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That's a very narrow reading of it. There's always an implicit "to the best of our current knowledge" caveat with every sound scientific statement. And it's tru

That's a very narrow reading of it. There's always an implicit "to the best of our current knowledge" caveat with every sound scientific statement. And it's true, to the best of our current knowledge, we can never know what it's like inside a black hole or very close to the time our universe began because the physics that we know tells us no person or probe can ever go there and come back to tell. If you're no so generous as to accept the implicit caveat you just end up being fun at parties because you go around and tell people to "never say never and always avoid always".

synu 4y ago
I watched the video, and the sense I got was you don’t need to bother to read anything where scientists talk about having figured out what happened at the beginning of the universe because we can never know. This seems to explicitly exclude the possibility that there could ever be a discovery you might read about that would change that.
- twiss 4y ago
  She explicitly says that the scientific method is insufficient to give an answer to this question. So reading anything written by scientists won't give a conclusive answer. I think it's implicitly hinted that you might as well read something by a religious person, or a philosopher, or anyone with a random theory, as none of the theories can be proven or disproven by the scientific method, and so all of their answers will be equally (un)satisfying. It's theoretically possible that we'll one day find some other method of finding out the truth (perhaps a god will descend from the heavens and tell us? or perhaps we manage to find a bug / exploit in the simulation?) but personally I find it unlikely.
  - pronlover723 4y ago
    She did make an appeal to simplicity, claiming that simpler is better, and she stated that religious origins are way more complicated so while they can't be proven wrong, if you accept the idea that simpler is better then religious explanations are unlikely to be true.
    - twiss 4y ago
      Yes, in the context of an example where the scientific method does / did work, and provides a simple explanation, namely evolution. Her argument is that in the case of the origin of the universe, the scientific method doesn't work, instead. That doesn't make the religious "method" better, but also not worse.
  - bandyaboot 4y ago
    Honestly I find “it’s unknowable” to be a pretty satisfactory answer. Mostly because to me it points at something that seems almost obvious the more I’ve thought about it. Even if it were possible to see past the “Big Bang”, what possible reason is there to think that would be the end of the rabbit hole? As mind bending as it is to think that the trail is infinite, it’s even more mind bending to imagine that it’s not.
- DemocracyFTW2 4y ago
  Well to quote user mensetmanusman: "Per thermodynamic axioms, incompleteness is implied by the arrow of time and information atrophy. This would imply an unknowable beginning." I think 'never' should be understood in this way—either there's something wrong or fundamentally incomplete about our theories, or we can not know certain things. Barring groundbreaking advancements in understanding akin to quantum physics and relativity theory, physics tells us so. Since the papers discussed do not establish such a new and testable theory but still go and discuss things current science cannot access, they cannot taken to be science. Doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong or uninteresting. I don't think she excludes the possibility that a groundbreaking discovery could be made that changes that. But the papers were not written in a time that knows of such a discovery.
  - synu 4y ago
    Ok, yeah maybe I could see that. But it’s kind of a confusing message - don’t read or take this research on this topic seriously, except in case some research on this topic comes that you should read and take seriously.
    - bardworx 4y ago
      Per PBS SpaceTime, humanity has been able to recreate conditions 0.000001 seconds after Big Bang (arbitrary number), in particle accelerators. But to add an extra 0 would require the energy output of our universe. The implication is that we simply don’t have enough energies to recreate similar circumstance in a particle accelerator and we cannot “see” past microwave background radiation. As such, as of now, there isn’t a straight path to understand the Big Bang further in any context.
    - tux1968 4y ago
      A more charitable reading would be "appreciate that all such theories are necessarily humble and limited; unless the entire context of science and human understanding becomes fundamentally and dramatically transformed"
      - synu 4y ago
sigmoid10 4y ago
This just falls completely apart when you look at the history of physics. Einstein for example is usually considered to be one of the smarter people, and even he thought it would be impossible to ever measure gravitational waves directly. He simply could not foresee the future developments of quantum mechanics, like lasers or squeezed light states. And yet here we are. Even if the author was the best physicist in the world (and if you look at her papers she certainly isn't by a long shot), you should never trust any statement like that. This is not just detrimental to science outreach (these things capture young people's imagination after all), it's also pointless to argue about them when we know that we almost certainly just lack imagination ourselves. Noone alive today can tell what will be possible in 100 years, period.
- twiss 4y ago
  Sure, but that's an example of measuring something that's happening now. It's not quite in the same category as measuring something that happened 13.7 billion years ago.
  - sigmoid10 4y ago
    Well, first of all these gravitational wave-creating events happened billions of light years away and thus are already a way to view the universe billions of years ago. Going back and looking even further into the past is just an example of what seems impossible to us right now. But in the grand scheme of things, we have no clue what's possible as evidenced by the history of physics. On top of that, there are actually pathways towards understanding things like string theory or the big bang. Einstein by comparison was not disingenuous when he made that statement, since the theoretical and experimental work didn't even show a possible path to imagine the future. Of course that doesn't mean that these other things will pan out in the future (e.g. stuff like astronomically-sized colliders or mathematical bottom-up/top-down proof approaches), but saying that anything we do today definitely won't ever work out, no matter what, is either incredibly naive, misinformed or outright slanderous towards these areas of research.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  I hate this way of thinking. Einstein never thought that it's impossible to measure gravitational waves, he just couldn't imagine any way we could ever make instruments precise enough to do so. However, measuring the state of the singularity that probably existed before inflation, or even more so, measuring anything about how that in itself came to be, is explicitly impossible given our current theories. As impossible as building a space ship that travels faster than light, or measuring the precise position and velocity of a particle. These are not technological issues: finding a way to do them would mean a completely new paradigm in science. So any paper that attempts to prove these things without presenting a new paradigm is doomed to the "we will never know" bag.
0134340 4y ago
That reminds me of her article, very narrow. She seems to imply scientists, or at least scientific theories, implicate certain universal origins when really they're implying "to the best of our current knowledge". I think most everyone that's scientifically literate, and you'd think it'd be common knowledge among most of HN crowd, knows that scientific theories of universal origins aren't certain but here we have a whole article of the 'well awkshually' party-pooping you're talking about. She does seem pretty certain about uncertainty though which tells the tale that she's not beyond the paradox either.

synu 4y ago

I watched the video, and the sense I got was you don’t need to bother to read anything where scientists talk about having figured out what happened at the beginning of the universe because we can never know. This seems to explicitly exclude the possibility that there could ever be a discovery you might read about that would change that.

twiss 4y ago
She explicitly says that the scientific method is insufficient to give an answer to this question. So reading anything written by scientists won't give a conclusive answer. I think it's implicitly hinted that you might as well read something by a religious person, or a philosopher, or anyone with a random theory, as none of the theories can be proven or disproven by the scientific method, and so all of their answers will be equally (un)satisfying. It's theoretically possible that we'll one day find some other method of finding out the truth (perhaps a god will descend from the heavens and tell us? or perhaps we manage to find a bug / exploit in the simulation?) but personally I find it unlikely.
- pronlover723 4y ago
  She did make an appeal to simplicity, claiming that simpler is better, and she stated that religious origins are way more complicated so while they can't be proven wrong, if you accept the idea that simpler is better then religious explanations are unlikely to be true.
  - twiss 4y ago
    Yes, in the context of an example where the scientific method does / did work, and provides a simple explanation, namely evolution. Her argument is that in the case of the origin of the universe, the scientific method doesn't work, instead. That doesn't make the religious "method" better, but also not worse.
- bandyaboot 4y ago
  Honestly I find “it’s unknowable” to be a pretty satisfactory answer. Mostly because to me it points at something that seems almost obvious the more I’ve thought about it. Even if it were possible to see past the “Big Bang”, what possible reason is there to think that would be the end of the rabbit hole? As mind bending as it is to think that the trail is infinite, it’s even more mind bending to imagine that it’s not.
DemocracyFTW2 4y ago
Well to quote user mensetmanusman: "Per thermodynamic axioms, incompleteness is implied by the arrow of time and information atrophy. This would imply an unknowable beginning." I think 'never' should be understood in this way—either there's something wrong or fundamentally incomplete about our theories, or we can not know certain things. Barring groundbreaking advancements in understanding akin to quantum physics and relativity theory, physics tells us so. Since the papers discussed do not establish such a new and testable theory but still go and discuss things current science cannot access, they cannot taken to be science. Doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong or uninteresting. I don't think she excludes the possibility that a groundbreaking discovery could be made that changes that. But the papers were not written in a time that knows of such a discovery.
- synu 4y ago
  Ok, yeah maybe I could see that. But it’s kind of a confusing message - don’t read or take this research on this topic seriously, except in case some research on this topic comes that you should read and take seriously.
  - bardworx 4y ago
    Per PBS SpaceTime, humanity has been able to recreate conditions 0.000001 seconds after Big Bang (arbitrary number), in particle accelerators. But to add an extra 0 would require the energy output of our universe. The implication is that we simply don’t have enough energies to recreate similar circumstance in a particle accelerator and we cannot “see” past microwave background radiation. As such, as of now, there isn’t a straight path to understand the Big Bang further in any context.
  - tux1968 4y ago
    A more charitable reading would be "appreciate that all such theories are necessarily humble and limited; unless the entire context of science and human understanding becomes fundamentally and dramatically transformed"
    - synu 4y ago

sigmoid10 4y ago

This just falls completely apart when you look at the history of physics. Einstein for example is usually considered to be one of the smarter people, and even he thought it would be impossible to ever measure gravitational waves directly. He simply could not foresee the future developments of quantum mechanics, like lasers or squeezed light states. And yet here we are. Even if the author was the best physicist in the world (and if you look at her papers she certainly isn't by a long shot), you should never trust any statement like that. This is not just detrimental to science outreach (these things capture young people's imagination after all), it's also pointless to argue about them when we know that we almost certainly just lack imagination ourselves. Noone alive today can tell what will be possible in 100 years, period.

twiss 4y ago
Sure, but that's an example of measuring something that's happening now. It's not quite in the same category as measuring something that happened 13.7 billion years ago.
- sigmoid10 4y ago
  Well, first of all these gravitational wave-creating events happened billions of light years away and thus are already a way to view the universe billions of years ago. Going back and looking even further into the past is just an example of what seems impossible to us right now. But in the grand scheme of things, we have no clue what's possible as evidenced by the history of physics. On top of that, there are actually pathways towards understanding things like string theory or the big bang. Einstein by comparison was not disingenuous when he made that statement, since the theoretical and experimental work didn't even show a possible path to imagine the future. Of course that doesn't mean that these other things will pan out in the future (e.g. stuff like astronomically-sized colliders or mathematical bottom-up/top-down proof approaches), but saying that anything we do today definitely won't ever work out, no matter what, is either incredibly naive, misinformed or outright slanderous towards these areas of research.
tsimionescu 4y ago
I hate this way of thinking. Einstein never thought that it's impossible to measure gravitational waves, he just couldn't imagine any way we could ever make instruments precise enough to do so. However, measuring the state of the singularity that probably existed before inflation, or even more so, measuring anything about how that in itself came to be, is explicitly impossible given our current theories. As impossible as building a space ship that travels faster than light, or measuring the precise position and velocity of a particle. These are not technological issues: finding a way to do them would mean a completely new paradigm in science. So any paper that attempts to prove these things without presenting a new paradigm is doomed to the "we will never know" bag.

0134340 4y ago

That reminds me of her article, very narrow. She seems to imply scientists, or at least scientific theories, implicate certain universal origins when really they're implying "to the best of our current knowledge". I think most everyone that's scientifically literate, and you'd think it'd be common knowledge among most of HN crowd, knows that scientific theories of universal origins aren't certain but here we have a whole article of the 'well awkshually' party-pooping you're talking about. She does seem pretty certain about uncertainty though which tells the tale that she's not beyond the paradox either.