Oh No wrote:
not the scientists. Pickering is a sociologist, and his book is called a
sociological history. Treat it for what it is, and I believe it is a
good book. But don't accept scientific and philosophical judgements from
someone who is not qualified to make them.


Pickering's book is a very well-informed, well researched and
scientific analysis of the development of high-energy physics from 1945
to the "GUT" era of the 1980s. Just because he interprets subjective
ideas in a way that is different from your preferred way, does not make
him wrong. Sometimes the most accurate reviews of a field, and the best
new ideas, come from those who stand slightly outside the field, and
avoid the academic group-think.


We can model a hydrogen atom precisely. Beyond that we are limited to
computer solutions, but we do have a very good understanding of atoms.
We have a very good understanding at a subatomic scale also, of
electrons especially, and not bad of protons and neutrons. Beyond
quarks, I think everything is less clear cut. Gluons are accepted, but
in my view, before we start building qcd, we really ought to sort out
the remaining problems in qed, and the interpretational issues which
have plagued quantum theory since its inception.


Since you feel more comfortable when bona fide professors of physics
are expressing their views, here is a little something from Prof. Lee
Smolin.

"Although I respect my colleagues who disagree, I find their thinking
basically incomprehensible. As much as I try to see what they are
talking about, I find the assertion that nature is actually a vector in
a complex space made up of infinite dimensions as silly as Aristotle's
universe of concentric spheres surrounded by heaven with Earth at the
center".

My research suggests to me in the most clear terms that the Born
interpretation of Psi-squared as a "probability density" was one of the
great wrong turns of modern science. But I suspect it will be quite a
while before the theoretical community is willing to consider that they
might be lost in some alien and artificial landscape.

RLO

[Mod. note: again, this thread should return to astrophysics or should
go elsewhere -- mjh]