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As the 20th century began, William Thomson Lord Kelvin addressed the British Association for the Advancement of Science, where he is rumored to have famously stated: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." (Albert Michelson is suggested to have made a similar remark.) Thomson then was said to have added that there was a bit of cleanup work to do on three small questions. Those, it would turn out, led to the birth of Quantum Mechanics and Special and General Relativity, among other things. Today, a very similar sense of complacency seems common in physics, the parent science for all of technology. After all, we're about done here, right? We have the Large Hadron Collider, and the good old Higgs Boson that just magically showed up upon its completion. We have various flavors of String Theory to provide a complete mathematics, and (via the SNS Resonance Theory) perhaps even a reconnection to fundamental physical properties of the universe - a true "Theory of Everything." We have graphene, easily the most amazing material discovered to date. And, last but not least, we even have the long-awaited discovery of gravitational waves, through the LIGO and aLIGO detectors. Everything seems to be falling into place. What could possibly go wrong? |
