- #1
jack476
- 328
- 125
"So what exactly has changed in physics in the last 20 years?"
So I was at a Christmas party joking around with one of my friends who is in electrical engineering and he said something basically to the effect of "Well physics hasn't changed in like 50 years"
Which is actually not a bad point, much of my undergraduate curriculum is material that is the product of work from 50+ years ago.
And on top of that, it really does (at least at a cursory glance) seem like not much has changed. We have stuff like string theory and the standard model now, theories that are incomplete and not fully tested. And we've got some fancy new lasers and accelerators, and something that's probably the Higgs Boson. But it does really seem like the truly momentous breakthroughs are all in the distant past now and progress has just slowed to a crawl.
I also don't really read a huge amount of popular science or science news, but while the stuff I do hear about seems cool, nothing really seems to point to be anything particularly huge.
So what I'm wondering is, if you were asked this question how would you respond?
PS: I responded by pointing out that at least my education won't be obsolete the week after I graduate ;)
So I was at a Christmas party joking around with one of my friends who is in electrical engineering and he said something basically to the effect of "Well physics hasn't changed in like 50 years"
Which is actually not a bad point, much of my undergraduate curriculum is material that is the product of work from 50+ years ago.
And on top of that, it really does (at least at a cursory glance) seem like not much has changed. We have stuff like string theory and the standard model now, theories that are incomplete and not fully tested. And we've got some fancy new lasers and accelerators, and something that's probably the Higgs Boson. But it does really seem like the truly momentous breakthroughs are all in the distant past now and progress has just slowed to a crawl.
I also don't really read a huge amount of popular science or science news, but while the stuff I do hear about seems cool, nothing really seems to point to be anything particularly huge.
So what I'm wondering is, if you were asked this question how would you respond?
PS: I responded by pointing out that at least my education won't be obsolete the week after I graduate ;)