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By Root 609 0

last 350 years, physics has been has been telling us more and more about the world, both at the level of the cosmological—stars, black holes, galaxies—and at the level of the microphysical—the fermions and bosons. It has continually revealed realms of nature that we had no reason to expect existed. It has told us how those realms affect us with a degree of accuracy that is breathtaking. The latest physical theories explain and predict what happens in regions of space and time that are so small that further division seems pointless or impossible. They do the same for quantities of space-time that are so large that we cannot gauge their enormity. Mostly we take for granted the startling precision of physics’ predictive power across an amazing range of phenomena. Few people realize that physical theory explains and predicts almost everything to inconceivably precise values over the entire body of data available. Few are prepared to see exactly how, from a small number of laws, physics can neatly explain the whole trajectory of the universe and everything in it. The reach of physics runs from before the initial big bang and “inflationary” expansion of the universe 13.7 billion years ago to its end a 100 billion years from now. And yet its theories, along with the scenario they mandate, are confirmed more and more strongly by every new scientific instrument we send into space and by every new linear accelerator that goes online underground (even if it breaks down the first couple of times it’s switched on, like the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva).

Physics has been demonstrating its explanatory, predictive, and technological power for quite a long time now, since about 1660, when Newton got things rolling, and it has been proving its powers at an accelerating rate over the last century. It’s not just that physics predicts what will happen to more and more decimal places. Physics has been predicting completely unexpected events, processes, and phenomena for a hundred years or more.

For example, scientifically sophisticated people may have first heard of black holes a few decades ago. We sometimes forget that Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicted their existence in 1917. And while some people know about antimatter, few realize that in 1929, long before there was any evidence for its existence, a physicist named Paul Dirac showed that there had to be antimatter just by looking at the equations expressing the quantum physics of electrons. It’s a surprise to people that the solid-state physics underlying every computer chip in our houses, cars, and mobile phones dates back to the 1930s and ’40s. And only physics groupies know or care that quantum electrodynamics predicts the mass and charge of subatomic particles to 12 decimal places. As Richard Feynman famously noted, that’s like predicting the distance between New York and Los Angeles to the accuracy of one hair’s width. And of course, physics has built most of the tools that the other natural sciences employ to expand their grasp on nature—X-rays, electron microscopes, spectrographs, DNA sequencers and gene chips, radio telescopes, fMRI brain readers, and supercomputers that can beat most people at Jeopardy!, just to tick off the obvious ones. The technological success of physics is by itself enough to convince anyone with anxiety about scientism that if physics isn’t “finished,” it certainly has the broad outlines of reality well understood.

The physicist’s picture of the universe is the one on which all bets should be placed. The bets are not only that it’s correct as far as it goes, but that it will eventually go all the way and be completely correct. When finished, it will leave nothing out as unexplained from physical first principles (besides those principles themselves). And it’s not just the correctness of the predictions and the reliability of technology that requires us to place our confidence in physics’ description of reality. Because physics’ predictions are so accurate, the methods that produced the description must be equally reliable. Otherwise, our