Maggie's Farm

Wonderful piece - thanks for posting it. There is much crisis in physics these days. Old standard models are falling away, especially in places like cosmology, the quantum, and origins. We're going to be faced with some interesting and wonderful truths as this tangent continues...

Bob, apparently you're unaware that you're promoting a quasi-religious, "scientifically"-cultural affectation of the Standard Model. You're expressing an opinion, and one that actually surprises me with its staid out-datedness. String theory? Really?

Unfortunately this is all case in point. Such as:

The quantum mechanics is firmly established as THE theory of physics, and the Copenhagen interpretation remains the standard.

Of that establishmentarianism I have little doubt. We thought the world flat and the Church confirmed it. We thought gravity a universal constant and Newton confirmed it. We thought comets balls of dirty ice and NASA confirmed it.

While the subject is vast, I can refer you to the most recent major, most visible hiccup in the Standard Model's "scientific" findings, findings so perplexing that they have in and of themselves converted the LHC at Cern from a God Particle proof engine into a Big Bang refutor overnight. The Higg's atomic mass discovered there prevents both the Big Bang and the multi-verses. Full stop. Cosmology is now reconsidering steady state models and they're proud of this new discovery of theirs...except that it was reliably and scientifically predicted half a century ago.

It's be funny if it weren't so religious. Actually, it's still funny.

We both know how and why this stuff happens.

Opinions aren't holding that middle anymore, Chuck, yours included. (Bob's overall formulation is simply faulty, although I think he misinterpreted my use of quantum as a heresy against quantum, which it is not. My intent was quite different than that. I don't disavow the quantum, just find it infinitely interesting and wholly capable of making fools out of absolutists and the hidebound. Neither are scientific.)

Back to general physics and crisis:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/supersymmetry-and-the-crisis-in-physics/

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6836

http://www.gsjournal.net/old/physics/kalanov3.htm

http://www.principia-scientific.org/the-crisis-in-modern-physics-too-complicated.html

http://www.p-i-a.com/Magazine/Ref/Puthoff_Rosetta_ZPE.html

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.01437.pdf

http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.147701

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6226/1100.full

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25420-star-dust-casts-doubt-on-recent-big-bang-wave-result.html#.VT02BpOm1M7

http://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantum-equation-universe.html

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/everything-we-know-about-the-big-bang-could-be-wrong/ar-AA9es2p?ocid=EIE9HP

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.3093.pdf

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-debate-whether-world-made-of-particles-fields-or-something-else/

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/july-2013/real-talk-everything-is-made-of-fields

http://plasmaredshift.org/Abstract.html

I'm neither promoting or defending any of these works or countless others like them. I'm linking just these few to illustrate that the assertion that physics is in crisis is not an opinion. It is an objective, verifiable fact.

The whole business of reality has spiraled out of grasp. I suspect G-d would have wanted it that way.

It seems to me that ultimately the problem centers on perspective - a quantized instantaneous thought, as it were - and The Whole. Deducing any one point eventually confounds finding with aspects of reality and existence that require that Everything come into focus, which to thought within Everything, is impossible.

Maybe this is the genesis of the notion of G-d. And vice-versa.

The conversation here is interesting, as is the material found at the links out: http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=15598&start=105

The science is far from settled.