However, at the beginning of the third decade of the 2 1 century, scientists told us that despite their great efforts, our understanding of nature and its laws was no more than that of the 1970s! What does this mean? This means that in the past 50 years from the end of 1970s to the present, our theoretical physics has somehow stopped and got into trouble! This is definitely an extraordinary thing, it is happening, and it is not an alarmist. If we go back to the history of science more than 200 years ago, at that time, scientific research was only the patent of rich children, but even so, the development of scientific theory did not appear today's dilemma.
You can simply sort it out here. At least from the late18th century, every quarter century, that is, 25 years, theoretical physics will make great progress on key issues. Newton's three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation provide a theoretical framework for people to understand everything in nature. When these theories have been popular for nearly 100 years, Antoine Laurent lavoisier advocated and improved the quantitative analysis method in 1780, and used it to verify the law of conservation of mass. At this time, people gradually began to understand the basic facts of matter, light and heat, and will gradually open the door to mysterious phenomena such as electricity and magnetism.
In the next 50 years (which can be regarded as two 25 years), people made some discoveries of great significance to the present. First of all, scientists understand that light is also a wave and discover the law of force between charged particles. Because of Dalton's atomism, people's understanding of matter has made a great leap. We have the concept of energy, explained interference and diffraction with the wave theory of light, and explored the relationship among resistance, electricity and magnetism.
Several basic concepts of modern physics appeared in the quarter century from 1830 to 1855. In these 25 years, Faraday put forward the creative viewpoint that force is transmitted by "field", which greatly promoted our knowledge and understanding of electromagnetic phenomena. At the same time, during this period, the law of conservation of energy was established by the second law of thermodynamics. In the next 25 years, james clerk maxwell further developed Faraday's idea of "field", thus establishing our electromagnetism today. Maxwell not only unified electricity and magnetism, but also explained that light is actually an electromagnetic wave. 1867, Maxwell explained the behavior of gas with atomic theory, and Clausius put forward the concept of "entropy".
During the 25 years from 1880 to 1905, scientists discovered electrons and x-rays. After several stages of research on thermal radiation, Planck finally found the correct formula to describe the thermal properties of radiation-Planck's radiation law in 1900, which ignited the spark of the birth of quantum theory and announced the beginning of the great moment of the new physics revolution. Planck therefore won the 19 18 Nobel Prize in Physics. 1905, Einstein was 26 years old. He proved that light is both a particle and a wave. He coordinated the relativity of motion with Maxwell's electromagnetic law and creatively put forward the famous special theory of relativity.
In the next 25 years, Einstein's thoughts exploded. 19 15, he put forward the general theory of relativity, claiming that the geometry of space is not fixed, but changes with time. The wave-particle duality he revealed in 1905 gradually grew into a full-fledged quantum theory by 1930, which made people realize that atom, chemistry, matter and radiation are inseparable. 1930, astronomers also realized that the universe also contains a large number of extragalactic galaxies like the milky way, which are moving away from each other. Although the significance of this phenomenon is not clear, people have realized that we may live in an expanding universe.
Einstein died in the last year of the next 25 years, namely 1955. In these 25 years, thanks to the efforts of Freeman Dyson and richard feynman, people have learned how to combine the special theory of relativity with quantum mechanics harmoniously. Not only that, people have discovered hundreds of basic particles such as neutrons and neutrinos, but also realized that the ever-changing nature is dominated by four basic forces, namely gravity, electromagnetic force, strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force.
During the 25 years from 1955 to 1980, physicists have constructed a theory that can explain the experimental results of all elementary particles and forces-the standard model of elementary particles, and the general theory of relativity has been verified by numerous experiments. Hawking put forward the theory of black hole radiation at this stage and began to explore the quantum universe. It can be said that in the history of physics, we have seen theoretical physics catch up with experimental physics for the first time. Since then, no experiment has contradicted the standard model or general relativity.
In the 1980s, as the title of the article said, the pace of theoretical physics stopped. Maybe you will raise some objections, but please think again: after 1980, is there any new theory worthy of our generation's pride? Why is theoretical physics suddenly in trouble? No one can say for sure.