Non-Fundamental Forces

[Baron Opal II]

Not really. Alchemy (and Astrology, since I mentioned it) is a qualitative model, not a quantitative one. And you cannot test what you cannot measure.

But, they lacked measurement or reproducibility. The language of full-blown alchemy is very complex and qualitative.

Basically, as soon as anyone came up with a way to actually test the theory, in a reproducible manner, the theory utterly failed.

Well, that's not quite true. It is true that they didn't know the why very well at all, but they discovered the what fairly solidly. This was done through painful repetition with some changes. Results were recorded, and with better results refinements were found. What I'm referring to here is mostly the production of pigments, ore refinement, alloy production, and common bulk chemicals for the time (acetic and sulfuric acids, ethanol, soda- and potash, &c.).

Later, there was certainly a branch of alchemy that became more mystical and involved more philosophy, astrology, and the like.

I make no assertations on astrology.

Anyway...

I came across the "effective entropic force" today. That which "causes" objects to sort themselves into efficient packing order. If you pour (cubical) dice into a container and twist it, the dice will pack themselves using less space.

 

[freyar]

The standard model of physics: it is in Flux, with major unanswered questions. I'm not going to presume to tell you what they are, bit my understanding is that reconciling quantum physics with general relativity is...fraught?

I think Umbran answered this pretty well. The Standard Model is incredibly accurate for what it covers, which is A LOT. There are a few aspects of particle physics that we don't yet understand but which we know are outside of the Standard Model and a few conceptual questions about the Standard Model. These have to be answered by new physics. We generally know of ways to deal with these issues, but we don't know which one is correct.

The other point is about quantum mechanics and general relativity. There are two main issues here. One is that GR as a quantum theory is "nonrenormalizable." That sounds scary but really just means that you need a more complete theory of gravity at the quantum level. There are several possibilities we know of, though there is as yet no experimental way to distinguish which might be right. The other issue is related to more fundamental problems like the information paradox associated with black hole Hawking radiation or the size of the cosmological constant. Again, we know some possible answers to these problems but don't yet know if these possible answers entirely work. And they may or may not fit into the possible theories of quantum gravity that we know of.

Exactly HOW and more importantly WHY the forces act in the way they do is also an interesting thing and physics is generally trying to unify disparate fields of “fundamental” knowledge under a single assumption (for example, coming up with the principle of Least Action can to some degree explain why gravity, optics, and Newtonian Mechanics all work, so I would call the principle of Least Action more “fundamental” than, say F=ma, since F=ma can be derived from the principle of Least Action - and so can the equations of refraction in optics - similarly to the way Relativity can be derived out of Maxwell’s Equations).

As someone who's been teaching this subject the last 5 years, I kind of agree and kind of disagree with this. A good mechanics textbook will show you how to derive the principle of least action (as applied to classical mechanics) from F=ma, so the two ideas are equivalent. Neither is more fundamental. However, the principle of least action is more broadly applicable --- if you use it in E&M, then it's equivalent to Maxwell's laws and the Lorentz force law for charged particles. So you might think it's more fundamental because it's very handy in many subjects.
Also, the principle you mean in optics is Fermat's principle of least time, which is very similar to but not precisely the same as the principle of least action. It is equivalent to Snell's law.