I've always enjoyed the history of science, and I'm fascinated in particular with the dilemma of quantum mechanics, which is that the only theories that seem to actually work in explaining the behavior of particles at the subatomic level are also bafflingly messy, counterintuitive, ad hoc-feeling and, as many physicists feel, "not beautiful." Einstein for his part famously rejected them (and spent most of his life as a bit of a scientific outcast as a result).
Many people feel that the situation we are now in is akin to Ptolemaic astronomy, in which the motion of the planets, which were understood to revolve in perfect circles around the earth, were explained through the construction of an ever-more complicated, ad hoc system of cycles and cycles within cycles (epicycles). Beauty and simplicity were restored to this messy system through Kepler's laws of planetary motion and Newtonian physics.
Some physicists, feeling that there must be some similar underlying unity behind the ad hoc theories of quantum physics, are searching for a new Kuhnian revolution, a Grand Unified Theory (that will for example encompass gravity, which has kind of been left out of quantum physics). The whole thing is really fascinating and dramatic. Will some startling new insight emerge that once again restores some order to physics and makes it accessible to human intuition? Will string theory, upon which many are pinning their hopes, do the trick? Or will physics just continue to get weirder?
I've been thinking lately that it's funny how there's an assumption that if a new breakthrough is reached, it will have huge consequences. The quantum revolution, after all, produced nuclear energy and weapons, and the transistor, which revolutionized modern life and still is doing so.
But it could be that, as we get better and better at manipulating our universe (however much social-historical arbitrariness there is in the direction of scientific exploration, that's basically what appears to be happening), successive revolutions have less and less impact. So the next revolution will refine our ability to manipulate the world. And the next one refine it even further, and so on, in ways that are progressively less directly related to our everyday life. So, the social utility of sucessive revolutions in physics declines as the subject of study becomes smaller and smaller and actually begins to lose applicability to practical life. Even as it gets more and more expensive to figure out the next smallest level of reality, with multi-billion-dollar supercolliders and other 'big science,' it becomes less important for reducing suffering and increasing the comfort of mankind.
Of course, a new explanatory theme for physics such as string theory could also burst open entirely new doors like interstellar space travel, or bring things as unimaginable to us as the transistor was to Ulysses S. Grant. This suggestion of mine could easily appear laughable in a century in light of events to come, like the famous (but apocryphal) nineteenth century patent office guy who supposedly resigned because he thought that everything that could be invented already had been. But the possibility that new scientific discoveries could actually get less and less important, is an idea that shocks the contemporary sensibility. So I like it.
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