Re:What Is a Particle?
by ssivark on Friday November 13, 2020 @07:28PM
(#25089166)
It’s not that bad... in fact, quite the opposite :-)
Whenever we peel back a layer to discover new physics, the old models are never lost, since the new models must necessarily reduce to those in more familiar situations!
Another factor is that as we learn more physics, as important as it might be to find answers, it is even more important to understand how our previous questions/notions might have been naive, and what might be better concepts with which to formulate our models. The variety of perspectives on the meaning of a “particle” merely illustrate that fact, applied to a naive word/concept that we’ve strung along for a long time.
Whenever we peel back a layer to discover new physics, the old models are never lost, since the new models must necessarily reduce to those in more familiar situations!
Another factor is that as we learn more physics, as important as it might be to find answers, it is even more important to understand how our previous questions/notions might have been naive, and what might be better concepts with which to formulate our models. The variety of perspectives on the meaning of a “particle” merely illustrate that fact, applied to a naive word/concept that we’ve strung along for a long time.