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发帖数: 4637 | | S*******l
发帖数: 4637 | 2 http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v4/n3/full/nphys899.html?foxtrotcallback=true
Thesis
Nature Physics 4, 159 (2008)
doi:10.1038/nphys899
Physics is dead, long live physics!
Mark Buchanan
Introduction
It would seem unlikely that any part of science, including physics, could
ever come to something like an 'end' — a point beyond which its subject
matter would be more or less exhausted. It's difficult to think of an
historical example of any 'dead' science; even fields as well-worn as
classical mechanics continue to elicit new surprises each year. Even so,
talk of the 'end of physics' was precisely what I heard in a recent dinner
conversation between two young physicists, who were chewing over views they'
d heard expressed by a pair of rather famous older physicists.
Physics is dead, a Nobel-prize winner had asserted, because most of the
relatively easy problems have been solved, and significant further progress
now often demands extremely complex and expensive apparatus — the Large
Hadron Collider at CERN being the most recent example. Meanwhile, in other
areas of physics — especially string theory and perhaps, to some extent,
cosmology — we seem to have reached an era in which theory is virtually
unconstrained by experiment. There remains, of course, the ever-vibrant area
of condensed-matter physics, especially rich as a source of new devices —
yet this might increasingly be seen, this eminent physicist suggested, as a
branch of materials science. |
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