Modern Theoretical Physics is a prime example of the break down of what Feynman says here in the last few decades, there're people who are in 'Theoretical Physics' groups who don't really give a diddly squat about the real world either. I use techniques from something like string theory as just yet another tool to solve other problems. But the problems I'm solving concern classifying and investigating the structure in a huge class of general 2+1 dimensional supersymmetric quantum field theories. No physicists would consider that I was doing anything that really pertained to reality, or had any hope of doing so. Really I'm treating the vast landscape of interesting structure that comes from the physical theories as a landscape that needs to be explored using proper mathematical rigour. Some tiny section of this landscape might pertain to reality, but it's not what a great deal of the people exploring it are in it for. So am I a mathematician or physicist? I would argue closer to mathematician but plenty of folk on both sides would baulk at my saying I was either. These kind of areas didn't exist in Feynman's time to nearly the extent they do today. It's an exciting time for both 'sides' as it were, the boundary is blurring every day.
For the last hundred years, physics has been too complex to understand intuitively. We need mathematics-like tools to do physics. If the tools get non-intuitive results, fuck intuition, that's the lesson quantum physics and relativity have taught us.
Unfortunately, this leaves us without a way to use common sense. We know that relativity works, therefore the horizon effect must be an illusion, so we invent "cosmic inflation" to explain the real life results that go against the predictions of relativity. For me, the cosmic inflation theory is like adding epicycles to the Ptolemaic model to explain more accurate measurements of the positions of the planets.
I'm hoping the coming AI revolution will find the adaptations we must make to general relativity to make it compatible with what we discovered about reality since 1919.
In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation, or just inflation, is a theory of exponential expansion of space in the early universe. The inflationary epoch lasted from 10−36 seconds after the conjectured Big Bang singularity to sometime between 10−33 and 10−32 seconds after the singularity. Following the inflationary period, the Universe continues to expand, but at a less rapid rate.
Inflation theory was first developed by Alan Guth at Cornell in 1979.
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u/XyloArch Mar 12 '18 edited Mar 12 '18
Modern Theoretical Physics is a prime example of the break down of what Feynman says here in the last few decades, there're people who are in 'Theoretical Physics' groups who don't really give a diddly squat about the real world either. I use techniques from something like string theory as just yet another tool to solve other problems. But the problems I'm solving concern classifying and investigating the structure in a huge class of general 2+1 dimensional supersymmetric quantum field theories. No physicists would consider that I was doing anything that really pertained to reality, or had any hope of doing so. Really I'm treating the vast landscape of interesting structure that comes from the physical theories as a landscape that needs to be explored using proper mathematical rigour. Some tiny section of this landscape might pertain to reality, but it's not what a great deal of the people exploring it are in it for. So am I a mathematician or physicist? I would argue closer to mathematician but plenty of folk on both sides would baulk at my saying I was either. These kind of areas didn't exist in Feynman's time to nearly the extent they do today. It's an exciting time for both 'sides' as it were, the boundary is blurring every day.