2 ms·
Parts of some of them were confirmed rather quickly. Other parts of some of them are still unconfirmed, and a subset of those are still well beyond our foresee
by ethanbond 11y ago
Parts of some of them were confirmed rather quickly.
Other parts of some of them are still unconfirmed, and a subset of those are still well beyond our foreseeable capability of testing. Black holes are one notable prediction that we have virtually no way to confirm.
What's your point? I'm not saying Einstein got things wrong, I'm saying that immediately dismissing science which is not immediately testable is risky. Especially as more and more of the low hanging fruit is picked – cutting edge scientific ideas are going to be more and more difficult to test.
Compare the Cavendish experiment to the Michelson-Morley experiment to the Large Hadron to... Creating a black hole?
Seems to be a steep increase in difficulty. It should be expected.
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoOK. This idea that we're actually discussing... is it testable? Is it even testable in principle?
- ethanbond 11y agoI believe that's the whole point. This is someone trying to distill a seemingly intractable problem into a testable form. I think the answer for now is "no," but that's precisely the question he is attempting to answer: "is consciousness something that can be modeled in such a way that we can answer whether or not it is [x]?" Not: "is consciousness [x]?"
- scottlocklin 11y agoEinstein didn't come up with the idea of black holes. Laplace did; before General Relativity for that matter. Meanwhile, Laplace gets to speculate about such things without being considered a goofball because he invented big chunks of mathematics, optics and physics. In fact, nobody in the physics community spoke of black holes at all until the 1960s when they began converting agricultural colleges into warehouses for people who speculate on untestable things.