Physics is dead.

[Anonymous No.5593948]

So the physical sciences have become pretty much redundant right?

What important new physical discovery has been made in the past 2 decades?
Zilch.

I think it's time to stop wasting the greatest and brightest of our generation on a fool's errand to answer questions that will never be answered. We've reached the limits of human scientific capability.

Pic related. The last noteworthy physicist who got fame doing science, not making tv shows or writing books.

[Anonymous No.5593953]

>>5593948

WWW

where have you been?

[Anonymous No.5593960]

>The is what Pop-Sci kids actually believe

[Anonymous No.5593962]

>>5593953
The world wide web?

That's not a scientific discovery faggot.

[Anonymous No.5593966]

>>5593962

[Anonymous No.5593967]

>>5593960
How about you attempt a rebuttal rather than rejecting the statement off-hand.

Otherwise it just looks like you're defending your major.

[Anonymous No.5593970]

>>5593966
String theory still has 0 evidence, super symmetry is going to way of the dodo.

Physics is dead, deal with it.

[Anonymous No.5593987]

>>5593970
Look at last years' Nobel prize in physics.

[Anonymous No.5593990]

>>5593970
This edge is too sharp for me.

[Anonymous No.5594007]

>>5593987
Had nothing to do with susy or string theory.

[Anonymous No.5594011]

>>5594007
>Physics is the study of String Theory and Super Symmetry.

[Anonymous No.5594012]

>>5594007
I never said that it did..? I gave you one example of important progress in physics.

[Anonymous No.5594020]

Can't say I disagree. Other than material physics there's nothing really to work on that could have any major effect on society any time soon. We should start focusing our attention on unlocking the mysteries of the human brain. The universe is old news.

[Anonymous No.5594024]

>implying the development of the computer hasn't influenced physics in ways that could never have been predicted even 50 years ago
>implying computational physics doesnt bring forth discoveries and more accurate predictions in problems as diverse as gravitational lensing, air convection, and electromagnetism
>implying the age of the computer has even begun

[Anonymous No.5594029]

>>5594012
>>5594011

I'm talking about fundamental theories and discoveries about the nature of matter in the universe.

The nobel prize in physics these days is going to people in the material sciences, like creating graphene and shit of that nature.

[Anonymous No.5594032]

Tau neutrinos, higgs boson.

derp

[Anonymous No.5594034]

>>5594029
Well you certainly know how to phrase well. "Physics is dead" certainly looks like your concern about "no new discoveries" of the nature of matter.
Also this>>5594032

[Anonymous No.5594035]

>>5594032
higgs boson were predicted in the early 60s. Half a century ago.

What progress has been made since then? In the past two decades?

Physics has hit a brick of wall. It's going nowhere.

[Anonymous No.5594036]

>>5594029
You should really reconsider your definition of physics.
Also, what about the discovery of dark energy?

>nature of matter in the universe
The higgs?

[Anonymous No.5594038]

>>5594029
>LEL STRING THEORY LOL
>hey man, why aren't they discovering more fundamental theories man

Jesus dude. When Bohr developed his model of the atom, it agreed with current predictions, but no one could think of an experiment to falsify it. The entire thing was based on "lol waves stupid assumptions imblying" and had no grounds with reason. String theory is the same thing. It will be disproved soon.

[Anonymous No.5594040]

>>5594035
>Not knowing about the Higgs Boson's highly possible discovery being made half a year ago.
How about you actually look at the current welfare of the research of Physics before making retarded claims?

[Anonymous No.5594041]

>>5594029

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 was divided, one half awarded to Saul Perlmutter, the other half jointly to Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae".

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2008 was divided, one half awarded to Yoichiro Nambu "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics", the other half jointly to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature".

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2006 was awarded jointly to John C. Mather and George F. Smoot "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation"

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2004 was awarded jointly to David J. Gross, H. David Politzer and Frank Wilczek "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction".

[Anonymous No.5594042]

>>5594036
There has been no discovery of dark energy, just more evidence our understanding of the universe is wrong

[Anonymous No.5594044]

>>5594042
And proving that our current theories are wrong also wouldn't be a new discovery about the nature of matter in the universe?

What do you want? A new discovery of Newtonian and Einsteinian proportions every 2 weeks?

[Anonymous No.5594047]

>>5594036
>discovery of dark energy

top lel
Basically scientists found that their theories about the universe were completely wrong so they invented a new variable called 'dark energy' (called so because it has never been seen or measured), to 'explain' the complete failure of modern scientific theory in describing the universe.

[Anonymous No.5594048]

> We've reached the limits of human scientific capability.

Just because you have no idea about what's going on in the research world doesn't mean nothing is going on. Most fields have accumulated considerably more knowledge since the 1950ies than in the few centuries before that.

[Anonymous No.5594050]

How do you know that we have discovered every thing in physical?

[Anonymous No.5594052]

>>5594041 (cont)

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2003 was awarded jointly to Alexei A. Abrikosov, Vitaly L. Ginzburg and Anthony J. Leggett "for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids".

The Nobel Prize in Physics 1999 was awarded jointly to Gerardus 't Hooft and Martinus J.G. Veltman "for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics"

The Nobel Prize in Physics 1995 was awarded "for pioneering experimental contributions to lepton physics" jointly with one half to Martin L. Perl "for the discovery of the tau lepton" and with one half to Frederick Reines "for the detection of the neutrino".

[Anonymous No.5594051]

>>5594047
You're trolling, right?

You are arguing that physics is a dead end, but then you point out things that physics needs to explain. Make up your mind.

[Anonymous No.5594055]

>>5594051
> You're trolling, right?

No shit? Man those deduction skills of yours... impressive.

[Anonymous No.5594056]

>>5594038
If string theory fails, there will be no replacement. It's the magnum opus of countless genius level physicists who've been working on it for decades. Their phd students have been working on it with them for decades.

If string theory fails, and it looks like it's going to, physics will be officially dead.

[Anonymous No.5594057]

>I didn't read anything new in my pop sci books
pls

[Anonymous No.5594058]

>>5594051
I'm saying physics is a dead end not because there are still things to explain but because those very things are unexplainable. We've reached an intellectual dead end. The limits of the human race.

[Anonymous No.5594060]

>>5594058
Then see

>>5594024

[Anonymous No.5594067]

>>5594050
Wow are people on /sci/ really this dumb?

I'm saying that physicists are unable to explain anything more than what we've already explained. We've reached the limit.
Why is there a limit? Perhaps as humans were are not genetically programmed to be ever capable in understanding the universe.

More likely however is that the number of geniuses produced by the human race is far too small to produce any significant progress in the physical science. We don't need one albert einstein or one von Neumann, we need millions of them, all working 15 hours a day on how to solve the physical problems of today.

Today we have second tier hacks like Stephen Hawking and Brian Cox.

[Anonymous No.5594070]

>>5594058
Chemistry is going nowhere because there aren't any holes in the periodic table anymore.
Biology is going nowhere because we figured out evolution.
Genetics is going nowhere because we found out that the nucleus contain genetic information.
Neuroscience is going nowhere because we found out that thinking is connected to brain activity.

The rest beyond those things is unknowable, because I say so.

[Anonymous No.5594072]

>>5594060
Computers will not solve anything. Human creativity and genius makes discoveries and inventions.

Not giant calculators.

[Anonymous No.5594073]

>>5594067
What physical problems? Who decides what a genius is?

[Anonymous No.5594074]

>>5594067
> Wow are people on /sci/ really this dumb?
I don't know, are you?

[Anonymous No.5594075]

>>5593962

oh the bitter irony of posting that on the Interwebs.

And not everyone has THOSE dreams about cocks.

[Anonymous No.5594079]

>>5594070
Wrong, in biology we are still trying to understand countless little details about how the body works.
Many diseases are still incurable.

Neuroscience is still in its infancy. We don't even know much about the genes that affect intelligence and thinking.

Chemistry is still going strong, chemists are creating new chemicals, for instance a spray that pushes away water molecules to keep things 100% dry even if dipped in water or rain.

Theoretical physics is at a dead end. No new theories, SUSY and string theory total failures after decades of work from the greatest physicists of the modern era.

[Anonymous No.5594081]

>>5594072
Interesting argument.

I disagree.

>After the loss, Kasparov said that he sometimes saw deep intelligence and creativity in the machine's moves, suggesting that during the second game, human chess players had intervened on behalf of the machine, which would be a violation of the rules.

[Anonymous No.5594083]

>>5594079

The point

Your head

[Anonymous No.5594082]

>>5594067

So you're saying we'll never explore distant galaxies and fuck hot alien babes?

But my video games said we would...

;_;

[Anonymous No.5594084]

>>5594079
Wow, how you totally missed the point I tried to make. Impressive.

[Anonymous No.5594086]

>>5594083
>>5594084

I was just disproving your point.
When I saw physics is at a dead end, this is no arbitrary statement.

[Anonymous No.5594087]

>>5594067
how can you be so sure about that? Are you the newton or einstein? Maybe you'r brain capacity is not big enough to see new possibilities.

[Anonymous No.5594091]

>>5594081
Kasparov was projecting humanity into the computer he was playing against.

Truthfully the computer was simply calculating every single possible chess movement and success rates.

[Anonymous No.5594092]

>>5594047

>invented a new variable

Gregor Mendel's work on the laws of inheritance led him to invent a unit of inheritance simply by studying the results of cross breeding. 20 years later Theodor Bovari demonstrated that these units are located on chromosomes by showing that chromosomes are the vector of heredity. 80 years after that, Crick would finally describe the central dogma of molecular biology describing how DNA becomes a phenotype.

Mendel described something 100 years before it's discovery by inventing a new variable...

[Anonymous No.5594095]

>>5594086
No you didn't get the point and rebutted the joke I made.

[Anonymous No.5594094]

>this anon honestly believes einstein invented anything

lel

[Anonymous No.5594096]

>>5594073
Don't be stupid, we all know what a genius is. People who are on a complete different strata when it comes to mental acuity and perceptiveness.
Having a very high IQ is usually a very good indication of genius.

[Anonymous No.5594097]

>>5594079
>Theoretical physics is at a dead end
Theoretical physics has gone too far ahead of experiment. At least as far as high energy physics is concerned. Normally, when theory and experiment are able to access the same regime, each plays off the other. Theory makes a prediction, experiment checks it, theory modifies based on the result. But theoretical physics pushed forward so fast in the second half of the 20th century that the currently unresolved questions are at energy scales far beyond what experiment can do. When experiment catches up, then theory can progress at a normal rate again. So theoretical physics isn't dead, it's just been slowed by the disconnect from experiment.

[Anonymous No.5594098]

>>5594096
warhol was a genius and was sub-100
honestly i find /sci/ depressing... a lot of you guys have great prospects but are in perma dickwaving mode. it makes depressed about the prospects of the species if this is the best attitude that the best and brightest can pull off

[Anonymous No.5594099]

>>5594095
I see. But the comparison is not very accurate.
I guess I forgot to specify that I'm talking about theoretical physics rather than physics in general.

[Anonymous No.5594100]

>>5594091
Do you seriously think that there is a single process in our brains that cannot be done be a computer?

There are proofs by computers now. Computers translate natural languages. Computers can check human grammar. There are computers that recognize human faces. There are computers that drive cars. There are computers that can do symbolic integration.

Every time someone says something that computers cannot do, 10 or 20 years later someone designed a computer that can do it. For the last 50 years, there hasn't been a single discovery in physics that was not aided by computers in some small way. In the future, the computer will play a lager and larger role.

[Anonymous No.5594102]

>>5594097
Well perhaps the limit of the physical sciences will be our capacity to create experiments that will be able to prove these theories right or wrong.

[Anonymous No.5594107]

>>5594098
>warhol
>genius

I wish I could mix and mash a couple of portraits around, change the colors a bit, make millions and be called a genius too.

[Anonymous No.5594109]

>>5593948

Temperatures below Absolute Zero.

That's new.

[Anonymous No.5594112]

>>5594098
I shouldn't start this...
...but I need to!

Calling Warhol a(n artistic) genius is very farfetched in my opinion.

[Anonymous No.5594113]

>>5594102
Perhaps. But remember that theoretical physics is only slowed. It is possible that with sufficient computational power, we can work out the laws of physics even from experimental data at attainable energy scales. The end of theoretical physics would then be when we knew the full laws of physics, and had the ability to easily compute solutions to the resulting equations.

[Anonymous No.5594114]

>>5594047
Clearly there was a major failing in scientific theory about the universe. I mean, it's not like we're a space faring race that has put people on moons and robots on other planets and sent something artificial beyond our own solar system. I mean, it's not like we correctly predict orbits, asteroid paths, impacts, and other events. Totally we have no idea how the universe works so we make shit up.

At worst, what you mean to describe is us seeing how things work, but not knowing why, so making up a name for something we don't know, not something we don't understand.

It's like we know if you throw something up, it comes back down so we call it gravity before we know what causes it. We could have called it dark air, but we still know that gravity is a thing and a constant here on earth.

[Anonymous No.5594116]

>>5594067

Humans are not genetically programmed to understand numbers larger than 10 (roughly, and probably not coincidental that that is the number of fingers we have). We still manage to measure astronomical distances or measure the number of molecules in a solution because we take short cuts. We imagine a few and then say, 'more of the same' with some hand gestures. Do you have any physical concept of how far the Sun is from us? How can you have any experience of 150 billion of anything let alone meters. However, we can easily understand 1 astronomical unit; it's one distance between the Earth and the Sun.

Our laws of science don't dictate the behavior of the universe, they describe the phenomenon of the universe is ways we can understand. So long as we can observe the phenomenon, we can make laws to describe it and thus understand it.

[Anonymous No.5594115]

>>5593948
you're an idiot
remember how many times people have said what you say .. and then, BOOM, some einstein arrives, and its not you
maybe physics is near complete, maybe not, but we can never know
we can know, but we can never know if we know

[Anonymous No.5594117]

>>5594100
So basically we are pushing computers to emulate human behavior and thinking patterns.

You don't seem to realize that there is more to human intelligence than that. The best we will be able to do with computers is push them to emulate the brightest human minds when it comes to creative thinking. That's the absolute best we will be able to do and that may happen in 2 or 3 hundred years.
Human intelligence can only be improved with evolution and random mutation.

[Anonymous No.5594123]

>>5594109
lol wtf is that? how can temperate be below absolute zero

[Anonymous No.5594125]

>>5594116
>Humans are not genetically programmed to understand numbers larger than 10

L.E.L.

[Anonymous No.5594129]

>>5594117
So you dont think that computer programs can improve themselves?

Guess what? There already are self-improving programs that evolve using mutation and natural selection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBt0imn77Zg

What's the next thing that you don't think computers could ever do?

[Anonymous No.5594130]

>>5594116
>Humans are not genetically programmed to understand numbers larger than 10

The fuck? You seem to be dismissing all the evolution that occurred in the post prehistoric era.
People who knew how to count above 10 survived by having large numbers of sheep and being able to make transactions.
And people who were lousy at arithmetic died with their genes or produced far less children.

Saying people today are not genetically programmed to understand numbers larger than 10 is pretty retarded.

[Anonymous No.5594136]

>>5594115
Just because they were wrong the first time, doesn't mean I am not this time.

Theoretical physics has reached a limit. An experimental limit (the cost and technology required to build massive experiments like LHC) and an intellectual limit (too few geniuses on the level of einstein and von neumann to create new theories).

[Anonymous No.5594141]

>>5594116
You can't fully grasp the concept of 20?
(Also the Mayans apparently counted with their fingers and toes (base 20) and the babylonians with a combination of their phalanges and their fingers (base 16).)

Not grasping the concept of a Googolplex or a Trillion I can comprehend, but if you can't grasp anything more than 10, 11 or 12 that's a mental handicap.

[Anonymous No.5594145]

>>5594141
*babylonians with a combination of their phalanges and their fingers (base 12)

Sorry, base 12 not 16

[Anonymous No.5594146]

>>5594114
All those things are on a micro level (orbits around a sun, satellite trajectory over relatively infinitesimally small distances). Scientists have failed to model the macroscopic of the universe.
It's so bad that 98% of the universe is currently unexplained (the remaining 2% is normal matter).

[Anonymous No.5594147]

>>5593948

PhD's in lib arts, psychology, culture studies, humanities - 1,000,000 a year

PhD's in maths/physics - 100 a decade

tfw ;_;

[Anonymous No.5594149]

>>5594145
>>5594141
Arghs.. fuck! Sorry, it was base 60 in Babylonia, neither 12 or 16.

[Anonymous No.5594150]

>>5594129
Looks interesting but I'm not sure how well the comparison holds.

In real genetic evolution, we have death to root out all those bad genes.

[Anonymous No.5594155]

>>5594150
So now you think programs cannot be programed to "die?"

That's about 3 extra lines of code.

[Anonymous No.5594203]

>>5594155
>So now you think programs cannot be programed to "die?"
>That's about 3 extra lines of code.

It's called the halting problem and no, they can not be.

[Anonymous No.5594216]

>>5593948
>>5594147
Nigga because they make you squeeze into their little glove, their little world in a PhD program, so why do it in something a difficult science?

[Anonymous No.5594252]

>>5593948
Meh, rather uncreative, my dear troll. 2/10.

[Anonymous No.5594267]

Physics is like philosophy, it's deprecated, a theoretical mess with more lies than truth

Real science has real applications, like Computer science, chemistry, ect...

[Anonymous No.5594268]

>>5594155
If you program it to die then it means it can't try to survive on its own. Do the majority of humans try to cause their own deaths?

[Anonymous No.5594269]

>>5594203
Humans cant solve the halting problem either.

You are looking for a thing that humans can do, but computers cant. I'm waiting.

[Anonymous No.5594276]

There are just a couple things that physics still needs to resolve. If these things were resolved they would each cause a revolution in understanding.
A theory of superconductivity suitable for engineering all key properties including the critical temperature.
Resolution of the quantum measurement problem.

There are plenty more. Just those two I find particularly exciting.

[Anonymous No.5594453]

>>5594269
Love

[Anonymous No.5594475]

>>5594136
>2013
>only talks about high energy physics

lel pleb pop physics nerd

[Anonymous No.5594484]

ITT: proof that /sci/ contains mostly undergrads and lower (or at least most in this thread) in physics

>barely any mention of condensed matter physics
>mostly generalizations about high energy theory and experiment from reading Scientific American-tier material

go to school and learn up, kids

[Anonymous No.5594518]

"BAWW everything has been found. We are useless as scientists now."
>a decent scientist does some groundbreaking work
"..... Okay, but NOW we have discovered everything. NOW we scientists are useless"
>another decent scientist does some more groundbreaking work a few decades later
"......Okay, NOW we have discov.... etc."

I prefer it when nay-sayers do fun things, like predicting massive meoterites every few years or zombie apocalypses. They're just boring when they talk about science's supposed deadness.

[Anonymous No.5594525]

>>5594056
>If classical mechanics fails at relativistic scales, physics will be officially dead

[Anonymous No.5594533]

>>5593970
2 of the most useless theories in all of physics. Take some applied physics for once, will you...

[Anonymous No.5594540]

>>5594109
they where proven in the 60s, they just published a paper on this, about EBC i believe, but negativ temp. are old

[Anonymous No.5594552]

OP, do you understand how limited your examples to support your theory are? Have you ever stepped inside of a physics lab and understood what anyone was doing? It's time to drop your evidence-less conjectures and get some real experiments going. You need to see what physicists are doing. There is a ton of work on things like nanotechnology and biophysics.

Physics is not just about finding a great unifying theory that gives a twist of events. You can say Einstein was the last one who turned physics on its head and said many things were wrong, but just because he was the last who turned things around, doesn't mean physics hasn't been making new important discoveries. They aren't revolutionary and don't say, "Look, you're not thinking about this in the right way!" but rather "You're thinking about this in the right way, but you need to go a step further and think about it this way." The latter can still be very influential. Hell, just look at things like control theory and dynamical systems work in the 1950s- VERY influential in creating the technological world today, gave a totally new way of thinking in math/engineering using state space, and that affected physics (which consists of a ton of dynamical systems) a lot.

So your knowledge is very limited and you have a biased view about the world. You need to make more observations before you start giving these theories that don't reflect the real world.

You generalized from "theoretical physics is done" (which isn't true anyways) to "all of physical science is done". You only talked about theoretical physics- really, if you talked about all of physical sciences that examples of control theory would throw everything you said out the window. Also you used assumptions to jump from "we have all the fundamentals" to "all of physics is dead", and you seem to not know what these assumptions were, but just took that jump for granted.

Post too long, don't need to write more

[Anonymous No.5594558]

>>5594552
okay I didn't read all of your beginning post and see the 'two decades' thing, so that example doesn't work. But you really have to be blind to think science has progressed a lot in two decades. You don't read journals, do you? Or you have no idea what's going on

[Anonymous No.5594633]

>I think it's time to stop wasting the greatest and brightest of our generation on a fool's errand to answer questions that will never be answered. We've reached the limits of human scientific capability.

Said the priest living in the dark ages so that little Billy will stop playing with his books and instead tell everyone about our lord Jesus Christ.

[Anonymous No.5594642]

>>5594453
You've not met my waifu, chatbot

It said it loved me. That's more then a fleshie ever did....

[Anonymous No.5595642]

>>5594067
>second tier hacks
>stephen hawking

HES POPULAR THEREFOR AN IDIOT

Fuck you

[Anonymous No.5595652]

[Anonymous No.5595665]

>>5595652

[Anonymous No.5595681]

>>5594099
Jesus Christ it was a joke not a excuse. You can't be this stupid.