kudos to stcredzero for a humorous and tactful exit... I'll be the killjoy and explain his joke, which I think was a last-ditch attempt illustrate the point he'

kudos to stcredzero for a humorous and tactful exit... I'll be the killjoy and explain his joke, which I think was a last-ditch attempt illustrate the point he's been trying (and failing) to get across all thread, which is that > When it comes to fundamental science, a consistent map is the territory isn't the case. Science/empiricism merely produce predictive models; over the last few hundred years, these models have improved dramatically, but they are nonetheless only maps of a territory ("reality"), and it's still fundamentally uncertain that the underlying assumptions (that laws of nature exist/that reality is mappable) are reliable. > "Map is not the territory" applies to simplifications that omit detail. Even if we had a perfect model, which we don't (and it's not clear that such a model is obtainable) that could predict everything, it would still be separate from the territory. You might think this is a pedantic distinction, and in your ideal world where we have a unified field theory, it certainly would be, but like I said above, it's not clear that such a thing is obtainable, so it's important to hold onto the distinction lest we forget the fact that we're still sitting on an incredibly young and uncertain foundation.