Physics & Space: Knowledge Deficit, page 1

Originally posted by Cosmic911
-In your opinion, professional or not, are our abilities to conceive, design, and develop commensurate to our growth as humans? Simply put, are we technologically-appropriate at this time as a species in regards to space exploration. I realize this may be a difficult question to answer as we have no comparison.

The record of written history suggests that our growth in technology hasn't always been smooth and continuous. There are many ways to answer this. One way would be to say if it wasn't for the dark ages which lasted for centuries, we might be centuries ahead of where we are now. The dark ages was a big anomaly and drag on our technological development.

-How much farther ahead would we be if finances was less of an issue? Besides having an unlimited amount of capitol, what kind of figure would "thrust" our understanding and R&D "out of this world?" Sorry, no pun intended

It takes more than just money, it takes focus to advance..focus like the US had in the 1960's, and that we haven't really had since according to Zubrin, and I think he might be right. This is the TL/DR answer to that question: www.nasa.gov... If you really want an answer to that question, and you haven't read that, you should probably read it.

-Do the different laws and theories in physics change as we learn more? Or are these laws pretty static?

This was discussed in another thread recently. The example I gave there was Eratosthenes measuring the size of the Earth thousands of years ago. We've since come up with more accurate measures and proven the Earth isn't a perfect sphere, but he still did pretty good science way back then. A lot of refinements to science are like that. So some things change, and some things stay the same. Sometimes we completely miss the boat, like Phlogiston theory.

-How much difference is there between the theories, laws, and concepts that birthed aviation and the concepts and theories that put man into space?

A lot. Some similarities, but I'd say more differences.

-To what extent is theoretical physics imperitive to our continued development as a spacefaring species? Considering Albert Einstein was a theoretical physicist, I'd guess pretty important! How much has changed in the last 50 years between modern physics and the time before Einstein? Are we still in our infancy when it comes to understanding physics?

To use an expression that Richard Feynman used, I don't think we know how many layers the "onion" of the natural world has yet. Some of the models we have make incredibly accurate predictions so claiming infancy seems totally inappropriate when we can make such accurate predictions. In other areas, like dark matter, we are totally ignorant of what dark matter is. In balance we're probably somewhere past infancy, but we still have much to learn.

I think about how incredibly gifted and intelligent some of these scientists and engineers are and it makes my head spin. I think about the different laws of thermodynamics, or Einstein's theory of general relativity and I can easily lose an entire day to daydreaming!

I think about how many people on ATS claim all these brilliant and gifted people are wrong, and they know better despite their lack of scientific education and training, that's even more mind-boggling to me than what the scientists work on! Yes I'm sure scientists have a few things wrong, but the rate at which papers are being written and at which knowledge is growing seems to be increasing almost exponentially. It's much different than when one man like Leonardo DaVinci could understand much of then-modern science himself...now there's way too much specialization among scientists for that.