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adrian_byesterday at 10:09 AM2 repliesview on HN

The existing theories are extremely far from being good enough for practical purposes.

There exists a huge number of fundamental quantities that should be calculated from the parameters of the "standard model", but we cannot compute them, we can only measure them experimentally.

For instance, the masses and magnetic moments of the proton, of the neutron and of all other hadrons, the masses and magnetic moments of the nuclei, the energy spectra of nuclei, of atoms, of ions, of molecules, and so on.

The "standard model" can compute only things of negligible practical importance, like the statistical properties of the particle collisions that are performed at LHC.

It cannot compute anything of value for practical engineering. All semiconductor devices, lasers and any other devices where quantum physics matters are not designed using any consistent theory of quantum physics, but they are designed using models based on a great number of empirical parameters determined by measurement, for which quantum physics is only an inspiration for how the model should look like and not a base from which the model can be derived rigorously.


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jhrmnnyesterday at 10:59 AM

This depends very much on what "practical purposes" are. For almost all conceivable technology, relativistic quantum mechanics for electrons and light, ie QED, is sufficient fundamental theory. This is unlike before quantum mechanics, when we basically didn't have fundamental laws for chemistry and solid-state physics.

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davrosthedalekyesterday at 12:25 PM

Lattice-QCD can, by now, actually calculate the masses of the proton, neutron from first principles pretty accurately.

This is of course a brute-force approach. We currently lack, in all fields, theory for emergent properties. And the mass of the proton definitely is such.

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