We've put so much together about the Universe. Could it all come tumbling down?
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If the faster-than-light neutrinos from a few years ago had turned out to be true, we would have had to rethink everything we thought we knew about relativity and the speed limit of the Universe. If the EMdrive or another perpetual motion engine turned out to be real, we’d have to rethink everything we thought we knew about classical mechanics and the law of conservation of momentum.
Everything we see, everything we hear, everything our instruments detect, etc., is all capable of being — if properly recorded — a piece of scientific data. When we try and put together our picture of the Universe, we must use the full suite of all the scientific data available. We cannot cherry-pick the results or pieces of evidence that agree with our preferred conclusions; we need to confront our ideas with every piece of good data that exists.
One revolutionary aspect of relativistic motion, put forth by Einstein but previously built up by Lorentz, Fitzgerald, and others, was that rapidly moving objects appeared to contract in space and dilate in time. The faster you move relative to someone at rest, the greater your lengths appear to be contracted, while the more time appears to dilate for the outside world. This picture, of relativistic mechanics, replaced the old Newtonian view of classical mechanics.
One of the great puzzles of the 1500s was how planets moved in an apparently retrograde fashion. This could either be explained through Ptolemy's geocentric model , or Copernicus' heliocentric one . However, getting the details right to arbitrary precision was something that would require theoretical advances in our understanding of the rules underlying the observed phenomena, which led to Kepler's laws and eventually Newton's theory of universal gravitation.
But here’s the important part: that won’t mean that everything about the Big Bang is wrong. General Relativity didn’t mean everything about Newtonian gravity was wrong; it simply exposed the limit of where and how Newtonian gravity was successful.
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