June 13, Stephen Sekula, chair of physics and associate professor of experimental particle physics at SMU Dallas, for an enlightening piece about how new discoveries that challenge existing research ultimately advance science. Published in the Dallas Morning News: https://bit.ly/3zpKjYT
One of my favorite quotes about science comes not from a practicing scientist but from a comedian, Dara O’Briain. He brilliantly summarized the whole point of science and how it makes progress: “Science knows it doesn’t know everything, otherwise it would just stop.”
Physicists, those scientists who study energy, matter, space and time, have just discovered a vast gap in their knowledge thanks to the unpredictable behavior of the tiniest-of-tiny particles, the muon. And if history is repeated, the new generation of physicists will discover pathbreaking ideas that could lead to revolutionary technology.
Like all science, physics advances because scientists come to know what they don’t know. A great example of this happened at the end of the 19th century. At that time, the physical science community was riding high on the many successes of Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, forces and gravity, as well as the newly discovered laws of heat and electricity and magnetism. Many practicing physical scientists were convinced that the end of physics was in sight, that all questions would soon be answered, all of nature completely understood even down to the atoms that were assumed to make up everything in the cosmos.
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