The Crisis That Hit Physics 100 Years Ago

[n2doc]

By Adam Mann October 28, 2011 | 3:15 pm | Categories: Physics


One hundred years ago, the greatest scientific minds of Europe met to address a perilous state of affairs. During the previous 20 years, curious scientists had uncovered new phenomena — including X-rays, the photoelectric effect, nuclear radiation and electrons — that were rocking the foundations of physics.

While researchers in the 19th century had thought they would soon describe all known physical processes using the equations of Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell, the new and unexpected observations were destroying this rosy outlook. Leading physicists, such as Max Planck and Walther Nernst, believed circumstances were dire enough to warrant an international symposium that could attempt to resolve the situation.

Reverberations from this meeting are still felt to this day. Though physics may still sometimes seem to be in crisis, with researchers yet to find the Higgs boson and lacking a complete understanding of dark matter and dark energy, what we do know about these mysteries is only possible thanks to the foundations laid down at the first Solvay Council.

From Oct. 30 to Nov. 3, 1911, 18 luminaries came together as part of the invite-only conference in Brussels, Belgium known as the Solvay Council. Funded and organized by the wealthy chemist Ernest Solvay, the guest list is an impressive collection of top scientists from the time.

Along with Max Planck, often called the father of quantum mechanics, there was Ernest Rutherford, discoverer of the proton, and Heike Kamerlingh-Onnes, discoverer of superconductivity as well as the chemist Marie Curie and mathematician Henri Poincaire. The youngest member of this group was a 32-year-old Albert Einstein.

more
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/solvay-congress/

[Yavapai]

1. Ah, quantum mechanics, the dreams that stuff is made of...

[Tansy_Gold]

2. As a total non-scientist happy to K&R.

I am currently reading Stephen Hawking's "The Grand Design" and am totally fascinated with it. I sooooo wish I knew more!!

Love your posts, n2doc, btw.



Tansy Gold, curiouser and curiouser

[jimlup]

3. While not the same crises I see historical parallels to the state of physics now

and the state of physics right before Einstein's 1905 papers. There are some really weird things and we don't have any idea about some stuff.

Examples:

"Dark Energy"
"Massive Neutrinos"
"CERN's fast than light neutrino anamolly"
"Dark Energy"
"Where is the Higgs we keep being promised?"
"Why is the top quark mass so large?"
"What the heck happened before the cosmic inflation era?"

I hope somewhere there is a group of young Einstein's even now about ready to revolutionize our thinking. We kinda need it... (In politics too!)

[starroute]

4. I think physics is in crisis now and doesn't yet know it

The anomalies just keep piling up. A few days ago, there was an article on evidence of large-scale structure in the arrangement of galaxies -- structure beyond anything they can explain even by invoking dark matter, which may not exist in the first place.

Back in the old days, this was known as "saving the appearances" -- because they kept adding new theories to make their calculations match the observed universe. It was particularly acute in the final days of the Ptolemaic system, when ever-more-precise astronomical observations challenged the geocentric system and forced them to add epicycle upon epicycle to make it work. When Copernicus published his heliocentric system, he didn't dare say the earth really did go around the sun, so he promoted it as making the calculations easier -- that's how messy things had gotten.

I intermittently follow what the electric universe people have to say, because even though they're kind of moonbatty at times, they're at least offering a vaguely plausible alternative hypothesis -- which is that the universe as we know it has been shaped by electromagnetic forces and not just by gravity. But I suspect the real answer may turn out to be far stranger and involve unknown unknowns.

[caraher]

5. I'm not sure why you think physicists don't know what they don't know

It'd pretty easy to find lists of mysteries in physics compiled by physicists. And if there weren't things in physics that were known to be unknown there wouldn't be much point in being a physicist.

The worst recruiting pitch in the series of mini-seminars my fellow new students and I were required to attend my first year of grad school was by a fairly well-known theorist (author of several popular works) who mainly did Standard Model phenonemology. The take-home message seemed to be, "There are a few details we need to mop up like the mass of the Higgs boson, the inevitable discovery of supersymmetric particles and making gravity play nice with field theory, but those are all just technicalities. We basically know how everything works."

Maybe he just really didn't want any new students just then...

In any case, I wouldn't waste time on the electric universe. If there were any merit to it at all it would be a thriving industry among professional theoretical astrophysicists.