It’s not such a problem that the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t found new physics
nautil.us
nautil.us
It is said that at the beginning of the 20. century many physicists thought that there wasn't that much more to discover and that most of the theories had been worked out already. There were a few areas where "weird" phenomena were observed (notably in electrodynamics and atom theory) but many people were confident that these would eventually be resolved with the existing theories. Fast forward 20 years and two completely new fields of physics (quantum mechanics and relativity) were discovered.
Personally I still think that we've just scratched the surface of the laws of the universe and it's not impossible that we'll have another wave of theories that will make our current understanding of physics seem hopelessly outdated by the end of the century. And in fact there are some areas where "weird" stuff seems to happen, dark energy or dark matter is a good example for this. I'd be really disappointed if we already discovered everything there is as well in terms of the laws of physics, I mean how boring would that be?
I hope that this the case, otherwise humanity will die on this planet. If there are no new physics then there is no faster-than-light travel and escaping earth will be pretty much impossible.
Although it brings to mind the irony that if one has the capability to live in space within artificial environments indefinitely, gather resources within it, and produce more of them there isn't technically a need to find any habitable planets. If such a state is reached there are only two things to worry about - self destruction and entropy or cosmic scale events that a planet wouldn't be safe from anyway.
(The same way inventiveness doesn't matter if you found yourself in the middle of Antarctica with no food, no heating, and no materials to make a compass).
I think if the Earth was something like 40% more massive, we wouldn't be able to leave the surface with chemical propulsion.
This QA goes more into this observation: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/14383/how-much-big...
From what's there it looks like it's a lot higher than 40% as a limit.
And the technology is pretty much there, it's just that the will isn't.
Is taking an FTL ship to another galaxy, even with a known habitable planet, that much easier than creating a dome city on Mars? What if they're barely habitable?
Who is going to do that and what for? Same resources, and no one wants to because Earth already has it all (and yes, by the time they're exhausted, it will be too late for anything).
Colonize the solar system, and if FTL is created, great, if not, meh.
To the other side of the galaxy it would be 12 years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_using_constant_ac...
Going to Mars using antimatter with the same 1g acceleration the entire time (reversing half way) will take a few weeks and require a small fraction of a gram of antimatter.
Ignoring the significant engineering problems like heat disappation, storage if it's not used instantly, you could get two years worth of thrust from antimatter measured in grams and cross the galaxy in just over a decade, in Earth time the trip would be >100,000 years.
Besides, we can always travel the slow way. Either with ships built for multi-generational habitation or some way to suspend/resume human life over long periods.
> No, that would have the same problem - being able to send information back in time.
Would it? If a wormhole is connecting two points in spacetime, then could time also be traversed at the same time? E.g. traveling through the wormhole would move you far enough forward in time to not cause any problems?
Well, the assumption abiut causality is based on our current understanding of physics. Perhaps we just don't understand the problem well enough and there are ways around the causality problem
In the long term, we have the entire solar system to work with, which should be plenty to keep us going for a very long time. The Earth is just a small fraction of what's available even if we're stuck with our sun. Frank Drake from SETI thinks that alien civilizations have no good reason to ever leave their home stars, because a star will provide all the energy they will ever need, and traveling light years just isn't worth the cost (assuming no FTL).
I mean, for comparison humans have been around in a modern form for about 50,000 years... well the chances of something not happening then are few and far between. Probably could have launched millions of generation ships between now and then.
Interstellar travel and colonization does not necessarily need superluminal travel; it could be done with sub-lightspeed spacecraft capable of hosting multiple generations of humans for many decades, possibly centuries.
However getting Earth's nations to cooperate on such a long-term undertaking may be no less difficult than achieving FTL travel.
[1] Meaning that, though it's not logically ruled out, you need flying Spaghetti Monster level subterfuge to make it compatible with what we know to be true.
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/09/23/the-laws...
https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-da...
So I really think there's much to discover yet, we just don't have a clue yet where to look.
What am I missing?
We can, it's just really hard to get a reaction out of the composite particles we've been using and we may have hit an energy limit here. Our energy problem is pretty much limited to fundamental accelerators now.
> dark energy or dark matter is a good example for this.
It's "weird" in the sense that based upon our observations there's a discrepancy between our presumed mass for very distant large stellar objects and the apparent rotation rate of some bodies in it's outer radius.
There's a lot of room for corrections there that don't involve new fundamental science. It's much more likely that we'll be able to to link two disparate areas of science together with a rigorous equation. This has been a good chunk of our progress so far.
> I'd be really disappointed if we already discovered everything there is as well in terms of the laws of physics, I mean how boring would that be?
Ultimately, there has to be a limit to how much knowledge there is to be gained. Beyond that we can start asking the really important questions like: "Does the universe fundamentally allow for the existence of free will?"
- what is dark matter (the stuff which makes up 97% of the universe!)
- what is dark energy (I.e. Why is the universe expanding at an accelerating rate?)
- what happens inside a black hole?
- what happened at the big bang?
- how does gravity work at the quantum scale?
The Standard Model has nothing to say on these, it is fundamentally incomplete. I fear we won't answer these questions within my lifetime, sure, we may get tantalising hints from astronomy, but not direct observation in experiment.
This is troubling for theoretical physics, it needs guidance by experimental physics. But all these super-smart theories to supersede the SM cannot be verified by experiment right now.
Namely, the LHC was never directly concerned with black holes, the Big Bang, dark energy and dark matter. (Outside of the possibility that completely new physics would be found and that this would somehow lead to an explanation of dark matter, dark energy and/or quantum gravity down the road.)
Moreover, I'm also not sure why you're casting doubt on dark energy (= the cosmological constant), the Big Bang and black holes. There are certainly many aspects about them we don't fully understand yet but their existence is generally not disputed.
This might coincide with the discovery of a new theory answering (or proving unanswerable) the fifth question as well.
Or, all the necessary “fixes” to the Standard Model are out there. Either way, I agree that it might be another long wait before our technology can find meaningful new constraints.
That's a ballpark figure for dark energy + dark matter combined.
One of my coworkers is a trained particle physicist, and he will be the first to say that the standard model is a mess and nobody in the field actually believes it's correct, just that it's what they currently have to work with. He describes it as basically a switch statement depending on the field in question.
None of this is meant to denigrate the endeavor, it's just that nuclear physics makes electrodynamics look like child's play.
* purported dark matter
* purported dark energy
* purported black holes
* purported big bang
Dark energy is just a name for what's otherwise known as cosmological constant. Yes, some people might believe that it's unnatural for the cosmological constant to be as small as it is and others might believe that it should really follow from a proper quantum theory, so there are definitely a bunch of open questions. But that doesn't change the fact that it's there.
The same thing goes for the Big Bang and black holes. We have absolutely no reason to believe they don't exist. (To the contrary, we have every reason to believe so.)
Dark matter, however, is just one possible (and comparatively speculative) explanation for various experimental deviations from theoretical predictions, regarding among others the stellar velocity distribution within galaxies, gravitational lensing and structure formation.
- What is holding the galaxies together, given they are rotating faster than gravity from observable matter can cope with?
- Why is the Universe so uniform, given parts of it we can see are outside of each others light cones?
I read the OP as using the names of these theories as a handle for the effects they account for, which is fairly standard practice. Even physicists investigating other explanations do this.
I'm not sure dark energy or black holes fit that description. "Dark energy" is a reference to something that is causing distance objects to accelerate away from us faster than near objects. Obviously that takes energy. Dark energy is just a place holder name for that energy given we don't have a clue what it is or where it comes from. A black hole is a name for enormously heavy, small (smaller than the schwartz radius) and very dark objects whose existence is inferred from the their gravitational effects. They are found at the centre of galaxies, among other places.
* purported cells
* purported persons
We've generally bemoaned (forgive me for not bothering to find examples but they're there) how difficult it is to get negative results published in scientific journals but we're exhibiting exactly the same attitude that leads to this in many comments here.
Academia has a professor who wants to prove their idea is true. They rig up an experiement to prove their idea is true. They teach a kid how to collect the data. Then wow, they proved it true! Discovery? No.
Engineering- prove your idea works and dont stop until the problem goes away.
I don't know of any reputable scientists that would claim to "prove" anything. Popper rather put an end to that.
I think any large organisation will have it's fair share of bullshit and people playing the system. It's hard to align incentives with outcomes.
One gets checked by customers, the other gets... reported?
Thus, cosmological expansion is caused by galaxies pushing against each other, and galactic rotation can be explained by the fact that each galaxy is surrounded by a "womb" of dust, gas, and other galaxies, and this "womb" pushes with repulsive gravity upon the outer stars of a galaxy to keep them in orbit at a higher speed than expected.
I give a cosmological / mathematical justification for this behavior in my Reddit article:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MyTheoryIs/comments/87pcgq/what_dar...
At the bottom, in the responses, I explain how General Relativity can be adjusted so as to retain time dilation while rejecting curved space and retaining flat, 3D, Euclidean space.
“So what now? What if there are no more new particles? What if we’ve caught them all and that’s it, game over? What will happen to particle physics or, more to the point, to particle physicists?”
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-multiworse-is-c...
You cannot predict the true value of basic research in a straight forward manner so let’s just stop. This is about extending our understanding of the universe. We will find ways to use that knowledge and ways to enrich our lives because of it in due course of time.
Did berners lee even work on the LHC? I know he worked at CERN, but didn't realize he took part in the creation of the LHC.
Everything was ready by that time, just remember the conference where it was presented. Or compare the internal memo with contemporary systems, such as the Symbolics Document Examiner. Or the NeXT demo for that matter.
The WWW you might allude to exists in large part due to US deregulation of that time, and therefore politics. The "value" part of it is as old as Alexandria, or Paul Otlet (TBL's boss who signed it off at the documentation dept. was also Belgian).