When I was a physics student, there were four forces: strong, weak, EM, and gravity. That picture seemed neat and clean. Strong kept the nucleus together, EM kept molecules and atoms together (or broke them apart), gravity kept astronomical bodies together, weak was some kind of momentum-accounting device.
Recently, GPT informed me that the strong force is really a tiny after-effect of the "QCD force" (in the same way that the Van der Waals forces are after-effect of EM). Also, more and more questions about "dark matter" seem to be building up, suggesting that the standard Newton-Einstein story of gravity is far from the complete picture.
25 years ago it seemed like physics was mostly complete, and the only remaining work was exploring the corner cases and polishing out all the imperfections. It doesn't feel that way anymore! The confusing part is that modern physics is so unbelievably successful and useful for technology - if the underlying theory was way off, how could the tech work?
Recently, GPT informed me that the strong force is really a tiny after-effect of the "QCD force" (in the same way that the Van der Waals forces are after-effect of EM). Also, more and more questions about "dark matter" seem to be building up, suggesting that the standard Newton-Einstein story of gravity is far from the complete picture.
25 years ago it seemed like physics was mostly complete, and the only remaining work was exploring the corner cases and polishing out all the imperfections. It doesn't feel that way anymore! The confusing part is that modern physics is so unbelievably successful and useful for technology - if the underlying theory was way off, how could the tech work?