3 ms·

> the foundational description of reality How can we ever really know that? Isn't the best we can do is just models?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wdh505 3y ago
I think that the same way that energy is shed when a particle steps from high energy to low energy is the way that "gravity aka possibility energy" is shed when quantum superposition collapses into position. I have daydreamed of becoming a physicist just to try testing this. To directly answer your question, by experimental results.
anyfoo 3y ago
A model that is able to perfectly describe and (more importantly) predict everything is effectively indistinguishable from “reality”. Yes, there might or might not be a completely different, and maybe even weird, process underneath that gives rise to that model, but assuming that nothing whatsoever of that underlying process “leaks” into the model, it does not matter and may as well not exist for us. Luckily, we’re still pretty far from a model which fully describes reality, and it may be entirely unobtainable for us. (Also, we only assume that spatial and temporal locality isn’t a thing, i.e. that the laws of physics are the same everywhere and everytime, so there’s that as well.)
jerf 3y ago
Science can never prove that it has reached the bottom, but it could hypothetically yield a model that makes predictions that always match the universe to within all relevant margins of error. It could be that that model is itself a simulation or that there are yet deeper layers we just can't see, whatever, you know, all that jazz. But if there was a complete model, with no internal contradictions, that matched everything we could see, then at least when someone said "in light of this theory, gravity is X", we would be making a coherent statement. Right now we can't say what gravity is. We know we don't have a complete description of it, because the contradictions between QM and relativity are something explainable to a motivated high school student, as they are pretty fundamental. You don't need to deeply understand either theory to understand enough of the conflict to know we don't have an answer. This isn't a criticism of either theory per se or the scientists involved. They're the best we've got and they're each on their own pretty good. But we are as justified in saying "gravity is definitely a curvature of spacetime because Relativity says so" as we are justified in saying "gravity doesn't exist because it doesn't appear in the standard model at all". Both are basically the same statement relative to the theory they relate to, it is just more obvious the latter is wrong.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

I think that the same way that energy is shed when a particle steps from high energy to low energy is the way that "gravity aka possibility energy" is shed when quantum superposition collapses into position. I have daydreamed of becoming a physicist just to try testing this. To directly answer your question, by experimental results.

anyfoo 3y ago

A model that is able to perfectly describe and (more importantly) predict everything is effectively indistinguishable from “reality”. Yes, there might or might not be a completely different, and maybe even weird, process underneath that gives rise to that model, but assuming that nothing whatsoever of that underlying process “leaks” into the model, it does not matter and may as well not exist for us. Luckily, we’re still pretty far from a model which fully describes reality, and it may be entirely unobtainable for us. (Also, we only assume that spatial and temporal locality isn’t a thing, i.e. that the laws of physics are the same everywhere and everytime, so there’s that as well.)

jerf 3y ago

Science can never prove that it has reached the bottom, but it could hypothetically yield a model that makes predictions that always match the universe to within all relevant margins of error. It could be that that model is itself a simulation or that there are yet deeper layers we just can't see, whatever, you know, all that jazz. But if there was a complete model, with no internal contradictions, that matched everything we could see, then at least when someone said "in light of this theory, gravity is X", we would be making a coherent statement. Right now we can't say what gravity is. We know we don't have a complete description of it, because the contradictions between QM and relativity are something explainable to a motivated high school student, as they are pretty fundamental. You don't need to deeply understand either theory to understand enough of the conflict to know we don't have an answer. This isn't a criticism of either theory per se or the scientists involved. They're the best we've got and they're each on their own pretty good. But we are as justified in saying "gravity is definitely a curvature of spacetime because Relativity says so" as we are justified in saying "gravity doesn't exist because it doesn't appear in the standard model at all". Both are basically the same statement relative to the theory they relate to, it is just more obvious the latter is wrong.