Question: Have you invented/discovered anything yet?

Jose Eliel Camargo Molina answered on 8 Mar 2019:

Hi Saranyan!

Science is built from small steps. It all depends on what you call an invention, but every scientific article should contribute something new to the field. I’ve come up with new models and ideas that might be discovered in experiments someday, but so do many other physicists working in my area.

We all have good and new ideas all the time, so in a sense, every scientist makes inventions and discoveries. In my case, I’ve for example proposed models that unify all forces into one at very high energies and might explain things like dark matter.

However, the big discoveries like for example finding the Higgs boson or the top quark, or coming up with the model that unified electromagnetism and the weak force (the one responsible for nuclear decay), are a combination of scientists that work out the theory and other scientists that actually find that this is the way nature works by doing experiments.

This usually takes a long time, and while there are fantastic original ideas about possible theories out there, it normally takes a while until we do the experiments that tell us which one will actually describe how the universe really works. For example, we only found the Higgs boson in 2012 but it was proposed in 1964 by several physicists working in the theory side.