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Comment by kovacs_x | Hacker News Reader

I'm 1000% sure, in 20, 50, 100, 500 years humans will look back on "science of 20/21th century" as we look now on say 16/17th century- there were some things that were "mostly" right, but most of it was incorrect / inprecise / incomplete and was a fantasy of earlier thought up models.

It's been like that always. Don't think it'll be different this time. Though people of every time thought they had (almost) complete understanding of the universe. I remember reading that at the beginning of 20th century science was largerly considered complete... we know how it turned out! (think relativity, quantum physics, etc.)

Think about that!

(ps. me personally I just cannot stomach that universe is only <15B "years" old. Not saying there was no BANG! (ie. large cosmic event) back then and we're products of it :), but don't think it was "the beginning of everything". Seems very much like "god created universe!" type of thinking)

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Sure, the frontier is always messy. Scientists talk about “quarks” and “dark energy” but those are just placeholders for “we kinda get what they do but we have no idea what they actually are.”

100 or 500 years from now, QM and GR will turn out to be approximations, or shadows, of some deeper theory. But that won’t change how insanely accurate their predictions are.

Our understanding of reality isn’t just moving forward, it’s getting asymptotically closer to ground truth. New theories may upend the conceptual framework, but they still just add decimal points — they have to, otherwise they’re worse theories than what we already have.

Why? Sure, maybe a better number to give is "somewhere around 20", but it's difficult to tell how the "true number" could be over 100 or even 50.

Explanation needed. How can you, a primitive ape on a tiny remote planet with an average lifespan of 80 years (not meant as an insult, I am too), be sure about what happened 15, 20 or 100 BILLION years ago? I think this is what parent meant with: "people of every time thought they had (almost) complete understanding of the universe." - "Don't think it'll be different this time."

There's good evidence for it, inferred temperature of the early universe included. Obviously not perfect evidence, but even if you assume "tired light", it's another thing all together to come up with a new version of thermodynamics.

Indeed. But keyword is „inferred“, assuming that all laws worked the same at any point in a gigantic timeframe, at any point in a gigantic universe. Except singularities. And quantum mechanics as it seems? And maybe dark energy. Oh and lately, maybe gravity waves. Btw I was once in a lecture room in Berlin where they claimed that one of the thermodynamic laws where discovered…while giving a lecture. Not too long ago, perhaps 150-200 years. Doesn‘t seem so unlikely that somebody comes up with a new version at some point.

We can literally see into the past 13 billion years ago by building space crafts that collect microwave radiation, because we aren't as primitive as you may want us to believe.

No, not literally…presumably. You believe that the radiation you look at is that old, because you measure certain wavelengths and study ladders, but you can‘t really prove it. Proving that something is 13 billion years old is beyond the capabilities of us apes, at least at this point.

Can you really prove anything beyond your own existence? Descartes says no. Maybe all your senses are just an illusion.

We know that light has a finite speed. We've measured it.

We know that speed is independent of the relative velocities between the litter and the observer. Again, we've carried out experiments and measured that as well

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