a reply to:
werewolf99
I feel that some perspective would be useful here.
Physics, more specifically the sort of theoretical physics which string theory and other, similarly tangled (or should that be entangled?) theories
fall into, is a deeply difficult field to examine qualitatively, without at least some rudimentary understanding of the subject.
So let me give you an example of why expecting everyone who is a famous physicist, to have discovered an actual thing, as opposed to being in the
middle of the discovery process, is a fools errand.
Peter Higgs, sent a letter to a physics publication in the sixties, postulating the existence of what came to be known as the Higgs Boson, or the God
particle, as some people took to calling it. He was an old man before the existence of that particle could be proven with any credibility what so
ever, and it took an effort from thousands of engineers, hundreds of physicists, thousands upon thousands of tonnes of infrastructure, and the most
powerful particle collider ever assembled, in order to do it, not to mention decades of revision, discussion, brain storming, and discovery.
Peter Higgs does not make television shows. However, the people who do, like Brian Cox, and indeed Michio Kaku, talk about the Higgs Boson and many
other topics, because they have been given a platform to do so, and they believe that these things are worth bringing to the attention of the people.
I for one am glad of this service that they provide.
Now, these people are very capable physicists in their own right, but that does not mean that each of them will discover something ground breaking.
Discoveries like those made by Einstein and Higgs, by Dirac and Feynman, these things are rare, in a field which is so complicated that in terms of
the quantum mechanics angle, it is widely thought that anyone who tells you they understand it fully is either crazy, or simply wrong, no matter what
qualifications they have.
Higgs waited DECADES, before proof of his theory was obtainable...not obtained, but obtainable, that is to say, that he waited decades for a machine
to be created which could find out, whether he was right or not. There appears to be in principle agreement that he was, according to the results of
the Large Hadron Colliders efforts in that regard. Consider the billions of pounds, dollars, and other currencies which poured into that project, and
then tell me again that people like Michio Kaku are paid to not discover. They are paid to TRY, because even the attempt at discovering things in this
field is EXTREMELY complicated and intricate, and involves mind boggling sums, and ridiculously tiny objects, which behave very strangely, and the
ability to even HOPE to discover in that environment is only possessed by a tiny number of people globally!
edit on 9-6-2014 by TrueBrit because: Grammar edit