Lord Kelvin once said : Theoretical physics is a knowledge which is nearly fully developed, do you agree?

Question

Lord Kelvin once proclaimed that theoretical physics, or in a more general sense, theoretical science, is a knowledge which is almost completely developed, NO MORE NEW DISCOVERY will be made after the 21century.

He liken the physics and maths subject as a huge building, which means all the revolutionary discovery was done by all the former great minds, Newton, Pascal, Galileo, Joule, Gauss, Gibbs and himself for instance. The great building is almost complete, what the current scientist do is just fix or modify/correct some simple problem that elude all the late scientist.

Furthermore, there will be a trend that more huge breakthrought will be made in the aspect of APPLIED science rather than the pure/theoretical science. As we can see, most of the nobel prize laureate made significant contribution in applied science( which result in more delicate/efficient product can be produce in the near futher) rather than any contribution in the so called theoretical science.

Answer 1

Not even close.

Lord Kelvin died before the ramifications of Einstein's work were fully appreciated and accepted, not to mention the discoveries made in the area of quantam physics.

None of the basic physical models which were in the mainstream of physics at the time Lord Kelvin said that are still accepted as the most correct methods of describing the universe.

Gravity, spacetime, nuclear forces, the nature of light, the interactions of individual particles at the atomic level, the existance of subatomic particles.....so many areas where physics is completely revolutionised since Lord Kelvin said that physics is fully developed. He was wrong then, and modern physicists will tell you how much there exists that we STILL don't understand.

Answer 2

A statistical point of view:

In organized science, every 50 years somebody writes something like:

-- science is over, only some details have to be discovered.

-- basically we know everything, the rest is just a question of the number of decimals.

-- in 1997 John Horgan wrote a book called "The End of Science".

They may be right but they are usually wrong.  Nature is too rich, too complex and too surprising.  But of course man can stop doing science because our society may go back to the dark ages or there is a ban on scientific research.

PS In Mathematics, it is definitively wrong. Mathematics is overwhelmed by unsolved problems.

Answer 3

I've never fully understood the rush for the Unified Field Theory.  Surely once they have this they can shut up shop?

Physics versus stamp collecting eh?  Universities will never be a place of applied anything.  There raison d'être will always be theoretical.  Even the so-called applied departments are really just blue sky thinking under another guise.

The big push is of course interdisciplinary.

The Victorian classification boundaries are beginning to disintegrate.  Where do you position Surface Science?  In Physics or in Chemistry?  

No-one sets out to do applied science; the question behind all research will always have a hypothetical base and be biased towards theory.  That is the nature of the Beast.

Are there any more big things to crack?  I hope so.

I look forward to the breaking of the language code and how Human intelligence really works.  I look forward to Cern actual finding of the Higgs Bosun.  

I live in hope,

yours Hildegardis

looking at the shadows in Plato's cave but desiring to see the light

Answer 4

If Kelvin really said that, he should have known better.  Philosophically, it would be impossible to prove that there is no physical principle or process that we don't understand or don't know about.

Answer 5

A similar sentiment, voiced by an apocryphal head of the US Patent office proclaimed that there would be no more new inventions.

Mark Twain expressed the correct view, "What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, it's what we know for sure that just ain't so."

Every theory is an abstraction of reality, we will continue to learn more things about reality, which will require more complex theories.

Answer 6

No, I don't agree.

I'm not a physicist, but even I know that there have been radical re-writings of the paradigm of physics since Kelvin's time. First Relativity, and then Quantum Physics have overturned the way physicsts think they understand the universe and its laws.

These fields are much, much more than CORRECTIONS to physics, they are fundamental re-writings of the laws on which it is based. And one thing is certain - physicsts do NOT yet have a full understanding of the universe. For example, Relativity and Quantum Theory contradict each other in some pretty fundamental ways. Relativity is true for large objects, and quantum theory applies to small objects - but the predictions of each do not overlap. So they cannot be true; they are not the "whole story". This is the search for the TOE (Theory Of Everything) which, hopefully, explains both large and small phenomena.