Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Long Held Theories Do Fall

Sometimes in the middle of night I wake up feeling chill in my back, what if, what I'm proposing here is all based on some sort of misunderstanding of the key knowledge of the universe? It is like the feeling of watching a gigantic castle you built in your life time is crumbling down in a heart beat due to the loss of foundation. I comfort myself knowing that no one has proved it can possibly be wrong. And most importantly no experimental data or observation has proved contradiction to the prediction of the theory so far.

It is a dangerous path of a work because you are standing alone in the gigantic stream of the school of thought that has totally missed the key point of it. People would have hard time to believe that the effect so tiny and negligible in the ordinary circumstances can be the cause of such a massive change of the perception of the physical science of the nature. It reminds us that physics is such an exact and meticulous scientific discipline that even a seemingly harmless and benign physical anomaly can not be overlooked.

As such, I do not find pleasure in the destruction of the monolithic structure of the established school of thoughts, aka, gravitomagnetism, Blandford-Znajek mechanism and other theories of dark matter problems etc. But, on the other hand, there is no way personally I can comfort them for their loss or the feeling of loss to be precise. Science is a harsh discipline. Either your theory is right or close to right or not right at all.

Newtonian theory of gravity may be the case that it was right but not exactly. Still, I don't think Newton would have to feel a chill in his back or suffer a loss of sleep even if he found out that he needed dipole gravity to fully explain the cosmos. After all, he was right in the enormous amount of the cosmological data. We would say he was in the right track all along.

What would Einstein feel if he were alive and knowing what we know now? He should be proud of himself and yet would be humbled by the unexpected turn of the event on the renewed interpretation of the Lense-Thirring force. But hasn't it be the way science has made progress in our history?

And life goes on as if nothing has ever happened.

“Read everything, listen to everybody. Don’t trust anything unless you can prove it with your own research.” - William Cooper.

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