• Question: Do you believe that Physics gives us an understanding of the way things work, occur and change, or do you believe it only describes the perceptions we have of reality?

    Asked by bradleygh to Adam, Geoff, Rob, Sheila, Suzie on 14 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Suzie Sheehy

      Suzie Sheehy answered on 11 Mar 2011:

      Wow, good question, thanks!

      Perception is an interesting thing, particularly the workings of the human mind! But that’s not my area… the good thing about physics (in particular) is that you can make direct measurements of the world and how it works, rather than relying on your own 5 senses. This gives you a head-start because you know that *every* time you measure a particular thing, it’s going to be the same. If the results changed depending on who measured them, it wouldn’t be very scientific at all!

      That said, with much of the stuff in physics and particularly particle physics we delve into the world of quantum physics, where things are a bit less certain. But that’s where statistics come into it – knowing how “sure” you are of the answer is a really important part of science in general.

      So yes, I DO believe that physics gives us an understanding of the way things work, occur and change. But I DON’T believe that it’s always right! We make ‘models’ or ‘theories’ of how things work and then do experiments to test if reality matches what we think – if it doesn’t, the theory gets thrown out! But sometimes a well-established model (like newtonian gravity) is only right for *part* of the time, so then we need to go back to the drawing board. But often, the simpler version is ‘good enough’ to explain what’s happening for most of the time, but you have to know the limits of your own knowledge!

    • Photo: Adam Tuff

      Adam Tuff answered on 12 Mar 2011:

      A hard question Bradley! Someone once said to me “Physics is our best guess”, and I think that is very true. In a lot of things our understanding is very good because we can predict very accurately what things will and should do, and this has allowed us to do amazing things – just think of how hard it must be to design a probe that can go to planets far out in our solar system, or making a tiny hard drive on your iPod that can have thousands of songs on it!

      Perception of reality is an interesting one – especially once you start looking at incredibly small things like the nucleus of an atom which is one-billionth of an millimetre wide – this is what is known as the Quantum realm”, and here our ideas of physics that we can apply to our everyday world don’t apply any more and we have to use a whole new set of rules…and even today we don’t know the full story of how physics works at these sizes.

      Perception is an interesting word though – Physics always changes depending on how and where you look at something from. Great question!

    • Photo: Geoff McBride

      Geoff McBride answered on 12 Mar 2011:

      There is no belief mechanism in physics. It is about measuring results and gaining an understanding of what is happening.

    • Photo: Sheila Kanani

      Sheila Kanani answered on 12 Mar 2011:

      Oooo deep! In my opinion physics is the underlying science and it really can explain to us how things/everything work. However we need maths too, as it is the ‘language’ of physics.
      On the other hand you could look at it in this way….it does ‘just’ describe our perception of reality. For example, humans invented the concept of time but physics can explain why we have 60 seconds in a minute and 24 hours in a day.
      Hope that helps, it just made my head spin! 🙂

    • Photo: Robert Simpson

      Robert Simpson answered on 14 Mar 2011:

      Good question! Physicists create models of the Universe and test them. We can model the Universe as having 11 dimensions and we can test whether this is true (the Large Hadron Collider will do this amongst other things) and this doesn’t mean we can experience any more than the three/four dimensions we live in. So we can test and explain things beyond our own experience to derive truths that are beyond our perceptions. There is obviously a limit though. The further we go beyond our own experiences the harder is gets to test things.

      Your question is perhaps more philosophical than scientific. Science is about evidence and we can only gather evidence from our own senses. We have extended these senses using technology but are mostly limited to reality as we perceive it. The idea of a universal ‘truth’ is a major philosophical idea, and a fascinating one. To answer it outright would require evidence that is impossible to gather.

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