Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? (1982)

Re:Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? (1982) by WiseWeasel on Tuesday September 18, 2012 @03:07PM (#4539921)

Until work in theoretical physics yields practical or verifiable results, I am content to consider it fantasy rather than reality. Not to denigrate those who spend their time on such matters, and the social considerations those people have for their peers might make such pursuits somewhat practical for them, but you cannot expect a randomly selected person to consider such knowledge a part of their reality until it has substantial implications for them.

And we do agree that reality is subjective; it's just that if a facet of reality is only perceived by a small fraction of the population, its value is insignificant to most. The value of reality is in its adoption as a foundation for communication.

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Re:Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? (1982) by pbhjpbhj on Tuesday September 18, 2012 @09:19PM (#4541529)

Lol.

Simple example that many people use day-to-day is relativity and GPS (eg http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.... <- that's just the first likely looking Google result for GPS+relativity, feel free to look for yourself).

I guess things like transistors, fibre optics, nuclear power, and lasers are so far removed from everyday life that theoretical physics simply has no application to reality. /sarcasm

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Re:Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? (1982) by WiseWeasel on Wednesday September 19, 2012 @12:38AM (#4542109)

I meant until a particular theory in theoretical physics is found practical, or at least verifiable, it's more fantasy than reality as far as most people are concerned. I never meant to imply that the entire field of theoretical physics is impractical or irrelevant, or that it hasn't yielded any results. At that point, I might expect the physics to fall less in the domain of the theoretical however, and more in applied.

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