There’s a big difference between our current state of knowledge regarding physics and previous eras’: we now completely understand the physics of everyday existence. In the past, there were many, blatantly obvious unknowns—e.g. Newtonian mechanics doesn’t let you understand how chemistry arises from physics. Nowadays there’s a lot less room for reality to surprise us with new observations—indeed, theoretical physics has largely stalled out in recent years due to the infeasibility of obtaining observations our theories don’t already predict. More generally, this seems to be what we should expect to happen in a lawful universe: after an initial period of discovery, we eventually discover all the laws and are done. What you propose—an endless string of new discoveries, each upending the last—is incompatible with the universe having a finite description. It’s not logically impossible that we live in such a universe, but scientific progress so far seems to support finite lawfulness.
We don’t have much data on 1 million Kelvin interactions
Neither have we tried saying magical spells in a high pitch much. Aside from the difference in literary genre, why would you expect either scenario to produce anomalies that violate the fundamental laws of physics? To be sure, new discoveries are made all the time in chemistry, biology, medicine etc. but they are all very much compliant with known physics.
1 million Kelvin doesn’t even get close to the limit of known physics, LHC generates collisions equivalent to quadrillions of Kelvin, and quantum gravity is another trillion times that. To a physicist looking for new fundamental physics in a 1 million Kelvin plasma sounds about as random a suggestion as chanting spells. In terms of observational science, only cosmology still has the potential to uncover new fundamental physics, which is way beyond this galaxy or galaxy cluster. This ain’t the 17th century no more.
Do you have reason to believe we will never collect surprising observations?
Sure, it’s likely we’ll get some new surprising observations before we nail down the TOE. The question is just about how surprising, and whether they will let us upend physical limits. Agreed that there’s a lot of new interesting things we could observe, but for most of your examples, I don’t think we have good reason to think that we’ll learn new things about fundamental physics from them.
Let me rephrase my objection. I think my main issue with your post can be found in this phrase near the beginning: you speak of the “rate at which we have constantly upended our own physical theories”. I don’t think that progress in fundamental physics is like technological progress or other things which happen at a steady rate per unit effort. It’s more like exploiting a non-renewable resource: our ignorance of physical phenomena. So 400 years ago we basically started with a huge ‘reservoir’ of ignorance, which has gradually been drained as our theories improved, until now there’s only a few small pools left that we can see. The reason that we’ve seen steady progress until recently is due to our slow draining of this reservoir, so now that it’s mostly gone, we no longer have a reason to expect further such steady progress. It’s possible that we might find new reservoirs someday, but equally possible that we won’t, so it’s a reasonable assumption that many of our current theories’ physical limits will continue to apply indefinitely into the future.
There’s a big difference between our current state of knowledge regarding physics and previous eras’: we now completely understand the physics of everyday existence. In the past, there were many, blatantly obvious unknowns—e.g. Newtonian mechanics doesn’t let you understand how chemistry arises from physics. Nowadays there’s a lot less room for reality to surprise us with new observations—indeed, theoretical physics has largely stalled out in recent years due to the infeasibility of obtaining observations our theories don’t already predict. More generally, this seems to be what we should expect to happen in a lawful universe: after an initial period of discovery, we eventually discover all the laws and are done. What you propose—an endless string of new discoveries, each upending the last—is incompatible with the universe having a finite description. It’s not logically impossible that we live in such a universe, but scientific progress so far seems to support finite lawfulness.
Neither have we tried saying magical spells in a high pitch much. Aside from the difference in literary genre, why would you expect either scenario to produce anomalies that violate the fundamental laws of physics? To be sure, new discoveries are made all the time in chemistry, biology, medicine etc. but they are all very much compliant with known physics.
1 million Kelvin doesn’t even get close to the limit of known physics, LHC generates collisions equivalent to quadrillions of Kelvin, and quantum gravity is another trillion times that. To a physicist looking for new fundamental physics in a 1 million Kelvin plasma sounds about as random a suggestion as chanting spells. In terms of observational science, only cosmology still has the potential to uncover new fundamental physics, which is way beyond this galaxy or galaxy cluster. This ain’t the 17th century no more.
Sure, it’s likely we’ll get some new surprising observations before we nail down the TOE. The question is just about how surprising, and whether they will let us upend physical limits. Agreed that there’s a lot of new interesting things we could observe, but for most of your examples, I don’t think we have good reason to think that we’ll learn new things about fundamental physics from them.
Let me rephrase my objection. I think my main issue with your post can be found in this phrase near the beginning: you speak of the “rate at which we have constantly upended our own physical theories”. I don’t think that progress in fundamental physics is like technological progress or other things which happen at a steady rate per unit effort. It’s more like exploiting a non-renewable resource: our ignorance of physical phenomena. So 400 years ago we basically started with a huge ‘reservoir’ of ignorance, which has gradually been drained as our theories improved, until now there’s only a few small pools left that we can see. The reason that we’ve seen steady progress until recently is due to our slow draining of this reservoir, so now that it’s mostly gone, we no longer have a reason to expect further such steady progress. It’s possible that we might find new reservoirs someday, but equally possible that we won’t, so it’s a reasonable assumption that many of our current theories’ physical limits will continue to apply indefinitely into the future.