Because of the way the ranking system works here, spats like the philosophy/physics thing will always rise to the top, I think.

I think this is overly reductive. Indeed, many consequences that follow from the nonexistence or impossibility of a certain thing, event, or effect are brittle to the physical model being refined to include additional effects. But plenty of important consequences follow from existence or possibility and can be directly supported through experimental evidence.

For instance, Newtonian physics predict absolute simultaneity: if one observer measures that two events occurred at the same time, then all other observers will measure likewise, regardless of their relative position or velocity. But special relativity violates this, instead predicting relativity of simultaneity. As long as special relativity's predictions hold to any extent (which, experimentally, they do), then simultaneity is definitely relative and not absolute. There's no way to recover absolute simultaneity short of postulating a grand cosmic conspiracy. And learning that the arrow of time isn't absolute definitely isn't a waste of time!

Also, I think it's unwarranted to say that just because some consequences of nonexistence have historically been invalidated in the past, all the consequences of nonexistence in our current theories are inevitably going to fall over with further evidence. Why should we expect a priori that we haven't yet discovered a single true invariant of our universe? After all, some observed invariants, such as the conservation of energy, have withstood the numerous revisions to our physical models, and it seems odd to blithely assert that they'll be invalidated any year now. In the limit, to say that exceptions will be discovered to every principle ever is to say that the universe doesn't run on any kind of laws.

And if we do concede that at least some of our current models' invariants truly do hold in reality, then it's no longer a waste of time to study their implications, since some subset of our findings will remain just as accurate now matter how far our models are revised.

We are extremely confident in the wrongness of relativity and QM in this matter, so using them in that particular way for philosophy is really a waste of time.

One could sensibly write philosophy of the form "If string theory is true, then..." or "If Loop Quantum Gravity is true, then...", because while those are not proved, they are also not proved actively wrong in the relevant ways.

It’s exactly the sort of situation that precedes a paradigm shift and it’s very hard to predict exactly what will trigger one.

That's not a great example, since conservation of energy is actually violated in current cosmological models. The expansion of spacetime actually implies violation of energy conservation at the global level. It's only locally that energy is conserved.

Similarly, while there is definitely something special about the speed of light, it may or may not be a limit in the sense we typically use. That is, GR and QFT are consistent with the existence particles to have speeds greater than C, it only prevents any particle from accelerating from below C to C or above. It also puts certain limits on observations of those particles. However, it's hard to say what overall implications there would be for all of our models if such particles were actually found to exist, or if there is some modification possible for those theories that would entirely prevent the existence of those particles.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There's also the uncollected-garbage problem, which this case is a good example of.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Of course, the Michelson-Morley experiment proved that even if this substance exists, it can't be dragged around, so frame dragging can't be an explanation for the constant speed of light, making the whole idea unnecessary. Future observations predicted by SR and GR would probably not have been compatible anyway.

But, getting back to your point, if this ether had existed and had been the medium through which light propagates and had been draggable by moving objects, then this would not have been a contradiction or even modification of Newtonian mechanics.

Please don't use the word "wrong". Alchemy is wrong. Astrology is wrong. Relativity and Quantum Mechanics get many things right but are probably "incomplete" in the same way Newtonian mechanics wasn't wrong, only incomplete.

I think this is important because physicists that popularize often make grandiose claims about how reality is when they should know better and then these claims form popular imagination in ways that shutdown thought.

Approximations aren't "wrong", they are just simplifications of something less wrong, usually in certain corner cases. Sometimes approximations are derived from the broader theory, and sometimes the broader theory comes later. (And of course, sometimes old theories are proven plain "wrong" by evidence and new theories, but those are things more like alchemy, or mistakes in math proofs, and less like Newton's laws).

Finally, iff we follow your logic then we can say nothing is ever "right". Philosophically it may be useful to realize we may never know the ultimate truth with 100% certainty, but in everyday English "right" can simply mean "appropriate".

I think it’s true that wrongness is relative to the use-case. But, on the other hand, before things like the Ultraviolet Catastrophe and the Michelson-Morley experiment, a lot of physicists thought they had the big picture of the universe basically right and just had to fill in the details. The revolution of GR and QM was barely even suspected and this should give us pause when it comes to our confidence in the modern picture of the universe. Relativity and QM will always be useful as models of the spheres they model, but the worldview we’ve built on top of them could change drastically overnight (in historical terms).

They are practical though. In that sense astrology can be said to be practical too.. hides.

I think you are partly right. Quantum mechanics and general relativity are incomplete rather than wrong. I don’t think either has been falsified, it’s more that they are just useless in specific cases.

This is in contrast with Newtonian mechanics, which implies Galilean transformation when changing reference frames, which looks right at our usual scales, but is plainly wrong in the general case.

However, the things you mention are not even wrong. As in, they are not falsifiable so you cannot say whether they are right or wrong in theory.

Of course they have. If you try to use SR or GR to predict how particles behave, you will get none of the quantum effects we have observed experimentally.

If you try to use QM or QFT to predict how the planets move* or at least how black holes move, you'll get predictions that don't agree with what telescopes have observed.

So yes, both of the theories have already been falsified.

* I have been told that there are some ways to account for gravity in regular QM in a way similar to GR that essentially work until you get to the kinds of strong fields near a black hole, where they break down again.