Just noticed this:
Tamayo wrote:
I could say, "the gravity equations work as they do because mass concentrations bend the spatial manifold through time", but I am begging the question. I can't tell you why that occurs.
I’m sure you know this (and I’m not being facetious), but to clarify for others on the board:
All mass has gravity and bends spacetime, it’s just that only in large concentrations does the effect become pronounced enough to be easily observed. [/Pedant]
To give a concrete example of what I was talking about earlier, let’s say I accept your above Einsteinian description of how gravity works by curving spacetime, and then ask how that works, and so we postulate and discover that it has a messenger particle, so I ask how the graviton works, and some string theorist (or M-theorist, or whatever they’re calling themselves these days) says that it can be mathematically modeled as a closed string that vibrates in such-and-such a manner, etc., etc. We may never get the complete answer, as I said, but we can at least try to gain a deeper and more useful understanding.
Just to reiterate, I never use “why” in connection with scientific questions, and if I did, it would be in a manner synonymous with “how” above.
Emy wrote:
Either Tam hit the wrong button, or she thought it didn't belong in a political debate.
Nonsense! Threads going wildly off-topic is a hallowed Kyhm tradition :P
IcyMonkey wrote:
Just because something works doesn't mean that it's true. The connection between effectiveness and truth is an entirely human-created one.
I thought your position was that they were one and the same?
IcyMonkey wrote:
Honestly, and I know I'm going to get a lot of shit for saying this, the idea of "objective reality" is pretty stupid. What matters in science is that the equations work. Asking what is "really" happening is mistakenly believing science can give us "truth". "Truth" simply does not exist. There are methods of acting or predicting events that are more effective than other methods, but this has nothing to do with "truth".
Tsk. Icy, I thought you had given up trying this Semantic-Fu nonsense on me. You
know perfectly well that I have limited definitions of “truth” and “reality”, and use those words essentially as convenient placeholders, because otherwise communication would be pretty much impossible (or at least massively annoying). What you’re talking about is Absolute Truth™, which isn’t something that’s really feasible to even think about pursuing right now, if ever.
If it helps you, anytime I say something like “how the universe works”, mentally replace it with “how the universe seems to work, in accordance with the repeatable aspects of our experiential observations, which cannot ultimately be proven to actually conform to any sort of “external universe”, if indeed such a thing can be said to exist, although as they seem to be all we have to go on at the moment I personally favor trying to explore these experiential constructs to the greatest extent possible, because hey, why not?”
See, if I tried to talk like that all the time, I would be deservingly lynched by the board. So in your words, suck it up, and realize that some of us are willing to use words like “truth” in a limited context while still understanding the fundamental weakness of the concept.
IcyMonkey wrote:
BTW, I'm honjestly a bigger fan of the Copenhagen interpretation -- in the end, it's a less complicated model than Everett-DeWitt.
Must... wait until... post for other thread... is finished. Grar!
Also, as I’ve said before, I don’t really like your designation of “useful” as the ultimate arbiter of what we consider true. I would prefer something like the term “repeatable”, since there are plenty of things we believe to be true that aren’t technically “useful” in any traditional sense of the word.
"
David Hume, the greatest skeptic of them all, once remarked that after a gathering of skeptics met to proclaim the veracity of skepticism as a philosophy, all of the members of the gathering nonetheless left by the door rather than the window."
(Although it was actually a character in one of his
books that pointed this out, I still found it amusing. This came to mind because I just heard Hume quoted in the surprisingly-entertaining-despite-the-sloppy-programming
Enter the Matrix, which I played for the first time the other day)
Tamayo wrote:
Wandering Idiot wrote:
Tamayo wrote:
We have to adjust to Clarke's Law: The universe is not only stranger than we know, but stranger than we can understand.
I always thought Clarke's Law was "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"?'
That's Clarke's
Second Law.
Wikipedia
disagrees with you. Actually, there seems to be some confusion over the origin of that quote. Clarke claims in an interview that he paraphrased it from
J.B.S. Haldane, but I’ve also found it attributed to the astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington.
Ah well, I like it either way. But I hardly consider pithy quotes to be the ultimate form of Truth™ (shut up, Icy).
Tamayo wrote:
Wandering Idiot wrote:
Anyway, it's an assumption. You can't know for sure that we (or our non-human descendants) will never be able to understand the universe.
Well, yes, actually, I can. The volume of the sum of the human species' knowledge (of all sorts) is currently expanding exponentially with time, and shows no sign of slowing down, ever. There just isn't time for anyone to learn everything there is to know.
And what if we eventually find a way to essentially transcend time, allowing for an infinite amount of knowledge to be collected in a finite amount of “time”? (Just as an example, I’ve seen one rather wild proposed method that involved making use of the energy of the collapsing universe. I’m not sure the math would come out right, but it’s at least interesting) Given what you undoubtedly are aware of regarding the fluidity of the concepts of space and time in General Relativity, and how it changed our previous conceptions of them, are you really willing to make categorical statements based on nothing more than the fact that a rough graph of our current progress/time relationship doesn't have a vertical asymptote, even taking into account the possibility of potential future revolutions of our understanding of the universe just as profound as that of GR? And what’s with this “human species” nonsense when I specifically mentioned non-human descended intelligences? If
anything were able to gain a complete understanding of the universe, I seriously doubt it would be anything remotely resembling human. To put it another way, how would you go about trying to explain quantum mechanics to an ant? You can’t, at least not in any way that would be both accurate and comprehensible to it. Similarly, if there were some hypothetical intelligence that is to ours as ours is to an ant, or even more so, don’t you think it might be able to come up with solutions we never could in response to
questions we couldn’t even comprehend?
Quite frankly, I don’t think we even know enough at present to even have any semblance of an idea of how much we don’t know. It seems entirely too early to be setting rigid limits on the ultimate extent of our knowledge.
So no, you can’t, not without being speculative to the point of uselessness.
Tamayo wrote:
You want "truth" with the quotes; I can't give it to you. I even think that looking for the kind of truth that comes with quotes is something better left to religion than to philosophy. Metaphysics is (almost) pointless.
See, I’d put it the other way, and say that Truth
without the quotes is the domain of religion et al ;)
But of course I normally leave the quotes off, for the same reason I don’t go around talking like I do in my “expanded” phrasing to Icy, above. I do think it’s a good thing to always try and keep in the back of your mind, though. (Icy seems to keep it in the
front of his... Although I’m sure he still exits through the primary opening of a room)
Thinman wrote:
Incidentally, I understood that light was a particle who's existence was a function of a wave of probability, not a wavicle. Can someone confirm/deny this?
Probably.
Seriously though, the interpretation swings around a bit. There was some big controversy involving duality last August that I’ve been meaning to look into further, so I wouldn’t want to give a “generally accepted definition” that no longer holds. But last time I checked, I believe it was more common to think of photons as “particles” that exhibit wave-like properties, if only for the sake of convenience. I haven’t heard the term “wavicle” used in a while.
Emy wrote:
Off topic: WI, you were right, a tesseract is just another name for a 4 dimensional hypercube. Also, go read And he build a crooked house by (who else) Heinlein.
Wow, that’s wayyy off topic :) (That reminds me, I never made my last reply in that thread)
Very well, you’re not the first person to recommend it to me, so I shall acquiesce to your massive Heinlein-whoredom and go read the book already. (Then I’ll retaliate by finally making a post in your book-recommendation thread. [Overabundance of Hard Sci-fi Recommendation Power, GO!!] )