Bummer.

Absolutely, and there are times that those efforts lead to the new theories. My comment was just a general one about at least admitting the current theories cannot be correct. And to be fair, there is a growing sense of that (lead to string theory among others, but that is another mess of its own), but eventually (and maybe it has already been proposed but is currently not accepted).

I also agree science cannot stop just because known theories are suspected or even known to be wrong, in the absence of a replacement, as you said. New and valid information still gets generated.

I disagree with that characterization. In fact I think it is the basic M.O. of science to do that. It's not necessarily all bad either.

I mean look at special relativity. Nearly all of that (I'd say 95%) arose because Lorentz and Poincare attempted to merge Maxwell's electromagnetism laws with observations that the particles displayed amounts of force that didn't make sense based on Newtonian mechanics. So they came up with a transform that was just a fix and then Einstein came along and (without giving credit) simply took the same ideas and hypothesized that maybe it wasn't unique to photons and electrons and was about matter in general. Thus, special relativity!

However a lot of the behaviors they were trying to explain can be pretty well explained with quantum mechanics. If quantum mechanics as the new theory as developed before special relativity, it's highly possible that they would have just said “well electrons and photons obey quantum mechanics principles and so that explain the discrepancy with Newtonian mechanics..” and they'd be right but that would have made it so the Lorentz transforms wouldn't have been necessary. Well until we expanded our theories about the Universe and developed better technology…but who knows how we would have described things differently.

I think that science in general is very pro-mechanism rather than anti-observation. By that I mean you can point out flaws in the current model and even eventually convince scientists that they are real, but until you have an alternative mechanism that has positive prediction capabilities that the current model doesn't, then people will just work on refining the existing one. I'm certainly finding this in my own work.

I agree. Even as a student, I was struck on how many times in history all of physics (my field of study) was completely overturned. Yet each generation of physicists, and scientists as a whole, acts as if current knowledge and theories are fundamentally correct, and only need refinement.

That leads to the current state of affairs, where more and more exotic theories and explanations are required to maintain the current hierarchy.

Don't even get me started on dark matter and dark energy. That to me is a perfect example of making 'fixes' to theories to fit data that otherwise contradict the current theories . It is like reading about the history of Luminiferous Aether (the Ether).

It's more likely our concept of time and space is wrong.

I grew up reading and dreaming of interstellar space flight, time-travel, ect., (still do, in fact), but unfortunately through my studies of physics have come to realize without some new fundamentally different understanding of physics that replaces all current theories, they will always be just dreams.

I do believe that we have hit the point that the patchwork required to keep the Standard Model working, even as well as it does work, is a clear sign that it is but another set of theories that explain what we can observe now, but there is another, completely different explination underlying physics yet to come.

A great example of that is Newton's Law of Gravity, which is now known to not be correct at all, but rather is a good enough approximation until you get to very large-scale interstellar calculations. we still use it most of the time, because it gives answers well within any required margin of error,but fundamentally it is not correct.