Comment by sillysaurus2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sillysaurus2 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to come up with a philosophically sound logically consistant explanation for natural phenomenon which isn't unified and connected at a fundamental level. Two incompatible sets of natural explanations are vastly less likely than one unless we're falling back on superstition again.

Really? Ancient philosophers argued that it's vastly less likely for there to be such a huge distance separating celestial bodies than whatever their pet theory of the day was. Or that it's vastly less likely for planets to travel in ellipses, because circles were "so perfect." Throughout history, time and time again, humans seem to have a problem accepting that the imagination of nature is far greater than that of man.

Plus because it's so specialized and inaccessible to the layman, the degree to which there's already tremendous consistency and unification in our theories of the underlying nature of things is dramatically underappreciated by most people.

I'm trying, but unfortunately you've given no examples.

> Ancient philosophers argued that it's vastly less likely for there to be such a huge distance separating celestial bodies than whatever their pet theory of the day was.

Is it me or is that a bit handwavy? The Greeks or whoever else got things awfully right and other things terribly wrong. We have the benefit of hindsight so we can point at the latter category. It doesn't negate the former.

Seems like you could take any statement and say "oh yeah? well the ancients got stuff wrong!"

I think that's a bit of a strawman. The pattern described was that we are often wrong because there's some factor about which we do not yet have the slightest clue.

Given for how long we've thought that we knew everything, it should hardly be surprising to find out that there's more to things than we know.

You're not comparing apples to apples when you compare ancient "theories" and modern scientific theory. Predicting that the sun will come up tomorrow, and why the sun will come up tomorrow are two very different levels of detail and granularity. The latter will have far more predictive power than the former.

No ancient theories had anything like the predictive power of modern theories, so were far less powerful. So when we talk about how the ancients had theories for this - we're talking orders of magnitude less complexity.

An analogy: when we were kids my brother took part in a guess the weight of the cake. The answer was 1.010 kg. My brother had guessed 1.005 kg and another boy had guessed 1.04 kg. They tried give it to the other kid - well his difference was "3 different" whereas my brother's was "5 different". Obviously anyone with a brain could see there was an order of magnitude difference in the precision of the two predictions.

Ancient theories are like that. Orders of magnitude less precise and therefore less predictive than modern theories. The differences tend to lead to dramatic differences in outcome making them fail to interweave in ways that are useful for us in the modern world - this is why, after all, we moved to the modern theories and they led to everything we have today.

Ancient theories didn't tend to connect in philosophically logical ways as do modern theories - this is reflected in their lack of predictive power. So when I say that the problems with tying theories together that modern physicists have are vast in our minds, but really amount to splitting hairs when we compare them to the differences between theories that preceded them, this is why.

The key difference is that we no longer posit that we know everything. We assumed we knew things we didn't, in ancient times, and in the process relied on hand-waves to keep moving, until some scientifically minded folks got too frustrated with the inconsistencies and started to accept that perhaps we didn't know it all. Now we know we don't know, and use the inconsistencies to tell how close we're getting to knowing enough to have consistent understanding.

The key is that we continue to improve our ability to gather evidence about what the universe looks like, and insist that our theories keep pace with the evidence we're gathering. So, the previous hand-waves occurred in large part due to insufficient data, and unwillingness to look for more. We've moved past that, to a large extent.

Those ancient theories are not philosophically and logically consistent. It's why we had the scientific revolution and the enlightenment in the first place. Because there were holes in those accounts. The degree to which Physicists are talking about inconsistencies are tiny compared to the huge holes in theories than the very primitive and simplistic ideas of the ancients.

As to your ending comment. That's the point. Without studying physics you're not going to understand the degree to which it already all plugs together very well. We would have no electronics nor satellites without an incredible level of agreement between theories and experiment supporting a tightly interconnected set of theories - they weren't going to happen with any pre-scientific revolution worldviews.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com