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anyone like physics?

 
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I was just curious today so I looked up a couple of interesting (to me) topics in physics. neither seem to be making much progress. cold fusion, and a unified field theory. after all these years.
 
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Looks like cold fusion is dead, but I read that the Brits think they will have plain old hot fusion working and in production "soon". Meaning within a decade or so, I think. I'll believe it when I see it.

But gravity waves seem to be the hot topic now. At least I think that's physics and not astronomy?
 
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Not directly related to cold fusion, I think, but Lockheed Martin has been working on the High Beta Fusion Reactor, which would "fit on the back of a truck" and "power a town of 80,000 people".

I don't think a Unified Theory is something we're gonna see soon.
 
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yeah, i heard about that. the truck thing. wikipedia is not the best source. im more interested in why einstein couldnt figure it out a hundred years ago. is a photon a particle or a wave. it depends how you look at it. he looked at the large and the others looked at the small, and neither could make their theory work. i think we need this knowledge. i dont like cern though.have you listened to some of the radio hosts? they say cern is the end of the world!
 
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cold fusion sure would be nice though.
 
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im just gonna keep making gold from lead ;^)
 
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Randall Twede wrote:im just gonna keep making gold from lead ;^)



Post back here and let us know when you've got that working! (And stop listening to those talk radio shows, it's bad for your health.)
 
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Paul Clapham wrote:[. . . Post back here and let us know when you've got that working! . . .

It will be sooner than cold fusion.
 
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I love, love and love physics! When I was 12, and most of the guys here played with their first computer, I was reading about the big bang theory, relativity, quarks, neutrons, atoms, and all that kind of stuff. I currently have a job where I combine computer science and physics, since we are programming calculation methods for research in the geology field. For me the love for physics is the principle of finding out what life and all the stuff is actually made of, and how it works. The more theoretical and non consumer related it is, the more I like it. Unfortunately there is not much employment in that. And if there is, you must be a real genius. And I am not a real genius I fear.
 
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My eldest brother has always loved Physics and studied it at university, so I have always had a "passive" interest in it.

Theoretical Physics does have a problem though, String Theory should have been abandoned years ago, but too many Physicists have invested too much time on it to let go, and so to get more funding they keep trying to overplay the likelihood of it being true.
 
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Ahmed Bin S wrote:String Theory should have been abandoned years ago, but too many Physicists have invested too much time on it to let go, and so to get more funding they keep trying to overplay the likelihood of it being true.


I think I disagree about that, Ahmed .
Not in the sense that string theory is true.
But because of the nature of any theory.
A theory is only a theory and is neither true nor false, until experimentally proven one way or another, possibly many years in future.
 
Ahmed Bin S
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Karthik Shiraly wrote:

Ahmed Bin S wrote:String Theory should have been abandoned years ago, but too many Physicists have invested too much time on it to let go, and so to get more funding they keep trying to overplay the likelihood of it being true.


I think I disagree about that, Ahmed .
Not in the sense that string theory is true.
But because of the nature of any theory.
A theory is only a theory and is neither true nor false, until experimentally proven one way or another, possibly many years in future.



Sorry, I probably wasn't explaining myself clearly.

Yes, you are of course right. What I meant to say was that what string theory describes could be true, or could be false, and many Physicists are continuing saying that the theory will be proved true, even though they know that it probably might not be.

The problem with string theory is that it isn't falsifiable. You can never prove it to be false - you can only "prove" it to be true. For the past few decades, every prediction of experiments proving string theory have failed to materialise. And every time this happens, the string theorists simply change their calculations and say we need collisions at higher energies to provide the evidence. So first we heard that we will see evidence for string theory when the LHC ran at 3TeV. Nothing. Then it was when it will run at 14 TeV - this hasn't happened yet, but some are already anticipating we will fail to see any evidence and are now saying we need a new collider that will run at 100 TeV! If we still see nothing, they can simply say we need to run it at 200 TeV!

The question is, should we be spending so much time on a theory that we can never disprove? When do we say enough is enough and maybe it's time to start thinking of new theories?
 
Don't get me started about those stupid light bulbs.
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