Most theories explain some things, otherwise they would not be good at all.

However they are rarely correct in every aspect.

Newton was correct in non relativistic and macroscopic areas, but fails in the microscopic and relativistic domains.

Similarly Maxwells theory is meant for the macroscopic aspects of electrodynamics.

Their gradual improvement and recognition of limitations is part of the scientific process.

In other words, this is natural and always goes on. It is not only failure, it is part of progress. Every thing is relative to the age we live in.

Hello, in a way your arguement is reductively unwise and contingent to a internal error as most modern physics doesn’t violate the anithesis...

Jody,

Excellent question! In my opinion, theories fail because they are not based on an underlying physical model of reality. They are based on mathematical constructs that try to describe experimental observations. When new experiments disagree, a new ad hoc parameter is added to the equation (i.e. h) without any explanation as to what and why this is happening. My favorite one is that electrons in an atom follow distinct orbitals and are not allowed to exist in between them. Who or what is not allowing this? And why is there an h anyway?

These questions (and many others) have motivated me over the years to build a theory that starts with what I believe is the underlying structure of reality (at the Planck scale). My reasoning is that if you build a proper physical model, then all phenomena should easily fall into place with no paradoxes or conundrums (such as wave-particle duality). Obviously, having what I call a ‘Two Substance Paradigm’ has not worked. We have ended up with two mutually incompatible theories where QM describes the behaviour of particles, and GR describes the curvature of space and time. There should be only ONE substance.

The substance that I started with was the Aether. The old Aether models didn’t work because they were all based on two substances: Aether particles and space. A better model is one where there is only one substance; that substance is a tightly stretched expanding foamy ether, and so-called particles are knots or kinks in the foam. Using this model, I have built many simulations that easily emulate physical phenomena such as EM waves and gravitational waves. Parameters such as h and c are easily explained, where the Planck length is the size of cell in the foam, and c is a result of the tension of the foamy ether. EM waves are created when a knot unfolds or changes from one configuration to another; this causes a disturbance in the foamy ether. Gravity is an accelerating inflow.

Much more is explained on my website: https://www.peterhahn.ca

“Foamy (A)ether – A Framework for a Theory Of Everything”

I hope you will find it interesting.

Theories fail if they are applied outside their domain of application.

Questions like yours are caused by thinking that physical theories must be either true or false, and that we should try to find the `theory of everything'.

The failure of Newton's original theory (pre- the ~1800 rewrite) seems to have been the result of incorporating an assumption (based on legitimate data) that was fundamentally wrong, and working it through to its logical conclusion.

Newton noted from his experiments with air-wedges that longer-wavelength red light was able to cross a narrow wedge-shaped air-gap more easily than shorter-wavelength blue light. Clearly, longer-wavelength light was better able to cross a barrier because it was more powerful, making light with "big" wavelengths carry more energy than light with smaller wavelengths. (!)

Entirely logical, but quite wrong.

Extrapolating, light that fell downhill had to gain energy, so under Newton's original inverted system, we get gravitational redshifts and blueshifts, but they are back-to-front (Michell, 1784). For light to be stretched as it falls downhill implies that regions of stronger gravity have a greater speed of light, and that light is therefore deflected to the region of greatest c (inverse Shapiro effect!).

Expressed as an aether theory (see Newton's "Opticks"), Newton's aether was therefore more rarefied where gravity was stronger, and was displaced by matter. Under Einstein's GR, the density of the metric increases with mass-density, and the aether is the gravitational field, a much cleaner concept. Using the wavelength of light as a ruler, Newton's original system said that there was a space-deficit in regions with stronger fields, rather than an space-excess (gravity-well).

Newton's faulty system was used for about a century as proof that Huygens principle was misguided ... we "knew" that the Newton system was right, because it agreed with all available data perfectly, and since Huygens' argument made light deflect to the region of slowest c, it was obviously wrong. Huygens' principle was supposedly only ascribed to by lunatics and crackpots, and the mentally ill (and the French).

The crisis happened in about ~1800, when improved technology and procedures allowed a number of experimenters to start measuring the speed of light in different materials, finding (to the presumed horror of the English physics community) that, contrary to Newton's system, the speed of light was lower in glass than air, rather than the other way about. Light at an air/glass boundary, which everybody knew was deflected towards the glass, was being deflected to the region of slower lightspeed, not to the region of faster lightspeed.

Consternation. Huygens' principle had been right all along, and Newton's system was ass-backwards.

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This lesson -- that even a perfect score for a theory today does not guarantee that a theory won't be completely overturned by tomorrow's data, and that we cannot safely consider incompatible theories as disproven simply because they disagree with current mainstream theory -- is an important one.

But because it makes the (Eighteenth-Century) physics community look stupid, we don't teach it. Early Nineteenth-Century physics folk hid their embarrassment by rewriting and redefining Newtonian theory, choosing not to mention the earlier incorrect predictions and letting Opticks go out of print. in other words, they mounted a cover-up.

This gives us a second major lesson. The physics community is capable of crass stupidity when issues of status and reputation are involved. It was anti-scientific to try to pretend that Newton's system had never been wrong, and it damaged our ability to spot future mistakes by learning from the mistakes of the past.

Also, it's a common belief that you can fool a lot of the people a lot of the time, but you can't fool everyone all the time.

The theoretical physics community seems to be an exception, as the apparent cover-up of Newton's mistake was extremely successful, and the fake history of what Newton had supposedly predicted persisted into textbooks as far as the late Twentieth Century. A self-serving lie was still perpetuating itself long after everyone whose reputations it was intended to protect had died.

So the physics community, while being unusually clever, are perhaps also unusually bad at fact-checking, and are perhaps worse than the general population at spotting when they are being told something that's wrong. As James Randi once said, scientists are more gullible than most people, and physicists are more gullible than most scientists.

SO ... if you want to identify the failure of a physics theory or concept before anyone else, pick a theory or idea that everyone in physics believes can't possibly be wrong. The stronger their belief, the less likely it is that anybody's actually checked the thing.

As a scientific self-test, make a list of your most cherished physics beliefs, and for each one, ask yourself -- What if it's wrong?

Willem Marinus de Muynck , I think that this modern trend for rejecting the idea that theories can be true or false is unscientific, and indicative of a rot in modern physics, in which "everyone must have prizes", and everyone has to be protected against their precious theories being overturned.

This seems to be to just be a way of protecting bad science and/or the status quo, and trying to eliminate the possibility of an inconvenient future scientific revolution.

In reality, scientific theories are disproved all the time (or at least, they used to be).

Phlogiston theory (~1667-), was the greatest theory of chemistry that had ever been proposed, it put chemistry onto a more solid footing, and it even had elements of mass-energy conversion, in that it related weight-change to energy output or input. It arguably deserved to be true, and it was our major theory for about a hundred years. Then we found out that these weight-changes were due to standard chemical reactions with previously-unisolated element, oxygen, and the hypothesis of an additional attribute of matter, phlogiston, was set aside.

Phlogiston theory did not live on as a limiting case of subsequent chemical theory, with its own domain of applicability: it was simply the wrong explanation.

Similarly, Newton's explanation for lightbending at an air/glass boundary as being the idea that light bends towards the region of fastest lightspeed - it (in its assumed sense) simply didn't agree with the experimental evidence.

And how about "creation science" which claims that the Earth was created by God in maybe about 5,000-10,000 BC? Would you say that that's true, within a given domain? Or how about the tobacco industry's early assertions that smoking tobacco was not implicated in raised levels of lung cancer? How about magical healing crystals?

Part of the point of science is supposed to be an attempt to head towards the truth (even if we can't guarantee that we'll ever quite get there), and part of that is about eliminating possibilities and establishing what appears NOT to be true (as in Popper's principle that a theory that doesn't allow at least the chance of invalidation isn't "scientific"). This useful (and efficient) process of elimination is not served by saying that all theories are true.

It's also perilously close to the Trump election campaign's idea of "alternative truths", that must all be given equal airtime.

The scientific concept that things can be wrong is a precious one, and it's part of the discipline of being a scientist that sometimes we do turn out to be wrong (and sometimes even wrong about things being wrong!), and are professionally obliged to admit it when it happens. The discovery that something is wrong can be incredibly important, and when I hear people saying that theories are never "really" wrong, it gets me worried about the quality of the associated science.

Dear Eric Baird,

Thank you for all the things you attribute to me. In Holland we have this saying: `Schoenmaker blijf bij je leest' (meaning something like `do what you are best able to do'). Fortunately most physicists abide with that saying. That is how science explores the domain of application of a theory. They are aware that the present domain is not all there is. And they are happy that there are scientists who are prepared to explore alternative theories. It is not impossible that some of these will find the `theory of everything'.

My contribution is a more modest one (see de Muynck, Foundations of quantum mechanics, an empiricist approach, Kluwer 2002) in which I have studied a modest extension of the domain of application of the quantum mechanical formalism, necessary to be able to describe certain `actually performed measurements resisting description by means of the standard theory'.

I leave more daring approaches to Titans like you.

theories fail must correspond to the interval of the Time of the creation of the fail. for example, earlier human considered the Earth as the center of the Solar System. now we consider the Earth as one of the planet rotating around the Sun. Now we must accept the fact that the Sun together with the planets rotates around the center of Milky Way. We must take into account that the Sun moves along the trajectory. This knowledge helps us to understand that this motion of the Sun causes many new events in the life of the planet. Galactic medium possesses by different density in different regions. This phenomena changes the planetary conditions and therefore our life is radically changes. Milky way as all celestial bodies possesses the own periods, which act on our life in the planet. Thus the fail of the theory is created by the Time when it was made. It means that theories which are new in principle are the products of the Time.

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