The theory of nearly almost someday everything

[PB666]

http://nautil.us/issue/29/scaling/the-trouble-with-theories-of-everything

piggybacking this onto the first

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/july-2013/real-talk-everything-is-made-of-fields

Edited October 1, 2015 by PB666

[vger]

The analogy I generally used for this is "what goes up must come down." We now know that rule varies greatly based on distance from a governing body and any velocity to counter that pull.

But... yeah. I don't know how relevant the point really is though. It's very similar to "you can't know if there's a god or not because you can't scour every nook and cranny of the universe in however many dimensions there are." But science isn't really concerned with that anyhow. It just aims to prove what it can with the data that we have available.

Edited October 1, 2015 by vger

[monstah]

I fail to see the relevance, too.

[PB666]

The precedences of the past demonstrate a certain frailty of the human mind. It is not so much the point that you know what needs to change as to accept that change is needed, and no matter how fundemental the idea, it could be replaced in subsequent lines of thought. I myself think string theory is bunk, but I think the standard model is representative of a direction but not necessarily the most precise representation of reality. There is, as the author eludes to, sufficient enough variance and uncertainty in the current observations to tolerate revisions of the model.

[NuclearNut]

The primary problem I have with implying that that or any other theory will apply to everything is that it cannot. We have gone through so much research, and we have still only barely scratched what we will learn. So far we have gone through... how many models of the universe? Hundreds doubtless, and each model explains our current knowledge, that is until our knowledge expands, and what we know always expands.

Now, I do believe, from those statements, that the standard model is beginning to show the edges of what can be done with it, and thus will need upgrades and alterations to meet finds, what those are I do not know, and will thus be used as a good enough approximation in the modeling of most of the quantum world as we know it. So yes, there needs to be alterations to the standard model in time, but I have no idea where those alterations and revisions would be made etc.