Apech

Sounds like progress to me.

Easy on the bottle old3bob 😀

The Ancient Egyptians saw everything I terms of time and didn’t even have a word for space as such.

I guess there must be people working on the foundational questions - which I guess is helpful. By the way I’m with Eric Weinstein that string theory is one of the major blocks to progress. But I spend very little time thinking about science these days so I’m out of touch with the latest stuff.

Thanks @steve that was interesting. Just goes to show that the questions that physics has 'stumbled upon' are very ancient. For instance as in the idea that the wave function of the experimenter interacts with the experiment to give the outcome. The Samkhyas asked a similar question - what is the observer and what is the observed ... and came up with Purusha and Prakriti as the answer. I guess Buddhists would say various things depending on the schools, it's dharmas, its 'mind' = citta or even Madhyamaka - there is no observer or an observed. So I think physics is asking important questions and more importantly showing that it's not just theory it's real. But they are still stuck in the paradigm of 'the external objective physical world is fundamentally real' ... while I would say that unless they break this assumption their theories will not develop. For instance they talk about the qualities of particles without ever asking what exactly is a particle (if indeed such a thing exists in the first place). I don't think fundamentally that reality can be broken down into bits. Or at least if you do ... then each 'bit' somehow contains the whole. As in each instance of consciousness (dharma) includes all consciousness (like a hologram). But to think like this would fundamentally tear up the very idea of an objective world as a real thing. We have tried, in a bid to be truly objective, to exclude ourselves from the equation, only to fail. But the successes we have had in manipulating 'matter' and so on keep us locked in this view.

Hi and thank you for your intro.

No it doesn’t.

I don't know why exactly but this is not just my view. When in my late teens I pretended that I was a physicist (because I came second regularly in the school exams behind Mr. Perfect who always got 90+% in every exam while I got 89%) I liked it because to me physics was the science which tackled the big questions about the nature of reality/astrophysics/relativity/quantum doodahs etc. Fortunately for me and the world of science I read the Tao Te Ching when I was 18 and that finished things. I became a mystic and just played at physics from then on. But still I held in it in some respect for the scope of its subject and so on. This would be in the 1970s by the way when the beast was still alive and kicking. One trick I discovered was that in any branch of physics there are one or two (max three) basic equations which if you master them all other equations are derived from. So you can 'know' (or in my case blag) a subject by just working out which equations these are. Which leads on to another point about physics - which is that most physics is the application of a form of mathematics to the physical world. In the 1670s or thereabouts both Newton and Leibniz invented calculus. Although Newton accused Leibniz of plagiarism this was not so. In fact Leibniz's notation and formulation were better, he was the better mathematician but Newton's application (to mechanics) was better. We use Leibniz's notation today but we have Newtonian mechanics. The history of science is littered with examples where two or more independently discover the same thing, at more or less the same time. I see this as there being times when key ideas enter the human consciousness. Of course the ideas used have always been there, the Greeks, the Egyptians, Babylonians, Indians, Chinese ... which is why Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants. But despite this there are times when these ideas/insights come into the human domain in a new way and with new applications. There are other times of course when ideas are not so forthcoming. The 'truth' becomes elusive. One thing that I suspect may happen is that there is a conceptual block because of the mathematics used. For instance in quantum mechanics there is 'uncertainty' and this means it is difficult to express mathematically the qualities of sub atomic particles, their position and energy for instance. But if you apply probability statistics to them you can make predictions about their behaviour which are accurate and allow you to do things like make semi-conductors which work in circuits. So you know that your approach works because the diodes and transistors work (and thus your television or computer works). Hey presto. But then you may fall into a conceptual trap because you might think that because probability maths works for you, then particles are probability wave functions. Not that they can be described in this way but actually this is their nature. It's a kind of conceptual capture which leads to a ton of woo woo. This means many physicists will say don't worry about what it means just do the numbers (cos they work). I think this may have happened across a number of fields of physics. Which has lead people to play with the maths too much and generate a host of hypothetical theories which are just kind of mathematical expansions which have no relation to reality. This is not progress but just a testament to the imaginative skill of humans. Just my thoughts.

Not science but technology. It’s different.

All based on theory developed pre 1970s.

Hi glad you found your way in : )

In theoretical physics.

There have been no true advances in theoretical physics since the 1970s - so fifty years.

Just for clarity: "In physics, arguments from naturalness refer to a heuristic principle used to evaluate theoretical models, particularly in particle physics and quantum field theory. It suggests that a theory is more plausible or "natural" if its parameters (like masses, coupling constants, or energy scales) do not require extreme fine-tuning to match observations. Core Idea : A theory is unnatural if it needs highly precise cancellations between unrelated parameters (often to many decimal places) to produce physically reasonable results. Conversely, a natural theory has parameters that are of similar magnitude (typically within a few orders of unity) without artificial adjustment."

There is a big problem in Theoretical Physics which is the heart of science's examination of the nature of reality. When the heart dies so too does the head. This lady seems to understand: