Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?

On 04/10/2018 07:38, Paul Schlyter wrote:
On Tue, 02 Oct 2018 07:01:20 -0600, Chris L Peterson
wrote:
You sound like a physicist from the late 1800's. Back then,
physics
was believed to be understood almost completely. Only a few minor
details needed to be clarified. However, those "minor details"
soon
expanded into relativity and QM, making physics quite different
compared to earlier...

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.

We don't know what we don't know and is out there waiting to be found.

If you would live for another 100-200 years I think you'd become quite
surprised about the development in physics more than once.
The current situation is really the same as the situation 150 years ago:
now, as well as back then, we don't clearly see the holes in our
knowledge. In the future, we'll be able to see it more clearly - but of
course it is always easier to be wiser after the fact...

We are about due for a paradigm shift in the next hundred years or so.

It just takes that one clever experiment that refutes present
established theory to open an entire new branch of physics. Science is a
game of successive approximation to reality with there always being
scope for a better more comprehensive theory to come along later that
includes all our present knowledge as a weak field limiting case.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown