[manasecret]

Originally Posted by Professor S

http://www.comcast.net/news/articles.../God.Particle/

This article illustrates everything wrong with theoretical physics.

1) `There MUST be a Higgs boson/God particle' - No, there is no such concept as "MUST" in science. Even science that we consider natural law needs assume constants to remnain true. Saying that anything MUST be one way or another closes the mind to unintended results and other possible answers and questions.

Excuse me for being glib, but duh -- that's science. But it's also science to take your best theory and assume, that because it's the best theory we have right now, you assume it's true and that its implications must also be true until the next best theory comes along. If scientists didn't do that, science would never go anywhere. Nothing proves (and can ever completely prove) that if you put a match to gasoline it will blow up, but that's what our best theory tells us so we (thankfully) assume it's true.

I know you know that, you say as much about Tesla, so I don't know why you're going on about it here.

2) The name "GOD" particle. Its shows that the true nature of popular science is sensationalism and not knowledge. Money for research and not enlightenment. The discovery of a particle that adds mass to an atom doesn't reveal anything about a real or imagined God anymore than the discovery of a neutron or proton. Its like saying you understand archetecture because you discovered a Lego.

Of course popular science is sensationalist. By definition, 'popular' science is dumbed down science stripped of the details to appeal to normal people like you and me. The Higgs boson wasn't dubbed the 'God particle' until some thirty years after it was theorized. From our friendly, neighborhood Wikipedia, The Higgs boson is

sometimes referred to in popular articles as the 'God particle', after the not-all-serious title of Nobel laureate Leon Lederman's book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?

The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? is a 1993 popular science book by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon M. Lederman and science writer Dick Teresi.

To appeal to general audiences, the book is written in a lighthearted tone, with numerous jokes and humorous anecdotes.

source1 source2

Personally, I think one of the most important things of our time for people to do is to sensationalize the boundaries of where science is now. Scientists need to express their excitement in ways that regular people can understand it. Maybe if we had more and better popular science authors spreading the new scientific ideas to the masses of laymen out there, we would have more scientists and less laymen.

3) A belief in pen and paper over experimentation. They are slaves to theory and formulaic postulation. First you make it real on paper, not unlike how statistics show reality, and then you spend 30-40 years arguing over that theory and running tests to expressly prove (not disporove) that theory. '

Tesla knew that knowledge came from the combination of theory and experimentation. He started with a broad idea and then pushed that idea to discover new ideas and concepts. Spending more time in the lab than at a desk is crucial in science, IMO. Hats off to these physicists for trying to prove the theory, but I think the years of pen and paper theory have slapped blinders on them.

This is where I'm confused by your point. How exactly is Tesla's method any different than these guys?

I'll tell you how (and how, in the end, it's not different).

Scientists understand that the old way of doing things has quite literally been flipped on its head.

Brian Greene says in his popular science book The Elegant Universe that it used to be that experimenters would be the ones making all of the exciting discoveries of new phenomena, and then the results would trickle down to the theoretical physicists to explain them with good theories. And that's a great way of doing things because there's nothing like actual physical phenomena to point at when someone asks why you're spending all this time and money on some theory. However, now and since the study of quantum physics, that way of doing things has been flipped around. Now, theoretical physicists make all of the discoveries and a little bit trickles down to the experimenters to test the theory.

It's different, but at the core, nothing has really changed except the original driving force. Discovering new phenomena with no explanation (for example, electricity) is a humongous driving force for new theories. But it's still left up to theoretical physicists to figure out the best theories to explain it, and then experimenters use that new theory to make new experiments and so on.

That's how most of science has gotten to where it is today. The "discovery of new phenomena" is a fantastic driving force.

The only thing different now is that initial driving force largely isn't there. The rest is still the same, the driving force now being a discrepancy in two major theories (relativity and quantum). However, that force has always been there, it was just overshadowed by the much larger force.

This isn't the fault of theoretical physicists. Strings are so small that it's impossible to directly "see" strings with our current technology or for the foreseeable future (perhaps ever). They're reliant on indirect tests to lend credence to their theories, which understandably makes scientists wary of their theory. The theoretical physicists know that, they're the ones that are most aware of their fragile position.

This is opposed to Tesla and others of his ilk, who could come up with a theory, and "easily" test it and "see" it.