On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 7:02 PM, Peter Humphrey <pe...@prh.myzen.co.uk> wrote: > On Friday 03 April 2015 17:11:11 Fernando Rodriguez wrote: > >> That's the problem with science in general. The one thing it may never be >> able to answer is "why?". > > I think that's the crux of the problem with some current approaches to > physics. Science does not answer the question "why?". That isn't its job. > Its job is to explain show "this is how the world works."
I think the ultimate goal though is to get down to root cause. I can have a model that does a great job explaining the behavior of a magnet without ever mentioning what a photon or electron is. However, compared to our current understanding of electromagnetism such a model is rather poor. This is how science has worked for hundreds of years. It has really only become a fashion in the last few decades to lower the bar and say "well, we'll probably never understand how this works - that isn't science's job - my theory predicts the results of most of the experiments we can do within some realm of precision and that is good enough." As I said, I think this is hubris. We think that the fact that we haven't figured out the answer means that nobody can figure out the answer. > It seems to me that prodigious amounts of time, energy and money are being > squandered on trying to find a graviton when no such beast is required to > exist. Gravity, as Einstein taught us, is an emergent effect of mass in > space-time. It isn't a force; it's an effect. Yet how many theorists and > experimenters are thrashing themselves trying to find this imaginary > particle which is supposed to moderate this imaginary force? It might have something to do with the fact that gravity as described by relativity doesn't account for the behavior of matter at small scales and high densities, or for the overall structure of the universe. Clearly SOMETHING is missing. Maybe that something is something other than gravity, but you can't rule out gravity not working the way we think it works. Plus, warping of space is a great concept, but what is it about massive objects that causes space to warp? Is there some underlying mechanism at work? > No mechanism is required because no process is operating. You have no proof of this assertion at all. Certainly there is no proof to the contrary either, but we know that our understanding of gravity is incomplete at best, so it seems a bit odd to stop investigating on the basis that we have it all figured out already. -- Rich
