
The Laws Underlying the Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood - maverick_iceman
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/09/23/the-laws-underlying-the-physics-of-everyday-life-are-completely-understood/
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smilliken
To everyone in this thread bringing up things we don't understand yet: you're
right, but probably missing the point he's trying to make.

What he means is that we have a theory ("Quantum Field Theory") that is
mathematically capable of predicting every physical phenomenon we're capable
of observing here on earth with any instruments we've invented to date. He's
definitely not saying we understand everything about the universe. By analogy,
it's like saying we know conceptually what a Turing machine is and how it
works, but not everything about computer science and software engineering.

It may also turn out that quantum field theory is somehow wrong, in the same
way that we replaced Newtonian physics with relativity and quantum mechanics.
But we still use Newtonian physics in engineering because it's only wrong in
ways that rarely matter in practice.

I highly recommend watching Sean Carroll's talks and picking up one of his
books. A few suggestions:

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFMfW1jY1xE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFMfW1jY1xE) \- "The Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time"

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrs-Azp0i3k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrs-Azp0i3k) \- "Higgs Boson and the Fundamental Nature of Reality"

* [http://www.amazon.com/Eternity-Here-Quest-Ultimate-Theory/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Eternity-Here-Quest-Ultimate-Theory/dp/0452296544/) \- "From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time"

~~~
ktRolster
_By analogy, it 's like saying we know conceptually what a Turing machine is
and how it works, but not everything about computer science and software
engineering._

That's reverse of what he is saying. As you say, we understand the Turing
machine (the most basic elements), but we don't understand everything it
implies.

Whereas in physics, we don't understand the most basic elements, but we do
understand what those elements imply (at least, the article asserts that we
do).

~~~
macspoofing
>Whereas in physics, we don't understand the most basic elements

I think he's saying we fully understand 'the most basic elements' in so far
how they underpin the 'domain of everyday life'. It's a little like saying
that the underlying physics behind the motion of bilard balls are completely
understood with just Newtonian mechanics, even though Newtonian mechanics
themselves are incomplete if applied to other domains - like explaining the
motion of the planet Mercury.

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jordigh
I thought we still weren't quite sure why bicycles don't topple over or why
ice skating is possible:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/science/21ice.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/science/21ice.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_and_motorcycle_dynamic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_and_motorcycle_dynamics#Other_hypotheses)

Also, have we figured out gravity? That's a pretty every day thing that I
thought we didn't understand yet. Has observing gravity waves given us an
answer there?

~~~
natmaster
As far as bikes go, they're designed to stay upright by automatically turning
the front wheel when it is tipped in any direction.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZAc5t2lkvo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZAc5t2lkvo)

~~~
tamana
The video says that we don't know exactly how that happens, though, and
various similar experiments give diverse results

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qaq
"A hundred years ago it would have been easy to ask a basic question to which
physics couldn’t provide a satisfying answer. “What keeps this table from
collapsing?” “Why are there different elements?”" Ok why time is moving in one
direction ?(is this basic enough question about everyday life?)

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dnautics
We do not have a good model for _the structure of water_.

~~~
macspoofing
There's a lot of 'everyday life' we don't understand. In fact most of our
scholarship is in the domain of 'everyday life'. From biology and chemistry to
computer science and economics and sociology.

What the author meant was that nothing that will be discovered in this domain
will shake fundamental physics. Things that will shake fundamental physics
won't come from 'everyday life', but rather from extreme environments like
those found in particle accelerators, and through study of gravitational
waves, CMB etc.

~~~
Avshalom
No, no. Turbulence, and especially the laminar flow -> turbulent flow
transition is A) not really understood B) could absolutely have massive impact
if we did understand it (obviously it's possible that that real understanding
could be so complicated that the existing heuristics are essentially as good
as we could get anyway).

~~~
algirau
We have not solved the Navier-Stokes equation for non general cases. This
equations describes how the velocity, pressure, temperature, and density of a
moving fluid are related.

If everything was already answered, then why offer $1M to solve an equation?
Fun?

------
visarga
Complexity. The fact that we know the basic laws doesn't mean we know how
complex systems behave. For example, we can't predict the weather more than a
few days, or the place a toddler will be at in 1 minute from now, even with
all our physical knowledge.

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okket
FYI: This blog post is from September 29, 2010.

~~~
jameshart
Has anything come up in the past six years to cast this conclusion into doubt?

~~~
Filligree
Well, we found the Higgs boson.

That reduces the doubt.

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dannypgh
Counterpoint: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shower-
curtain_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shower-curtain_effect)

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apo
Life is all around us. There's hardly a crevice too small, too hot, too cold,
too dark, or too bright where we don't find it.

But we have absolutely no idea how life got here. Pick any starting point in
the earth's history and try to spin a hypothesis for how cells came to be from
organic molecules and other stuff lying around.

You can't do it at a high enough level of detail to even attempt the most
rudimentary experiment.

~~~
Koshkin
True, a single cell is an astonishingly complex system. On the other hand,
science does, in fact, offer hypotheses as to the origin of life on Earth.
Also, the fact that life in all its forms that exist today was able to evolve
from those primitive single-cell organisms seems to me just as amazing.

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ImTalking
Don't understand his point.

100 years ago, we understood the physical laws surrounding the everyday things
like the telegraph, the radio, the bi-plane, the early cars, etc.

And 100 years from now, we will understand the physical laws surrounding
everyday things like the holograph, light speed travel, the driverless hover-
car, etc.

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jamesrcole
An analogy: it's like saying the elements of Turing Machines are completely
understood. All computation can (as far as we know) be described in terms of
them. But that doesn't mean understanding Turing Machines is saying we
understand all specific computational systems and their properties.

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Koshkin
I find it hardly surprising that physics as a body of knowledge may be finite
and that we may be already close to "knowing it all". At the same time,
physics is not the only science and therefore it can not claim to be able to
explain "everything".

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D_Alex
Wikipedia has a list of unsolved problems in physics.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics)

Most of them might arguably not be "Physics of Everyday Life", but - number
one on the list is

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(arrow_of_time)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_\(arrow_of_time\))

We do not know why time moves in the direction that it does! And you cannot
get much more "everyday life" than that.

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RobLach
Not to get too high-minded here but the most fundamental question of everyday
life: "why live at all?" is greatly dependent on completely understanding the
what we currently consider outermost fringes of physics.

Free Will in a deterministic universe is non-existent so there is no physical
capacity for choice, but once we breached the quantum threshold all sorts of
fun concepts began emerging (like multiverses for example) that bring that
lack of capacity into question.

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throwaway_exer
This article made me feel uneasy since knowing the names of several particles
doesn't mean we understand them.

And superconducting would change our world, yet it's still early days for both
the science and engineering of efficient applications.

Maybe a follow-up is needed in 2110.

~~~
Steuard
My understanding of Carroll's point here is that if we were to revisit this
question in 2110, there is absolutely no reason to suspect that the ultimate
explanation for superconductivity would have turned out to have required any
fundamental particles or interactions other than those in quantum field theory
as applied to the Standard Model (plus gravity). Certainly our ability to _do_
calculations within those theories will probably have improved drastically by
then! But there's every reason to expect that physicists of that future era
will be able to say, "Physicists from 2010 were entirely familiar with the
basic principles and structures that our recent algorithms explaining
superconductivity are based on."

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elwell
The title is a philosophical statement; one which, to me, is brazen and
absurdly proud.

~~~
Steuard
If you read the post, you'll see that Carroll means it in a specific and
experimentally precise sense: not that "physics is finished", but simply that
we have experimentally ruled out the possibility of interactions beyond the
standard model (plus gravity) that are strong enough to affect the physics of
everyday life in any measurable way. We absolute expect that there are things
we do not know about at all (much less fully understand)! But any new
interaction strong enough to have measurable effects on systems at familiar
human scales would necessarily have shown up in experimental searches many
years ago.

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beastman82
This is preposterous. We don't understand gravity.

~~~
tobinfricke
We understand gravity in exquisite detail: the theory of General Relativity is
our theory of gravity, and its numerous predictions have proven true again and
again.

But you don't even need GR for "everyday life." For that, Newtonian gravity
suffices, and the entire theory of Newtonian gravity could easily be grokked
by a high school student.

~~~
gus_massa
The GPS system needs a small but important correction due to Special and
General relativity.

From:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System)

> _Special and general relativity predict that the clocks on the GPS
> satellites would be seen by the Earth 's observers to run 38 microseconds
> faster per day than the clocks on the Earth. The GPS calculated positions
> would quickly drift into error, accumulating to 10 kilometers per day. The
> relativistic time effect of the GPS clocks running faster than the clocks on
> earth was corrected for in the design of GPS._

More details: [http://www.astronomy.ohio-
state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps....](http://www.astronomy.ohio-
state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html)

