Physics in Trouble: Why the Public Should Care

In this Microsoft Research program, American theoretical physicist Lee Smolin, author of "The Trouble with Physics," states that physics has lost its way amid failed experiments and wasted funding. He cites repeated unsuccessful attempts by scientists to develop a "theory of everything," or a single model to explain the theories of all the fundamental interactions of nature.

Category:

Education

[alnot01]

Most of the powerful minds I encountered as a student were mediocre teachers. Their writings were much clearer, and said all that they had to say on the subject. Over coffee and beer, they disdained polished teaching as taking time away form research, and as salesmanship over substance. Smolin is cut from the same cloth, but had the decency to move his career to a think tank. He is quite aware that his concerns nowadays are mostly philosophical. Unlike philosophers, he knows a lot of science.

[SpitamaFan]

Smolin's book is great. I'd recommend it to everyone. Smolin isn't anti-string. He simply writes that it's achievements have been overstated and other approaches have been needlessly pushed to the margins.

Smolin writes that string theory might indeed turn out to be right. Or it might indeed turn out to be wrong. But other approaches should also be encouraged.

[boodistGeek]

It's a damned shame we can't see the slides

[vksonakia]

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vksonakia

Unified Field scientist

INDIA

[vksonakia]

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vksonakia

Unified Field scientist

INDIA

[vksonakia]

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Invention of FIT technology has already changed History of science .Translation oF video will take some time Patent Paper already published open Google search engine and see three things about FIT 1-Big patents india vipin kumar sonakia 2-twitter vksonakia- covers detail articles 3-Seeing is Believing First time in world-Book .World scientist are welcome to see and test FIT

vksonakia

Unified Field scientist

INDIA

[aalderma1]

@YoLninYo : Smolin didn't record or post this instructional video. The facility where he gave the lecture is responsible.

[sbergman27]

@darcon81 "We sim dt 1of em is ryt but so far everything is still theory and..."

No. Rather, collections of hypotheses which are mathematically consistent together. A "theory" is a hypothesis, or collection, which has withstood empirical testing to the point that we can have confidence in it. I make the distinction, since unscrupulous people often take advantage of the confusion, calling successful theories they don't like "just a theory". Very slippery and deceptive. And it really fools people.

[sbergman27]

After watching, I decided to look for explanatory videos about LQG. And came up with 1 rather involved lecture with poor video and audio quality, and a few videos of Smolin bemoaning the poor funding LQG gets. Do a search for String Theory, and you get pages and pages of hits to lectures by active researchers explaining aspects of String Theory to all levels of folks from the general public, to physics students, to other active physicists. Perhaps LQG guys should try to get taxpayers interested.

[ragasaraswati]

@darcon81 Well put. Einstein said imagination is more important than knowledge, and it would take a new Einstein to come up with the incredible imagination to derive the truth about quantum phenomena. Theory and experiments are the funding blocks though to which scientific philosophy can act upon. As Einstein again said, all we know comes from experience. Imagination can reveal weak links of experience and expose the true causes instead of be deluded by symptoms.

[ragasaraswati]

Great lecture, but the audio needs compression and anti-clipping because both the dynamic range and the frequent distortion make it difficult to often hear and need constant adjustment of volume.