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Comment by PhilWright | Hacker News Reader

I think you are making the mistake of assuming that there is always something more fundamental to discover. It could be that we have now discovered all the pieces of the puzzle, all the building blocks are now known about. Maybe the LHC has not discovered anything new, apart from confirming the Higgs, because there is nothing more to be found.

Maybe the issue that is that we cannot work out the theory, the equations that correctly describe it all properly. Maybe dark energy and dark matter and not actually 'other stuff' but just an indication that there are errors in our theories. Fix the theory and the 'other stuff' disappears. Quantum physics and General Relativity need to be combined at some point and doing so may resolve everything! Or it could simply be that human intelligence is not capable of finding the solution. In the same way a dog is never going to understand calculus, maybe you need an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000 to solve physics.

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This reminds me of one of my favorite short stories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_stor...

The premise is that antigravity is ridiculously obvious & simple to discover for almost any intelligent species, and we somehow missed it.

Seems internally inconsistent. I may or may not have read that story a long time ago, (seems like something that probably was in Analog or F&SF) but according to the description on Wikipedia, the aliens are overconfident because "they can detect no use of gravity manipulation". But if they are only using matchlocks and black powder, how would they even begin to sense anything about Earth's society remotely? Why would basic antigravity technology be enough for viable space travel any more than rockets were on Earth in the 13th century?

In general, if there was an easy way to travel between stars that we'd missed, then visitors would be everywhere, and in fact would probably have prevented humans from ever evolving undisturbed in the first place. You may say "well, what about UFOs", but as others have pointed out, society has changed recently to where billions of people have high quality cameras with them every minute of the day, and pictures of UFOs, bigfoot, etc. are still blurry and inconclusive. If they were real, we might have such pictures, but archaeologists and astronomers would have copious evidence too. It wouldn't be just hints at the fringe.

> Or it could simply be that human intelligence is not capable of finding the solution. In the same way a dog is never going to understand calculus, maybe you need an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000 to solve physics.

In philosophy, this is called cognitive closure. It’s possible that we humans are hitting some “edge” just like, in your example, you mentioned that a dog may never grasp calculus. To my knowledge, I’m not sure if there’s a way to scientifically test this.

Turing disproved this. If the universe is mathematical, we can understand it.

Only if you assume unlimited compute time. For instance, if the equations that describe the universe are a million lines long (as opposed to Tegmark's "should fit on a T-shirt" criteria) then it could take an impossibly long time to discover them.

That’s not how scientific discovery works. We aren’t handed a description that might have fractal complexity, but rather we invent models to describe it. Even if reality is infinitely complex, out descriptions need not be. And it’s well established that our approximate models can be vastly simpler than underlying reality.

We have, today, approximate models that are simple. But they're not quite exact for things like quantum gravity. If you want an exact model, it is presumably longer. Presumably, because smart people have looked for a long time for simple models that are more accurate and haven't found one.

If the exact model is only moderately long, then we (or a Turing machine) can discover and simulate it. But it's at least conceivable that the shortest-possible exact description of physics is extremely long.

The issue is more of data availability. Quantum gravity is hard to pin down because the differences are not observable at energies we can test or at cosmic scales we can measure. If we had a probe skirting the event horizon of a black hope the answer might be obvious. But we don’t.

Turing didn't prove anything about human understanding. He proved about computation with an idealized, resource-unlimited computational system, which isn't, at all, the same thing.

> In the same way a dog is never going to understand calculus,

Dogs may never understand calculus as you mean it but they can certainly solve related-rates problems in real time physical situations.

Yeah I believe there are two approaches to this:

1. Either we actually have discovered all the fundamental pieces of the puzzle and there is nothing significant we still could work on so we entered the infinite journey of technological optimization. Or,

2. We have missed or misinterpreted some important pieces of the puzzle and we're stagnant until we go back and fix them so we can move forward.

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