Yeah, when this meme was first cycled around over 20 years ago I didn’t like it then, I like far, far less now in an age of science denial and every fukkin headline on every fukkin major media site feed saying shit like “SCIENTISTS BAFFLED OVER NEW DISCOVERY OF UNKNOWN SIGNALS” or “SCIENTISTS HORRIFIED BY DISCOVERY THAT BREAKS THE LAWS OF NATURE” and so on.
This shit is the reason we have an anti-vaxxer with no qualifications leading the most powerful nation’s health and human services. This is the shit that feeds people deciding that horse-dewormer is as good as the accumulated knowledge of centuries of study and data. This kind of over-simplification is why we won’t see a dozen scrapped space missions and why people spit on scientific data about how helping people with their gender identity helps prevent suicide and on and on and on.
We have to make knowledge “cool” again, and I have no idea how to do that.
shalafi@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
No way I live long enough for us to get to a Grand Unified Field theory. :(
SmokeyDope@piefed.social 14 hours ago
What in particular do you want to know?
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Didn’t scientists just prove a unified theory was impossible?
rikudou@lemmings.world 17 hours ago
What a bunch of nonsense. So, pseudo-scientists repeat after me: you cannot derive rules of the outer universe from the inner universe.
The only way to “prove” the hypothesis is if an admin sends a message or leaves some other way for us to discover we’re in a simulation, other than that it’s unprovable and undisprovable.
Acamon@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Yeah, I think the “simulation hypothesis” is a super pointless take, partly because it is so profoundly unfalsifiable. It’s no more plausible or convincing to me than “the universe exists in God’s mind” or “we are figment within a dream of a dragon”.
Propenents try to argue things like “if we can create lifelike simulations, then we’d create loads of them, therefore we’re statistically likely to be inside one”. But that’s to draw conclusions about what the “outer” universe is like from features of the simulation. If our reality is within a greater one, I don’t find more evidence for it being a “computer simulation” than for it being inside Tommy Westphall’s snow globe.
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 16 hours ago
While you’re totally right IMHO, I’d argue that the inner universe indeed can prove this. Just within the rules and boundaries of the inner universe. With our given measures and abilities. Which are or might be totally different from the outside.
SmokeyDope@piefed.social 14 hours ago
Are you kidding? Gödel proved that decades ago for all of mathematics including theoretical physics. The incompleteness theorem in a nutshell says no axiomatic system can prove everything about itself. There will always be truths of reality that can never be proven or reconciled with fancy maths, or detected with sensors, or discovered by smashing particles into base component fields. Really its a miracle we can know anything at all with mathematical proofs and logical deduction and experiment measurement.
But something you need to understand is that physicist types do not believe math is real. Even if its mathatically proven we cant know everything in formal axiomatic systems, theoretical physicist will go “but thats just about math, your confusing it with actual physical reality!” . They use math as a convinent tool for modeling and description, but absolutely tantrum at the idea that the description tools themselves are ‘real’ objects .
To people who work with particles, the idea that abstract concepts like complex numbers or Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are just as “real” as a lepton when it comes to the machinery and operation mechanics of the universe is heresy. It implies nonphysical layers of reality where nonphysical abstractions actually exist, which is the concept scientific determinist hate most. The only real things to a scientific determinist is what can be observed and measured, the rest is invisible unicorns.
So yes its possible that there is no ToE or GUT because of incompleteness and undecidability, but theres something alluring about the persuit.
JustAPenguin@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
I disagree in part with this logic.
Gödel’s incompleteness theorem says that a system typically cannot prove all truths that come from axioms.of the system, like you said.
Where I disagree is how this is applied to theoretical physics. Depending on where you draw the line of “everything”, the limits of proof comes down to two things: observation and the language we use to describe it.
As it stands, for example, gravity is difficult to fit into the standard model. It may be impossible to do so within that system. However, it may work well in an alternate description of the universe. In this case, the core mathematics is the same, but the theories differ. It may be likely that our understanding of the universe is filled with logical holes and fallacy, but that does not mean that the incompleteness theorem says anything regarding the ability to unify physics.
Mathematically, physics is nothing more than descriptions of observation and expectations. It could very well be that our perception of the universe is fundamentally flawed and, in essence, we can only perceive certain truths that appear correct in our perspective. As such, it isn’t necessarily impossible to formulate a correct theory; it’s just that we are unable to succinctly describe reality.
More simply, math is just the thing we use to describe the universe. So, it’s likely we can keep “adding new math” as we discover new physics. The hard part is understanding the physical nature of the universe, first.
Or perhaps the universe truly cannot be described all at one, such that everything is related. As a mathematician, I like to believe that we simply lack the ability to perceive the full reality of, well, “reality”. And as such, we are missing important information that would tie all the loose ends together.