Contemplating the End of Physics
Is physics finished? The 21st century is often called the age of biology. Or artificial intelligence. Or any other emerging field. But is it the end of the world for physics? The answer is not yet known, but it may be in the next century or two.
This view is wrong in at least three distinct ways:
First, for a subject supposedly past its prime, the first two decades of this century have been pretty successful for physics.
- We saw the discovery of the Higgs particle in 2012, the detection of gravitational waves in 2015 (announced in 2016) and the first image of a black hole’s event horizon in 2019.
Second, it ignores a large part of the discipline and vastly underestimates what we can still achieve.
The aim of physics is to understand in a precise, mathematical way all manifestation of matter and energy in the universe – and we have barely started to explore this infinitude of possibilities.
Physics is self-sustaining – it can use itself to produce new fundamental insights, which can then be captured in rigorous mathematics
Instead of studying a natural phenomenon, and subsequently discovering a law of nature, one could first design a new law and then reverse engineer a system that actually displays the phenomena described by the law.
- We will begin to explore all there is to be made with these building blocks.