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DUH-----------is there a problem with physics—
Not that I know of! Have I said there’s a problem with physics?
Well technology is of course reliant on humanity catching up with its own ass anon.
The only problem I have is too many idiots spoil the field.
What in the wide world of sport aren’t I science is putting the cart before the horse all the time atm, but mainly in physics. Don’t get me wrong I like speculation what I don’t like is just speculation on speculation ad nauseum. Evidence comes first not maths. Maths is the engine science runs on not the axle, without the axle science is going nowhere on no wheels.
Frankly I get tired of listening to how many dimensions need to be compactified until gravity works, it sounds like you’re taking a piece of paper with a graph on it and screwing it up into a ball, I have some advice throw it in the bin when you’re done. It’s just pure maths STFU. 
anon
you said something about humanity catching up. what was that about–
humanity and physics are interconnected.
Ah, well Caldrid mentioned “something that benefits mankind”. My comment was about the limited usefulness of beneficial technologies in helping mankind, in the absence of beneficial attitudes, philosophies, politics, etc.
good. i agree
was this an interview? i must have missed something
it was so much fun hump
Science and technology are entirely different things. You can have technology without understanding the underlying principles and you can have a complete understanding of some principles without having a technology that implements them.
Understanding of the underlying principles definitely helps refine technology, but that is the only contribution of science to technology.
As scientific theories go, it can be proved wrong by showing the underlying assumptions to be false or it can be superceded by showing the underlying assumption as a limiting case of more generalised assumptions.
Newton’s Theory of Gravitation isnt wrong, it is a limiting case of General Relativity.
However QM can be proven wrong, by disproving Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle. The unecrtainty principle itself predicts several impossible measurements. If anyone can make a measurement considered impossible by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the underlying assumptions of Quantum Mechanics would have been proven wrong, while it can continue to be a useful tool to explain expected behaviour of systems where such measurements are not practical, it would still be possible to discuss in theory as if the system behaved deterministically and not probabilistically as required by QM.
In my opinion, QM is a jump that most physicists haven’t mastered conceptually although they are very good at using the mathematics. The reason is not far to seek. QM (the Copenhagen iinterpretation) introduces a concept, consciousness, into physics that most don’t know how to relate to. Alternate interpretations like Many World Interpretation, that don’t require consciousness playinga role, are hardly better introducing concepts that cannot be tested.
Perhaps we won’t see the next jump until physicists gain conceptual (as opposed to mathematical) understanding of QM or prove the Uncertainty Principle wrong.
No science and technology are bed fellows they are not different things they are lovers.
Understanding a concept is all well and good but taking the ball and running with it to infinity and beyond is not going to sell many cakes to the hungry. I’m just asking for pragmatism in science. Let them eat cake.
Logic is all very well but science isn’t philosophy only.
Maths is abstract (cough). It’s moved on and is moving still. pre - CE maths was sentences. Speech effectly. Trying to describe a picture to somebody, that’s it’s problem really. Then symbols came in, we moved on from 1, 2 and everything else 3 (many). To counting live stock with stones and placing a new one down at 20. Yan, tan. Round where i live now people still say, “Can a have Yan?”. “How many children do you have?” is an irrelevent question to tribal people in the Amazon as the children are looked after collectively. They’d simply answer they don’t understand the question. Counting, time keeping, these arent applicable to them. That’s like folk who can’t get there heads around the hypermaths involved in places like CERN. Most of the maths is there, things are slowly proved all the time – Anti-protons recently. Maths predicts.
Since Galileo sent the bandwagon going and Newton sent everything on with more abstract mathmatical principles, abstraction is king. I mean, you sound like Goethe, with his Theory of Colours, where he argues against Newton turning colours into an optical spectrum and saw it as a phenomenon of human perception. He didn’t like seeing our senses broken down into numbers. Everything was holistic with him, even in evolutionary terms.
[edit] “Search nothing beyond the phenomena, they themselves are the theory.” Goethe. Is what i believe you are trying to get at.
I think that it’s silly to discredit the merit of theoretical forms of science and advocate for a purely pragmatic approach to the subject. Sure, society as a whole benefits from the technologies that emerge from physics and other types of science, but I do not believe that it is nor should it be the main interest of scientists to produce such technologies. In physicists especially, there is, more than anything, a curiosity about the structure of nature that pushes them to do things. So I would disagree that a whole field of science should be concerned with how it can benefit society. It’s about understanding how things work, not how they can be used to benefit humanity. I would argue, for example, that the crowning achievement of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity was the conceptual shift in our understanding of the universe, not the technologies that became available out of it’s success (like GPS and other stuff). So long as the fringe of science is able to keep pushing forward our understanding of the universe, then it’s doing fine-- not ‘stalling’ or taking away effort from its ‘real’ goal. And it’s not entirely mathematical masturbation on the fringes of science which seems to be where this concern stems from. A lot of physics is highly experimental still, too, and hasn’t completely fallen into mathematical abstraction. Experiments are done all over the world at places like the LHC and the SLAC trying to make sense of the physical phenomena that occur in the lab-- in addition to the blackboard-theoretical physics that are attempting to find directions for the frontiers of physics to go towards next.
Understanding > application
And besides, as soon as new scientific understandings get published, there always seem to be ambitious companies willing to implement them as can been seen in examples all throughout history and especially today. So I would argue that doing physics to aid human understanding of the universe is anything but counter-productive for society’s interests.
I think that it’s silly to discredit the merit of theoretical forms of science and advocate for a purely pragmatic approach to the subject. Sure, society as a whole benefits from the technologies that emerge from physics and other types of science, but I do not believe that it is nor should it be the main interest of scientists to produce such technologies. In physicists especially, there is, more than anything, a curiosity about the structure of nature that pushes them to do things. So I would disagree that a whole field of science should be concerned with how it can benefit society. It’s about understanding how things work, not how they can be used to benefit humanity. I would argue, for example, that the crowning achievement of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity was the conceptual shift in our understanding of the universe, not the technologies that became available out of it’s success (like GPS and other stuff). So long as the fringe of science is able to keep pushing forward our understanding of the universe, then it’s doing fine-- not ‘stalling’ or taking away effort from its ‘real’ goal. And it’s not entirely mathematical masturbation on the fringes of science which seems to be where this concern stems from. A lot of physics is highly experimental still, too, and hasn’t completely fallen into mathematical abstraction. Experiments are done all over the world at places like the LHC and the SLAC trying to make sense of the physical phenomena that occur in the lab-- in addition to the blackboard-theoretical physics that are attempting to find directions for the frontiers of physics to go towards next.
Understanding > application
And besides, as soon as new scientific understandings get published, there always seem to be ambitious companies willing to implement them as can been seen in examples all throughout history and especially today. So I would argue that doing physics to aid human understanding of the universe is anything but counter-productive for society’s interests.
That is a myth propogated by scientists to get funding for their research and make a career doing what they like 
Many scientific prinicples have been known for long before anyone thought of putting them to use in a particular technology. Bernoulli’s principle, the sceince behind modern aviation, was published in 1738 but the first application for flight didn’t come for a couple centuries.
Technologies based on gravity existed for millennia before gravity was understood
Science is not and has never been about “pragmatism”, it has always been about and will always be about some guys satisfying their curiosity. You are probably unhappy with the number of career scientists living on public funding. If that is the case, you should probably canvass for cutting public funding for scientific research.
That’s not an argument for science but an argument against it.
I think so too, but that’s what scientists are doing now as a matter of religion not scientific method. We are bored by this. Science is conjecture but not conjecture alone?
I’m losing the poll oh my god it’s but another fall of man.
A physicist isn’t all about calculas, long equations and theorems, it’s pulling things apart to see how things work. You can genuinely never know what is going to be useful. I truely admire the way the reintroduction of maths in the Renaissance to the West from Arabia has slowly brought about the secularization of mankind. It’s no longer Fortune, Deities, it’s probability and mathmatical laws. Modern physicists are the new Pythagorean schools, Arab Caliphates or the new Indian Vega math makers, or myth makers.
Favourite theory at the moment, simplified, is that there are continuous big bangs, that the super massive blackholes eventually dissipate (Hawking), mass (Higg’s boson) eventually dissipates and re-appears as the big bang as the a mass-less universe is essentially a tiny universe. This is from waves patterns they’ve noticied in the cosmic background of space-time ripples of SMB’s colliding in the univese before ours.
It is an argument neither for nor against science. For centuries science was the hobby of the wealthy or sponsored by the wealthy. It was no different from poetry. When industrialisation came about, some discovered that scientific advances can help refine technology, especially of war, so science was sponsored from public purse in the hope that new scientific discoveries will lead to tangible benefits and more and more people became career scientists, not just the wealthy or those who could find wealthy patrons. If scientific research itself seen not to yield the expected returns for the public and the public do not consider science a value in itself, public funding of scientific research will slowly dry up and it will revert to being a hobby of the wealthy or career for those that can find wealthy patrons.