Re:Musings on the Current Status of High Energy Physics
by pfdietz on Monday January 06, 2020 @10:34PM
(#21976572)
What? Quantum mechanics was used almost immediately to understand chemical bonds and to understand the nature of semiconductors. The frickin LASER is a quantum mechanical device! I could go on and on. The notion that QM wasn't used for roughly a century is totally false.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Musings on the Current Status of High Energy Physics
by SkyMarshal on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @06:07PM
(#21986229)
The laser was invented in 1960, 55yrs after Einstein published his Nobel-winning paper on the photoelectric effect. So great, in some cases it takes even less time to get from correct fundamental theory to useful technology.
The is point is - finding the correct theory sets off a process of hacking and tinkering that results in useful new technologies at some future time, some of which may not have been foreseeable at the time the theory was discovered. But we have to invest in finding the correct theory, anticipating eventually useful things will come of it, some we can foresee and some we can't.