I can say, we will never know what the first human that got to North America had for lunch on their 20th birthday, and I think that’s as true as it could reasonably be. Sure maybe we’ll invent a time machine or some other technology in the future that invalidates it, but if you apply that logic then nothing can ever be stated as a fact.
What is the 20th birthday? According to which calendar? (Leap days etc)?
What is lunch? Not every people subdivide their meals in a predictable way that you can pinpoint to what "lunch" is
Etc etc
EDIT: forgot the most obvious: define what counts for human. It's not clear cut to distinguish boundaries between species
if there is a large mirror a few hundred light years away we might be able to see his lunch in the reflection ;)
All I'm saying is that making (nearly) absolute claims with incomplete knowledge is not a contradiction.
It's theoretically possible that we'll one day find some other method of finding out the truth (perhaps a god will descend from the heavens and tell us? or perhaps we manage to find a bug / exploit in the simulation?) but personally I find it unlikely.
I think 'never' should be understood in this way—either there's something wrong or fundamentally incomplete about our theories, or we can not know certain things. Barring groundbreaking advancements in understanding akin to quantum physics and relativity theory, physics tells us so. Since the papers discussed do not establish such a new and testable theory but still go and discuss things current science cannot access, they cannot taken to be science. Doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong or uninteresting. I don't think she excludes the possibility that a groundbreaking discovery could be made that changes that. But the papers were not written in a time that knows of such a discovery.
The implication is that we simply don’t have enough energies to recreate similar circumstance in a particle accelerator and we cannot “see” past microwave background radiation. As such, as of now, there isn’t a straight path to understand the Big Bang further in any context.
However, measuring the state of the singularity that probably existed before inflation, or even more so, measuring anything about how that in itself came to be, is explicitly impossible given our current theories. As impossible as building a space ship that travels faster than light, or measuring the precise position and velocity of a particle.
These are not technological issues: finding a way to do them would mean a completely new paradigm in science. So any paper that attempts to prove these things without presenting a new paradigm is doomed to the "we will never know" bag.
These people have (for better or worse) burnt the ships with the people of their generation who write grants and sit on tenure committees.
Hossenfelder’s pivot to “wildly over-credentialed pop-sci YouTuber” is interesting. My gut flinch reaction is like, “you’re better than this”, but… I have not walked a mile in her shoes, and if this is an end-run around a corrupt job market for particle/high-energy people who won’t won’t get on board with The Landscape? Maybe more power to her.
I give that context so that people will know (my opinion on) the backstory for why she’s in an adversarial relationship with The Academy.
The “will never know” phrasing might be unfortunate. But the epistemological principle goes back to Hawking at least: “asking what happened before the Big Bang or where it came from is like asking what is north of the North Pole”.
It’s a fun thing to theorize about, but the Big Bang is almost definitionally “the bound on observable causality”. It’s not a statement about what we won’t ever know, it’s a statement about what’s knowable.
"""How about you wait, and we talk again in 10 billion years."""
this is not so much a joke as a thinly disguised a deeply held conviction. There's no need for a secret cabal to explain why someone who clearly thinks the job should not even be done has trouble finding further employment in an extremely harsh job market.
She's obvious pissed off, and that should be taken into account when evaluating her assertions. Woit is way more pissed off, and probably the better mathematician. Smolin seems like, sad and resigned more than angry, but he also got a great gig wither Perimeter (which he might still hold?), which has to soften the blow.
Frankly my layman's knowledge of all this is badly dated, because after decades of avid interest going back to childhood I got so dispirited about it I've kind of stopped paying attention outside of a few bright spots (Deutsch/Marletto have my rapt attention).
So I don't doubt you that lots of people reject Stringworld now maybe even to the point of that being a fairly mainstream view, but 10 or 20 years ago that was a CLM at best and usually tenure-track suicide, and there's a whole generation of people who did in fact operate under the dictates of something that could, with a little poetic license, be called a "cabal". Dismantling the scientific method to admit the Landscape was, at least to an avid outsider, dogma not long ago.
I'm enheartened to hear that people are starting to try new stuff again, but it's not difficult for me to have sympathy for people who just kinda gave up.
Honestly I think the biggest problem is that you have the timeline wrong, string theory reached its zenith in the 90's, but already by 2002 Woit could give it a good public kicking and mostly get praise for it (if you trust his own account here: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/arxiv-trackbacks.html I find it deeply funny that of the two of the people he reports as being angry with his beat down, one is the infamous Lubos Motl! ).
As an aside, from the tone with which Woit recounts how people wrote possibly mean things about him in the comments of a blog, I suspect he might simply not be a very nice person to interact with which explains why he might have had trouble in his career.
For example, when reporting that he complained to the arxiv admins, he's careful to note he was polite, which I think sounds like someone who unprompted confirms they were wearing pants to an interview...
It seems to be a product of not realizing (or wanting to realize) how old I am! I just checked and Witten won his Fields in 1990, I would have sworn it was like 5-8 years later than that, to pick one key milestone. Getting old is an experience!
Gödels incompleteness theorem.
In that case, we know for sure that we will never find a list of complete and consistent axioms for all mathematics. We do not need omniscience for this, it’s something we know for sure we will never learn.
I think there are more examples, I remember one of my professors mentioning off the cuff he believes P vs NP will never be proven one way or another because it’s most likely one of those problems that simply don’t have a solution. Or, maybe the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is another example. We know for sure there are limitations on the knowledge we can have.
I don’t think it’s unfair to imply a limit to our knowledge. I’m not saying the universe’s beginning necessarily falls into this category, I honestly don’t know. But there are for sure classes of problems that by their very nature cannot be known, or cannot be known with certainty.
I read into one a few years ago when I was trying to find when the last American slave died.
The problem is they were considered property so no documentation or birth records were produced. The lack of record keeping made this an impossible question.
The last documented one was in the 1930s but the last civil war veteran died in the 1950s, surely there was some baby of the 1860s that was born into the system that probably survived until at least the Montgomery bus boycott or Brown v. Board.
But this is something I discovered is a factual statement that's impossible to verify and will never be resolved.
That's no contradiction though.
A contradiction would be "I know everything about X" and at the same time "There's a limit to our knowledge of X".
It's no contradiction to claim that there are limits to our knowledge but still claim to absolutely know Y about Z.
In other words, the idea that "there are limits to our knowledge" is not incompatible with the idea that we fully know this or that. You just mean that those limits only apply to other things.
(Heck, in math we can even prove that some things can never be proven, thus both implying limits to our knowledge and that we know something with 100% certainty).
No we can't. We can only prove that certain formal systems cannot resolve certain statements. We might still invent other formal systems that are acceptable to us and that can resolve those statements.
That's irrelevant, though, because a mathematical proof or a statement X is considered in the context of a specific formal system (and any isomorphic system).
Proving that S can't be proven under formal system F will always be true regardless if you are able to prove the same statement in the formal system Z.
For example, you can't say "I just disproved that triangle angles add to 180 degrees" just because you've proved they add to more than 180 degrees under a non-flat surface or non-Euclidean geometry.
People saying "triangle angles add to 180 degrees" implicitly already mean "under Euclidean geometry and in a flat plane". It's just left implied, because it's goes without saying that they mean it within the system they expressed the problem and did the proof in.
Is it something you have personally verified and found to have been the case as you established the principles in play, or is it (at the other end of the spectrum) that a science paper says such-and-such and you read a summary on HN?
There are a lot of misconceptions about the Big Bang. The Universe is a metric space. The "metric" part here is deliberate, specific and technical. It really means that given two points the metric can tell us what we call the "distance" between them. Abstract maths deals with spaces that do and don't have metrics.
The best explanation I've heard of the Big Bang is not that the Universe originated from a single point but rather the metric between all points in the Universe at the time of the Big Bang was 0.
There's an open question about whether the Universe is finite or infinite. I mean the actual Universe not the observable Universe. This is almost a metaphysical question since we'll probably never know.
We don't really know how gravity and space acts in such extreme environments but with black holes (that we also don't understand at the quantum level) we have plenty of examples of admittedly less extreme but still exxtreme corollaries. It is kind of mind-bending though. One description I read says that time acts like space and space acts like time within the event horizon. As in, you can see light entering the black holes behind you but that's the past and we can view the past all around us (eg distant galaxies are us viewing the past). Towards the singularity is the "future" and we can no more see that than we can see any future.
We, as sentient beings, have a difficult time comprehending things beyond our existence. What I mean is that before we were born, we didn't exist. After we die, we don't exist. We can't really comprehend that intuitively because our perception of the world is predicated on our cognizance. The past is easier. Stuff happened before we were born. But now we do exist. So at some point in the future we won't exist. How can you comprehend your own lack of existence?
I feel in some ways similar about the Universe. Our observations are predicated on concepts like "time" and "space" that at some point didn't exist. How do you reason about the lack of existence of space let alone time when everything we know is predicated on that?
Still, I too feel like the author is too pessimistic about how much more we can learn here. Assuming we aren't extinguished in the next few centuries (which is actually more difficult than it sounds at this point) we are going to be here for an inconceivably long time. Given our understanding of the Universe, that's likely to be >10^100 years. That's a long time to figure stuff out.
For who is man to say, that man must only learn about God through objectively verifiable facts, because man said so? Perhaps this God wants seeking. If we were born without eyes, color would still exist, but we would never perceive it, and how would we believe it if someone said it did exist?
Strange that gods who were so occupied with matters on this planet, who live in a nearby heaven up by the firmament of stars, are also still credible candidates for "creator" of the universe.
The real universe is so much more vast and so much more strange than any scriptures had ever imagined. One could be forgiven for excusing that underestimation of the universe as a limitation of the imagination of man.
In other words, "the god of the gaps" has to keep finding new gaps to fill, and the gaps are ever less tenable.
Edit: Furthermore, this said God might point out on said day the lack of any aliens, or other life, as another sign that the universe was made for man, and nothing else, and the sheer enormity of it should be yet another sign. For if the universe was not large, would it be more easy to deny?
Edit 2: You might dismiss the above, and these aren't the best arguments that could be formulated, but it is more to show that your presupposition that a larger universe disproves his existence is untenable.
Theism is man's "theory". Either way, we enter a paradox, if you believe in gods then the theories of man ultimately came from gods, ie, a perfectly logical system only produces logical output.
This whole thread pretty much wound up like I predicted while reading the article. Author implies with certainty that science is uncertain in a specific field and it's invaded by people certain of their beliefs in other fields, ie, if science has a kink in it then gods exist for certain.
For god of the gaps argument never fails to amuse me.