution is to postulate dark matter and dark energy, until things match again.