What good is the physics work I have done--the equations I derived, the thoughts put in logical order attempting to understand some little corner of how the material operates in axiomatic and mathematical fashion?
I ask myself that question, not only in regard to what I did years ago, but also what I am doing now, and the virtual conference I just attended, that was so pleasing?
It's a question for my ego. I don't know the answer of course. Even back in Austin, I asked myself whether the results I spent so hard to achieve and publish were ultimately mathematical curiosities that no relation to anything measurable and observable. Such were the nature of the physical systems I looked at---far into the hyper-relativistic regime, too far to be something modeled by experiment in any near term, it seemed, if at all. Could anything I found, even in theory, be verified by experimentum crucis?
These are the questions that can keep circling in your mind for years, if you are a physicist. Probably it is my pride now, bragging about how this question plagued me, because in complaining about, I am telling that I was indeed a true physicist, even if I couldn't answer the question.
In my talk in the Virtual Prague conference, I emphasized how many of the open questions of relativistic particle mechanics have been open for a long, long time. I specifically focussed on this beautiful equation from classical electrodynamics, which turned 100 years old this month. I was very fascinated by this equation in graduate school, and my thoughts about it became a core motivation for much of my dissertation. Despite the fact that is only a low-order approximation, I pointed out in my talk, it is still "state of the art" after a century. We are still looking for the "non-approximate" generalization, to complete the theory.
On the other hand, as I said in my talk, two years ago at the conference in Mérida, when I came to physics after being away for twenty years, I was delighted to hear the talks that were using novel applications relativistic theory to explain experimental results, mostly in the astrophysical realms, in regard to the behavior of galaxies, neutron stars and other systems. Slowly experimental data had been coming in, and people were working with it, churning it over, doing "real physics," as I said. I was envious of them, I confessed, getting their hands dirty that way with the observable universe.
We are living in, I said in my talk, and "Era of Patience," not unlike the time in Prague four centuries ago when the great scientists Brahe and Kepler did their work in that city. Every physics knows the beautiful of Kepler's laws, the concise and achingly beautiful mathematical encapsulation of the orbits of the planets. In order to come to these results, of course, it took decades of the meticulous gathering of precise data on the positions of planets against the night sky, all before invention of the telescope.
"We are living in the Era of Patience now too," I said. Everyone understood my point, I'm sure. In the Twentieth Century, we got used to amazingly rapid progress in the physical science, with mind-blowingly novel theory being derived almost every year, and verified rapidly by experiment.
Then things slowed down, to put it mildly. The most significant advance in physics in the last few years was the verification* of a theoretical predication from three months before I was born. Coincidentally, this transition happened in the mid-1960s, when just about everything else in western civilization underwent a profound transformation.
That last point is something I am probably way more obsessed by than physics lately.
*alleged verification. I have my doubts that it will hold up over time.
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