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Maybe it stops being science and starts being math, but I don’t think that means we should discourage people from doing it. That said, I am sympathetic to an ar
by kevinventullo 4y ago
Maybe it stops being science and starts being math, but I don’t think that means we should discourage people from doing it. That said, I am sympathetic to an argument that we may not need to fund such inquiries.
“We will never know” sounds overly pessimistic to me; I could imagine someone from the 10th century claiming we will never know the trillionth prime number.
- tsimionescu 4y agoI think that the evolution of physics has actually been a series of discoveries of new things that are impossible. We used to think that many things were possible if only we knew the right spell, or invoked the right god, or just worked hard enough. Then as people studied nature more thoroughly and systematically, they started observing laws that simply can't be crossed - conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, the increase of entropy , the limited speed of causality, the uncertainty principle - to name some of the bigger ones. All of these have put limits on something we used to think of as unlimited. There are many more non-existence proofs in math as well - so even in pure math, you can't escape this accumulation (probably the most famous such problem, one long attempted that ultimately proved impossible, is "squaring the circle", or in modern terms, the fact that pi^n is irrational for any rational n).
- danwee 4y ago> “We will never know” sounds overly pessimistic to me; I could imagine someone from the 10th century claiming we will never know the trillionth prime number. There are tons of stuff we as human beings we'll discover and be pretty confident about it. There are other things we'll never know. I think that's part of being human, to know our limits.