Come to think of it, I think the OP’s premise might be flawed. benny73 is starting with the assumption that Newtonian gravity is grasped by the everyman… But FedEx’s Moon office commercial not only got made, but was voted best commercial of the Superbowl by viewers, which seems to argue to the contrary.
I think Stranger nailed in Post #9. If anyone ever figures out how gravity works, it’ll be a hell of a big deal. Not least because several generations of very smart people working very hard have been thoroughly stumped by the question.
Argh. Good point.
And Stranger, you missed Renaldus Columbus .
And this is his sofa, is it?
Sorry to continue the tangent, but boy-o-boy does that commercial annoy me. Another one is the Red Bull cartoon commercial in which the astronauts can’t put footprints on the moon because they’ve got wings.
More on track, I’d say the mechanism of natural selection is one that is easy for anyone to understand, but was never formally explained to everyone until Darwin.
I also like to believe that the true unification of the forces will be such a revelation. I know it most likely will be something non-physicists will find really difficult, but wouldn’t it be great if it turned out to be a fairly simple shift in viewpoint, obvious once we’ve figured it out? Future generations could be amazed that it took us so long to get there. Spacetime will tell…
That’s terrible. Although, it gains a lot of points by having the FedEx ship swoop in to “Final Countdown.”
Knowledge is fractal; that is, the more we know, the more we know what we don’t know. I’m sure someone of a scientific bent in the 1500s could have said to himself, “Yup. As soon as we solve these last few mysteries we’ll know everything there is to know.” Ditto for the 1700s and 1900s. Didn’t happen then, won’t happen long after we’re no longer human but have photon flippers, or something.
John M. Ford said (and I’m paraphrasing this badly) that God hands us a box with a mystery in it. When we finally get the box open and solve the mystery, we find inside a note, “Oh, you’ve got that? Here’s another.”
Last I heard there was still debate over exactly what version of quantum mechanics is true. If some clever scientist finds a way to prove that, say, the Many Worlds interpetation is true ( that’s the one that says that every quantum possibility produces it’s own world ), that would be a Newton-level discovery.
That simple statement is, to me, very deep. And cool. Thanks!
As to the OP, of course there could be revelations made that are HUGE. Problem is that we don’t know what they will be otherwise they wouldn’t be revelations. If someone developed or determined something for real that we only think about in Science Fiction, wouldn’t that be big? From today’s science we know that faster-than-light travel is impossible. If someone came up with a way to do it, I’d count that as being an amazing discovery. Or way a to tap energy directly from the Universe in some currently unknown manner. That would solve a bunch of impending problems and would rank up there with defining gravity.
These may be poor examples and the Smart People among the Dopers could tear them apart, but I am just trying to throw out some possibilities of what could be a quantum leap in the knowledge level of science. We don’t necessarily know what we don’t know and whatever is pointed out could well be viewed as being simple after it is discovered, explained and shown on a NOVA special.
Just thought I’d mention that I believe it was Carl Sagan in Cosmos who pointed out it was a myth that people thought the world was flat. They always knew it was round; they could see the ships going over the horizon, the masts being the last visible. It was only a question of how big it was, and if Columbus had known the real distance between Europe and Asia – without knowing of the New World lying in between – then he might not have attempted his voyage.
I had to resign my membership in the Flat Earth Society after I read that. 
There is only one version of quantum mechanics. There are many interpretations, but interpretations don’t matter. The calculations don’t care which interpretation you’re using. In fact, the interpretation favored among physicists is the “shut up and do the calculations” interpretation.
Actually, all we know is that accelerating a mass past lightspeed is impossible; we can’t prove that other methods won’t work, like creating FTL particles or wormholes and such.
First, I was using the words “version” and “interpetation” interchangably. And the interpetations do matter for the purpose of this thread; we are talking about new discoveries, in this case the underlying reality behind the calculations; not something like designing a new nanoscale device/material/whatever, for which that doesn’t matter.
I think you can make a case that the notion of computation is far more important to modern society than anything Newton did. From an intellectual perspective, the most important discovery there is the notion that not all problems can be solved, and not all solvable problems can be solved quickly. This blog entry and the comments below go into some detail about why theoretical computer science is important and should be very interesting to the participants in this thread.
I think you’re misunderstanding the point Chronos is making. There’s absolutely no way to tell using QM which of the various interpretations is “right”. You can start with any one of them, work out the math, and you’ll end up with exactly the same theory.
There’s a similar situation in general relativity. The standard interpretation is that objects curve spacetime according to their mass, but you can also work with a flat spacetime where massive objects curve other objects. The math is useless for distinguishing the two situations.
They’re not interchangable, though. The resultant effects of quantum mechanical operations don’t change with interpretation; whether you believe that Schrödinger’s Cat is a superposition of probability waveforms, or dead in one universe and live in another, or a result of inaccessibly hidden nonlocal variables, or whatever else is irrelevent to the result. And is seems pretty apparent that we’ll probably never be able to peer beyond the veil of the probabilistic behavior of particles on the quantum level, as any attempt to measure or constrain the system implicitly makes you a participant rather than an objective observer. The whole business of different interpretations is a great way for physicists to pass an otherwise quiet evening at the coffeehouse, but as Chronos notes, any real approach to QM involves dispensing with concerns about why it works and focusing on the mathematics, which do work…even when they’re not strictly mathematically self-consistant, as with renormalization in QFT.
Besides, I’m firmly of the opinion that all interpretations are equally wrong and that something much stranger than we can possibly imagine is actually driving the mechanics from behind the scenes. Collapsing waveforms…pfft!
Stranger
So far this whole thread has focused mostly on only one branch of science (physics.) But I’d like to guess that there is room for a Newtonian revelation in another branch of science: biology.
We have a decent understanding of how the physical universe works–but we have essentially zero understanding of how our own brains work. Yet it is reasonable to guess that sometime in the next few hundred years we might figure it out.
If anybody ever discovers a way to trace the brain’s functions, it would be far more revolutionary than Newton’s discovery of gravity. Suppose it becomes possible to “hit the rewind button” and play back the brain’s activity, recording every word you have spoken over the past day, or year. All of human nature would be changed forever.
That’s more revolutionary * than quantum physics.
*(and scary)
From what we do know of neurophysiology–and you are correct to say that it isn’t much–this is unlikely. What we do know of memory is that it isn’t encoded into the brain like files stored on a disk drive; it’s more like the processors of the computer are continually modified to store information, such as it is, directly “on-chip” as part of the processing matrix.
And not only are individual memories suspect, they are also–essentially by definition–highly subjective. The visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory information you “percieve” isn’t raw data directly from the sensors, but highly preprocessed information which is filtered, desaturated, refined, masked, prioritized, interpreted, cross-referenced, integrated, categorized, highlighted, and otherwise heavily essentialized into fundamental concepts that you can comprehend before it ever gets to anything resembling voluntary awareness or higher consciousness. The resulting memories are more impressionistic than discrete and internally complete, and the associations to an individual memory are more likely to be categorical than chronological, hence why a certain smell will invoke the memory of a long-past, otherwise untopical experience.
Even the raw sensory information coming directly down the optic nerve (backwards through the retina…stupid design) is pretty useless; the rods and cones in the eye don’t provide a complete image, but rather bits and pieces of information at different sensitivies, orientations, and rates, which are somehow integrated into a sight picture in the visual cortex located in the back of the brain (again, stupid design) after passing through the optic chiasma junction and then being routed by the lateral geniculate nucleus of the visual region of the thalamus. Putting this altogether is a processing operation more complex than the fastest computer rendering system and provides layers of detail in varying levels of priority and graduation.
The auditory processing system is more simple, which is not to say trivial, and as for tactile sensations, the shear amount of networking and influx of data requires severe filtration and attentuation before anything gets to the point of being comprehended or rememebered.
So, even having a more comprehensive understanding of how the individual mechanisms of consciousness and memory function doesn’t mean that you’ll have the ability to read or record memories; it could give you, however, the ability to manipulate baser level processes and sensations, like emotions and impulses, which impact judgement and “objective” consciousness.
Check out Ian Glynn’s An Anatomy of Thought and Eric Kandel’s In Search Of Memory for more information on this. The former is modestly technical, anticipating a basic grounding in biology (though providing all the specifics that you need) and the latter is more conversational and anecdotal; an easy and fascinating read. I might also add Adam Zeman’s Consciousness: A User’s Guide for his articulate explanation of the pathology of consciousness and the role of vision, though I found the book less interesting as he actually gets into the origin and nature of consciousness. (Given that there is little substantial information on the topic, he seems to indulge in a lot of handwaving and somewhat banal speculation.)
Stranger
I’m told that the mathematicians have since found a self-consistent way to describe renormalization. We physicists are glad to hear it, since it justifies what we would have been doing anyway :).
And Der Trihs, there is one other thing that current science says about FTL travel: Anything that can be used for FTL travel can be used as a time machine as well, and vice-versa. The standard line of reasoning rejects time travel because of the possibility of paradox, and then rejects FTL because it allows time travel. But yes, if we ever figure out a way to resolve the paradoces and do it, that’ll be pretty revolutionary.
I’d say quantum mechanics is arguably a bigger revelation in terms of our understanding of how the word works than Newtonian gravity. But as far as a revelation that’s understood by the “average joe”, I kind of doubt there will be one. (Not so much because the average joe isn’t smart enough – he just doesn’t care enough to read a physics textbook.) Whether “the next big revelation” will be summed up with highly-metaphorical catchphrase that can be understood by the masses is another matter.
I suspect we’re on the verge of one right now, that the true nature of dark matter/energy is about to be figured out, and that that will change our understanding of the nature of physics altogether.