Comments by "" (@TheDavidlloydjones) on "3 Perplexing Physics Problems" video.
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@Killua2001
That's true enough -- although it was obvious to me as a child that Africa and South America had once been connected, and my father agreed that this was his impression, too. (At one point in the 1980s a bunch of people decided I ought to go to work with J. Tuzo Wilson, and it all got as far as an interview with him. I don't know what he thought of me, but I backed away like crazy: I admire the man's work, but. But.)
The inverse square law and the fact that earthquakes are pretty continual while all the planets lining up happens very rarely if at all have both been known since the year Dot. I.e. the New Scientist guy was a fool and his editors were asleep at the switch.
But a query: what makes you think our understanding of science has "shifted dramatically" at any time in the last fifty years? Hell, since Bacon? Well, Bacon modulo Popper... No, I don't think mumbling about paradigms shifting is dramatic; it's just an example of the power of a clever buzzword.
The biological sciences have made great advances, but in a pretty straightforward way according to the DNA/molecular and the games-theoretical/information-theory programs that have been pretty clear since maybe 1930~50, don't you think?
IMHO physics has been in a black hole for about the past ten years with what seems to me like an extremely stupid walkabout into string theory. ("We've got all these infinities, so let's get rid of all the zeroes by calling them little-itsy-bitsies. An' hey, we've been studying harps and sine waves for three thousand years, so let's call them strings. Problem solved. Let's move all those grant applications out...")
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