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Think of everything we’ve discovered even in just the last 50 years, and how impossible it seemed from the perspective of the past. You can always argue that w
by shepherdjerred 4y ago
Think of everything we’ve discovered even in just the last 50 years, and how impossible it seemed from the perspective of the past.
You can always argue that we know more now, that there are fundamental limits, etc., but there’s always more to learn and revise.
- tsimionescu 4y agoNothing we've discovered in the last 50 years seemed impossible from the perspective of the past. They did seem much farther away, and some had just not been thought of, but no one in the 1970s would be completely incredulous at anything that exists today. Instead, many things that seemed possible 50-150 years ago have turned out in the meantime to be impossible - speeds faster than c (before Maxwell's equations and SR), arbitrary precision measurements (before Heisenberg's uncertainty principle), uniquely determining the future state of a system based on a previous state (before wave functions), arbitrary amounts of matter and energy (before quantization of these and other properties) etc. The history of physics is usually one of discovering new constraints, not one of discovering new possibilities. Before physics, we used to believe in unconstrained magic. Not only have we always believed we can reach the stars, we used to believe we could do it by finding the right magical formula or praying hard enough. Of course there are some exceptions - electricity and quantum computing come to mind.
- mdiesel 4y ago50 years ago is not 500 years ago is not 5000 years ago. In the last 50 years we've had some incremental improvements to our understanding, in 500 you're going to before Newton. 5000 and we were just developing complex farming societies and the first civilisations. 5000 years is before Ozymandias. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!