Then Einstein and Bohr broke everything again. Then Dirac and Feynman put it back together again. Now, we’ve basically got it all worked out…
Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
I love that quote. I should buy that book just as an artifact to make me happy every time I see it. The absolute pinnacle of self-aware humor.
Which book?
The book “States of Matter” by David L. Goodstein.
That’s a good one lol, love it when a textbook has some humor.
I can’t remember which text it is, but it opens talking about a bunch of physicists studying stat mech then suck starting shotguns. Then it goes “and now it’s our turn to study statistical mechanics”
People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly… time-y wimey… stuff.
Wasn’t there an experiment with lasers and reversing cause and effect?
I read this in TechnologyConnections voice.
I’ll bite - we understand turbulence, don’t we ?
As for time, it was very well understood until physicists started their shit .
Imo turbulence is “unsolved” in the same way the 3-Body problem is unsolved. It’s chaotic.
We have a mathematical model, Navier-Stokes (NS), that seems to describe motion of fluids well. In practice NS and related approximation models with simpler numerical solutions can be used to derive useful results. In that sense we can simulate turbulence for some sets of conditions and get useful approximations out. In general it’s still an open problem if NS has, given an initial velocity field, a solution that is globally defined and smooth. Practically this means we don’t know one way or the other if NS has initial conditions under which the velocity or pressure fields of the solution tend to infinity in finite time. This is the unsolved Navier-Stokes problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier–Stokes_existence_and_smoothness
Maybe the turbulence was inside us all along / the friends we made along the way.
I love the honesty of actual science.
It should be said that this is from Science Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness by Zach Wienersmith.
Weinersmith, really? Poor bastard
Thanks, though, that’s really helpful! I didn’t believe you until I looked it up :)
His last name at birth was Weiner.
And his wife’s was Smith. They combined their names when they married.
“This is how the world works, except maybe it’s not.” - Physics
“This is a model and description of how the world seems to work”
Just wait until you learn about friction!
What we need is a visionary stem dropout to put it all together in a powepoint and release a YouTube video about how academia is suppressing their ideas.
I read this in the jingle voice from ‘the history of the entire world, I guess’. You know, the part about China?
Physics is back together 🎶 and it broke again
