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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Is the world of physics now incomprehensible?
« on: 28/11/2009 13:22:20 »
It seems to me that things were looking good in the world of physics that belonged to the likes of Galileo and Newton. They postulated laws that were part of what was believed to be revealing God's work and it turned out to be relatively easy to understand and visualise. The 20th century has somewhat changed that view and, for those that believe in a supreme being, it seems that He moves in more mysterious ways than anyone would have imagined. It was once possible to visualise the universe, the immense and the minute, as extensions of how we perceive the world in which we live, but the reality is that we have no mechanisms built into our brains that can allow us to fully and intuitively grasp these worlds. We are simply not equipped to deal with the four dimensions of space-time and the possible multiple dimensions of the quantum world. The possible visualisations are only by analogy or simplistic reductions; the only real representation is mathematical and abstract.
Of course this does not mean that the various theories cannot make predictions - the true test of a theory - but it seems very hard to get any insight of the underlying structure. A good example is the recent work by Garrett Lisi. I would urge a viewing of this YouTube video of a talk for TED:
This illustrates both the beauty of his mathematical theory and also the difficulty in relating it to the reality that most mortals perceive.
However, I like to think that it may be a matter of familiarity and that when we are taught, for example, about the mathematics of Lie Groups at an early age we may develop insights which today we find difficult.
What do you think? Will Physics become easier for people to understand in future or will it become increasingly specialised, even at a fundamental level, so that very few will have any grasp of the basic concepts?
Of course this does not mean that the various theories cannot make predictions - the true test of a theory - but it seems very hard to get any insight of the underlying structure. A good example is the recent work by Garrett Lisi. I would urge a viewing of this YouTube video of a talk for TED:
This illustrates both the beauty of his mathematical theory and also the difficulty in relating it to the reality that most mortals perceive.
However, I like to think that it may be a matter of familiarity and that when we are taught, for example, about the mathematics of Lie Groups at an early age we may develop insights which today we find difficult.
What do you think? Will Physics become easier for people to understand in future or will it become increasingly specialised, even at a fundamental level, so that very few will have any grasp of the basic concepts?