5 ms·
To quote Alan Watts, "There is no end to the minuteness that you can unveil through physical investigation. For the simple reason that the investigation itself
by GartzenDeHaes 4y ago
To quote Alan Watts, "There is no end to the minuteness that you can unveil through physical investigation. For the simple reason that the investigation itself is what is chopping things into tiny little pieces. And the sharper you can sharpen your knife, the finer you can cut it. And the knife of the intellect is very sharp indeed. And with the sophisticated instruments that we can now make, there’s probably no limit to it."
It's almost as if we're looking at a continuous functions that can generate an infinite number of discrete segments.
- nxmnxm99 4y agoNot surprising you're downvoted on HN, but your comment is the only one that makes sense in this entire thread. I wonder at one point our collective consciousness will wake up to the fact that we've completely hit a wall in our understanding of the universe, and that spending billions detecting more particles isn't magically going to explain reality.
- timbit42 4y agoLet's keep going until we figure out how to harness gravity.
- Lapsa 4y agobut not before we get pocket sized hadron collider kid toys costing around $5
- JetAlone 4y agoI think you're both quite right that we're not likely to find much in this subdivision. It seems to me that the people who want to detect more particles are not driven by a desire to explain reality itself. No, I think the research is done in the hopes of cataloguing particles that could be useful, as other comments have said. Is there a way to even begin to assess the likelihood that research on esoteric subatomic particles is going yield useful results for energy, health care, or transportationn? Or are we just digging away ad nauseum with zero idea if the next rock contains some precious ore?
- nxmnxm99 4y agoAs with all physics, I think we ultimately hit the point of diminishing returns before we need to introduce a new category of thought to explore into. That was supposed to be Quantum and/or Particle Physics, but neither have taken us anywhere and we no longer have new ground to explore. Our fundamental understanding of the Universe has barely over the past half century, and it continues to slow with every anticlimactic LHC collision that emerges.
- astrange 4y agoThe comment is incorrect because it confuses "each quantum field is apparently continuous" with "the number of quantum fields is a real number". That's two different dimensions.
- rsynnott 4y ago> will wake up to the fact that we've completely hit a wall in our understanding of the universe What makes you think that's a fact?
- nxmnxm99 4y agoLiterally all of the evidence