3 ms·

I don't know, something about this feels more like an abstraction than a real thing. If you say "the speed of light is the speed limit for information" that doe

I don't know, something about this feels more like an abstraction than a real thing. If you say "the speed of light is the speed limit for information" that doesn't feel like you're saying something about the way the universe works directly.

krastanov 5y ago
Pretty much the entirety of modern physics is this type of abstraction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...). You are just facing the discomfort felt when your intuition clashes with the tools usually required to make reliable predictions and explanations about the universe. Consider, how is your current discomfort with this statement any different from the discomfort felt through the centuries when ideas like fields instead of forces, entropy, phase spaces, quantum amplitudes / complex numbers, matrix mechanics, spacetime, curvature, etc were being introduced. They are all abstractions that end up being more reliable than our intuition. Whether this "abstraction" is a "real thing" is a question for the philosophers. For me there is no difference between the two.
jakeva 5y ago
Sure it's a bit different (especially if you're concerned with how it makes you feel) than, say, describing tectonic plates or the acceleration of a falling body due to earth's gravity but that doesn't make it not a real thing. Quantum spin is one that gets me, or the uncertainty principle. It makes me very uneasy, but whether or not I'm comfortable is irrelevant. Those are to the best of our knowledge actual features of the universe. Abstractions aren't really in the language of the pure sciences. Analogies, metaphors, etc can all serve to help explain but the speed of the propagation of information in this universe is very much defined as the velocity of light in a vacuum in a completely literal sense. There's no abstraction here. Maybe some confusion about what we mean by 'information' but I'm sure there are better resources if you want an afternoon rabbit hole.

krastanov 5y ago

Pretty much the entirety of modern physics is this type of abstraction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...). You are just facing the discomfort felt when your intuition clashes with the tools usually required to make reliable predictions and explanations about the universe. Consider, how is your current discomfort with this statement any different from the discomfort felt through the centuries when ideas like fields instead of forces, entropy, phase spaces, quantum amplitudes / complex numbers, matrix mechanics, spacetime, curvature, etc were being introduced. They are all abstractions that end up being more reliable than our intuition. Whether this "abstraction" is a "real thing" is a question for the philosophers. For me there is no difference between the two.

jakeva 5y ago

Sure it's a bit different (especially if you're concerned with how it makes you feel) than, say, describing tectonic plates or the acceleration of a falling body due to earth's gravity but that doesn't make it not a real thing. Quantum spin is one that gets me, or the uncertainty principle. It makes me very uneasy, but whether or not I'm comfortable is irrelevant. Those are to the best of our knowledge actual features of the universe. Abstractions aren't really in the language of the pure sciences. Analogies, metaphors, etc can all serve to help explain but the speed of the propagation of information in this universe is very much defined as the velocity of light in a vacuum in a completely literal sense. There's no abstraction here. Maybe some confusion about what we mean by 'information' but I'm sure there are better resources if you want an afternoon rabbit hole.