I find such thoughts exciting. In the future, children will be taught basic facts that, to us in the first half of the 21st century, are some of the most complicated questions of the universe.
I think knowledge about universe will be mostly the same but streamlined. In our modern day science we have a lot of concepts that exist only because of the path we took to get to where we are now.
Most of these interpretations will be cut out once a better ways to proper undestanding is found. I imagine electrons shells, wave function collapse, pseudo-vectors, relativistic mass, xyz ... will go away quickly to be replaced with more suitable concepts previously (and still) held back by necessity of humans to be able to do some math with pen and paper.
Not going away. It's based too directly in quantum mechanics principles, and the same tools are used in too may other problems with good results. If you talk to a hard core physicist, they may explain some minor corrections, but the simple model is 99% accurate and the corrections quite technical. Perhaps there is a better theory in the future, but it will be very weird, you really don't want to know it.
> wave function collapse
It's going away, but it may take 500 years. Nobody likes wave function colapse. There is people working to eliminate it, but we have no clue if it's hard, very hard or impossible. I think that a combination of the so-called-many-worlds-interpretation and something-something-decoherence will solve it in 50 years, or 100 years or 500 years. I'm optimistic, but it may take a while......
> pseudo-vectors
Solved? The problem is drawing normal vectors that are 1-forms and pseudo-vectors that are mostly 2-forms in the same space. Most pseudo-vectors are like a tiny surface area instead of a tiny arrow. But people love to draw all of them as arrows and that causes the problem. Also, in special relativity the electric field (vector) and magnetic field (pseudo-vector) are combined in a single weird entity that fixes the problem. There is still the problem with the weak force, but I think it's solved once you replace mass with the Higgs boson. So it's "solved" if you like to use a little more math and want to translate it to everyone else that likes arrows.
> relativistic mass
Solved. Most modern Special Relativity books try to avoid relativistic mass. The problem is that you need number to accelerate to one side and a different number to accelerate to the front/rear. So it's better to skip it and use other equations. The usual "relativistic mass" is good for accelerations to one side to get circular movements, so it's nice for some problems.
Has almost nothing to do with actual orbitals. "Filling electron shells", "octets" are just idiotic old rule of thumb ideas only accidentally aligning with reality.
> wave function collapse
I think it's going away pretty fast as we exprimentally find quantum behaviors in increasingly macroscopic objects. At some point it will become clear that nothing collapses into particles and it's just that through interaction wavefunctions narrow down when they exchange some energy and momentum. But other interactions can spread them apart back again. We are gonna create consistent description of the process in both directions.
> pseudo-vectors
they are still used but they are gonna be replaced by bivectors as they are more natural
> relativistic mass
true that it's partially sovled, but we need a generation or two of people not mentioning at all in educational context or metioning it negatively for it finally go away ... today it's still treated as "useful educational metaphor" which it is not
> xyz
Basically breaking down math calculations to coordinate wise caluclations
People will stop doing that because most symbolic maths in education is going to be done with computers and rarely anyone will be doing any element-wise transforamtions on anything.
It's a good rule of thumb for hand waving chemistry. It's not good enough to predict protein folding, but it's good enough to understand how amino acids connect. I don't expect it to disappear.
> wave function collapse
I disagree because I expect a different solution to the problem.
> pseudo-vectors -> bivectors
I agree. We only have to convince the other 7999999998 persons :) .
> relativistic mass
Another good rule of thumb, but I'm not sure for whom. This days nobody has to make a DIY synchrotron at home. It can probably go away, but it will resurface from time to time like a clever trick in a YouTube video.
> xyz
I like covariant equations, so I agree. Anyway, at work we sometimes use some non-covariant approximations but we add a search to optimize the base to get the best one were we can apply to nasty coordinate tricks.
Anyway, I needed like 10 years to understand the difference between a matrix and a linear transformation. 20yo probably only can use coordinates until they grow up.
