Quote:
Originally Posted by Celestial Mechanic
It was thrown out because it was discovered to be unnecessary. Had you and Jerry been around at the time of Einstein's 1905 paper I'm sure the two of you would have declared Maxwell's equations "falsified", electromagnetism must be abandoned and a new theory of electromagnetism must be found.
I would say that a theory whose defects are only revealed after a thorough, diligent use of its formalism is in need of no more than amendment. For example, Newtonian celestial mechanics predicts a certain value for the precession of Mecury's perihelion. Observation showed a discrepancy. The issue was resolved with general relativity, which although it does have a rather different paradigm than Newtonian gravity, is still only an amendment to and extension of the latter.
But we need the hard science first. We need accurate values of any modifications to the values of constants. It is wise not to speculate on uses for science that might not be confirmed. Find it and then call in the engineers!
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80 years ago this was correct; GR provided a relatively simple fix to Newtonian mechanics; a brilliant if curious dimensional solution. Even the inclusion of dark matter (when galaxies failed to rotate properly), was a modest adjustment. Then the universe became to big, and GR fell out of the saddle of Occum's razor. It is no longer simplifies - the physics surrounding 'inflation' are an unrelativistic mess. Hard science tells us the universe is too big to fit into a simple expansion box. If mainstream theory is correct, we are stuck trying to characterize weird happenings at the fringes of our observational limit. I reject that philosophy because there is enough strangeness in our own neighborhood.