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> If an alien sense relying on physics unknown to us were to come to our attention, it seems likely to me that it would indeed lead us to discover that new phys

by acqq 8y ago

> If an alien sense relying on physics unknown to us were to come to our attention, it seems likely to me that it would indeed lead us to discover that new physics. But since we don't know whether physics like that exists or not, we can't say whether such a sense could exist either. But we do know enough physics already to explain everything we can observe that surrounds us, not with our senses alone but with the measurement devices that we can construct. The only physics that we can't measure and completely explain is that one that is anyway inadequately reachable not only to us with out human senses but to our measurement devices which already can measure changes in length 1000 times the size of the proton, which happen on the 4 km length (see LIGO). The only physics that remains to be known better are the effects that happen on the galactic and intergalactic scales or inside of the black holes and during the first picoseconds of the existence of the universe, or with the particles that exist too short or interact too little to influence anything we can observe: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/09/23/the-laws-underlying-the-physics-of-everyday-life-are-completely-understood/ http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/09/23/the-laws... "The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood" "there’s no question that the human goal of figuring out the basic rules by which the easily observable world works was one that was achieved once and for all in the twentieth century." "You might question the “once and for all” part of that formulation, but it’s solid. Of course revolutions can always happen, but there’s every reason to believe that our current understanding is complete within the everyday realm. Using the framework of quantum field theory — which we have no reason to doubt in this regime — we can classify the kinds of new particles and forces that could conceivably exist, and go look for them. It’s absolutely possible that such particles and forces do exist, but they must be hidden from us somehow: either the particles are too massive to be produced, or decay too quickly to be detected, or interact too weakly to influence ordinary matter; and the forces are either too weak or too short-range to be noticed. In any of those cases, if they can’t be found by our current techniques, they are also unable to influence what we see in our everyday lives."

FakeComments 8y ago
There’s a ton of things we have no explanation for — superconductors, how protons collide, a ton of things about material science, we’re still not great at non-local effects, etc. That’s setting aside the doozy of “gravity and particle physics say wildly incompatible things, and we’re not sure how to fix that”. And when I say “how protons collide”, I mean numbers from existing accelerators don’t match predictions and they’re having to change models — and all the fixes they can come up with (eg, elaborate swarms of virtual quarks) still don’t fix the collision numbers. There’s still a pretty poor understanding of 4D topology, and the effects and possible knotting states play in non-local interactions. Microsoft for instance theorizes that you can have 4D anyons, but no one is sure how to build them. And it comes into play in more mundane ways when talking about plasma physics or fluid dynamics, since the same mathematics governs stability there. You seem to be wildly overstating the success of science.
- acqq 8y ago
  And then I'd claim you wildly understating the success, of course. Superconductivity is not an effect that involves any "new physics" in the sense of the necessity of changing the underlying theories: it's the typical "emergent" property, and we know that modeling many of the "emergent" properties is far away from our possibilities. Ditto with the material science, or any other observations where "too many of the stuff known to us interacts at the same time." It's not "we don't know" in the sense that the basics will have to change it's "we don't know because there's too much to model at once" like we can't reliably predict the weather 2 weeks in advance, even if we understand the nature of the particles that produce the weather. Edit: to answer your response below this post: It's a [Citation needed] for you that the fundamentally "new physics" is needed instead of reaching the limits of our instruments or the modeling capability. The second you mention is not something that contradicts what we measure, it just that naively trying to combine the provably successful models that match our measurements to produce "something more" outside of their domain really doesn't work: and that of course doesn't have to work to claim that the models do work for the things that they actually model, and which independently correspond to the things we can "observe" (where "observe" includes using our best measuring devices).
  - FakeComments 8y ago
    I disagree: I don’t think we know what features of the underlying model lead to the emergence of things like superconductivity, and having to account for that explicitly will demonstrate a new paradigm for analyzing the base mechanics — which is likely to lead to a new interpretation and “new physics”. I’ll also note you didn’t reply to two big ones: They can’t predict proton on proton collisions in a hyper controlled tube accurately. They can’t predict how the two most established theories, each boasting dozens of orders of magnitude of accuracy, interact.

by acqq 8y ago

FakeComments 8y ago

There’s a ton of things we have no explanation for — superconductors, how protons collide, a ton of things about material science, we’re still not great at non-local effects, etc. That’s setting aside the doozy of “gravity and particle physics say wildly incompatible things, and we’re not sure how to fix that”. And when I say “how protons collide”, I mean numbers from existing accelerators don’t match predictions and they’re having to change models — and all the fixes they can come up with (eg, elaborate swarms of virtual quarks) still don’t fix the collision numbers. There’s still a pretty poor understanding of 4D topology, and the effects and possible knotting states play in non-local interactions. Microsoft for instance theorizes that you can have 4D anyons, but no one is sure how to build them. And it comes into play in more mundane ways when talking about plasma physics or fluid dynamics, since the same mathematics governs stability there. You seem to be wildly overstating the success of science.

acqq 8y ago
And then I'd claim you wildly understating the success, of course. Superconductivity is not an effect that involves any "new physics" in the sense of the necessity of changing the underlying theories: it's the typical "emergent" property, and we know that modeling many of the "emergent" properties is far away from our possibilities. Ditto with the material science, or any other observations where "too many of the stuff known to us interacts at the same time." It's not "we don't know" in the sense that the basics will have to change it's "we don't know because there's too much to model at once" like we can't reliably predict the weather 2 weeks in advance, even if we understand the nature of the particles that produce the weather. Edit: to answer your response below this post: It's a [Citation needed] for you that the fundamentally "new physics" is needed instead of reaching the limits of our instruments or the modeling capability. The second you mention is not something that contradicts what we measure, it just that naively trying to combine the provably successful models that match our measurements to produce "something more" outside of their domain really doesn't work: and that of course doesn't have to work to claim that the models do work for the things that they actually model, and which independently correspond to the things we can "observe" (where "observe" includes using our best measuring devices).
- FakeComments 8y ago
  I disagree: I don’t think we know what features of the underlying model lead to the emergence of things like superconductivity, and having to account for that explicitly will demonstrate a new paradigm for analyzing the base mechanics — which is likely to lead to a new interpretation and “new physics”. I’ll also note you didn’t reply to two big ones: They can’t predict proton on proton collisions in a hyper controlled tube accurately. They can’t predict how the two most established theories, each boasting dozens of orders of magnitude of accuracy, interact.