4 ms·
Depends on your point of view. If you something is not knowable even in principle then maybe the question was wrong, like "how many angels can dance on the head
by jules 9y ago
Depends on your point of view. If you something is not knowable even in principle then maybe the question was wrong, like "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?".
A better answer is perhaps that there are things that we could in principle find out, but cannot because either:
1. We can't do the experiment in practice, such as building a particle accelerator much bigger than the LHC, or factoring a 100000 digit number.
2. It's too complicated and there's no simple description in terms of macroscopic variables, such as the earth's ecosystem.
- lootsauce 9y agoYou can explain away with reasons why something is not or will not be known. That makes it no less a limit to our understanding.
- jules 9y agoNot always; the unknowable information in quantum mechanics is simply not there. It's not that there is no way to get at the information in practice, it's not even that there is no way to get at the information in theory. It's even stronger: Bell's theorem proves that the information can't be there: simply assuming that the information is there already leads to conclusions that contradict experimental facts. The idea that there ought to be information comes from erroneously applying our everyday intuition to quantum mechanics.