I think the high expectations are mostly a result of us making so tremendous (from our point of view) progress in the understanding of the universe in the last 100 years. There's no reason that nature should make it so easy for us to discover new laws of physics in the future though, especially since our technology is still quite limited (e.g. we can't produce very high energy particles and can't control quantum systems very precisely yet).
It is said that at the beginning of the 20. century many physicists thought that there wasn't that much more to discover and that most of the theories had been worked out already. There were a few areas where "weird" phenomena were observed (notably in electrodynamics and atom theory) but many people were confident that these would eventually be resolved with the existing theories. Fast forward 20 years and two completely new fields of physics (quantum mechanics and relativity) were discovered.
Personally I still think that we've just scratched the surface of the laws of the universe and it's not impossible that we'll have another wave of theories that will make our current understanding of physics seem hopelessly outdated by the end of the century. And in fact there are some areas where "weird" stuff seems to happen, dark energy or dark matter is a good example for this. I'd be really disappointed if we already discovered everything there is as well in terms of the laws of physics, I mean how boring would that be?
> Personally I still think that we've just scratched the surface of the laws of the universe and it's not impossible that we'll have another wave of theories that will make our current understanding of physics seem hopelessly outdated by the end of the century.
I hope that this the case, otherwise humanity will die on this planet. If there are no new physics then there is no faster-than-light travel and escaping earth will be pretty much impossible.
It is perfectly possible to travel vast distances without FTL: just self-sustaining generation ships that are capable of operating indefinitely. A very boring solution to the problem admittedly. It is even possible without generation ships if the understanding of biology advanced enough to allow for indefinite cell repair, or 'state restore' of DNA. Obviously beyond our capabilities but there is no 'special sauce' required just a lot of depth.
Although it brings to mind the irony that if one has the capability to live in space within artificial environments indefinitely, gather resources within it, and produce more of them there isn't technically a need to find any habitable planets. If such a state is reached there are only two things to worry about - self destruction and entropy or cosmic scale events that a planet wouldn't be safe from anyway.
We may not need FTL travel, at least for interstellar exploration, as opposed to intergalactic. Even a ship going at 50% of light speed would put hundreds of stars within a reasonable time-frame, especially coupled with advances in cryogenic technology. If humanity's only goal is to avoid extinction by colonising another planet (what a dreary prospect), then this ought to be quite enough.
Or maybe the universe is indifferent to our goals, and we're stranded in this rock without sufficient materials and ways to get away, no matter how inventive we can be.
(The same way inventiveness doesn't matter if you found yourself in the middle of Antarctica with no food, no heating, and no materials to make a compass).
Why would you need FTL? There's a whole system to colonize in our backyard. Teraforming seems daunting, but start one dome at a time and it grows from there.
And the technology is pretty much there, it's just that the will isn't.
Is taking an FTL ship to another galaxy, even with a known habitable planet, that much easier than creating a dome city on Mars? What if they're barely habitable?
Who is going to do that and what for? Same resources, and no one wants to because Earth already has it all (and yes, by the time they're exhausted, it will be too late for anything).
Colonize the solar system, and if FTL is created, great, if not, meh.
To reach close to the speed of light (~0.9c?) it'll take about 1 year before turning off the engine, and then another year of deceleration if you're planning to do anything else besides travel around at relativistic speeds.
Going to Mars using antimatter with the same 1g acceleration the entire time (reversing half way) will take a few weeks and require a small fraction of a gram of antimatter.
Ignoring the significant engineering problems like heat disappation, storage if it's not used instantly, you could get two years worth of thrust from antimatter measured in grams and cross the galaxy in just over a decade, in Earth time the trip would be >100,000 years.
Time dilation: At a constant acceleration of 1g, 100k galactic time reduces to 12 years ship time. Cf the link provided in the comment you're replying to.
As you approach the speed of light, the time observed by the traveler ticks slower, so you can travel vast distances in short observed time periods. So the people on the ship would spend 12 years, a manageable time period, but us more or less stationary observers would still see 100000 years pass.
I'm not sure new physics will help with that. Faster than light travel, if possible, would really screw with causality.
Besides, we can always travel the slow way. Either with ships built for multi-generational habitation or some way to suspend/resume human life over long periods.
Well, it depends on what you mean, I guess. You can't travel through space faster than light, but if we could figure out how to create and use wormholes, for example, we could potentially travel to places that are out of reach when traveling through space.
No, that would have the same problem - being able to send information back in time. We also have no theory of traversable wormholes that doesn't involve imaginary energy, so it's just fantasy.
I don't know much about this stuff, so take this as me being genuinely curious.
> No, that would have the same problem - being able to send information back in time.
Would it? If a wormhole is connecting two points in spacetime, then could time also be traversed at the same time? E.g. traveling through the wormhole would move you far enough forward in time to not cause any problems?
> Faster than light travel, if possible, would really screw with causality
Well, the assumption abiut causality is based on our current understanding of physics. Perhaps we just don't understand the problem well enough and there are ways around the causality problem
> I hope that this the case, otherwise humanity will die on this planet. If there are no new physics then there is no faster-than-light travel and escaping earth will be pretty much impossible.
In the long term, we have the entire solar system to work with, which should be plenty to keep us going for a very long time. The Earth is just a small fraction of what's available even if we're stuck with our sun. Frank Drake from SETI thinks that alien civilizations have no good reason to ever leave their home stars, because a star will provide all the energy they will ever need, and traveling light years just isn't worth the cost (assuming no FTL).
Given we've got about 7.5 billion years until the sun burns out, and about 1 billion years before anything may become completely uninhabitable, it's pretty unlikely either new technology or space colonisation won't have happened before then.
I mean, for comparison humans have been around in a modern form for about 50,000 years... well the chances of something not happening then are few and far between. Probably could have launched millions of generation ships between now and then.
> If there are no new physics then there is no faster-than-light travel and escaping earth will be pretty much impossible.
Interstellar travel and colonization does not necessarily need superluminal travel; it could be done with sub-lightspeed spacecraft capable of hosting multiple generations of humans for many decades, possibly centuries.
However getting Earth's nations to cooperate on such a long-term undertaking may be no less difficult than achieving FTL travel.
There is basically no chance[1] that new physics would allow meaningful violations of the speed of light bound. It's as well established as conservation of energy.
[1] Meaning that, though it's not logically ruled out, you need flying Spaghetti Monster level subterfuge to make it compatible with what we know to be true.
Beg. of 20th, you couldn't even explain why an object on a table didn't simply fall to the center of the Earth. What's left to discover with respect to laws of physics is very unlikely to be relevant to creating new technologies.
Well, we're at the beginning of the 21st century now and we can't even explain what 95 % of the universe is made of (but we know there's "something" there):
Heck, we don't even know everything there is to know about things here on Earth. And not even going as far as unreachable ocean depths or unexplored remote locations, we even still discover new organs in our bodies, or neurons in our guts.
We can, it's just really hard to get a reaction out of the composite particles we've been using and we may have hit an energy limit here. Our energy problem is pretty much limited to fundamental accelerators now.
> dark energy or dark matter is a good example for this.
It's "weird" in the sense that based upon our observations there's a discrepancy between our presumed mass for very distant large stellar objects and the apparent rotation rate of some bodies in it's outer radius.
There's a lot of room for corrections there that don't involve new fundamental science. It's much more likely that we'll be able to to link two disparate areas of science together with a rigorous equation. This has been a good chunk of our progress so far.
> I'd be really disappointed if we already discovered everything there is as well in terms of the laws of physics, I mean how boring would that be?
Ultimately, there has to be a limit to how much knowledge there is to be gained. Beyond that we can start asking the really important questions like: "Does the universe fundamentally allow for the existence of free will?"
Perhaps the high expectations are the result of the huge amount of money that the LHC has cost several countries. Paying up such amounts for a device that might discover something is pretty daft in most people's eyes. Of course the Physicists are happy to have all that dough to spend, but it came from taxpayers mostly.
It's a problem, because we are no closer to answering questions like:
- what is dark matter (the stuff which makes up 97% of the universe!)
- what is dark energy (I.e. Why is the universe expanding at an accelerating rate?)
- what happens inside a black hole?
- what happened at the big bang?
- how does gravity work at the quantum scale?
The Standard Model has nothing to say on these, it is fundamentally incomplete.
I fear we won't answer these questions within my lifetime, sure, we may get tantalising hints from astronomy, but not direct observation in experiment.
This is troubling for theoretical physics, it needs guidance by experimental physics. But all these super-smart theories to supersede the SM cannot be verified by experiment right now.
More to the point, the LHC has not answered the following questions: were we correct in thinking dark matter and dark energy exist (ie, physics did not accidentally mistake the map for the territory), that we were correct in thinking black holes actually do exist (and it isn't an entirely different phenomenon involving extremely high energy plasmoids or something even weirder), and that the big bang actually happened (and that the universe is indeed expanding).
You can formulate all kinds of questions a given experiment like the LHC didn't answer but unless the experiment actually set out to answer these questions in the first place, you're mostly just talking about the empty set.
Namely, the LHC was never directly concerned with black holes, the Big Bang, dark energy and dark matter. (Outside of the possibility that completely new physics would be found and that this would somehow lead to an explanation of dark matter, dark energy and/or quantum gravity down the road.)
Moreover, I'm also not sure why you're casting doubt on dark energy (= the cosmological constant), the Big Bang and black holes. There are certainly many aspects about them we don't fully understand yet but their existence is generally not disputed.
I would not be surprised if someday more than one of your first four questions are all resolved by the discovery that theoreticians have made a bad assumption, and have been chasing today’s phlogiston or aether.
This might coincide with the discovery of a new theory answering (or proving unanswerable) the fifth question as well.
Or, all the necessary “fixes” to the Standard Model are out there. Either way, I agree that it might be another long wait before our technology can find meaningful new constraints.
> The Standard Model has nothing to say on these, it is fundamentally incomplete. I fear we won't answer these questions within my lifetime, sure, we may get tantalising hints from astronomy, but not direct observation in experiment.
One of my coworkers is a trained particle physicist, and he will be the first to say that the standard model is a mess and nobody in the field actually believes it's correct, just that it's what they currently have to work with. He describes it as basically a switch statement depending on the field in question.
None of this is meant to denigrate the endeavor, it's just that nuclear physics makes electrodynamics look like child's play.
Maybe .. the other universe also contained life and sentient beings. But as they were aggressive and tried to invade our world. So the scientists decided to stop the experiment and never to tell anyone about it.
I wouldn't put dark energy, black holes and the big bang on a level with dark matter.
Dark energy is just a name for what's otherwise known as cosmological constant. Yes, some people might believe that it's unnatural for the cosmological constant to be as small as it is and others might believe that it should really follow from a proper quantum theory, so there are definitely a bunch of open questions. But that doesn't change the fact that it's there.
The same thing goes for the Big Bang and black holes. We have absolutely no reason to believe they don't exist. (To the contrary, we have every reason to believe so.)
Dark matter, however, is just one possible (and comparatively speculative) explanation for various experimental deviations from theoretical predictions, regarding among others the stellar velocity distribution within galaxies, gravitational lensing and structure formation.
Yes, you are right, dark matter,and the big bang are just the leading theories explaining an observed feature of our universe:
- What is holding the galaxies together, given they are rotating faster than gravity from observable matter can cope with?
- Why is the Universe so uniform, given parts of it we can see are outside of each others light cones?
I read the OP as using the names of these theories as a handle for the effects they account for, which is fairly standard practice. Even physicists investigating other explanations do this.
I'm not sure dark energy or black holes fit that description. "Dark energy" is a reference to something that is causing distance objects to accelerate away from us faster than near objects. Obviously that takes energy. Dark energy is just a place holder name for that energy given we don't have a clue what it is or where it comes from. A black hole is a name for enormously heavy, small (smaller than the schwartz radius) and very dark objects whose existence is inferred from the their gravitational effects. They are found at the centre of galaxies, among other places.
A few responses here highlight a very common problem in science: namely that people don't appreciate negative results as much as positive ones.
We've generally bemoaned (forgive me for not bothering to find examples but they're there) how difficult it is to get negative results published in scientific journals but we're exhibiting exactly the same attitude that leads to this in many comments here.
The problem with negative results is that you as the publication reader don't know if the thing just plain didn't work or if the people trying to do it were incompetent.
This is entirely why I find engineering far more trustworthy than 'science' in 2018.
Academia has a professor who wants to prove their idea is true. They rig up an experiement to prove their idea is true. They teach a kid how to collect the data. Then wow, they proved it true! Discovery? No.
Engineering- prove your idea works and dont stop until the problem goes away.
It would be improper to say it doesn't revolve around certain outcomes though. I know a few guys in college that would get free money and travel to some remote part of the world to "research" climate change. It was pretty much a paid vacation for them. If you were studying how the climate followed cycles and it may have less to do with what humans are doing, you wouldn't get the funding.
I think there's a lot of bullshit in academia but it's not so much about the engineering vs science distinction being made here as it is about any situation where people can play the game.
I think any large organisation will have it's fair share of bullshit and people playing the system. It's hard to align incentives with outcomes.
I posit this hypothesis that does away with both dark matter and also dark energy. I posit that at a distance of approximately 1.5 million light-years gravity becomes slightly repulsive, gradually increasing with distance to achieve a peak repulsion, and then decreasing with distance to zero.
Thus, cosmological expansion is caused by galaxies pushing against each other, and galactic rotation can be explained by the fact that each galaxy is surrounded by a "womb" of dust, gas, and other galaxies, and this "womb" pushes with repulsive gravity upon the outer stars of a galaxy to keep them in orbit at a higher speed than expected.
I give a cosmological / mathematical justification for this behavior in my Reddit article:
At the bottom, in the responses, I explain how General Relativity can be adjusted so as to retain time dilation while rejecting curved space and retaining flat, 3D, Euclidean space.
“The LHC hasn’t seen anything new besides the Higgs. This means the laws of nature aren’t “natural” in the way that particle physicists would have wanted them to be. The consequence is not only that there are no new particles at the LHC. The consequence is also that we have no reason to think there will be new particles at the next higher energies – not until you go up a full 15 orders of magnitude, far beyond what even futuristic technologies may reach.
“So what now? What if there are no more new particles? What if we’ve caught them all and that’s it, game over? What will happen to particle physics or, more to the point, to particle physicists?”
And yet we also gained a lot of value we did not expect, such as the World Wide Web.
You cannot predict the true value of basic research in a straight forward manner so let’s just stop. This is about extending our understanding of the universe. We will find ways to use that knowledge and ways to enrich our lives because of it in due course of time.
Are you referring to some NeXT box, RPC, or the cut-down SGML with links? Or any combination of thereof? It is amazing how easy it seems to appropriate technical engineering feats with simple narratives that are repeated often enough (ie. propaganda, in the Goebbelsian 20th century sense).
Everything was ready by that time, just remember the conference where it was presented. Or compare the internal memo with contemporary systems, such as the Symbolics Document Examiner. Or the NeXT demo for that matter.
The WWW you might allude to exists in large part due to US deregulation of that time, and therefore politics. The "value" part of it is as old as Alexandria, or Paul Otlet (TBL's boss who signed it off at the documentation dept. was also Belgian).
No I'm not. I'm just saying: we spent so much money on this and we expected results (even though we know there was the possibility we could get none). We got no results, so it's wasted money.
It is a problem that we wasted billions on basically nothing.
LHC discovered the first known scalar particle, and the linchpin to the mass-generation mechanism of the Standard Model.
Yes, it turned out where other experiments had begun to hint that it might be, but I can state from personal professional experience that, prior to LHC, nobody really knew what to expect. Furthermore, most of those experiments were done after LHC began construction.
I would have bet on a single low-mass Higgs, had I been asked, only because it was the Standard Model prediction, but I would not have bet very much. I think most people expected something Higgs-like, but slightly different. I think everyone is surprised that there have been no surprises (hence this very article).
The very absence of surprises is perhaps the most important result from LHC. There were lots of good reasons to expect new stuff at a few TeV, and for some reason, those reasons just weren't good enough.
Viewed another way, if we hadn't built LHC, physicists would have continued to clamor to build something very akin to LHC until something LHC-like was built. It represented the most effort- and cost-efficient approach to the best predictions we could muster!
A collider, probably lepton/anti-lepton, that sits on the Higgs resonance is the clear next step, now that the Higgs mass is known, just as it has been since the "discovery machine" LHC was proposed.
It is said that at the beginning of the 20. century many physicists thought that there wasn't that much more to discover and that most of the theories had been worked out already. There were a few areas where "weird" phenomena were observed (notably in electrodynamics and atom theory) but many people were confident that these would eventually be resolved with the existing theories. Fast forward 20 years and two completely new fields of physics (quantum mechanics and relativity) were discovered.
Personally I still think that we've just scratched the surface of the laws of the universe and it's not impossible that we'll have another wave of theories that will make our current understanding of physics seem hopelessly outdated by the end of the century. And in fact there are some areas where "weird" stuff seems to happen, dark energy or dark matter is a good example for this. I'd be really disappointed if we already discovered everything there is as well in terms of the laws of physics, I mean how boring would that be?