Re:Has Physics Gotten Something Really Important Really Wrong?
by neltnerb on Sunday July 10, 2016 @03:14PM
(#12066800)
I totally get your point, that getting stuck in a framework can make it harder to get out of said framework, but I also have every reason to think that the experts in the field (which may well include you) are aware of this trap and spend a huge amount of time trying to get out of it.
But I'd also expect that people making new theories be intimately familiar with the current ones, right? It would be silly to expect someone to come up with hamiltonian mechanics for the first time without having ever been exposed to newtonian mechanics, even though both give the same answers to every problem. Yeah, thinking outside the box is always super hard, but you have to at least deeply understand the box before you can know enough to replace it. I definitely don't understand this particular box, but I feel it's reasonable to assume that those that do are trying their darndest to escape it -- if for no other reason than fame if successful.
The overall point was which I might not have expressed fully is that there is in my opinion too much bias in the field of theoretical physics, and to paraphrase Brian Greene again we took a giant leap and probably skipped a few steps and no one seems to want to look back and see if we missed something.
I think one of my favorite quotes that somewhat describes this view is by Rudolf Peierls: “In recent years the debate on these ideas has reopened, and there are some who question what they call ‘the Copenhagen interpretation’ of quantum mechanics’ - as if there existed more than one possible interpretation of quantum mechanics.”
And I think that this view is antithetical to the advancement of current physics, and sadly this bias is instituted even unintentionally in most new physics students especially those who take physics as part of their degree in CompSci/Engineering.