3 ms·

I am reminded of this footnote in Feynman's Lectures on Physics: "Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing

by splat 16y ago

I am reminded of this footnote in Feynman's Lectures on Physics: "Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"

loup-vaillant 16y ago
In the same vein: http://lesswrong.com/lw/oo/explaining_vs_explaining_away/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/oo/explaining_vs_explaining_away/
bluekeybox 16y ago
Physics is a rabbit hole and we are going deeper every year, but I doubt we will ever hit its bottom. One of the main outcomes of the 20th century physics was that it was shown that this hole is deeper than anyone has ever imagined. I don't think that any mystery has been taken away by this outcome, and I think that something much bigger has been added. The reason poets of the times past wrote verses about stars and not quarks is because they could not see quarks.
- glhaynes 16y ago
  I personally bet that we will hit bottom, and pretty soon. But that's totally an unsupportable gut feeling (and certainly could be said to go contrary to experience thus far). This is really nice; thank you: "The reason poets of the times past wrote verses about stars and not quarks is because they could not see quarks."
  - bluekeybox 16y ago
    No problem. I would like to explain though why I think there is not going to be a bottom: physics is an experimental science; all physical theories have to be tested by experimental evidence. I'm sure you know how much trouble string theory has had -- not because it is bad science, but simply because it is hard to come up with a way to test something that makes claims that lie at the limits of our understanding. Suppose though after decades of painstaking experiments we do come up with a Unified Theory (UT). But then one fine day someone notices some strange effect beneath that is not explained by the UT. What then? When Max Planck decided to become a physicist (end of 19th century), his advisor told him that basically "everything in physics has already been discovered, physics now is only concerned about details." We may feel the same way after we come up with UT, but even UT may be "the tip of an iceberg" that is actual deep reality. As another illustration, the space-time is expanding at an ever increasing rate, and that space-time expansion is not limited by the speed of light. Some time in the distant future (a few billion years?), the background radiation we now see from the time of the Big Bang will be off limits because the Universe's boundary will have expanded faster than light. So the future scientists will be forever in the dark about how the Universe came about. They will generate some theories about it, maybe even close to correct ones, but they will never really know what happened in the beginning. There are certain physical bounds (computational complexity, irreversibility of entropy/time, uncertainty principle, the speed-of-light limit, cosmological constant) that prevent us from knowing everything and which may be impossible to overcome. We should remain cautiously optimistic though, since pessimism is counter-productive. Also, hey, it looks like strong AI will be a reality one day, maybe it will answer those questions for us.
ff00 16y ago
If the wonder's gone when the truth is known, there never was any wonder.~Dr HOUSE.

by splat 16y ago

loup-vaillant 16y ago

In the same vein: http://lesswrong.com/lw/oo/explaining_vs_explaining_away/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/oo/explaining_vs_explaining_away/

bluekeybox 16y ago

Physics is a rabbit hole and we are going deeper every year, but I doubt we will ever hit its bottom. One of the main outcomes of the 20th century physics was that it was shown that this hole is deeper than anyone has ever imagined. I don't think that any mystery has been taken away by this outcome, and I think that something much bigger has been added. The reason poets of the times past wrote verses about stars and not quarks is because they could not see quarks.

glhaynes 16y ago
I personally bet that we will hit bottom, and pretty soon. But that's totally an unsupportable gut feeling (and certainly could be said to go contrary to experience thus far). This is really nice; thank you: "The reason poets of the times past wrote verses about stars and not quarks is because they could not see quarks."
- bluekeybox 16y ago
  No problem. I would like to explain though why I think there is not going to be a bottom: physics is an experimental science; all physical theories have to be tested by experimental evidence. I'm sure you know how much trouble string theory has had -- not because it is bad science, but simply because it is hard to come up with a way to test something that makes claims that lie at the limits of our understanding. Suppose though after decades of painstaking experiments we do come up with a Unified Theory (UT). But then one fine day someone notices some strange effect beneath that is not explained by the UT. What then? When Max Planck decided to become a physicist (end of 19th century), his advisor told him that basically "everything in physics has already been discovered, physics now is only concerned about details." We may feel the same way after we come up with UT, but even UT may be "the tip of an iceberg" that is actual deep reality. As another illustration, the space-time is expanding at an ever increasing rate, and that space-time expansion is not limited by the speed of light. Some time in the distant future (a few billion years?), the background radiation we now see from the time of the Big Bang will be off limits because the Universe's boundary will have expanded faster than light. So the future scientists will be forever in the dark about how the Universe came about. They will generate some theories about it, maybe even close to correct ones, but they will never really know what happened in the beginning. There are certain physical bounds (computational complexity, irreversibility of entropy/time, uncertainty principle, the speed-of-light limit, cosmological constant) that prevent us from knowing everything and which may be impossible to overcome. We should remain cautiously optimistic though, since pessimism is counter-productive. Also, hey, it looks like strong AI will be a reality one day, maybe it will answer those questions for us.

ff00 16y ago

If the wonder's gone when the truth is known, there never was any wonder.~Dr HOUSE.