131–140 of 326 posts
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When was the last time an experiment had a result that wasn’t explained by theory (supralumimal neutrinos aside)?
Observations of the cosmic microwave background, galactic rotation, gravitational lensing, and redshift led to the concepts of "dark matter" and "dark energy" that aren't yet explained by theory.
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I'm not sure how you missed it, but she did give a recommendation. Attempt to resolve inconsistencies as a means of discovery.
This is so general and vague that it is useless, even more considering that the author has been saying the same for the last 10 years (the same timeframe her career progression stopped) and there is not a single valuable paper proposing a somewhat-valuable idea. I hate to sound like Lubos Motl (for the cognoscenti) but Sabine's criticism is trite.
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I believe in gravitational waves, but specifically with LIGO I wish they did a better experiment with the multimodal observations. An easy one would be:. For an [n] month period blind all of the results, and mix them with 3X fake data. Then instruct traditional EM astronomers to search for EM phenomena corresponding to these signals. If only 25% of them correlate, we know the multimodal search is not working.
There is no believing in them. Gravitational waves have been observed and you can't "believe" or "not believe" in them anymore than you can "believe" or "not believe" in electricity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Observations of the cosmic microwave background, galactic rotation, gravitational lensing, and redshift led to the concepts of "dark matter" and "dark energy" that aren't yet explained by theory.
The cosmic microwave background was first detected in the 1960s, gravitaional lensing was predicted by Einstein in the early 1900s and redshift can be traced back to the later half of the 1800s (as an extension of the Doppler effect)...
This article seems like a decent introduction:
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/five-reasons-we-think-...
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that's because experiment drives physics rather than mathematical consistency (no matter how much people pretend it's about "beauty"). plenty of mathematically consistent physical theories have been falsified by experiment and plenty of mathematically inconsistent physical theories have made precise and accurate predictions.
When was the last time an experiment had a result that wasn’t explained by theory (supralumimal neutrinos aside)?
Short version, without the anger and bitterness: Theoretical physicists' way of working is to put forward baseless mathematical models and build $40bn machines to prove them wrong. They should instead work on theoretical inconsistencies that have been known for a while.
So the alternative is to build a $40bn machine, look at the data and then try to imagine then how to fix the theoretical model. [There is a risk of overfitting the model, and finding patterns in the noise.]
Another alternative is to build a $40000bn (or more) machine and have enough precision to make the model obvious from the data. [I'm not sure this is possible, I guess with enough money, perhaps m000000re money.]
Once more people accept the concepts of modern physics as a way of life (perhaps intuitively?), we will be in fertile territory for any potential new revolution in physics.
I strongly disagree that the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years. We have been looking really hard for answers to persistent questions. While we have not found affirmative answers, physicists have systematically ruled out option after option after option. We have not yet discovered a unified-theory-of-everything, but we know a whole lot more about what that theory is not . Furthermore, the past 40…
「三十輻，共一轂，當其無，有車之用。埏埴以為器，當其無，有器之用。鑿戶牖以為室，當其無，有室之用。故有之以為利，無之以為用。」
Personally I find it amusing Hossenfelder is now invoking the need for learning philosophy of science, given how hostile she's been to it before. See for instance http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-unbearable-ligh... that begins with: "Philosophy isn’t useful for practicing physicists. On that, I am with Steven Weinberg and Lawrence Krauss who have expressed similar opinions." Though to be fair, she clarifi…
In the spirit of pointing out inconsistencies...I am not a physicist, but something I've been confused about lately is why the action constant has a unit of seconds baked into it. Feels like E = hf is an experiment with a hard coded 1 second measure time. Why not express the relationship in terms of power? P=uf where u is the action constant without the seconds unit hard coded. And E=utf has a variable time parameter
Down votes? Care to explain? I'm just trying to learn here :)
I'll try to answer it: I think you just want to move units around so h (Planck's constant) has units of Joules instead of Joule-seconds. While this works mathematically, it doesn't really make sense physically, where we care about the energy of a photon because that's the value that is conserved (along with momentum, also relating to h) during any interaction (e.g. the quantity gained by an electron if the photon is absorbed). It really doesn't make sense to want to quantify the "power" of a photon, which doesn't have any physical meaning, in favor of a simpler constant.
You are right about the constant 'h' having a "hard-coded" 1-second built in, but so do ALL derived physical constants . If we, say, changed it to two seconds, the number would be cut in half to reflect the scale change and preserve the energy of the photon (or any action) because that does not depend on scale.
As to "why is it Joule-seconds?": that's the discovered law of nature. If the energy was proportional to frequency squared, h would be in units of J*s².