On 04/10/2018 14:18, Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Thu, 4 Oct 2018 11:19:16 +0100, Martin Brown
wrote:

Back then we lacked the knowledge to know what knowledge we lacked.
That doesn't appear to be the case anymore. We have a good
understanding of where the holes in our knowledge are, and we have
good ideas about the sort of things that are likely to fill them.

And then every now and then you still get a surprise like high
temperature superconductors (though still pretty cold) and the discovery
of several new allotropes of carbon - the latter having been sat waiting
to be discovered since the first use of graphite or soot for writing.

Yeah, but those don't really surprise anybody. We almost immediately
understand them in the context of the core physics we already know.

High temperature superconductors did at least for a while and there is
still no good theoretical upper bound on how hot a superconductor can
work. Apparently simple problems can still be tricky to solve.

In essence, we understand how nature works pretty well. That's
unlikely to change. The "surprises" are just our failure to recognize
consequences of what we know.

Fine until we actually detect a dark matter particle and it turns out to
be nothing like what any of the theorists have predicted. You are
sounding so like a nineteenth century physicist that it is unbelievable.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown