Am reading a SciFi book. The book begins with a physics lecturer being taunted and killed in the Chinese Cultural Revolution for teaching the subjects of relativity and the Copenhagen interpretation, which the Revolution claimed were lies. (Reading this made me so angry that I had to stop reading many times).
Fast forward to the future. What if the revolutionaries were correct, and fundamental physics is wrong? The scientific method is based on the sequence – make an observation – derive a hypothesis to explain the observation – independent confirmation – continuing confirmation to progressively better accuracy. Now consider two scenarios out of the realm of metaphysics:
1) The Shooter. A shooter decides one day to shoot holes in a piece of metal 2 cm apart. Later, 2-D scientists living on that metal by use of the scientific method conclude that the presence of holes 2 cm apart is a fundamental physical law.
2) The farmer. Scientists among the turkeys by use of the scientific method conclude that food arrives at 11 am each day. Which it does, until Thanksgiving.
In each scenario a scientific theory, supported by full use of the scientific method, is wrong.
Now back to the present. Are there any indications yet that fundamental physics may be falling apart? That made me think of the following.
1) Godel went mad in his later years, shuffling around campus talking to himself. It was rumoured that not only had he proved that all mathematics was either incomplete or self-contradictory (as we all know) but had followed that up by proving that all physics is self-contradictory.
2) When asked (in the early 1980s) what he thought the next great breakthrough would be in physics, Feynman replied that he thought it would be the introduction of more uncertainty.
3) There is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that bypasses the problems that led to the Copenhagen interpretation, by means of the introduction of non-repeatability. We don’t have to worry about the collapse of the wave function, it says, because that is only needed if experiments are exactly repeatable – and no experiment can be repeated exactly.
4) There is a well known theory in fluid mechanics that turbulent fluid motion can never be exactly computed, because the number of unknowns always exceeds the number of equations. Introducing more equations just results in creating more unknowns.
5) Failure of all proposed explanations of “dark matter”. Failure to detect any properties of dark matter other than their gravitational influence.
Those are the main five that immediately sprung to mind. Other topics that may or may not be related are:
1) The perennial failure of all experiments into controlled nuclear fusion, since the late ’70s.
2) The continued failure of attempts to prove that the theory of quarks is mathematically self-consistent, failure of supersymmetry, failure of string theory (which relies on supersymmetry), continued failure of “theories of everything”. In short, theoretical physics died somewhere in the late ’70s.
3) Still no firm “yes or no” for either the strong anthropocentric principle or weak anthropocentric principle.
4) Lack of detection of gravity waves.
5) Physical theories that I call “see-saw theories” because every decade opinion swings in the opposite direction. These include “is travel backwards in time possible?”, “are wormholes possible?”, “could the Big Bang have been preceded by a Big Crunch?”, “do pentaquarks exist?”
6) Many examples where later experiments have failed to confirm earlier ones. One example I can think of right now is that an advanced experiment based on the style of Millikan Oil Drop experiment found free quarks, ie. quarks not bound inside subatomic particles. That was not confirmed by at least one later experiment.
What do you think? Could fundamental physics be wrong?