(January 6, 2009 at 1:58 pm)Purple Rabbit Wrote: I don't agree that fundamental physics arose from theory instead of experimentation. The starting point for Einstein's Special Relativity was to take the results from the Michelson-Morley experiment (MME) as an elementary result and starting point for his theorizing. In MME the speed of light was measured in two perpendicular directions. It was designed to measure differences that would be attributed to a hypothetical aether in which light was supposed to travel much in the sense that waves on water need water to exist. The existence of this mythical 'aether' (still found as a word used in the world of radio broadcast) that supposedly permeated all of space, certainly permeated almost all of the scientific community in Einstein's days. It was Einstein's genius and also an important feat for empiricism to take the results of MME seriously.
There are some theories in physics however that not yet have been tested experimentally. The most obvious one is M-brane theory (aka superstring theory), but to all scientists in the field it is clear that M-brane theory is in desperate need for experimental proof to shake off it's current hypothetical status. In the scientific community some debate on this is going on. The debate is nicely covered by Lee Smolin in his "The Trouble With Physics".
For fundamental physics, I'm talking about the theory of gravity, for example. The greeks initially thought and took as given that objects of different masses, dropped from the same height, would hit the ground at different times. They thought that the rate of falling was proportional to the mass of the object, so the heavier object would fall faster. Eventually, someone discovered it was not true, and the mass of the object is irrelevant. Eventually, the theory of gravity was developed. Later, that theory was found to be incomplete, and so on. But the problem is that people have continuously attempted to theorize something elegant to reconcile a foregone conclusion with a contradiction.
In contrast, quantum mechanics has developed from pure experimentation. Attempts to make predictions based on it have largely failed. Attempts to reconcile general relataivity with quantum mechanics have failed. And it is because we keep trying to reconcile this beloved, elegant, foregone conclusion with inconvenient evidence that it is wrong. Past attempts were successful, but quantum mechanics is an insurmountable hurdle. You have to give up the elegant math. The elegant stuff is wrong.
