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Comment by dakiol | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t know that Physics was about understanding reality (sure, from a romantic perspective yeah). I always thought it was about making our lives better (like any other branch of science).

I believe we will never find out what’s the real nature of reality. That doesn’t mean we should stop doing science, though: it makes human live better.

I believe that the “meaning of life” is not about the answer (science telling us what’s the actual meaning) but about the discovery process we embrace: knowing beforehand that we’ll never understand everything and nevertheless keep waking up every day to do the job.

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> . I always thought it was about making our lives better

That's Engineering not Physics.

Understanding reality makes our lives significantly better. No room for primitive religions leading us to stagnation or even reversal, when we can understand very well what sun, moon and stars are, why they move as they do, or why lightning happens and why weather patterns are what they are.

Understanding of reality via physics gave us all electronics too, including one I use to write this and one you use to read it. That's a noble goal on its own, no need to meddle with that.

Pursuit of meaning of life is completely different topic, for different folks, no need to try to mix those two. Plus its very subjective - tons of folks already found it or simply don't care about it.

> No room for primitive religions leading us to stagnation or even reversal, when we can understand very well what sun, moon and stars are, why they move as they do, or why lightning happens and why weather patterns are what they are.

Do you mean this literally, as in this is knowledge (JTB) that you possess?

> Pursuit of meaning of life is completely different topic

Is this a part of reality, or of something else?

> no need to try to mix those two

How does one go about accurately determining what is needed?

> Understanding reality makes our lives significantly better.

Of course on the whole understanding makes our lives better, but if you're asserting this for everything, it's probably some kind of a survival bias. The understandings that aren't really useful are often forgotten, while the useful ones are passed down through generations.

It's actually very easy to get caught in understanding niche topics that genuinely find very little application.

Is all potentiality that exists unlocked and harvested? Is science even looking in all the right places? Can a mind on science even care about such things (or better: to what degree do individual and a culture/society of minds on science have the ability to care (have non-constrained curiosity))?

In my experience, something about the mind makes it think it is able to know the correct answer to these questions, which is a remarkable but little studied phenomenon.

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