Star's strange path around black hole proves Einstein right (2020)
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One thing that does amaze me though, is his unbelievable capacity for intuition.
I think that part of what was marvellous about Newton (Einstein, too) was how many things he did. As you say, it seems plausible any individual thing Newton did would have been done by someone else—probably the same is true of anyone—but it seems unlikely that any one person could have done everything Newton did.
I suspect that if you asked the HN crowd for their guess at the smartest person, Mozart (thanks to Hofstadter) and von Neumann would come out on top (though I might just be biased towards whom I'd answer). Tao is a likely candidate for living person.
In terms of impact, Newton is truly stand-out, though I think when it comes to math, his most significant contribution was calculus, and Leibniz came up with that independently at the same time, and we now use his version instead of Newton.
I was specifically thinking about physicists in that case, though I guess Neil deGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan fall under that umbrella.
I also don't know a ton about him, but as someone in the math scene, he's the only modern-day mathematician I hear about with any regularity.
Few in the HN crowd understand the mathematics Grothendieck worked in and therefore cannot properly assess his contributions and intellect due to their unfamiliarity with his work.
von Neumann had savant like intelligence, but Grothendieck was in an unmatched league of his own in terms of abstractions.
If you partially submerge a stick into water, it appears as if the stick is broken. When a physicist first sees this phenomenon, their reaction is: space must be warped/contracted/broken! It's a strange kind of intuition.
I have a pretty crazy opinion about all of this, where I think creationism and science do not contradict each other. The book of Genesis and science describe the same exact thing, but in different languages.
And it explains how, in the Bible, this God "person" was able to predict the future without fail, with unlimited horizon. It's like a video tape - fast forwarding and going back to the original point does not change the plot.
See? I figured it out. Next question.
I doubt anything in the Universe is truly random. What if you have all of the information? And I mean, ALL of the information?
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
In short, it's fundamentally impossible to completely and precisely describe the current state (position & velocity) of any particle. The more precisely you measure one of those values, the more uncertain the other becomes, in proportion.
This is a fundamental physical reality of the universe... It's not just an imperfection of how we take measurements. At a quantum level, the universe is actually random in it's behavior. You can make statistical predictions, which in larger & larger quantity can asymptotically approach certainty, under the right conditions... But at a macroscopic level, outcomes will always reflect some amount of randomness.
By implication, you cannot fully predict the future behavior of a system by knowledge of its current state. This was a tremendous shock to the worldview of many scientists, including Albert Einstein. But over the last century, every attempt to disprove the reality of this fundamental randomness has failed.
It's kind of like saying "All our experiments appear to come up with consistent results, only because God intervenes in all our experiments to create those results." That statement can never be made falsifiable, so it's not a scientifically interesting statement to consider, because by definition it can never yield testable predictions.
That does not mean Superdeterminism is uninteresting... Just that it's a matter of theology or literature, not science.
That's not how proofs work.
These people (linked in the article) calculated the effect to be "12' per orbital period":
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2020/04/aa37813-...
So no, not even close to being as dramatic as on "artist's animation".
That's why there is such consternation about it, versus the Standard Model born of quantum physics: both models have tons of confirming evidence supporting them, and yet they are at some level incompatible/incomplete. There's a gap in our knowledge, understanding, and intuition.
People (including myself) get in a bugabear about the use of the word "prove" because it implies a finality of knowledge which is not true of the experiment, and in fact counter to the spirit of the scientific method. The equations are supported by the experiment, but that support still admits the possibility of better equations later ("better" having many possibilities). The ideas confirmed by this experiment as still subject to revision and review and modification and improvement, hence the disagreement with calling them "proven."
The split is there because running the entire simulation completely in QM is overkill will bring the main CPU to its knees.
The non-determinism and measurement fidelity of QM also means reality is classically non-deterministic, as in chaotic systems which cannot be predicted beyond short horizons because measurement precision in initial conditions forbids it.
Algorithmic/computational models of reality are therefore false ("aproximations") rather than the converse. All computations are functions from N to N -- and randomness in the QM sense isn't a function.
Ie., a QM/Classical-Chaotic system is a "function" from state-space X to measurement space Y such that for some X there is no determinate Y. This isn't a function; and hence not computable.
That doesn't necessarily follow. It's totally possible for us to observe non-determinism within a simulation. Reductio ad absurdum - the simulation could be of what we think we know, rather than actually what we observe.
Given we're talking about a universe-scale simulation, I don't think that's actually absurd. We wouldn't be able to do that, no, but we wouldn't be able to do any of this. It's obviously possible in principle.
No, reductio ad absurdum: The simulation could be of you. Just you. All other people are simulated only to whatever degree is needed when they interact with you; people who don't, are only simulated as trendlines.
You can never really observe non-determinism. All you can say is that there is no observable determinism; you can never exclude the possibility of hidden patterns you aren’t smart enough to notice. Maybe our observations are totally deterministic but we will never be able to know because the determinism is computationally intractable, or depends on variables we cannot observe
Arguments from QM, such as Bell’s theorem, are sometimes presented as disproving hidden determinism: but, at best, only disprove local determinism, and leave the possibility of non-local determinism entirely intact; and when one considers the possibility of “superdeterminism” (that the observer’s choices of what observations to make are determined by the same determinism as the system being observed) maybe don’t even do that
The notion that non-determinism can be proven, exists, and/or has a relevance to a simulation all make assumptions about reality that either won't or don't have to hold if you're in a simulation.
But then simulation is unfalsifiable. Whatever you observe, the simulation could have paused an arbitrary number of times, or modified you or the environment to an arbitrary degree, hence it's compatible with simulation. Which makes simulation "a difference that makes no difference".
I like the word "bullshit." Bullshit isn't necessarily true, isn't necessarily false, it's simply not worth my time to wade into it.
But falsifying that proposition would not falsify the notion of simulation.
It does however not necessarily make a simulation a difference that makes no difference, because if we're in a simulation it is possible that we are in one where it is possible to falsify the theory that we're not in a simulation.
E.g. we could potentially find bugs that reveal telltale signs we're in a simulation, or outright vulnerabilities. It's even possible we could finds ways of "escaping" the simulation.
The problem of course being that you could well devote a lifetime to it and find nothing and it would tell you nothing about whether we're in a simulation or not, so unless you run into some anomaly that hints at it, it'd seem a rather wasteful pursuit.
In reality, of course, chances are none of us will ever see anything to give us reason to pursue that idea, but it's fun to think about. I write short stories about this subject, and I have a long document with headache-inducing scenarios to write up.
To avoid hypotheses that are unfalsifiable is good practice absent evidence because you can construct an infinite number of such hypotheses. That does not mean that a given unfalsifiable hypothesis can not be true, however, just that pursuing it is generally likely to be a waste of effort.
Asserting that simulation is definitely true absent evidence would be unjustified, but very few people would make that claim, so it's not very relevant.
However the inverse - the hypothesis that we're not in a simulation - is falsifiable by proving that we are in a simulation. And any number of variations over the idea that we might be in a simulation can also be testable and falsifiable in various ways.
The original point of contention was that QM and non-determinism proves we're not in a simulation, however, and that is not a viable way to falsify the hypothesis that we're not in a simulation. The hypothesis that non-determinism proves we're not in a simulation is falsifiable by coming up with a way wherein non-determinism can be accommodated.
If the world the simulator runs in has access to non-determinism this is trivially done by simply forwarding non-determinism into the simulation (many other approaches to attack that hypothesis are possible, e.g. using a additional simulations as oracles to determine if supposedly non-deterministic events would be revealed as such, and use that to pick values that ensures a failure to simulate non-determinism never gets detected, so access to a source of non-determinism is not necessary to falsify that hypothesis either, though it would complicate matters). As such the hypothesis that non-determinism alone proves we're not in a simulation is false.
Unfalsifiable propositions can be true, and it is even possible to have good reason-whether direct or indirect evidence-for believing one
“Somewhere and somewhen in this universe there exists an extremely controversial and very famous politician named Donald Trump” is an example of a proposition which is true, and we have very good reason to believe is true, but which is strictly speaking unfalsifiable, indeed almost inherently so. Even if we suppose our Donald Trump had never been born, we could not rule out the possibility of some very famous and controversial politician having that name (let’s say named by a very similar sequence of sounds) existing on a planet in a distant galaxy. If one accepts a B theory view of time, that proposition has always been true, and was just as true in 5000 BCE as it is today, but nobody back then could have possibly known it was true.
But it is worth also remembering that Bostroms Simulation Argument is an argument for simulation, not the only one possible.
To me the original point I made was simply that non-determinism can't falsify simulation.
More broadly I believe simulation is unfalsifiable, because the impossibility of proving we have existence in time (our consciousness could exist for only a moment, and we can't tell, because we have access to the past only as memories which could be fake), or that a world outside ourselves exists (our sensory inputs could be fake) means we can say hardly anything about the scale or complexity of a theoretical simulation. Said another way: we don't know even how much of ourselves exists.
That opens the door to a vast set of possible simulation arguments, but also raises the question of whether there is a clear line between simulation and what reality is. E.g. you can imagine a similar set of possible conceptions of a physical reality. If physical reality is that our existence is mere fragmentary moments of parts of a mind, then that would mean any experience we might think we have one day of building simulations would themselves be illusory.
So it's not a given that we can meaningfully tell whether or not a simulation exists even if we one day believe we successfully build one, because the experience of building the simulation might well be the totality of the experience. There's no certainty said simulation ever exists.
Trying to nail down what we can actually infer about this is something we'll struggle with for a very long time.
Even defining in concrete terms what is simulation vs. simply an arrangement of physical reality is unclear (think Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where Earth was a computer)
Consider the following argument:
1] If P being true is a necessary precondition for rational thought to exist, we are rationally justified in believing that P is true
2] The general reliability of our memories is a necessary precondition for rational thought to exist
3] Therefore, we are rationally justified in believing that our memories are generally reliable
4] Therefore, our memories are generally reliable
From the general reliability of our memories, the substantial existence of the past trivially follows; does that count as "proving we have existence in time"? And replace the "general reliability of our memories" with "the existence of other minds" to turn the above argument into a proof of the later.
> but also raises the question of whether there is a clear line between simulation and what reality is.
I actually think the simulation hypothesis is a pretty good argument for idealism: if the simulation hypothesis is true, then either materialism is simply false (if one interprets "matter" to mean only the apparent physical matter of this universe), or else its truth is unknowable (if one interprets "matter" to mean the unknowable matter of the substrate universe.) If we cannot know whether the simulation hypothesis is true, how can we know that materialism is true? By contrast, if idealism is true, then minds and their experiences are the most fundamental constituents of reality; whether this universe is a simulation is simply a question about whether there exists another universe containing minds who have the experience of operating a computer simulation which appears to contain minds having particular experiences, where those particular experiences happen to be identical to the set of all experiences had by all minds in this universe. Idealism could be equally true no matter what the answer to that question may be. The ontological status of this universe is completely independent of whether that separate simulating universe happens to exist; in principle, our universe could even be simultaneously simulated by multiple distinct simulating universes.
Since, as you said, there are infinite possible unfalsifiable theories, it's a good idea to avoid them. It's better to deal with them when evidence does appear; otherwise you have an infinite number of them to go through.
> E.g. we could potentially find bugs that reveal telltale signs we're in a simulation, or outright vulnerabilities. It's even possible we could finds ways of "escaping" the simulation.
I'm not sure that's even decidable. Is, say, relativity a glitch in the Matrix or just the way the universe works? Or, to flip the question on its head: do simulations we can construct behave like the real world because the real world is simulated, or just because what we can construct is limited by the world we live in?
I think these outright flaws would have to be very obvious to unambiguously point to simulation. And I can't escape the feeling that the simulation idea is a modern version of Newton's clockwork universe: trying to explain the universe by the metaphors we have available today.
If "simulation" is just an alleged property everything is meant to have (ie., sim = "seeming-as-if real but actually being a... dream, ...").
Then the argument against it is simply pragmatic: rather than add "seeming-as-if" to everything we say, drop it.
Adding it can make no difference, which is stipulated by this definition of "simulation".
You could also make a kind of rationality argument: consider the family of all such seeming-as-if properties, say S; and the family of all real properties R.
Given conditioning on S essentially makes all claims false, eg., P(I am a human awake on earth | S) = 0
Ditching the S properties is equivalent, essentially, to reasoning being possible.
So if we are in a simulation essentially every judgement we make is false. So to beleieve we're in a simulation, ie., to condition on being in one, prevents any thought/reasoning/etc.
To actually believe we're in a simulation, in this sense, you'd be completely incapable of essentially any thought wahtsoever.
You're right that since we can't falsify the general idea of simulation, it makes sense to simply discount it in most discourse, because we just have to act as if the world is real.
(EDIT: I'll add that "implementable by a universal Turing machine" or not does not change any of this in either direction)
This is the most straightforward rejection of Berkeley's idealism as well.
But that is different from discounting the possibility.
Because while we can't falsify the hypothesis that we're in a simulation, as I've expanded on in another comment too, if we are in one there's at least a possibility that we are in one where the hypothesis that we are not in one can be falsified (e.g. a doorway could open in front of me to let me "exit" the simulation; as wildly unlikely as it is; or we could travel into space and hit a literal wall, or an infinite number of other things)
Going further, it's in particular different from discounting the possibility because of details of the world, because all of what we think we know is a product of processes that if we are in a simulation could have been manipulated or outright manufactured.
So you're right that in our day to day lives it makes sense to just not worry about whether we are in a simulation or not and act as if we're not.
I don't agree that a belief in one would affect our ability to reason, though, as we are good at compartmentalising and saying exactly what we're saying here: As long as / until we can tell we're in a simulation, you just go on acting as if you're not. Whether you believe you're in one or not doesn't really make a difference as long as you have no evidence either way.
[1] https://philosophybreak.com/articles/george-berkeley-subject...
This was Husserl's project. But it's a failure.
Consider the case where realism is true: the environment causes us to enter a brain state which is ambiguious, so we cannot recover perfect information about the enviroment. Eg., light hits our eyes from a 3D room in a largely 2D way so we get depth perception wrong. A common occurance.
This means that there is a metaphysics, say R, where if R is true then all descriptions derivative/about anything metal may be systematically false.
In this sense realism is a scepticism about the "netural language" idealism presumes.
Since this scepticism is at least coherent/possible, there is no neutral language.
ie., the global sceptic says P(I am human|Scepticism) = 0 for a particualr Scepticism, eg., "youre in a dream" etc.
The idealist says: let's translate to a neutral language. P(Perceptions seem as if human|Scepticism) = 1
The realist says this is not 1, and may be zero, eg., when
P(Perceptions seem as-if human|AmbiguousBrainState) = 0
So realism offers a scepticism that idealism cannot overcome. There is no neutral language. And so reasoning does become impossible.
Eg., consider the claim "the object is 1m away" has to be translated to "perceptions seem as-if objects are 1m away" but in the case of an ambgious perception there is no fact about what "seems as-if" -- so you loose the ability to even talk about objects being at any distnace.
And since perceptions are bascially always ambigous there is no means by which you can translate objective claims into neutral subjective ones.
The choice to reason becomes the choice of a domain (of concepts) with which to interpret claims. A priori there is no neutral choices (eg., Idealism is NOT neutral!) -- so any sceptical choice becomes a decline to reasoning as such or a positive claim about the way the world is.
By this argument, we can't continue to reason, as we can't falsify the hypothesis that we might be in a simulation.
We clearly can continue to reason, on the basis of working within a set of assumptions / axioms that presume that what appears to be physical reality is physical reality.
That we can't disprove that it isn't physical reality is irrelevant.
Conditioning on any global scepticism disables reasoning.
Any any alternative is "positivistic" in the sense that it positsts against scepticism.
Idealism, ie., the false belief that there is a neutral language of "experience alone" is a posit against scepticism and presumes quite a radical metaphysics.
My point is that one alwayas has to condition on some positive account of the objectiuve content of our concepts in order to reason.
The way you describe idealism also makes no sense to me. The way I understand what you wrote does not match Berkeley's subjective idealism at all. You call it false, but it's an unfalsifiable philosophical view, so while we can reject it as meaningless, you have no basis for saying it is false.
In later idealism this became formalised as the claim that there is a "language of the subjective" -- but it is clear that Berkeley thinks this also. ie., that you can "describe your experiences as such".
This claim is false, and is basically just a restatement of the same genetic fallacy. Language describes the objective (eg., "I am in a room"), not the subjective. It is just asserted that since the objective = subjective, then this language is "ontologically neutral" -- ie., it "avoids metaphysics".
It does not! (1) the claim about the objective is metaphysical; (2) the language is still about the objective.
The idealists need there to be a "neutral language of the subjective" to avoid the challenge of scepticism -- ie., that all our claims are false.
But there is no neutral language. You cannot just "describe the subjective" to substitue for "describng the objetive".
To see this, suppose realism is true (ie., that you really are in a 3d space, with light hitting your eyes, etc.). In this situation you have an ambigious perception: it neither seems as-if you are 1m from the tv nor 2m (eg., consider the duck-rabbit illusion).
In this situation there is the objective claim "i am 1m from the tv" but no possible subjective reference for that claim. The subjective is ambiguous with respect to the objective. So idealism fails in its reply to scepticism: the subjective is ambiguous.
So what? Well then there is no reply to scepticism. If you believe all our claims are false then there is no "neutral language" to translate them into for the sake of "practical reasoning". To be sincere in this belief, you cannot reason.
Any sceptic (including idealists) who engages in conversation and claims to hold a global sceptical belief are just acting incoherently. They are, in fact, doing metaphysics.
Whatever "neutral language" they translate "ordinary claims" into entails a non-neutral set of metaphysical commitments. So to "reason at all" is to choose a metaphysics.
To connect this with the simulation point: to believe we are actually in a total simulation you are either (1)incapable of reasoning; or (2) asserting a contrary metaphysics without any justification whatsoever.
No, the idealists claim there is no objective, and that we only know the world subjectively via our senses. This is an unfalsifiable claim, because any attack on it can be written off by arguing that any experience of investigating the claim is coloured by the subjectivity of the senses.
The only viable "attack" on idealism is to accept that while it is possible, unless there is direct evidence - e.g. you observe things that would not be possible in a physical world - it is pointless to consider the idea because it is unfalsifiable.
This is much the same with simulation arguments - they're nothing but "digital versions" of idealism. What simulation arguments (any varianet, not just Bostrom's) gives us is a constraint that gives us something that could become worth investigating if we specific things. E.g. if we were to observe telltale signs of possible compression in physical reality
> This claim is false, and is basically just a restatement of the same genetic fallacy. Language describes the objective (eg., "I am in a room"), not the subjective. It is just asserted that since the objective = subjective, then this language is "ontologically neutral" -- ie., it "avoids metaphysics".
That languages seeks to make claims about the objective does not mean the claims are true.
A simple description of idealism in "physical terms" is to imagine three rooms connected in a series with a data feed A <-> B <-> C, where rooms A and C are minds, and B is physical reality, and where none of the rooms have any other ability to obtain information about what is outside the room. Idealism states that only A and C exists, and that B is an illusion produced by A and C or by as a product of their connection. Any statement you make "about the objective" is meaningless because you have no way of talking about an objective outside your room that is not based on the information obtained from the data feed.
If you are A you don't know if B exists or if C exists for that matter, because you have no source of information about them that you can prove is objective. Your data feed might be purely fake, it may come from you yourself, or it may be manipulated in all kinds of ways, or it may come from outside the rooms entirely. But there's a further problem: You only observe A as well through a stream of data that you believe to be internal to A, but you have no way of verifying that either. You can't prove A exists, have existed, or will exist. You can at most assert that in the given moment, something has an experience that gives an experience of time and space and consciousness. There is no way for you to independently verify the existence of time even.
You may not have existed before you read this and you may cease to exist after having read this, and I might not exist at all.
Now, if I were to assert that this is definitely true, that would be unjustified and idiotic. I can't even say if it is possible. I can say, however, that we have no means of falsifying it, and so any assertion - like the one that started this discussion - that anything we observe falsifies simulation, is unjustified.
> The idealists need there to be a "neutral language of the subjective" to avoid the challenge of scepticism -- ie., that all our claims are false.
The only viable attack on idealism is that it is unfalisifiable, and so not worth spending time on the unconstrained form of idealism.
That does not mean all forms of idealism are necessarily unfalsifiable; one can imagine constrained forms that set out further propositions that would make it detectable; e.g. in the subset of idealist philosophies of simulation theories, a simulation theory that posits specific constraints on computability or posits "escapes", those specific subsets could possibly be falsified if they're concrete enough.
> So what? Well then there is no reply to scepticism. If you believe all our claims are false then there is no "neutral language" to translate them into for the sake of "practical reasoning". To be sincere in this belief, you cannot reason.
This does not hold at all. All you need to do to reason is to argue that even if you believe idealism (or a simulation) to be true, you accept that this idealist world / simulation at a minimum appears to adhere to certain rules, and to constrain your reasoning to add an implicit "assuming the observed apparent rules hold and continue to hold then within this subjective space / simulation ....". We don't need this to be true. If it's not true, then the reasoning doesn't hold, but that's fine.
Put another way: We can reason about fantasy worlds within the rules that hold in those fantasy worlds all we want. We do it all the time. If the rules for those fantasy worlds are sufficiently well defined, we can do complicated reasoning about them. E.g. we can reason about a game of chess to a great level of fidelity. Whether that world has a physical existence or is simulation has no bearing on our ability to reason about it. We just can't claim that the reasoning is about an objective reality.
So we can continue to act as if we are in objective reality, and reason as if we are, whether or not we are or whether or not we believe we're in a simulation or not, because we can reason with implicit caveats that what we believe we observe continues to hold.
Even assuming we are in an objective reality we do exactly that anyway. We keep extrapolating and assuming that things will continue mostly the way it always has, because that is the best we can do. We don't know if there's some unknown natural law that causes the speed of light to halve tomorrow. It makes no sense to assume there is, and so we reason on the basis there isn't until there is evidence to the contrary.
> To connect this with the simulation point: to believe we are actually in a total simulation you are either (1)incapable of reasoning; or (2) asserting a contrary metaphysics without any justification whatsoever.
Certainly, this I agree with.
But what I addressed initially was your claim that non-determinism falsifies simulation, and it does not.
That does not translate into believing we are, only in believing that it may be possible.
The two are different - we have no evidence that we are. We do however have a number of theories that set out in various level of detail and seriousness ways in which a simulated reality might be possible or even likely, and some of those theories are at least in theory falsifiable. E.g. Bostroms Simulation Argument is falsifiable (but falsifying it falsifies just his set of propositions, not simulation in general, and it's reasonable to argue if one wishes that the conditions required to falsify his argument makes it unfalsifiable in any meaningful way - e.g. the ways to falsify it either for humanity to go extinct prior to creating simulations, or for us to prove that simulations of sufficient fidelity are impossible within our perceived reality; while the former is possible and the latter might be, they're not exactly practical)
The point being that even though we absolutely agree that there is no justification for claiming we can currently claim to know we are in a simulation, that does not mean it's a subject we can't investigate or reason about. It just means for us to be able to get somewhere meaningful we need to investigate sets of propositions about these concepts that are actually falsifiable, and outside of that narrow scope people should just reason on the same basis as we always have: On the assumption that the laws of nature will continue to hold.
Sorry for brevity, am typing on a potato.
But we do know that there are no hidden variables - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem
The process of splitting into many words, as well as necessary limitations on measurement, i think both leave you in non-computable territory.
You'd model this by generating an infinite number of Turing machines for each quantum event, but you'd also need to do something about the time horizon on prediction.
Ie., chaotic systems aren't long-run deterministic because of measurement limitations. So there's something like many uncountable infinities of Turing machines out there. As for each digit in X there is an infinity of many-worlds in Y (the nature of chaos).
I dont see this many-worlds vision giving you anything you can simulation. Rather its a useful conceptual heuristic when interpreting QM probabilities.
You don’t actually have to compute umpteen branches. You just have to simulate sufficient evidence to convince an observer in the simulation that many-worlds is true. Surely it is far easier to delude simulated people into believing some theory of physics is true, than to actually accurately simulate a universe in which it is true.
But, even that wholly accurate simulation - if we are living in a simulation, it is possible the physical laws of the “real” universe are very different from those of our own. If our simulators are living under very different laws of physics, they may have access to computational resources which would be “unphysical” in ours. They may even be capable of hypercomputation. Maybe their laws of physics contain an oracle for the halting problem. Maybe they can execute supertasks. Even proof that simulating our universe would be uncomputable does not exclude the possibility that we are simulated on a hypercomputer
We don’t even know that hypercomputation is physically impossible in this universe. We know of no way of achieving it given known physics, but we cannot exclude the possibility of unknown physical laws or processes which permit it, or even that it might be some bizarre mathematical consequence of existing theories which nobody has yet discovered. Maybe the hypercomputer will be the defining technological advance of the 57th century.
Finding that theory is hard to find for our current knowledge and capabilities. But extrapolating that this will remain so will not age well.
Do you think we will be able to grow capabilities indefinitely ? For example, let's imagine we know how to build a detector for some phenomenon. For some reason we need to go to another star (for example, to mine all of its planet for some unobtainiun). Then we would be stuck in our progress...
I'm not in physics but is there lot of room to improve our capabilities left ?
Could one could also argue that quantum indeterminacy makes it difficult make predictions the more interactions you add to a system? That is, interactions at the atomic and subatomic levels are manageable enough to observe, but as we add actors, the interactions grow exponentially, and each actor's state is influenced not just by itself but by other actors in the system, ad infinitum.
> I'm not convinced that comparing two different states of matter is a useful comparison.
Don't forget that the universe itself has undergone a phase transition, after (or during, depending on who's lecturing) the inflation period (very shortly after the big bang).
I prefer calling it a vacuum collapse, 'cause that's what it was. "Phase transition" sounds too clinical.
Always wondered if there's any chance there may have been some form of life existing prior to reheating. It's not as though we have any way to find out, unfortunately.
> "Phase transition" sounds too clinical.
What does "vacuum collapse" mean? No matter how I try to interpret it, I cannot come up with anything that resembles the cosmic inflation.
The problem is we're not sure that's what caused reheating. There's been other suggestions, some of them quite exotic -- a collision with a neighbouring brane, for instance. Still, my bet's on false vacuum decay.
On the other hand, have you ever tried to explain even the most elementary concepts of basic special relativity to a crow? Crows are intelligent and can reason about problems, but special relativity is just beyond them no matter how long you try to teach them, and it seems likely that this is something crows will never be able to understand. At best some distant descendant of crows that has evolved so much from present day crows to be a completely new species might get it.
I see no reason to assume that the capabilities required to completely understand physics fall somewhere between the limits of crow intelligence and the limits of human intelligence.
"In the case of stars orbiting close to a spinning, supermassive black hole, frame dragging should cause the star's orbital plane to precess about the black hole spin axis. This effect should be detectable within the next few years via astrometric monitoring of stars at the center of the Milky Way galaxy."
And it's exactly this they are showing in the article.
If I say that below the surface of earth there are green goblins who suck down objects from the air and then an apple drops from a tree - that does not prove me right. It just does not prove me wrong.
Modern scientific authority derives from a inheritance of proofen right, which people who hang around in online communities usually do not know about. Add to that the "progressive" tendencies to smash the "old" - now taken over by the alt-right and you get a ahistoric bunch of fool, who would throw dirt at everyone no matter how right or wrong his hypothesis was.
Apples and goblins should produce predictions that differ from existing theory, and predict a new type of observation that could confirm its correctness versus existing work.
It provides evidence that his theory is correct, it does not prove it because they still could find evidence that does not fit general relativity.
The posters example made it sound crazy, but "proof" is the wrong word to use. I much prefer the paper's opener of
>The theory of General Relativity (GR) continues to pass all experimental tests with flying colours
However, this doesn't open the floodgates to any old theory because a simpler theory that explains the data is preferrable to a more complex one. Your green goblin theory might fit the data, but then leaves open questions like what do green goblins eat, why were they not detected previously, what else might they affect etc etc.