As in, are there some parts of physics that aren’t as clear-cut as they usually are? If so, what are they?

  • Contramuffin@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Disclaimer: I’m not a physicist, but I am a scientist. Science as a whole is usually taught in school as though we already know everything there is to know. That’s not really accurate.

    Science is really sort of a black box system. We know that if you do this particular thing at this particular time, then we get this particular response. Why does that response happen? Nobody really knows. There’s a lot of “vague” or unknown things in all of science, physics included. And to be clear, that’s not invalidating science. Most of the time, just knowing that we’ll get a consistent response is enough for us to build cool technologies.

    One of the strangest things I’ve heard about in physics is the quantum eraser experiment, and as far as I’m aware, to this day nobody really knows why it happens. PBS Spacetime did a cool video on it: https://youtu.be/8ORLN_KwAgs?si=XqjFEjDfmnZX31Mn