Any physics tomorrow?
JAN 01, 1949
In physics come to an end with nothing left to do but the tedium of cleaning up details? There is a kind of game going on between the experimentalist and the theoretician. The former keeps bringing in new empirical constants and the latter keeps trying to reduce their number by expressing them through each other. The author speculates on what the chances are of this game’s coming to an end. Then all new constants brought in by the experimentalists would be expressible in terms of only four basic constants.
DOI: 10.1063/1.3066352
Will the development of physics in the years to come always present us with ever broadening horizons offering limitless possibilities for further explorations, or is our science converging towards a complete and self‐consistent system of fundamental physical knowledge with all the ground thoroughly explored and with no new striking discoveries to be expected?.
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More about the authors
George Gamow, George Washington University.
© 1949 American Institute of Physics
