In high school, the first sentence from the teacher was:
"Our first topic is light. We do not really know what it is. Sometimes it acts like a wave; sometimes like a particle; but we do not really understand it. All we can say, is that light is light, and observe what it does."
Near the end of the course came what was known at the time about atomic physics, relativity, and quantum mechanics.
One thing that struck me was the discussion of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, which concludes that there is a level of knowledge on an atomic scale that is impossible to penetrate or observe.
And at the large end of town, we learned about black holes; and there again, we find that we will never be able to find out or discover or observe what goes on inside a black hole. We can theorize; we can make hypotheses; but it is impossible to go into one
and make observations.
Later in life I discovered Chaos Theory. This, of course, did not exist as a high school topic in either physics or mathematics or geometry. But there it is.... new field, among many others. [Did you know that you can have a line of infinite length, that never crosses itself, within a geometrical area of one square inch ? Or that some infinities are larger than others ?]
So I wonder about all the devotees of science, and why we should base our values and morals and ideas upon a dsicipline that increasingly has nothing to do with everyday problems, admits to its own limits, has uncertainty at large and small scales, and is undergoing chaange and revision rapidly and constantly.
The trends in physics as I understand them are pretty far out, compared to Newtonian dynamics and even relativity.
They are very hard to keep up with.
