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Re:100-year-old physics problem has been solved by TTPrograms on Thursday June 22, 2017 @04:28PM (#14615076)
Let's be clear to differentiate when we're talking about fundamental laws like conservation of momentum or unitarity versus "how much energy can be stored in a fiber", which was really just the derivation someone did on a specific class of fibers and then assumed that every other fiber would be the same thing (some homogenous material, boundary conditions, etc.).

Calling this particular result "breaking a fundamental law" is just typical hyperbolic science PR.

Re:100-year-old physics problem has been solved by joefkelley on Thursday June 22, 2017 @07:09PM (#14615996)
Yeah a more accurate title in these cases is often something like "assumptions of theoretical law don't quite apply in this case or can be otherwise worked around in practice" but that doesn't get clicks.

Another good semi-recent example that comes to mind is the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem being "broken" by compressed sensing.