Comment on Gravity
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 1 week ago
This is wholly inaccurate. We do know what causes gravity; time dilation near matter. What we don’t know is why gravity, because we have yet to produce a model that matches both quantum effects and cosmic behaviors like gravity and dark matter/energy.
“Quantum gravity” is the general term for figuring out something that ties these two universes of behavior together.
pcalau12i@lemmygrad.ml 1 week ago
For any physical theory, you can always just ask “why x”, like a child who constantly asks “why” over and over again to every answer, but you will always hit a bottom. There seems to be a popular mentality that “why x” is always a meaningful question, and from that, we can conclude that we don’t know anything at all, because all our beliefs rely on a “why x” we don’t know the answer to, an so they are all baseless. We can’t make any truth claims about the behavior of particles, galaxies, or anything, because you can just infinitely ask “why” until we hit a bottom and then you would say “I don’t know.”
But, personally, I find this point of view rather bizarre, because, again, it can make it seem like we don’t know anything at all and have no foundations for truth claims in the slightest, and are completely ignorant about everything. I think it makes more coherent sense to just allow for to be a bottom to the questioning. Eventually a string of “why” questions will reach a bottom, where that bottom shouldn’t be answered with “I don’t know” but it should be answered with “it is what it is,” because, for all we know, it is indeed an accurate description of reality at a fundamental level and there is nothing beneath it.
That shouldn’t be taken as a strong claim that there definitely isn’t anything beneath it, as if we should just accept our current most fundamental theories are the end of the line and stop searching. It should be taken as the weaker claim that as far as we currently know it is the bottom, and so we can indeed make truth claims upon that basis. The child might ask, “why do things experience gravity?” You might say, “time dilation near matter.” The child then may ask, “why does time dilate near matter?” In my opinion, the appropriate response to that is just, “as far as we know, it is what it is.” That could change in the future, but, given our best scientific models at the present moment, that is the end of the line of the explanation.
That seems to be a fairly controversial point, though. Most people in my experience disagree, but I don’t see how you can have a basis for truth claims at all if you claim that “why gravity” does indeed have an answer but you can’t specify it, because then it would also be baseless to claim that gravity is caused by time dilation near matter, because you’ve not established that time actually does dilate near matter, as you would be claiming that this relies on postulates which you’ve not defined. It seems, again, simpler to just take the most fundamental theories as the postulates themselves, as the fundamental axioms.
There is a popular point of view that we shouldn’t do this because scientific theories often change, so something you believe today can be proven wrong tomorrow. But then we end up never being allowed to believe anything at all. We always have to pretend we’re clueless about nature because if we believe in any of our most fundamental theories, then our beliefs could be overturned. But personally, I don’t see why this to be a problem. A person who believed Newtonian mechanics was fundamental to how nature worked back in the 1700s were shown later to be wrong, but that person’s beliefs were still closer to reality than the people who rejected it and upheld outdated Aristotelian physics, or people who refused to belief in anything at all. It is fine to later be shown to be wrong, nothing to be upset about, nothing negative about that. We are better off, imo, as treating our best physical theories as indeed fundamentally how reality works, the “bottom” so to speak, until we find new theories that show otherwise, and we change our minds with the times.