a physicist responds: physics has done very little for like 70 years
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- Опубликовано: 5 окт 2023
- What have you done for me lately physics???
Turns out a whole lot of stuff. Neat. Physics is cool.
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Alright, but apart from the Higgs boson, the tau neutrino, cosmic microwave background observations, graviational waves, the black hole image, the isolation and characterization of graphene, the internet, atomic clocks and the other things mentioned, what has physics ever done for us?
The internet was the product of a physics institution, but the internet is not itself a physics discovery. Let computer scientists have a few things.
Everything you listed could be completely made up except the last three things. Open your eyes not your as
Prying the mystery beyond space time would be nice. Oh probably that can’t be so readily monetized…
This is a pretty dumb comment ngl.
The Internet, was as much a discovery of Physics as the car was a discovery of Biology. Yes the fields are related, but the Internet was not purley physics in nature. It was a defense invention based on electronics and circuits which had been known for ages. The theory which enables the Internet to work on a fundamental level really has not changed all to much.
Then there is the fact all the discoveries you mentioned, Higgs, Tau, CMB, Gravitational Waves, black hole images etc outside of Graphene have no impact on the day to day live of 99,9999% of people. And will never, Black Hole physics is nice as a concept but has no known applications. Similarly, the Standard Model, which predicted the Higgs, has not changed in ages so the discovery of the Higgs similarly didnt really do anything as the Standard Model only worked with it.
The Sentiment that Physics as a field is standing still is based on the fact no new big theories have emerged in decades. We are still not any smarter on what Dark Matter or Energy are, Quantum Field Theory and GR are not an inch closer to being unified, High Energy Physics has not produced a new broader model since the Standard one, String Theory was a total bust.
Nobody argues discoveries in physics have a great impact on everyones live. The argument is that at its core the field has stood pretty still for a while.
The selection of 1973 as a date seems especially odd to me as a computer guy because of course that's when the world was first introduced to the microcomputer.
I made this same mistake while I was studying chemistry. I was like "wow, everything significant in chemistry happened more than 50 years ago". Then I got into grad school. Turns out they don't teach you recent stuff until you learn the basics. Big "well fucking duh" moment on that one.
They also don’t teach the new stuff because it is not proven or settled in a way that would be useful in teaching undergrads. Otherwise the curriculum would need to be heavily revised every year…and even in the middle of the semester.
Lol even inorganic in undergrad shows one frontier of the field of chemistry. Like hey, we don't really understand complexes, but we can explain some of their behavior by using bits of models that don't work, like VSEPR and Crystal Field Theory. There is so much room for discovery in chemistry.
+1. I was thinking that a recent Physics student could easily get that impression if they spend multiple years learning about discoveries from generations ago. It doesn't feel like they are studying anything current, and they definitely aren't conducting research on the cutting edge, but babygurl you gotta learn this stuff first. Plus, it's just VERY easy for us to convince ourselves of something that aligns with our world view.
Honestly though, I doubt most of the people making these comments have ever even taken a college level physics course.
@@derekcavanaugh1788 Inorganic feels like a fever dream to me. Idk about you, but I only had to take one inorganic course whereas physical and organic totaled to six courses between the two (including labs). Needless to say, I definitely need to brush up on it.
That's the cool thing about studying computer science, you might be reading a paper from a couple years ago in an undergrad class
My favorite physics are similar to MRI: PET scans. You basically inject someone with something radioactive like Glucose with one OH replaced by a radioactive isotope of Flourine. In this application when tumors are in the body they use up a lot of energy so the Glucose ends up there. The radioactive substance emits a positron that then annihilates quickly in the body made of matter. This emits two gamma rays that you can use to build an image and see where tumors and metastases are. It sounds so sci-fi but gets used every day. Amazing. (btw this was from the top of my head and its not my field so if I said anything wrong please correct me)
Don’t really have a background in this but this explanation made so much sense! Thanks for going out of your way to make a complex subject easy for someone to understand
Right?!?! PET scans are absolutely astonishing, _AND_ they're routine. Humanity is an awesome expression of this universe.
Good point; I’ve had one.
You had me at antimatter
Came here to mention PET scans. They're literally detecting matter-antimatter annihilations happening in a patient's body to discover where your body uses how much energy, and to me that's incredibly sci-fi. If you put that concept into a sci-fi novel and didn't call it a PET scan, people would be like "woah this is such a cool sci-fi concept".
Reminds me of people saying "there is no good music released anymore", people that didn't take any effort to do research of what is actually released (and not just the charts...)
Happens with all sorts of media. "It's so easy to find collections of the greatest X from the past few decades, but when I consume a random new X, it sucks! X is bad now!"
Combine that with nostalgia, and the fact that the more media you consume, the more media literate you are likely to become, the more likely you are to spot flaws you would not have noticed previously...
Good music continues to be released, but maybe the quality of _pop_ music declines?
@@shimrrashai-rc8fq Not at all true...maybe in the charts, but that's never been a true reflection of things.
For pop music I think these are all outstanding and refreshing right now: Caroline Polacheck, Billie Eilish, Beyonce, FKA Twigs, Porter Robinson, Grimes, Frank Ocean, SOPHIE, underscores, Charli XCX (hyperpop fase), ...
Also that's survior bias. There was certainly as much trash music back then as is now but it has long been forgotten and only the good stuff remains.
Those people drive me crazy. My coworker was complaining “remember 10 years ago when no one cared you were gay”? I just started bursting out laughing because that was not a true statement but it’s funny how we tend to think about the past
Man it's crazy how this field of science that I haven't paid attention to since high school has not made any significant discoveries since I graduated high school.
I've paid attention to physics, and there haven't been any significant discoveries since I graduated high school. I must say, though, I graduated in June, so there hasn't been that much time.
@@stooshie1616I know this is a joke but unironically, findings on gravitational waves were detected and published in July 💀
@@stooshie1616 last week the first paper showing that antimatter experiences gravity in the same way as other particles was released. There are hundreds of thousands of physicists out there, working in an endless number of different fields, and by the day people learn more and more about the way the world works :)
@@stooshie1616 The power of a good-natured, humorous comment in action: People who know something are spurred into sharing it 😉
@@stooshie1616excellent comment
As I sit at my electron microscope, I think to myself, what are physicists doing these days?
Same, as I reply on a computer that is orders of magnitude more powerful (yet also quieter!), in every possible respect, than the first one I used, using an internet connection that is similarly orders of magnitude faster than what I started with.
Rest in peace coolio
Me as I analyze the 50,000,000,000 base pairs of DNA sequenced on one machine in 24 hours
luckily, you can check.
Hello fellow electron microscopist 👋
One of my favourite bits of progress in physics is the humble LED. I saw my first red LED while in high school in about 1970. It was small and dim but wow, that's a diode that emits light! I have had a thing about LEDs ever since. Now the whole world is lit up by LED's, from phone screens to street lamps. Kind of a huge impact on regular peoples lives, even if most of them don't even notice it.
I know this is late and you are likely very well aware of it. But if not you should look up how the blue LED was made and why it came 30 years later than red and green LEDs. Fascinating stuff.
ruclips.net/video/AF8d72mA41M/видео.html
especially the blue one changed the world ;)
Veritasium did a video on the blue LED: ruclips.net/video/AF8d72mA41M/видео.htmlsi=RL9nwH5bbCjVJbQG
@@mikeg9b Sorry, I don't like that channel because there are too many half right, half wrong things mixed together to force people to click.
When thinking about progress in field of study, people usually think of large paradigm shifts; something that can completely redefine our understanding of the subject. But if you become involved in any area of research you realize that progress is usually accumulation of thousands of tiny discoveries. Also a very substantial breakthrough in a certain area might not seem super impressive from the perspective of outsiders if it does not directly impact our lives immediately.
Yeah, it took our species over 100,000 years before written language. Everything we've learned about the universe has happened in a miniscule fraction of the time we've had to learn it because of how much comes before you even get to the point that you can meaningfully answer wild questions for the time like heliocentrism. We had to stop hiding and shitting in bushes, develop tool use, develop language, develop agriculture, develop writing, develop governance, develop trade, develop translation, develop mathematics and so on and so on before you get to the likes of Galileo and Copernicus and those guys came around roughly 2000 years after Archimedes, Euclid, Pythagoras, etc.. Before we could even begin to start answering the kind of questions we can answer now calculus had to be developed and G.O.A.T Isaac Newton came in and started hammering in loose nails everywhere. So much gets lost in the details because it's easier to explain the really big stuff and very hard to get people to understand the significance of the really small.
Yeah, the mainstream is guilty of only really wanting the "sensational" stuff. Steady progress is "boring" to them.
Oh right! Accumulation of thousands of people are needed for discoveries in physics! What about these?
- Bell's Theorems
- Newton's dynamical laws and gravitation
- Special Relativity
- Schrodinger's wave equation
- Schwarzchild's solution
- Prediction of the Higg's Boson
- Maxwell's equations
- Friedmann's equations
- Heisenberg's uncertainty principle
- Pauli's prediction of neutrinos
- Dirac's prediction of antimatter
- Weinberg's electro-weak unification
I guess taking a picture of something theorized 100 years ago must be really considered a breakthrough, truly an amazing feat!
Real progress is when the paradigm shifts happen. The boring, incremental progress is just the existing paradigm playing itself out and keeping the scientists occupied until the next paradigm shift that will provide a new context to all of the results obtained during the boring period
@@octavioavila6548 Fortunately for the real world, science's effectiveness isn't graded on how entertaining or boring it is to laymen.
A note on MRI: Not only is it a big success story of modern physics, it is also a big success story of applied mathematics. See, the MRI machine takes a bunch of measurements of your body from a bunch of different angles. But it turns out, to exactly figure out the state of your body with high resolution requires a *lot* of measurements. To take enough measurements to get MRI images of the quality one is used to, one would need to be in the machine for hours: no fun for you, bad for the patients in line behind you, expensive for the hospital, and more chance of motion blur from you moving around.
But if you've ever had an MRI scan, chances are you weren't in there that long. How? Applied mathematicians figured out how one could take *not enough measurements*, but use what we know about the structure of an image to reconstruct a high-resolution image anyway, despite having fewer measurements than are technically necessary. This method of "subsampling" has been integral to the success of MRI. And progress continues to occur on this front, nowadays using deep learning. MRI (and CT, and PET, and...) will keep getting better and better thanks to advances in image processing.
Compressive sensing and compression in general is such a fascinating and subtle topic which a lot of people (including physicsists I've talked to) think is trivial.
This and also how the theory transferred to chemistry in NMR spectroscopy which may be the most powerful analytical tool for deducing/affirming structures of molecules
I have a vague idea it involves a lot of Fourier Methods.
obligatory "all physics is just applied mathematics" comment
Hard to overstate how much I love this channel
One of the few channels where I watch every single video immediately and completely
@@theryanglepodcast2482right?! I immediately got excited to see she posted this morning when I woke up. There hasn't been a video I didn't like and watch all the way through.
@@theryanglepodcast2482 i think her glasses should be bigger.
@HarryNicholas, oh, like Spaceballs? Every episode they get bigger and bigger? I'm all for it.
@@theryanglepodcast2482 Agree. Trying to put my finger on why. Think it’s her easy, bff-like storytelling style & delivery that sets your expectations at chill Valley-Girl levels but then it’s the low-key dry & ridiculously sharp sarcasm that hooks the listener in and reveals the depth of intelligence & perspective we rarely get from other videos in this genre. And it’s so refreshing.
I kind of want a video that goes through cool physics stuff year by year over 70 years.
I appreciate and learn from your analysis but what really makes it compelling viewing is your earnest and unfiltered energy. Keep up the good work.
I never realized how cool lasers are until I laid on a table, someone beamed my eyes with one and suddenly I could see without glasses for the first time in my entire life
And the same ppl need extremely thick coke bottle bottomed glasses just to look at a computer screen 8+ hours/day for their day job. 😂
@@shitmandood Ever considered they like glasses or can't afford the procedure themselves?
@@kylegonewildI doubt many people "like glasses" so much as "like not having lifelong complications from laser surgery". Not everyone wants to make that roll of the dice.
Like you, I have to wade through hundreds of eye-rolling comments about how physics is broken, scientists can't think out of the box, etc. But every single interaction I have with scientists confirms their creativity and open-mindedness to me. There's an idealogical wish to return to simplicity, I think, and it definitely tracks with the apocalypse influence. "When everyone's gone, I'll finally be respected for my brilliant ideas."
It's cool to see Fraser in the comments. Yeah, I marvel at the sheer volume of mind-numbing comments. It's a weird juxtaposition to the science video they're commenting about.
Lasers are fantastic at poking holes in people who deny progress in science!
It's almost like some of these comments contain specific talking points that are orchestrated with a motive.
Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
@@hans-joachimbierwirth4727 I think there's a law against that. =:oD
Clocks!!! My EE career recently circled back to atomic clock design (I interned at NIST 25 years ago), and I'm blown away by the performance of modern lasers and laser combs. The bleeding edge of clocks are sensitive to a 1cm height difference due to gravitational redshifting. Our group is recreating the performance of the NIST-7 ensemble, which filled multiple labs and took a lot of maintenance, in a 3U rackmount box! So much of physics and engineering is deeply rooted in time.
Oh, one quibble about voltage measurements... at NIST I designed a 76.76GHz synthesizer for the Josephson Voltage Standard. The output voltage is proportional to the input frequency (multiplied by exactly defined fundamental constants). The more accurate our clocks, the more accurate our voltage reference. Sure, there's a bunch of voltage/time conversion techniques, but they're nowhere near the 14-19 zero's of our clocks.
The problem with clocks, though (impressive as the new advances are) is that they reached "good enough" a long time ago. Do you really need a clock accurate to one second in the life of the universe? Don't get me wrong - I'm not contending that quartz watches are "good enough." They're good enough for your routine life, but scientists certainly need better. But even in science there comes a point where it's hard to imagine actually more accuracy, and I think we hit that point some time ago.
The history of clock development is a story, though.
@@KipIngram Not true, there's always a need for better clocks, otherwise people wouldn't be paying to develop them: communication systems, navigation, astronomy, holdover in GPS denial attacks, physics research, stabilized lasers, having better clocks to test your clocks against, combining short and long term performance, high performance ADC's/DAC's, making them smaller, simpler, and less sensitive to environmental conditions...
Loved the joke "That was in 1953. In 1954...." - and I would have totally loved the video had you chosen to do it the other way! Thanks for the interesting and well-presented topic!
But ... but computer simulations predate physics and 1953
@@2adamast Huh? Physics has been going on for a couple of centuries, minimum, so "predate physics"...?
And what computer simulations do you have in mind that happened before 1953?
@@therealpbristow It's about her claim that modern physics were the first to do computer simulations in 1953. They have build thousands of artillery computers before and during the war doing old school physics.
@@2adamast the claim is that 1953 was the first time computer simulations were used to model the solution to a physics problem that could not be done without computers.
Artillery computers in the 1940s were doing a thing a person can do with pencil and paper, computers just do it quicker and more accurately (and afaik, gunners still learn to do it by hand in case the computers break). We didn't increase our understanding of projectile motion with pre-1953 artillery computers.
But that said, all these discoveries are building on earlier discoveries, of course they are, that's how all knowledge works.
@@camipco 1945, they had thermonuclear reactions on computer back then’ and that’s not the first
One of those posts started with "I was listening to Joe Rogan"
goddammit
What an absolute and unexpected coincidence!
His talks with Brian Cox and Neil DeGrasse Tyson were pretty nice though
@@Skillprofiwere they, though? 😉
When someone tells me they're a Rogan fan, I immediately eye them suspiciously. Because their declaration of Rogan fandom is usually followed by a load of pure bullshit.
@@Skillprofino, they were not. Neil Tyson is a fucking grifter and you content consooming goblins are the reason everyone will eventually hate capitalism. Imagine thinking watching a fighter and comedian talk to some midwits to entertain the lowest common denominator will give you any knowledge whatsoever.
Einstien or Feynman or Dirac wouldn't have talked to Joe fucking Rogan.
I have a theory that; most people do not realise how enormous the domain of Physics is. They think it’s just gravity or something similar - the point is, simple and reductive concepts. Physics is actually a massive field that you only truly learn about if you’ve proceeded further down the educational chain. Glad this video shows some of the amazing achievements!
They won’t understand they are all stupid
@@matsv201you do understand that interdisciplinary studies exist, right?
The implementation was as a result of the discovery that protons react a certain way when put in a magnetic field. It wasn't medical experts that discovered that
@@matsv201 Agreed. Almost all of her talking points are applications of physics, i.e. technologies derived from physics principles discovered many years before. Apparently, there is very little in the fundamental physics for her to talk about.
@@matsv201 I agree as well. Physics to me right now looks like that staff member in the office who is always "busy" but somehow their product is never ready to ship. Physics is first and foremost about figuring out what the universe is and how it works. Not building medical equipment. Sure they may have a hand in it and interdisciplinary studies are a thing. But like, seriously, what progress has been made in answering the fundamental questions of reality in the last 70 years? Very little. All the rest is just "being busy".
Back in the university the theory of everything seemed so exciting, but the more I learned about science the more I've grown into the mindset that "maybe there is no theory" is such a fundamental important part on how we approach learning
The unified theory of everything has already been found. But the military made sure to keep that to themselves...
I think there's a bit of anthropocentrism behind the idea of a unified theory of everything. Namely, the idea that there must surely be some underlying explanation to the universe which _we_ find beautiful and elegant. That's not to say that such a theory can't exist, but I don't think we should be deliberately looking for one. It will emerge as we improve our collective patchwork understanding of the universe, or it won't.
The editing at the beginning was mind-bending and very well-done.
From an electrical engineer, I think physics totally deserves credit for the breakthroughs that make applications possible. Don't sell yourself short.
How many of those theoretical breakthroughs were made since 1973?
@@AdrianBoykoa lot...
A lot are made through a bunch of smaller breakthrough (not paradigm shifting ones) that all compound together that brings us to an end result.
@@AdrianBoyko Since 1973 in no particular order (non exhaustive list)
Quantum computers.
Pulsed lasers.
High temperature superconductivity.
Top quark.
The acceleration of the expansion of the universe AKA dark energy.
Neutrino oscillation.
Quark gluon plasma discovered.
Graphene.
Higgs's boson found, confirming Higg's field.
Gravitational waves observed.
First ever image of black hole.
Yeah, we study "device physics" for a reason. Somebody had to come up with that.
From another EE, same. It's just wild how many how much heavy duty physics has changed electronics every year for the last 30+ years.
I think the focus in the popular press on string theory over the past 20 years has led to this believe that nothing new has happened in theoretical physics for decades. There's been lots of theoretical work that simply got drowned out by string theory.
Thought the same thing, and by me thinking I mean, she did a video covering that issue awhile ago and I am remembering it.
@@joed180This is why you need to admit that you’re not an expert on 99.99% of topics. It takes a lot of humility to admit you don’t know. But the fact is 99.99% of topics we’re ignorant about and shouldn’t form strong opinions on.
MRI’s exist. They wouldn’t without physics funding. Same for field effect transistors which are allowing us to extend moores law another 10-20 years. We can get down to 1 nm transistors now, whereas before we could only get to 5nm before tunnelling made the transistors unusable.
Despite the lack of progress on a FUNDAMENTAL (ultraviolet complete, as in it works as you go to infinite energy scales) theory of everything, immense progress has been made in practical effective theories that allow for new superconductors, smaller transistors, etc. Take for example material sciences; effective field theories allow for new materials to be predicted/made such as the superconductors used at the upgraded LHC.
And there has been incredible string-related progress too that helps us understand field theories generally.
@@ModuliOfRiemannSurfaces I mean….
Ask yourself why that is. When the "failure" that is String Theory is the biggest thing when it comes to the impact of physics in public perception then just how little impact does other physics research have?
It’s absolutely true that chemists and biologists are doing the heavy lifting for humanity whilst physicists drone on about black holes etc. sort out nuclear fusion and we’ll talk. Yours sincerely, a chemist.
Have you never heard about lasers before? MRI? Superconductors? GPS? Fiber optics? Ever smaller transistors? That's all physics
@@HunsterMonter I’d say the engineers did all that tbf
I think they said it in Futurama; "when you do something right, people won't think you did anything at all"
The headaches thing is real. I get episodic cluster headaches. When I was first seeing a neurologist, they were like its probably cluster headaches, but there's a small chance it could be something really bad so just go get an MRI so we can look at your brain and make sure. After a quick routine visit to the MRI, I can rest easy knowing there's nothing sinister going on inside my head. Before this, I guess I would have had to live with the headaches and the fear that it was a tumor just waiting to kill me. Thanks physics!
Exact same. I'm so grateful.
They did a CT scan when I first started getting chronic migraines but later on did an MRI. I think they did CT first because the CT machine was closer to me and easier to get to than the MRI machine at a different facility out of town, and I hadn't had any x-rays before. Anyway my brain looks normal, no tumors, luckily. Still haven't managed to get the migraines sorted though.
... itsnotatumor!
Someone leaving a comment on a RUclips video with a smartphone or a computer about how physics hasn't done anything lately feels like someone saying: "What the hell have hydrogen and oxygen done for me when I have all this water and air?"
Smartphones and computers were designed by ENGINEERS using science overwhelmingly developed before 1973. Sure there's been more data and discovery since then...but you'll be hard pressed to find interpretations as solid as relativity, QM or thermodynamics presented in the same time.
@@clevelandsavage Lack of revolution does not equate lack of evolution.
It's a huge mistake to assume that because we knew the basic theory we know all about it under all circumstances and no further work needs to be done to understand its ramifications and interactions with other existing and emerging theories and understandings. We are still testing and fine tuning the edges of classical mechanics even if the vast majority of it has been understood for decades and centuries.
It's also a huge mistake to think that engineers don't look at developments in theoretical and experimental physics for inspiration on where to take their own work, as well as declaring engineering to not ever be science/physics itself as well. The work of engineers help physicists understand reality.
You are missing the forest for the trees by focusing on the broad underlying theories and not recent developments built on those foundations.
@@honkhonk8009 I mean.. Quantum computers?!
@@honkhonk8009 For personal use, yeah, but just like atomic fission, I think it's still important work to be done even if it doesn't have tangible results in our lifetimes.
Did I mean fusion?
@NATIK001 How the theory works under different circumstances is application, NOT a change in theory itself. Just like a new mechanical invention won't be considered a change in Newtons laws.
Of course we do and many times physicists work AS engineers and help. But formally, physicists discover the rules and engineers apply them. It's a huge mistake to conflate the two professions though. They're two different fields for a reason.
Physicists focus on the forest and we focus on the trees. If we applied something like falsifiablility to design we'd probably get our feelings hurt--Just as scientists would if they used a 'psudoscientific' engineer assumption made for a specific case instead for a broader theory. So while blurred, the line is there.
For me, personally, coming into this video, I think I had the perception that physics was more just about theories or general, intangible topics - like gravity or the interaction of forces and matter and such. Any practical applications of physics, such as lasers or superconductors, could be easily lumped into some different category; "physics" isn't a thing you can buy in a store. Obviously you touched on that a bit towards the final third of the video, and I think that mindset is one that you could indeed poke those sorts of holes into. But I wonder how many people have that similar mindset of me where you just kind of re-categorized any new discovery or application as "not physics".
Have you ever taken a physics class? If not, maybe that's part of the issue. If you have, then we need to teach it differently.
Getting an MRI was a quasi spiritual experience for me. It was wild and so cool. It and CT Scans are some of the coolest stuff out there. Getting excited about that stuff also made having cancer so much more bearable. The nurses that operate them were all very excited to explain how they work and what they do.
They must've had some funny stories of people entering the room with metal stuff, like vacuum cleaners and office chairs too :D
It's so funny to me that the "There's been no real changes/discoveries in physics since XXXX" arguments have themselves been pretty much the same for the last decade or so
On the contrary, I think they can be tracked to which most recent historic nuclear bomb movie came out.
That's consistent with there having been no real changes/discoveries in physics since XXXX
@@timcooijmans3840LIGO.
These proclamations have been around since ancient times. Some people simply take discoveries for granted, and think they've been around forever, if they weren't around when the discoveries were made. How many people were on the internet before 1993? People seem to think it was either always about, or that it happened by itself. The same thing applies to just about anything: During WW1 radio wasn't a reliable technology, and 25 years later, in WW2, people were dumbfounded that it could be jammed...
"How can you not have invented an unjammable radio system yet?!"
🙄
s/last decade/last 490 years
This channel is one of my favorite physics discoveries I've made in the past 70 years. 😎
you win this comment section for me LOL
and same
For sometime yt had recommended videos from you and I never took the time to watch any, I guess. Now, after seeing a couple of them in a row, I feel like bingewatching your channel.
As the saying goes: Liked and subscribed.
As an engineer, I do think many of these were engineering feats, the physics used in the devices were understood. Many of the other ones were experimental physics breakthroughs, which have reinforced hypotheses or made the crisis in cosmology worse. The Higgs theorization in 64, and improvements in understanding superconductors were good one for theoretical physics in the last 70 years. To be clear I do think physicists do a lot, but I'm more hesitant about this particular list.
I mean, engineering is just about the practical application of theoretical sciences, which happens to advance those theoretical sciences when it discovers what physical applications work in what circumstances. Nevertheless, top-tier engineers developing new systems and technology work hand-in-hand with physicists throughout all stages of development to anticipate potential contingencies and to verify the proper application of theory.
Good point!
The separation between the two seems a bit silly to me. Like how do you get to the moon? Well, you're going to need a bunch of physicist and engineers working together. One or the other just isn't going to get anything new done. I happen to know some NASA Engineers irl, and they are all super into physics. There are plenty of engineers who don't care about what's happening in physics and just apply long-established stuff without thinking about it in a deep way, but those engineers don't work at NASA.
The early devices of this nature are often built by teams led by physicists. The early ones that the get out into the wild are probably engineer led with physicists on the team. It's only once they reach maturity that everyone starts making them.
"We have MRIs because we have a super-conducting material, that's so cool!" - Well thanks to modern physics it doesn't have to be SO cool 😅
Ayyyy! That pun had been bouncing around in my mind the *moment* the video got to the topic of superconductors. Very good execution on your part!
I see what you did there. 😂
sorry but where are high temperature superconductors used? Pretty much nowhere because they are all bad. The MRI machines use liquid helium even though liquid nitrogen would be cheaper. Why? Because liquid nitrogen temperature superconductors suck. They are weird ceramics incapable of forming wires and transferring huge currents.
No it would still be super cool for the foreseeable future.
Actually that was engineers applying physics.
I know it's really hard to narrow it down to just ten things, but IMHO light emitting diodes should have been on there. The first LED was made in 1961, and the first blue LED wasn't until 1972. Maybe not as flashy as photographing a black hole but I feel LEDs are definitely something they'll have daily practical experience with, and has been undeniably impactful.
Also do not look at the laser with your remaining eye.
I’m old enough to remember when a white LED was considered either impossible or very far off in the future. And this was in tech magazines I was reading in like 2002. I remember them saying something like “LEDs are really cool because of energy efficiency, but we can’t make a white light with them, so they will probably be confined for uses like stop lights for the next 25-50 years, and by then we will probably have better technology for making light.”
The impact of the LED on power use alone mandates a landmark-sized monument.
It's really cool how we'll phosphors work in white LEDs.
Remaining eye?
LEDs are about 100 years old, some Russian dude wrote about noticing his diodes were glowing a teeny weeny bit.
It bears repeating: LEARN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PHYSICS AND *ENGINEERING*!!!!
Physics needs young minds like yours to bring the majestic universe down to the level of everyday people. This is another awesome video from this young scientist. Her future is bright.
She’s already a postdoc lol, her future is secured
My favorite in the last 70ish years is the PET scan. PET stands for Positron Emission Tomography. Positron... the anti electron. WE'VE BEEN USING ANTIMATTER TO LOOK INSIDE OF PEOPLE!
How have I missed the antimatter implication of that… fucking cool! Thank you for pointing it out to me. :)
I like that the banana i ate this morning emits positrons. My insides are so sci-fi atm
Discovery of positrons is one of the greatest feats in physics (Dirac predicted using pure mathematics of spinors and then a year later experimentally verified - a lesson for the string theory preachers!). But that in itself is not 70 years old.
Not only that, but the use of radioactive elements as radiation emitters for the purposes of various tumor treatments - things like usage of cobalt-60 in "gamma knives", actually visible actinum isotopes as an actual gamma ray source, or utilizing isotopes of lighter-by-contrast-to-usual-radioactive-elements like iodine, caesium, technetium to emit beta and/or alpha particles as well, to allow them for medical uses
It's something I absolutely adore, because it's not only a breakthrough in physics, but also biology and chemistry as well, showing how connected sometimes they may be despite the differences - and also proves the point that science is actively making breakthroughs
Brava! I am not a scientist, I read (and watch) a lot of popular science. I am 75. Ten years ago, I visited my mom and she showed me a general science textbook from my childhood. I was laughing at it! This post should be mandatory for everyone
Wow, as "a youngin'", I would love to know anything in particular that stuck out to you as you were looking through it again!
@@LillianRyanUhlsame
Yes, he should tell more.@@LillianRyanUhl
Embarrassed to say that even in my mid 1980s EM physics classes fractal antennae were unknown, though the equiangular antenna that is in my book was years later realized to be the first fractal one.
Negative refractive index in mid 1980s? HAH, that's nonsensical! Except....real materials with negative refractive index constructed around the year 2000.
The universe in my textbooks was expanding at a constant rate... oops in 1990s the rate was found to be accelerating! Major shock to astrophysics!
Gravity waves? Far too weak to detect, a theoretical curiosity forever, am I right? HAH, done deal, gravitational wave astronomy now 8 years old!
Maybe a black hole at center of our galaxy? Confirmed, the orbits of stars around it prove it's there. Accretion disk photographed last year!
The Milky Way was 120,000 light years in diameter in my books.... but wait, Gaia mission now says it's 200,000 !
A laser that operates at X-Ray frequencies? Impossible, no "mirror" could reflect at the ends of a cavity to make x-rays hit excited atoms and cause them to emit another x-ray with same phase and direction, as happens in an optical laser....except, in 2009 the first x-ray laser was operated, it used bunches of electrons not a mirrors of matter!
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@@LillianRyanUhl The only one I remember is that the universe is 5 billion years old. Just a little off. People still thought that Mars had canals and Venus was warm and swampy and might be populated by dinosaurs!
By the way, your video is very informative and gave me the itch to explore more of the stuff you reference!
I hadn't come across this channel previously, but I'm glad I finally did. It seems like a channel worth watching, so I subscribed. 🖖
Regarding the headache thing: before MRI there was a way of checking the brain without just cutting it open and looking. They would replace all the cerebrospinal fluid in the brain with air, do an x-ray, and then put the fluid back. It was called pneumoencephalography and obviously it was not a fun time
holy shit! why would anyone put themselves through that?
@@fzigunovto do an xray of the brain perhaps, i dont think it was a hobbie
That procedure of replacing cerebralspinal fluid with air is still an invasive procedure compared to the MRI.
That is truly awful. A small leak causes bad headaches. I hope they were sedated.
certainly someone couldn't survive very long wih air where their cerebrospinal fluid used to be.... crap!!!
Timestamps / Chapters
Top Ten Things
1:27 Computer Simulations
4:43 MRIs
6:11 Space Exploration
7:14 Black Holes and Gravitational Waves
8:48 Bose-Einstein Condensates
10:46 Higgs Mechanism
12:10 Optical Fibers / Integrated Circuits / The Internet
14:01 Superconductors
17:17 LASERs
19:31 Atomic Clocks
22:17 Outro of List
Second List
22:38 Is it really Physics?
23:27 Physics is progressing very fast
24:34 "But there's no theory of everything!"
27:36 Grifters
31:08 Thought Journey
Thank you!
When she mentions Bose-Einstein condensates, she at first talks about gases. I want to make it clear that B-E Condensate is not a gas. Nor is it a liquid or a solid or a plasma. It's the fifth fucking state of matter!! Sounds a bit more mind blowing when you find that out.
This needs to be pinned. Great work. Thank you!😘
I'm glad this is already solidly one of the first of top comments 👍 hopefully it gets pinned too!
@@aceman0000099 thank you, as a physicist I feed off small moments of validation for my own minuscule errors
Good video.
Been an EE for 35 years and everything you said is true.
Keep it up.
jim
Thanks Doc. Modern life is so overwhelmingly awesome in myriad ways it is very possible to take it all for granted.
People who think physics hasn’t done anything in 70 years has the “where are my flying cars” or “why doesn’t the future look like the future” energy. That last one was said by Elon Musk’s son and Elon was “blown away” by it. Jeez.
Elon Musk is a dumb person's idea of a smart person.
My number 1 answer to "where is my flying car?!" is "THE AIRPORT!!! Checkout the ones made by Cessna. You people cant even figure out how a stop sign works, and can barely handle 2 dimensions, why in the world would we allow everyone to have 3 dimensions to pretend like they're the single most important person in existence in?!?!"
And honestly, the brighter greener future just around the corner was a lie. It was a marketing gimmick to keep us distracted and complacent in the actual; A) absolutely doomed state of the atmospheric gasses, and B) devastatingly detrimental spills and releases but its okay, I recycled my plastic bottles and started driving an ugly car that can burst into a self feeding hell fire at any moment!
Im still patiently waiting for people to stop listening to corporations and entities with vested interests, cackling along to the lunacy as we slip a little closer to hell every day......
I hate the 'future looking like the future' thing because The Future means science fiction and like...marketing posters? One exists to make money, the other exists to tell fun ~~fantasy~~ science-adjacent stories for fun and amusement rather than actual accurate predictions and to make money
These are awful things to base impressions of reality off of (and kinda why I lowkey dislike mythic science fiction) and unfortunately poison the human well of imagination.
If we want people to have accurate impressions of the future, we'll unfortunately need less fantastical/cinematically appealing visions of the future to be made, which requires a truly bold vision and creator to look upon the luster of fantasy and say "no" and still be popular
@@spudsbuchlaw Why do movies if accuracy trumps fantasy? Why not just read papers?
@@spudsbuchlaw the problem isn't that fantasy exists, the problem is that people have no reading comprehension and take things at face value
I just want to compliment your content, I'm not a scientist myself but I cherish most of the science communication channels, your stories are Very unique, and you do manage to make the topics digestible. (Also you make some of us weirdos laugh with the simplest things).
Very informative, thank you for this excellent video.
Great video! I would also like to mention PET scanners which were invented in 1961 and is literally an application of antimatter to detect cancers based on activity.
Why is there no progress in Physics *that I can fully understand* with a high school diploma is what they mean. Thanks for the awesome new video!
That does hint at a real problem, that science education is lagging behind science itself massively.
@@agodelianshock9422 Yeah we need to give science education a serious boost if the general public is to ever catch up. That means both in funding and in how much of the curriculum it takes up, which I think is justified because understanding science is important to everyone now. Perhaps in the 20th century science was something you could just leave to the scientists and that was fine but science now plays directly into the public debate so it is vital that everyone can participate.
Of course education getting more funding and better planned curriculum might as well be a pipedream in the current political climate in the west.
"Why can't a relatively constant investment in basic science education keep up with exponential growth in scientific progress?"
It's a mystery.
Seriously though, a lot of undergrad physics is learning about century plus old physics alongside the applied mathematics necessary to understand much of the work done in the 20th century. If we start teaching middle schoolers linear algebra...
What bugs me is when people don't take biology, chemistry, and physics in high school. How can you begin to understand the world if you don't know even the basics about how it works. I think people should even be quizzed about basic physics concepts on driving tests: 0.5mv^2 is crucial to fuel economy and accident safety. Maybe people would pollute less and be safer if they knew how the physics works....
@@SnakebitSTI True: it's a steep hill to climb, and only so much can be taught before calculus. I wish I could have taken linear algebra in HS, though! I also wish I could force-feed a basic understanding of electricity into everyone, too....
Just a small very practically important example before watching the video: Atomic layer deposition. Critical for making ever-smaller and more advanced transistors, necessary for modern computers, phones, and pretty much all electronics that require transistors. In fact, pretty much everything about the progress computers have made has required some very difficult materials physics to do.
I think you can make an argument that foundational physics is in an awkward position where there's no large cracks with progress being made into it, not practical physics
It also makes sure my car engine goes Vrooom instead of Caboom because the cylinder liners use atomic deposition to be completely symmetric and consistent.
@@personzorzThe cracks tend to get smaller over time and the advancements to fill them tend to get harder. Both mean that advancements seem less sensational.
The empirical verification of gravitational waves is a good example. Empirical evidence for General Relativity came out within a decade or so of the theory. Direct gravitational wave detection took about a century. "Guys, guys, we confirmed a major prediction of General Relativity!" just doesn't seem exciting to a public who has heard that before.
The cart winds up put before the horse: "General Relativity is correct, therefore it's just a matter of time before experiments verify its predictions" rather than "General Relativity is correct if we can experimentally verify its predictions."
There's very cool foundational physics being done now with lasers. If you want to call anything remotely practical "non-foundational," fine, but I'd urge you to think otherwise. The astrophysical advances of Webb and Hubble have only been possible due to advances in semiconductors, which have only been possible due to advances in glass-making technology and lasers. It's like looking at two sides of the same coin. Both are still physics.
You are just toooo cool. The science is wonderful, your presentation and love for science is EXCEPTIONAL. Like my MIT profs, your teaching is infectious, leading one to question, do research and find answers to what you don't know. Many Thank you's
Loved the video keep up the good work! :)
Willful ignorance is comfortable. Love the passion you have for your subject matter.
It's comfortable, until it isn't. Then you have to fight, to maintain that ignorance. (i.e. you become a denier)
@@michaelblacktree but even when you get to that point, it might be harder, but it's still easier than _the alternative:_ admitting to yourself that you're wrong and now have to learn unlearn and relearn a ton of stuff that you thought you knew. That can be a really painful realization, so some people just..... don't 😕.
Obviously it would always be easier to go back in time and choose curiosity over ignorance, but given that we don't have a time machine, that's not a viable solution :)
EDIT - in case i wasn't very clear, my point was that it's never _actually_ harder. I guess the [total, sum] "net difficulty" is higher (if that makes sense), but for individual moments/actions it's *always* easier to continue being ignorant than it is to educate yourself.
I don't think the argument that "physics does nothing" really has to do with physics. I think it's just a testament to the huge amount of science skepticism there has always been and is again on the rise. It's a "but mah tax dollar!!!" argument to me.
It’s people who are still bitter that their tax dollars told them to wear masks and stand 6 feet away from the person in front of them in line at the grocery store.
WHAT HAS SCIENCE DONE IN THE LAST 70 YEARS?
NO, NO, NOT THAT!!!
True, and it's probably not an easy obstacle to tackle, as a lot of factors might contribute to it like politics, human nature, structure of society, lack of mutual empathy and understanding, et cetera. So it's fortunate that modern content creators take up the subject and bring it home to the people in an approachable way.
Nah, I feel like the average person understands that maths and physics lead to advancement. I think the ones saying there's been no progress in physics are the consumers of airport popular science books on quantum physics who obtain the barest-bones overview of modern physics and think it's a failure of all of physics that it hasn't explained these seemingly very basic questions about the nature of reality since the time of Einstein.
Science is built on skeptecism
accurate@@nikobitan7294
I LOVE what you’re doing.
You are outstanding! You make me laugh and you make me think better. You rock!
why don't you guys just find another gravity or air or something? those sure were banger discoveries. I can't have an MRI or Higgs at home so it sure is less of a discovery.
Exactly, where’s my room temp superconductor?
I miss my luminiferous ether.
I have a lot of Higgs inside me
Where's my stargate?
Those are a ways off.... but in the meantime, how do you feel about room temp semiconductors? :D@@jacquesfaba55
I would totally listen to a decade by decade account of physics discoveries where in each episode you tell us about 10 discoveries!
This is not the channel for it
Beautiful video!
Well done!!
my favorite thing that physics has done in the past 70 years (aside from the stuff you mentioned) is something very small, very weird, and without any practical known applications- but apparently phonons can be considered to have anti-gravitational force, which is just... so silly and so cool. I know it's mostly just a result of modelling phonons in certain ways, or something like that, but its still super cool in a kind of cute way.
Sorry, this isn't how I absorb information. Can you summarize this in an inflammatory reddit post title?
😆😆
This is quite off-topic, but I finally saw your video on sexual harassment in STEM education and I had to express how much it troubled me. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it for almost a week now. I'm glad I ended up learning so much about this topic, but I'm also disappointed that I had to learn it from you and not the dozens of other professors and science communicators I have known over the years. Your video has been out for quite a while now, so I dearly hope it helped bring about some needed change. Thank you for putting it out there.
I’ve watched almost all of Angela’s videos except for that one. I’m afraid it’ll just confirm what I presume happens in any male-dominated/patriarchal field. So, how bad is it?
@@Qwicksilver It's about that bad, yeah. Still worth watching I think, if you can stomach it.
That one made me cry. Took a few days to get through it.
@@Qwicksilverit was one of the most insightful videos I’ve ever watched. Full stop. It’s something I’ve always known was a thing but it really really brought to light just how horrible the situation is.
i kept putting it off too, and finally watched it last month, and also cannot stop randomly thinking about it. I'm surprised to see its happening to someone else, too. i actually had to go somewhere that day, and couldn't turn it off, and its literally the only non-song ive ever played in the car, lol.
Thank you so much I love your videos
Of course, you often crossed the boundaries into math, chemistry, and electrical engineering, but this was so well done you deserve crossing some blurry edges
The edges _are_ pretty blurry: for nature, it's all the same stuff; we just throw boundaries at it as humans so we can try to understand parts of it. And so we can teach it in school. You see many, many cross-disciplinary teams of scientists these days. Biophysics, materials science, medical physics, physical chemistry... it goes on. When biological mechanisms are quantum in nature, it helps to understand quantum mechanics, for example.
This position has been espoused a lot by Sabine Hossenfelder, who was a pretty effective science communicator before she started slowly realizing that center/right pandering was a more profitable pathway forward
I tensed up at the name, and then relaxed in the end. 😂
But she narrows that take down to the subfield of particle physics, doesn't she?
@@Yajoy-kh3kc oh shit you might be right, thanks for the correction!
@@Yajoy-kh3kc wait no, she's written some articles about physics as a whole , look up "Why physics has made no progress in 50 years."
@MonocleTopHats alright, I looked it up and read it and yeah, her stance seems to be more extensive and hyperbolic than I previously thought (even though the title of her piece includes " 'the foundations of' physics" to be precise). Plus it's quite reductive regarding the proposed causes, ascribing alleged inertia to cultivated arrogance and lack of interdisciplinary curiosity instead of a function of general socioeconomic imperatives in academia.
AND,.. let's not forget that any day now, String Theory is going to delivery something amazing!
A physics achievement that is pretty close to my heart because I did some work with it in a project I worked on is Chirped Pulse Amplification, which allowed for higher power lasers. It earned its developer, Canadian physicist Donna Strickland, a Nobel prize. As a Canadian, I think what's not to love? More powerful lasers, a Canadian physicist, and a woman in physics being properly recognized for the work she's done!
Was going to mention this too. What a phenomenal breakthrough. I actually had dinner with Donna in January and she was an absolute sweetheart. So humble and open, just the perfect model of a physicist.
“Holy shit. Lasers.” I’m going to say this out loud every time I’m checking out at the grocery store. If anyone acknowledges the statement in any way, I’ll follow up with “Collimated beam of light…heck yeah!”
I can't imagine I'm quantum AI enough to survive the physicspocalyps. I'd probably end up stuck in a superposition. "go on and leave me. Observation would only slow you down"
Hi, I've only watched your content for about a month or two now. You might be one of the most apt and engaging presenters on this platform. I am learning so much about the subject AND how to better connect with audiences. Really appreciate the effort.
The sarcastic delivery here is on point.
Love your work 😊
I imagine that the same people who complain that physics has made not progress since Einstein, Bohr, Schrodinger, et al. would have complained in 1899 that physics had made not progress since Newton.
There was a similar complaint that physics had stalled around 1900. And then they kept running into phenomena they couldn’t explain and explanations that made impossible predictions
... No.
“The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.” Albert Michelson 1899
@@robertadsett5273 "We are very lucky to be living in an age in which we are still making discoveries. It is like the discovery of America-you only discover it once. The age in which we live is the age in which we are discovering the fundamental laws of nature, and that day will never come again. It is very exciting, it is marvelous, but this excitement will have to go." Richard Feynman, 1964
@@thstroyur I’m agreed with Feynman but that’s little to do with the opinions of people at the turn of 20’th century, before he was born
Now to slip ergodic into to day to day conversation
Great Top ten list! I think in my Top ten would be the discovery of Exoplanets, which is a huge step foward for the search of extraterrestrial life. The discovery of the cosmic microwave background, the discovery of neutrino oscillations and solving with it the solar neutrino problem.
I remember when 51 Pegasi b was discovered! Such an amazing day.
thanks for reminding us
The Fractional Quantum Hall Effect - completely unexpected! The experimental proof of the Integer was a tour de force that won the Nobel Prize in ‘85, for work done in ‘80.
Collaborating with physicists in neuroscience (from my AI background) blew my mind, every conversation just mutually kept adding puzzle pieces, and there is just something about physicists (esp. compared to computer scientists..); they always have this air of excited curiosity around them and it is so contagious
If you could ask just one question to person who knows all which question would it be?
physicists in neuroscience sounds like a scam
@@dubscheckum8246 Not exactly because brain is physical object. His role is similarly to a computer by this i mean it processing data from input and giving the result output as for example muscle contraction. Physicists are working mainly on small particles and they want to know generally the physics of our world and how it works. Brain is part of our world. Neuroscience investigating brain and neurons, which are physical objets of role simirar to transistors and wires in computer. The main difference is that the neuron transfering the electric impulse from sensors and changing it on the chemical information which brain can decript. The electric information is the electric impulse of some potential and guess what physicist are investigating electric impulses in some potential fields. Moreover each neurotransmitter also have its own electric potential so it can be also part of investigation by both considered branches of science. So here the plane of neuroscience and physics are connecting.
@@dubscheckum8246have you ever heard of the entire field of study called statistical mechanics?
@dubscheckum8246 A lot of physics is the study of complex dynamicsl systems, so there's a lot of overlap with neuroscience. The electrical activity of the brain is inherently electrodynamics so i think it makes a lot of sense given the interdisciplinary nature of neuroscience
I've watched several of your videos - some good, some not so interesting (from my perspective).
This one is close to a 10/10. I feel the like button is inadequate. You deserve something like a youtube emmy for this one.
Mathematicians get told we have done nothing for hundreds of years i guess its the last bit that people at least think they understand
The "room temperature" super conductor thing sounds like 2 competing engineering/physics projects, one taking an ordinary room in a regular house, and chilling it as much as possible, and the other developing higher temperature superconductors to place in that room.
Actually, the critical temperature for YBCO is 93 Kelvin, and the liquification temp of oxygen is 90 Kelvin, so *in theory* you could have a room with a breathable atmosphere with superconductors in it, however, you only have a 3K window between your superconductor ceasing to work, and the oxygen liquifying out of the air and suffocating you. Wikipedia lists something called BSCCO as having an even higher critical temp of 110 so that might be a little easier. That said your lungs would probably freeze but you could maybe have some device that would heat the air as you breath it in to prevent that. (I think I'm thinking about this way too much, lol)
This fucking ruined me lmao
@@Mandragara but MRI now able to work at higher temperatures and with less energy, thanks to physics. Liquid nitrogen MRI and also refrigeration MRI that use tiny amount of liquid helium, half a liter, now exist.
@@Mandragara Liquid nitrogen MRI without helium have been announced. There are superconductors that function at LN temperatures.
@@Mandragara That is a defect we in USA have, to ignore rest of world and think we lead everything. Voxelgrids Innovations in India has the nitrogen only MRI
I was about to comment that people are comparing our puny lives to the paradigm shattering early decades of the 20th century, but your rant is so much better than mine.
I’m 75 so I got to see the before and after of the computer age. While it would be nice to be a lot younger, the one thing I look at positively is that I got to see the ushering in of this absolutely fantastic age while still being able to look back and reminiscing nostalgically at a simpler time as well.
I’m binging your content and you’re hilarious.
Yup a new acollierastro video makes this a good day. Btw congrats on the 100k. I've been loving all of your latest vids, and also would like an update on the scientific equipment collection!
Brilliant video, loved it. Just finished my PhD on theoretical condensed matter physics, so thank you for mentioning us 😊 In my opinion, you missed graphene (2004), which is a huge deal.
I worked with Graphene and Buckey Balls in a Lab at Iowa State University. It gets frustrating having folks outside of the sciences, who don't appreciate that the details matter, speaking so disparagingly of the "sciences". They don't see that their lives are being improved immensely in the background. Right now AI is in the spotlight however there is a ridiculous amount of scientific and technological advances that makes those visible advances possible. SMH
I'm excited for graphene battery technology to see wider adoption.
Oh man, I just remembered the talks about graphene a few years later (not in the "I'm a physicist," way but in the "I sometimes heard science stuff in the late 00s and early 10s that was interesting and vaguely scifi) where it was like... the stepping stone to Carbon Nanotubes or something and we were going to use it to start putting up space elevators and blah-blah-blah.Funny that that's where my brain went, considering the last video put out here.
@@TacticusPrimeDon’t hold your breath. Graphene can help with conductivity, and possibly with surface area, but so far it has only added maybe 20% extra capacity or power handling (note: not both at the same time!) so don’t get too drunk on the graphene hype - claims that the graphene battery is gonna store 10x as much energy are physically impossible and always will be.
@@zjg4gcvn Not really. For composite materials, it’s brilliant. A few percent mixed into the resin used to lay up glass fibre or woven carbon fibre, increases the stiffness and toughness remarkably, without adding any extra weight. Great for racing cars and aircraft. Shame it still costs far too much to make, although the new flash graphene production process is going to start reducing that cost fairly soon.
I think when people say there's not much happening in Physics they mean fundamental theories, while you're talking about either applications, experimental/observational validations, or refinements. I can't emphasize enough how great I think those are, and I'm not too worried about a theoretical stall personally, but you're not really responding to the allegation. (note: I'm not a physicist, I just love the sound of my own voice)
“No discoveries in fundamental physics have had dramatic engineering implications for the last two generations.” - That is pretty defensible.
The LED?
Some new tings depend on older physics: Gen. Relativity is fundamental to GPS, the transistor made the PC and cell phones possible, MRI and PET scans are used to measure material fatigue, and some depend on newer discoveries: the maser and laser were invented in my lifetime - as a result we can print with our computers, level everything when building. Just a few off the top of my head.
@@stevewhisnant that’s all from science done before the boomers.
@@Matthew-by2xx LEDs and semiconductors don’t leverage any fundamental scientific insights from the last seventy years.
@@moonman6359The blue light LED won the nobel prize in physics lmao
I had no idea this was a widespread idea at all. It's something I've been mulling over in my head for a while. For reference, I am a former physicist.
70 years is clearly too much. Much of the Standard Model was developed in the 60s and 70s. 40 years ago is around where I'd put the beginning of the stagnation. And as you point out, there are many parts of physics that aren't stagnated, especially condensed matter as you point out. What's stagnated is just the most fundamental parts of physics - particle theory, astrophysics theory/cosmology. A lot of the stuff you mention is not new physics, but experimental confirmation of old physics. That's not to say that that's not important - it is - but it's not NEW in the same way as the flurry of discovery that characterized the first half of the 20th century. We're all still waiting to find out the answers to questions that were first asked a lifetime ago - what's dark matter, how does QFT work in curved spacetime, did cosmic inflation really happen, is there a unified theory of the electroweak and strong interactions, etc.
But I don't think there's anything much to be learned from this observation. So what if some fields of physics are stagnated? We have no idea how hard these problems are to solve until we try to solve them, and sometimes it takes a while. I don't think it's reasonable to expect that the ridiculous pace of discovery of the early 20th century be continued forever. It just is what it is. I don't think the field of physics is full of people whose creativity is stagnated or anything - I just think that these problems are hard as balls.
I feel the same way. Every time i hear about contemporary _theoretical_ physics, it's some unsolved problem in our models or observations that we have no idea how to explain. I don't know the last time i heard "We have finally figured out X." (and that explanation actually becoming consensus).
Experimental physics is of course still physics, and it does important research and we learn a lot from it. It just feels like it's been standing on a shaky foundation for a while, and the cement truck is nowhere in sight.
Ah another believer of the legendary black holes 🤣 math crack be strong stuff
Thanks for saying this. I feel like this video and a lot of commenters are almost willfully missing the point of (the best versions of) these critiques.
It's quite obvious they are missing the point of the critiques in bad faith.....almost as if they were offended by the criticism@@level10peon
@@level10peon The best version of this critique is equally if not more stupid than the one being responded to though, the comment literally points it out.
watching this in the week where the attoseconds research was given the nobel prize and someone explained to me how much it expands our frontier of knowledge just makes me so delighted to watch this Video .
as Always , excellent Video.
I feel like there's some very specific physics youtubers the end is aimed at, and I'm not aware who they are, but I'm curious.
Sabine Hossenfelder is for sure one.
Oh shit, congrats on getting that 100k!!!
I think the feeling people mean is, that there are fewer completely new fundamental theories. But I'd say that is because we have these very successful fundamental theories and the last decades and technological progress have been used to confirm all their predictions. And as they largely worked out, there really wasn't a reason to develop a new standard model and stuff
I have a theory of quantum gravity unfortunately it doesnt have analytic solutions nor numerical ones but I swear its right!
That thought link at the end made perfect sense
Lasers! LAZERS! You can touch'em if you want.
As a former teenager who thought he wanted to be an astrophysicist from watching videos until he tried it and saw the math only got harder I can assure you the physics apocalypse hypothesis 100% tracks
👈 This guy wanted to study physics and ended up with a master's in... communication . Lol.
Math amirite?
Yes, it turns out that the real world is actually complicated. In astrophysics, just to follow your example, the two-body problem is nice and tidy and lovely. But add just one more body and the math completely changes and in fact we can't solve that problem in general to this day. And on top of that, it's a chaotic dynamic system, so we can't even use numerical simulation to make predictions into the future beyond a certain point. It's ok for a while, but then you get to the point where just the fact that your computer uses limited precision numbers means your prediction is worthless - your prediction might put Jupiter completely on the wrong side of the sun far enough into the future.
I love the idea that physicists just aren't thinking outside the box. it's so funny
the grocery store scanner analogy is perfect! practical applications of huge discoveries that people take for granted!!
~8:00 - I haven’t heard of the Event Horizon Telescope looking at Andromeda’s SMBH, their website only includes references to Sag. A* and M87*. Please correct if wrong.