7 ms·

Are Physical Laws Inevitable?

56 points by chmaynard 7y ago

rrauenza 7y ago
I see the article mentions Sabine Hossenfelder -- I had just started watching some of her videos on YouTube. She's a wonderful presenter. She's also a talented singer and has some music videos on her channel as well.
- djaque 7y ago
  Be careful with her videos. While she does have some good content, Sabine has an agenda to push with respect to big science and I've seen at least a few of her articles on projects I'm familiar with that are well within conspiracy theory territory. See, for example, her blog post and video on LIGO where she makes it seem like the researchers committed fraud and fabricated the whole detection of gravitational waves. My explanation of why this is dishonest here: [1] Unfortunately, this is really harmful because she's coming from a place of authority and spreading the lie that big science is bending the truth when it comes to their discoveries. You can see this reflected in her audience and her video comments are full of climate deniers and others that want this to be true thanking her for exposing, in their words, the so called "quack-a-demics". [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21448974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21448974
  - wallace_f 7y ago
    What agenda in particular are you accusing her of, here? Are you suggesting it is particular to LIGO, or is it a more general, political agenda? Also, what is wrong with people who question the politics and alarmism around climate change? Isn't the ability to question something fundamental to scientific reasoning? I don't think your dismisal of people as "deniers" is very reassuring of scientifc reasoning in that context, and this is because I don't see people there who are denying scientific facts, but rather questioning commonly held assumptions.
    - baddox 7y ago
      I think when people express concern over climate change denial, the concern usually isn't over the fact that climate change denial is physically and legally possible. The concern is usually more about the consequences of denial and the fact that denial seems to have a disproportionate influence over political outcomes.
      - wallace_f 7y ago
        Part of what I was trying to articulate in my comment is that I don't even know what you are accusing these people of denying. So I guess the first part to trying to communicate my comment's meaning is to understand that as far as I can tell, it just comes across as a smear.
        hcknwscommenter 7y ago
        It is a smear because climate change denialism simply ignores that the best available science points to humans as the cause of global warming, that global warming is a huge threat, and that we need to start doing more now. Moreover, the best available science has been heavily attacked by all manner of extremely well-funded skeptics and held up. This funding to comes from 100B+ multinational corporations as well as state actors. Yes, the climate models could be wrong, but denialism in the face of the facts on the ground has reached the level that it is more likely that tiny underground monkeys on mars are beaming thoughts into our heads than that the deniers are right. Thus, those who continue to pose as "I'm just asking questions man" are either disingenous or gullible. Yes it's a smear, and deservedly so.
        wallace_f 7y ago
        I don't even know what a Climate Change Denier is. As far as I can tell it's basically anyone who questions anything about the politics, economics, science of this issue. I don't see how it's basically anything more than smear label on any non-believer, or heretic, including Nobel Prizer Winners to Pulitzer Prize Winners.
  - conistonwater 7y ago
    > her video comments are full of climate deniers Not commenting on the rest because I don't know much about it, but saying that the quality of youtube comments under a video says something about the quality of the video is, I think, quite unreasonable.
    - djaque 7y ago
      It wasn't one or two comments that caught my eye, it was the overwhelming anti-science sentiment of the audience in those videos. Judge ideas for the ideas themselves, but this is a clear red flag and points to the type of community she is building.
      - conistonwater 7y ago
        No, that's just what youtube comments are like, you get so much garbage on pretty much anything. It's not like the author vets the comments, or even reads them. Like I said, I don't think it supports your argument.
  - AareyBaba 7y ago
    'she makes it seem like the researchers committed fraud and fabricated the whole detection' She ended the video saying the opposite [0]. She said she personally does not doubt that the signals are caused by gravitational waves but points out that "in science evidence counts'. They, according to her, haven't conclusively eliminated other terrestrial sources that could cause the signals. [0] https://youtu.be/WWTvNlfkvoI?t=595 https://youtu.be/WWTvNlfkvoI?t=595
    - djaque 7y ago
      When somebody pretends to be neutral and unbiased and then goes on to give a one sided narrative containing information that they know is false and leaves out the many valid counterpoints to those claims and brands the people who would defend them as morally compromised, then it's pretty obvious what's going on.
      - retsibsi 7y ago
        > a one sided narrative containing information that they know is false What specifically are you accusing Hossenfelder of lying about? I read your linked comment[0] and the Hossenfelder transcript[1], and your characterisation of a lot of the things she said doesn't match my reading of them. But even taking your reading as correct, I don't see where you've identified cases of Hossenfelder giving "information that [she knows] is false". [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21448974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21448974 [1] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/11/have-we-really-measured-gravitational.html https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/11/have-we-really-mea...
  - knzhou 7y ago
    It's worse than that. She made a reasonable blog post highlighting somebody's doubts of the LIGO response, got a reasonable response from LIGO, and acknowledged that she was satisfied with it. That was a perfectly fine scientific dialogue. Then months later, she made a much more conspiratorially-toned blog post raising no new issues, but which linked only to her original post as proof that "doubts have been raised", not acknowledging the LIGO response, and generally painted scientists as liars. That is just incredibly disingenuous, and I see no motivation behind it besides wanting to fire up a popular audience.
    - djaque 7y ago
      Yes! To be clear it is the second blog post/video that I am criticizing.
- particleguy 7y ago
  Her post linked to in the original blog post makes a good point too: Even if your theory is consistent, it is only as valid as the assumed axioms. Consistency, of course, is necessary in any correct theory of physics, but it is not sufficient and definitely does not make the theory "inevitable". Also, if the consistent axioms are underspecified, you get ambiguous and un-falsifiable theories. Her main target has often been multiverse theories (i.e. how would you define a measure over universes/how could you verify a probability distribution over universes). In her book "Lost in Math" a target of ire has also been supersymmetry, though she dislikes supersymmetry for another reason, namely the fact that it relies too much on justifications of "beauty" to survive all of its empirical short-comings. In her view, the fact that supersymmetry solves the hierarchy problem is more an aesthetic point (and therefore irrelevant), than a mathematical or logical necessity.
petschge 7y ago
The article in Quanta magazine has also been discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21743847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21743847
QuanticSausage 7y ago
Yes. edit: punctuation
- QuanticSausage 7y ago
  By definition a physics law is inescapable. If that law can be circumvented, then there are deeper physical laws at work. Don't be conceited, nothing can be absolutely relative. If everything is relative and it's an illusion, at least the existence of illusions is objective.
yters 7y ago
Materialists just trying to avoid the implications of Wigner's argument.
- jes5199 7y ago
  We don’t actually know that human minds can’t be in superposition
- ithkuil 7y ago
  What would the implication be? Do you assume that it's absurd to consider that a conscious being is really no different than any other memory equipped machine and thus can be in a superposition state like anything else without necessarily "feel" anything special about it?
  - yters 7y ago
    Considering no machines are conscious, yes, it is absurd.
    - ithkuil 7y ago
      No machines _we know of_ _in the present_ are conscious. Our ignorance about whether that's possible or not is not a proof it's not possible. Besides, why would it matter if the observer is conscious or not? Our psychology is biasing our reasoning about these thing, leading us to attribute something magical to the process that make us "us". It's understandably utterly disconcerting to lose the ground under the sense of self that we inhabit, but that's not a reason to discard, a priori, a line of questioning reality. I know it's hard to shake this uneasy feeling off, even for non-religious people. But let's imagine for a moment that whatever the substance of our consciousness actually is, it can be forked/cloned into copies of itself that no longer share the identity after having been cloned, yet retain the memory of past events (external or internal to itself). I realize this is a bold assumption, but arguably less contentious to accept than whether machines can ever become conscious (perhaps because it sidesteps our innate aversion for outgroups, non-biological entities being extremely outgroup). Now, imagine you fall asleep and get cloned in two, and the two resulting persons are put, still asleep, in two rooms (room 0, and room 1). After an hour they wake up. They both have copies of your memories and both have a copy of whatever-the-thing-that-holds-consciousness is (soul, matter, different kind of "stuff", not really relevant, as long as it's not incompatible with the "cloning postulate"), so in a way, they both think they are _you_; they feel a direct continuity with what they were before falling asleep and getting cloned. They'd have no way to tell which of the two entities they are though. Imagine now being one of them. You get out of the room and peek at the room number on the outside of the door. Which number will you see?
mirimir 7y ago
This is the best bit, from the comments: > Actually, in many of his talks he [Arkani-Hamed] explains clearly the motivation for the hype: it’s to motivate himself.
chmaynard 7y ago
Nima Arkani-Hamed was one of three theoretical physicists featured in the wonderful 2013 documentary "Particle Fever". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_Fever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_Fever
cscurmudgeon 7y ago
Anyone who claims physical laws are inevitable in the sense of the Quanta article should please take a small course in formal logic.
swiley 7y ago
There are physical laws but if you watch people they always find ways around it given enough money and time. Space travel via rockets is a nice example of that. Even the rocket equation itself has been circumvented via solar sails and magnetic propulsion. You might think you can rely on something as simple as thermodynamics but if you are you’re going to have to be absolutely anal about where you draw the system boundary. People are really really good at getting work out of nearly anything. Don’t forget the planet is warmed by the sun and that you can just walk outside and use that for work.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  It seems to me that you are not talking about violations of physical laws, but violations of the rough, but wrong, approximations of physical laws that people use in some contexts. It doesn't seem startling or interesting that people continually find ways around rules that are not rules.
  - swiley 7y ago
    Right they’re not violated, but my point is that they’re almost never the impassible barrier that people make them out to be. It’s not that the rough approximations are wrong it’s that people focus too much on one or two ways of doing things (using atmospheric air as a reaction mass to fit my first example) until someone creative and knowledgeable enough finds a new way to do them (rockets then.)
keithnz 7y ago
I'm no expert, but it seems likely to me that there should be an infinite amount of mathematically consistent "theories" to describe a given system. Iff the "theories" have no more predictive power than the rules of the system itself ( they may make predictions but unless they are testable they could describe non existent things and you wouldn't know).
- Taniwha 7y ago
  Got to be careful there, when someone pointed out to Einstein that his theory of Relativity predicted wacky singularity things he scoffed ... we call them "black holes"
raspasov 7y ago
After reading a few blog posts and interviews with Peter Woit, I think I can say he's definitely a little bit "fringe" as far as physics is concerned. He does try to stick to the science (of sorts) but using some philosophizing he makes critiques like here: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/why-string-theory-is-still-not-even-wrong/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/why-string-... "This is however a straw man argument: the problem with such research programs isn't that of direct testability, but that there is no indirect evidence for them, nor any plausible way of getting any." Sure, we might not have a plausible way of testing it today but that doesn't mean there won't be in the future. 2000 years ago people were on the right track that the Earth is round but couldn't "test it" but going around it. I'm sure the prospect of going round the earth back then seemed as distant as testing a multiverse today. He also calls other reputable physicists "pseudo-science", which is aggressive and over the top. All in all, he doesn't seem to present a logical critique beyond "it's not testable", all while using circular logic that "not being testable" is sometimes beneficial: "Many ideas that are "not even wrong", in the sense of having no way to test them, can still be fruitful, for instance by opening up avenues of investigation that will lead to something conventionally testable."
- h0l0cube 7y ago
  > 2000 years ago people were on the right track that the Earth is round but couldn't "test it" but going around it. Fun fact: Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth and the tilt of its axis around ~200 BC, by comparing the angles of shadows at two locations. Perhaps not definite proof, but certainly a test of an assumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes This is not to disagree with the thrust of your argument, however :)
  - raspasov 7y ago
    I was aware of this one :).
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  > Sure, we might not have a plausible way of testing it today but that doesn't mean there won't be in the future. 2000 years ago people were on the right track that the Earth is round but couldn't "test it" but going around it. I'm sure the prospect of going round the earth back then seemed as distant as testing a multiverse today. But there lies the problem: people 2000 years ago had a very clear idea of how they could test their round earth idea, it just wasn't technically feasible. Even worse for your point, they did quickly come up with experiments and proved pretty definitively the shape and general size of the earth, based on ships going past the horizon and others. There have been many physical ideas with no hope of testability throughout the ages, and many of these have turned out wrong. Aristotle believed, and physicists agreed, that all objects have a natural place which they tend to move to, so apples falls down, but steam rises up. As far as I know, there are not even thought experiments about how we could tell whether there is a multiverse, or for many (but not all) aspects of string theory. This is not an engineering problem (its way out of our league to implement), it's a theoretical physics problem (we don't know whether there is a way to tell, there may very well not be one). It's like the difference between people in ancient Greece imagining a high-speed car, versus building faster-than-light travel.
ncmncm 7y ago
Simple answer: No. Anybody who says yes is selling something. "Maybe" is not necessarily dishonest.
louis_pasteur 7y ago
Physical laws work only in the physical realm. They break down the moment you get into the realm of "thoughts and feelings". There are other deeper realms too which advanced buddhist meditators have experienced and talk about.

56 points by chmaynard 7y ago

I see the article mentions Sabine Hossenfelder -- I had just started watching some of her videos on YouTube. She's a wonderful presenter. She's also a talented singer and has some music videos on her channel as well.

djaque 7y ago
Be careful with her videos. While she does have some good content, Sabine has an agenda to push with respect to big science and I've seen at least a few of her articles on projects I'm familiar with that are well within conspiracy theory territory. See, for example, her blog post and video on LIGO where she makes it seem like the researchers committed fraud and fabricated the whole detection of gravitational waves. My explanation of why this is dishonest here: [1] Unfortunately, this is really harmful because she's coming from a place of authority and spreading the lie that big science is bending the truth when it comes to their discoveries. You can see this reflected in her audience and her video comments are full of climate deniers and others that want this to be true thanking her for exposing, in their words, the so called "quack-a-demics". [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21448974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21448974
- wallace_f 7y ago
  What agenda in particular are you accusing her of, here? Are you suggesting it is particular to LIGO, or is it a more general, political agenda? Also, what is wrong with people who question the politics and alarmism around climate change? Isn't the ability to question something fundamental to scientific reasoning? I don't think your dismisal of people as "deniers" is very reassuring of scientifc reasoning in that context, and this is because I don't see people there who are denying scientific facts, but rather questioning commonly held assumptions.
  - baddox 7y ago
    I think when people express concern over climate change denial, the concern usually isn't over the fact that climate change denial is physically and legally possible. The concern is usually more about the consequences of denial and the fact that denial seems to have a disproportionate influence over political outcomes.
    - wallace_f 7y ago
      Part of what I was trying to articulate in my comment is that I don't even know what you are accusing these people of denying. So I guess the first part to trying to communicate my comment's meaning is to understand that as far as I can tell, it just comes across as a smear.
      - hcknwscommenter 7y ago
        It is a smear because climate change denialism simply ignores that the best available science points to humans as the cause of global warming, that global warming is a huge threat, and that we need to start doing more now. Moreover, the best available science has been heavily attacked by all manner of extremely well-funded skeptics and held up. This funding to comes from 100B+ multinational corporations as well as state actors. Yes, the climate models could be wrong, but denialism in the face of the facts on the ground has reached the level that it is more likely that tiny underground monkeys on mars are beaming thoughts into our heads than that the deniers are right. Thus, those who continue to pose as "I'm just asking questions man" are either disingenous or gullible. Yes it's a smear, and deservedly so.
        wallace_f 7y ago
        I don't even know what a Climate Change Denier is. As far as I can tell it's basically anyone who questions anything about the politics, economics, science of this issue. I don't see how it's basically anything more than smear label on any non-believer, or heretic, including Nobel Prizer Winners to Pulitzer Prize Winners.
- conistonwater 7y ago
  > her video comments are full of climate deniers Not commenting on the rest because I don't know much about it, but saying that the quality of youtube comments under a video says something about the quality of the video is, I think, quite unreasonable.
  - djaque 7y ago
    It wasn't one or two comments that caught my eye, it was the overwhelming anti-science sentiment of the audience in those videos. Judge ideas for the ideas themselves, but this is a clear red flag and points to the type of community she is building.
    - conistonwater 7y ago
      No, that's just what youtube comments are like, you get so much garbage on pretty much anything. It's not like the author vets the comments, or even reads them. Like I said, I don't think it supports your argument.
- AareyBaba 7y ago
  'she makes it seem like the researchers committed fraud and fabricated the whole detection' She ended the video saying the opposite [0]. She said she personally does not doubt that the signals are caused by gravitational waves but points out that "in science evidence counts'. They, according to her, haven't conclusively eliminated other terrestrial sources that could cause the signals. [0] https://youtu.be/WWTvNlfkvoI?t=595 https://youtu.be/WWTvNlfkvoI?t=595
  - djaque 7y ago
    When somebody pretends to be neutral and unbiased and then goes on to give a one sided narrative containing information that they know is false and leaves out the many valid counterpoints to those claims and brands the people who would defend them as morally compromised, then it's pretty obvious what's going on.
    - retsibsi 7y ago
      > a one sided narrative containing information that they know is false What specifically are you accusing Hossenfelder of lying about? I read your linked comment[0] and the Hossenfelder transcript[1], and your characterisation of a lot of the things she said doesn't match my reading of them. But even taking your reading as correct, I don't see where you've identified cases of Hossenfelder giving "information that [she knows] is false". [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21448974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21448974 [1] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/11/have-we-really-measured-gravitational.html https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/11/have-we-really-mea...
- knzhou 7y ago
  It's worse than that. She made a reasonable blog post highlighting somebody's doubts of the LIGO response, got a reasonable response from LIGO, and acknowledged that she was satisfied with it. That was a perfectly fine scientific dialogue. Then months later, she made a much more conspiratorially-toned blog post raising no new issues, but which linked only to her original post as proof that "doubts have been raised", not acknowledging the LIGO response, and generally painted scientists as liars. That is just incredibly disingenuous, and I see no motivation behind it besides wanting to fire up a popular audience.
  - djaque 7y ago
    Yes! To be clear it is the second blog post/video that I am criticizing.
particleguy 7y ago
Her post linked to in the original blog post makes a good point too: Even if your theory is consistent, it is only as valid as the assumed axioms. Consistency, of course, is necessary in any correct theory of physics, but it is not sufficient and definitely does not make the theory "inevitable". Also, if the consistent axioms are underspecified, you get ambiguous and un-falsifiable theories. Her main target has often been multiverse theories (i.e. how would you define a measure over universes/how could you verify a probability distribution over universes). In her book "Lost in Math" a target of ire has also been supersymmetry, though she dislikes supersymmetry for another reason, namely the fact that it relies too much on justifications of "beauty" to survive all of its empirical short-comings. In her view, the fact that supersymmetry solves the hierarchy problem is more an aesthetic point (and therefore irrelevant), than a mathematical or logical necessity.

petschge 7y ago

The article in Quanta magazine has also been discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21743847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21743847

QuanticSausage 7y ago

Yes. edit: punctuation

QuanticSausage 7y ago
By definition a physics law is inescapable. If that law can be circumvented, then there are deeper physical laws at work. Don't be conceited, nothing can be absolutely relative. If everything is relative and it's an illusion, at least the existence of illusions is objective.

yters 7y ago

Materialists just trying to avoid the implications of Wigner's argument.

jes5199 7y ago
We don’t actually know that human minds can’t be in superposition
ithkuil 7y ago
What would the implication be? Do you assume that it's absurd to consider that a conscious being is really no different than any other memory equipped machine and thus can be in a superposition state like anything else without necessarily "feel" anything special about it?
- yters 7y ago
  Considering no machines are conscious, yes, it is absurd.
  - ithkuil 7y ago
    No machines _we know of_ _in the present_ are conscious. Our ignorance about whether that's possible or not is not a proof it's not possible. Besides, why would it matter if the observer is conscious or not? Our psychology is biasing our reasoning about these thing, leading us to attribute something magical to the process that make us "us". It's understandably utterly disconcerting to lose the ground under the sense of self that we inhabit, but that's not a reason to discard, a priori, a line of questioning reality. I know it's hard to shake this uneasy feeling off, even for non-religious people. But let's imagine for a moment that whatever the substance of our consciousness actually is, it can be forked/cloned into copies of itself that no longer share the identity after having been cloned, yet retain the memory of past events (external or internal to itself). I realize this is a bold assumption, but arguably less contentious to accept than whether machines can ever become conscious (perhaps because it sidesteps our innate aversion for outgroups, non-biological entities being extremely outgroup). Now, imagine you fall asleep and get cloned in two, and the two resulting persons are put, still asleep, in two rooms (room 0, and room 1). After an hour they wake up. They both have copies of your memories and both have a copy of whatever-the-thing-that-holds-consciousness is (soul, matter, different kind of "stuff", not really relevant, as long as it's not incompatible with the "cloning postulate"), so in a way, they both think they are _you_; they feel a direct continuity with what they were before falling asleep and getting cloned. They'd have no way to tell which of the two entities they are though. Imagine now being one of them. You get out of the room and peek at the room number on the outside of the door. Which number will you see?

mirimir 7y ago

This is the best bit, from the comments: > Actually, in many of his talks he [Arkani-Hamed] explains clearly the motivation for the hype: it’s to motivate himself.

chmaynard 7y ago

Nima Arkani-Hamed was one of three theoretical physicists featured in the wonderful 2013 documentary "Particle Fever". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_Fever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_Fever

cscurmudgeon 7y ago

Anyone who claims physical laws are inevitable in the sense of the Quanta article should please take a small course in formal logic.

swiley 7y ago

There are physical laws but if you watch people they always find ways around it given enough money and time. Space travel via rockets is a nice example of that. Even the rocket equation itself has been circumvented via solar sails and magnetic propulsion. You might think you can rely on something as simple as thermodynamics but if you are you’re going to have to be absolutely anal about where you draw the system boundary. People are really really good at getting work out of nearly anything. Don’t forget the planet is warmed by the sun and that you can just walk outside and use that for work.

perl4ever 7y ago
It seems to me that you are not talking about violations of physical laws, but violations of the rough, but wrong, approximations of physical laws that people use in some contexts. It doesn't seem startling or interesting that people continually find ways around rules that are not rules.
- swiley 7y ago
  Right they’re not violated, but my point is that they’re almost never the impassible barrier that people make them out to be. It’s not that the rough approximations are wrong it’s that people focus too much on one or two ways of doing things (using atmospheric air as a reaction mass to fit my first example) until someone creative and knowledgeable enough finds a new way to do them (rockets then.)

keithnz 7y ago

I'm no expert, but it seems likely to me that there should be an infinite amount of mathematically consistent "theories" to describe a given system. Iff the "theories" have no more predictive power than the rules of the system itself ( they may make predictions but unless they are testable they could describe non existent things and you wouldn't know).

Taniwha 7y ago
Got to be careful there, when someone pointed out to Einstein that his theory of Relativity predicted wacky singularity things he scoffed ... we call them "black holes"

raspasov 7y ago

After reading a few blog posts and interviews with Peter Woit, I think I can say he's definitely a little bit "fringe" as far as physics is concerned. He does try to stick to the science (of sorts) but using some philosophizing he makes critiques like here: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/why-string-theory-is-still-not-even-wrong/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/why-string-... "This is however a straw man argument: the problem with such research programs isn't that of direct testability, but that there is no indirect evidence for them, nor any plausible way of getting any." Sure, we might not have a plausible way of testing it today but that doesn't mean there won't be in the future. 2000 years ago people were on the right track that the Earth is round but couldn't "test it" but going around it. I'm sure the prospect of going round the earth back then seemed as distant as testing a multiverse today. He also calls other reputable physicists "pseudo-science", which is aggressive and over the top. All in all, he doesn't seem to present a logical critique beyond "it's not testable", all while using circular logic that "not being testable" is sometimes beneficial: "Many ideas that are "not even wrong", in the sense of having no way to test them, can still be fruitful, for instance by opening up avenues of investigation that will lead to something conventionally testable."

h0l0cube 7y ago
> 2000 years ago people were on the right track that the Earth is round but couldn't "test it" but going around it. Fun fact: Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth and the tilt of its axis around ~200 BC, by comparing the angles of shadows at two locations. Perhaps not definite proof, but certainly a test of an assumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes This is not to disagree with the thrust of your argument, however :)
- raspasov 7y ago
  I was aware of this one :).
tsimionescu 7y ago
> Sure, we might not have a plausible way of testing it today but that doesn't mean there won't be in the future. 2000 years ago people were on the right track that the Earth is round but couldn't "test it" but going around it. I'm sure the prospect of going round the earth back then seemed as distant as testing a multiverse today. But there lies the problem: people 2000 years ago had a very clear idea of how they could test their round earth idea, it just wasn't technically feasible. Even worse for your point, they did quickly come up with experiments and proved pretty definitively the shape and general size of the earth, based on ships going past the horizon and others. There have been many physical ideas with no hope of testability throughout the ages, and many of these have turned out wrong. Aristotle believed, and physicists agreed, that all objects have a natural place which they tend to move to, so apples falls down, but steam rises up. As far as I know, there are not even thought experiments about how we could tell whether there is a multiverse, or for many (but not all) aspects of string theory. This is not an engineering problem (its way out of our league to implement), it's a theoretical physics problem (we don't know whether there is a way to tell, there may very well not be one). It's like the difference between people in ancient Greece imagining a high-speed car, versus building faster-than-light travel.

ncmncm 7y ago

Simple answer: No. Anybody who says yes is selling something. "Maybe" is not necessarily dishonest.

louis_pasteur 7y ago

Physical laws work only in the physical realm. They break down the moment you get into the realm of "thoughts and feelings". There are other deeper realms too which advanced buddhist meditators have experienced and talk about.