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    The Quote of the Week
    By Tommaso Dorigo | June 26th 2012 06:41 AM | 13 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
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    About Tommaso

    I am an experimental particle physicist working with the CMS experiment at CERN. In my spare time I play chess, abuse the piano, and aim my dobson...

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    "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more
    precise measurement"
    Lord Kelvin, 1900

    Comments

    UvaE
    I don't know if the writers of the film "Around the World in 80 Days(2004)" were making fun of the above quote---because Kelvin never said the following--- but the actor who played him had the line,
    This is the Royal Academy of Science. We don’t need to prove anything. 
    Enrico Uva | 06/26/12 | 10:09 AM
    Hank
    With Steve Coogan in the movie, you can bet they were going to make fun of lots of stuff. Kelvin is also seen playing with a Slinky ancestor and humming the song from the commercial.

    Kelvin generally gets a bad rap because of that quote Tommaso uses (and he did a lot of terrific stuff) but it just shows scientists get cranky when they are older, like anyone else.
    —
    Want more no-nonsense, independent science? Buy Science Left Behind
    Hank Campbell | 06/26/12 | 10:31 AM
    This can mean two things. Either history repeating itself (and we're about to find some cool new things!) or Kelvin might have been just a 100 years off ;)

    Garbage (not verified) | 06/26/12 | 10:28 AM
    dorigo
    Good point Garbage... Indeed it was the spirit of my posting the sentence !!

    Cheers,
    T.
    Tommaso Dorigo | 06/26/12 | 16:08 PM
    Not everyone in 1900 was saying silly things. Henri Poincare had gave a great lecture in 1900 on the Coming Century in Physics, and he got a lot of it right.

    Best,

    Matt

    Matt Grayson (not verified) | 06/26/12 | 18:12 PM
    In fairness to Lord Kelvin, every physics and chemistry student studies the law that bears his name. Every freshman physics and engineering students still studies Newton's gravity and mechanics and Maxwell's electromagnetic laws, in both cases more or less unmodified, and people still study and learn the periodic table. 20th and 21st century physics aren't taught at a level sufficient to allow them to be used in real life (apart from a little special relativity) to anyone except upper division physics majors and graduate students. Engineer's build bridges and skyscrapers and tanks with tools of physics and chemistry that Kelvin would have been familar with.

    General relativity has profoundly shaped the world philosophically but has only the slightest impact on practical applications. QED has had profound practical applications admittedly, but few people do QCD from first principles for practical applications even if their understanding of nuclear physics is informed by it and likewise the simplified versions of weak force physics used in real life would have been comprehensible to Madame Curie and don't begin to approach its subtle mysteries.

    Everything changed, but very little of the physics and chemistry of 1900 has been truly displaced - it has just been refined in profoundly unexpected ways that he had no strong experimental indications of at the time.

    Are we today's Kelvin 2.0, or is it really the end of physics? I think we have more than polishing off constants to go, but I could imagine that we could really have a theory of everything that genuinely is the end of the line in my lifetime, or at least my children's lifetime.

    ohwilleke (not verified) | 06/26/12 | 20:10 PM
    MikeCrow
    Also consider the periodic table, and how many elements are in practical use vs ones we really haven't done much of anything with, and in some case have not even collected more than a few dozen atom worth.

    In the early 70's while considering what I wanted to be when I grew up, my dream job was Theoretical Physicist, but how many Theoretical Physicists were there jobs for?
    Boy was I wrong.
    —
    Never is a long time.
    Mi Cro | 06/29/12 | 07:46 AM
    I've always wondered how it felt living 100 years ago and knowing that no human had any idea why the sun was hot.

    exception (not verified) | 06/26/12 | 20:51 PM
    Maybe no new physics, but see what could happen to the incautious experimental particle physicist:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j4gO9sR7zs

    XD

    Ps.
    (go around 1.20 if you are in a hurry)

    Luke (not verified) | 06/27/12 | 07:39 AM
    Tony Fleming
    So this was 'perfect timing' by Lord Kelvin, what with Max Planck, and Albert working in the background at the same time!!
    Are we agreed that science has NOT yet reached the nirvana of a perfect knowledge? 
    —
    Tony Fleming Biophotonics Research Institute tfleming@unifiedphysics.com
    Tony Fleming | 06/27/12 | 10:59 AM
    The Stand-Up Physicist
    At least Lord Kelvin was right about quaternions, whatever those things are ;-)  Should we finally know the Higgs exists in a little over a week, I still don't think we can answer Feyman's childhood question about the ball in the wagon rolling to the back when the wagon is pulled.  Forget what electric charge means.
    Doug Sweetser | 06/27/12 | 11:21 AM
    Tony Fleming
    Doug, I know this (1900) was just after the time Maxwell's four equations had been formulated by Lorentz and others (including Heaviside and Hertz) from Maxwell's original 20 quaternion eqns. Do you know what was done? According to some there;s a whole lot of physics that's been lost in this reformulation.


    —
    Tony Fleming Biophotonics Research Institute tfleming@unifiedphysics.com
    Tony Fleming | 06/27/12 | 12:12 PM
    The Stand-Up Physicist
    It drives much traffic to quaternions.com.  There is nothing to those internet rumors, not a thing.  In the first edition which can be found somewhere on the Internet, there is a chapter with quaternions in the title.  Go through it, and what Maxwell did was write a bunch of proverbial pure quaternions, ones of the form (0, Ex, Ey, Ez).  He was using the German conventions, so all the letters are different, but you get the point.  And that was the extent of it.  When I get emails about the 200 missing quaternion equations, it rings that bell.  I even made a YouTube.com video on this subject.
    Doug Sweetser | 06/27/12 | 12:32 PM