Comment on 1000 years from now physics is forgotten and all that remains is the legend of two hobbits, Charm and Spin, and their quest for the Higgyboson. At this point, is physics true?

schmorpel@slrpnk.net ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• spiderwort@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  No, haven’t. Thanks. Also consider “A Canticle for Leibowitz”.

  My point is that, over time, knowledge gets corrupted. Especially esoteric knowledge. And it might not even take much time.

  So you gotta wonder what myths we’ve got now that started as sincere attempts at a model.

  And even today. When a guy who made the observation and crafted the model tells you the model, your understanding and his are probably not the same.

  So there’s that corruption to consider.

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  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    “Physics” is more or less syntactic sugar for “how the universe works”. It’s not a belief system. It’s just the way work - and, in fact, it’s allowing you to experience cognition and sapience, as well as enabling you to ask this latest in a sequence of odd and strangely aimed questions. But I digress: Our understanding more or less of the universe and its operation doesn’t change its fundamental nature.

    We gained our knowledge of physics through experimentation and logical extrapolation.

    Any knowledge gained from experimental evidence can be regained.

    Ergo, knowledge that is lost - or as you put it, “corrupted” - will be re-learned and/or corrected in time, so long as the species whose knowledge we’re discussing doesn’t straight up go extinct.

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  • neatchee@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    There is no question that most myths and legends were originally an attempt to convey facts, theories, or guesses into the future.

    Humans are built to be pattern matching machines and prediction engines; it’s one of the big survival traits we developed through evolution and we’re better at it than any other species we know of.

    BUT objectively speaking we were still really, really bad at it. Yet that doesn’t stop us from trying.

    So we tend to do the best we can with the information we have available at the time.

    As others have said, “physics” - and science in general - is by definition immutable. It is the thing that can be tested with specific predictions that always turn out to be correct. If I can perform an experiment today, and you can perform the same experiment 100 years from now, and (adjusting for environmental factors and measurement accuracy) we get the same results, and we can repeat that over and over, that’s science.

    But our understanding, our knowledge of it, can change as you say. That doesn’t make physics less true, it just make our knowledge of and ability to describe physics less accurate.

    We can trace so many stories - including modern religions - to origins that attempt to explain our limited observations in the past. They were our best effort at matching patterns and predicting outcomes in the world around us. And the inaccuracies, the limitations don’t mean we should stop believing the things we think we understand today.

    It just means that we must recognize new information when it arrives as testable data, and incorporate it into our current understanding, relegating the wisdom of the past to history.

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