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I wonder if it's possible to ever find out what our reality is even if we will eventually reach the intellectual and technology necessary because we are part of

• collyw 12y ago
  Yes. Open minded comments like this, questioning the limits of science get down voted here on HN.
  • goblin89 12y ago
    I didn't downvote, but if you ask me I'd say others did it mainly because grandparent brought philosophy into scientific discussion. (And with reasoning or phrasing issues at that: “we can't do something even if we can”, for example, contradicts itself.)
    • halfcat 12y ago
      Ironic that science is a subset of philosophy.
      • goblin89 12y ago
        That's precisely why, IMHO, if you aren't prepared to make a complete well-thought-through argument, then you should think twice before venturing into a philosophical discussion. On the other hand, due to the nature of HN, one has to choose between either spending a few days researching the comment and posting it with a very slim chance of being read or answered, or blurting out something not very polished. In this case it's the latter. (How you define “objective”? “reality”? A rough example of how could the answer to the question “what reality is” roughly look like? Any links to existing research—people certainly attempted to ask a question of this nature before?) The resulting discussion may be worth it, though.
• unfunco 12y ago
  "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable." – from The Restaurant at the end of the Universe.
  • lrem 12y ago
    "There is an accompanying theory that states this has already happened." - same source
    • antimagic 12y ago
      I often think about that quote when I'm thinking about the universe as being a simulation in someone's computer somewhere. So imagine us clever little monkeys on the inside, have been probing the behaviour of the simulator by conducting science experiments. We're basically conducting targeting fuzzing of the simulator, which probably results in quite a few bugs going off. At which the compsci student running the simulation sighs, corrects the bug, and launches the simulation again.
• snarfy 12y ago
  "Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. In particular, for any consistent, effectively generated formal theory that proves certain basic arithmetic truths, there is an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in the theory" - Gödel (Kleene)
  • k__ 12y ago
    Some CS prof. told us this in first semester. After that, Physics was over for me. And I felt that the Planck-scale was somehow a proof for this.
    • deeviant 12y ago
      The thing is, the universe and mathematics are totally separate entities. The universe did not start off "as math", nor is it defined by it. We, as clever little beings found similarities and analogies between the universe and mathematics and leverage those to make conjecture regarding the form and nature of the universe. However, having a "complete" knowledge of either mathematics or the physical universe does not confer complete knowledge of the other.
      • s_baby 12y ago
        You don't experience the universe directly. You experience it through cognitive constructs and all the limitations that entails.
    • xenophonf 12y ago
      Physics (and science in general) isn't about searching for the Truth. Instead it's about reducing the amount of error in the mental models we use to approximate reality. Like, when a scientist says "the Law of Gravity", they actually mean "our best current guess as to how gravity works, which seems to make accurate predictions in what we consider a statistically significant number of different scenarios, but which is incomplete and perhaps even completely wrong in several other interesting scenarios or edge cases". Only _everything_ in science has a confidence interval, and prefacing every description of some phenomena with the phrase "we're pretty sure this is how this works, but to be perfectly honest, it's only an approximation to some X degrees of accuracy" gets really exhausting, so for stuff we're really, really sure of, like 99.9999% sure, we call it a "Law" (even though it isn't) and move on with our lives.
• noiv 12y ago
  I think, we are not bad at describing reality, the problem is describing our self, because whatever the outcome is it doesn't sound, well, motivating?
• danbruc 12y ago
  For the moment it seems to me that there is no chance to ever know what something REALLY is. There is obviously stuff out there that behaves exactly like mathematical models we made up - there are things called electrons behaving like our model of electrons interacting with things called photons behaving like our models of photons. But what does this tell you about the nature of electrons and photons? Is a electron just a handful of numbers like charge -1 and spin 1/2 behaving according to the laws of physics or is there more to an electron? I can't even imagine how one could bridge the gap between our models of reality and reality but then there is probably so much more to learn about our universe, maybe some day...
  • snarfy 12y ago
    Why are all electrons the same? It's because they are all manifestations of the same electric field. But then what is the electric field? Yep, it's a rabbit hole.
  • thibauts 12y ago
    Maybe asking what things REALLY are has no meaning. Do objects have characteristics apart from what we can (physically) interact with and measure ? If thoses characteristics exist but aren't measurable can we say they are real ? Does it make any sense ? I often use this line of thought to talk about God with open-minded believers. If there is a God that created our reality and acts on it, then the effects of these actions are real in our sense and thus measurable. It then follows that God isn't separate from the natural world and can be observed like many other natural phenomena we don't look at directly. Without a chain of interactions this wouldn't be possible. What I mean is our reality is one of interactions. What is real to us, and what can be called "existing" is what interacts directly or indirectly with our senses and our minds. What we mean by "nature" on a large scale is ultimately internal structure. Once we hit a level where internal structure doesn't make sense anymore, I'm not sure what we are looking at and what the word "nature" can be made to encompass.
• axilmar 12y ago
  I do not think that it is possible. Any physical system that can be described by a set of mathematical laws is bound to have some axioms that simply cannot be proven within its context. Godel's incompleteness theorems prove that. Hence, we will never get to the bottom of the reality of our universe.
  • macspoofing 12y ago
    What if we live in a universe/reality where anything that can happen, does happen. And the reason for this state is because it just is.
    • fjolthor 12y ago
      You mean...the multiverse theory.
  • coliveira 12y ago
    This argument is always used to try to reduce the power of mathematics, but the whole fact that mathematics was used to prove this tells me otherwise. There is a huge amount of properties of the universe that can be understood with mathematics despite Goedel's result.
  • fjolthor 12y ago
    I agree with this but for a different reason. No matter how much we discover, everything we find is still something in existence. No matter what force or object you are observing, you can't doubt that it exists at some level, in some way (whichever multiverse or reality it is). This means that at some point, existence must have been started by something non-existent. Because we only comprehend cause-and-effect, we can't possibly find the origin in a provable way while researching from within existence.
  • john_b 12y ago
    Godel's incompleteness theorems only place restrictions on deductive systems. In mathematics, you can't perform "experiments" and measure what happens. As long as we can observe and measure physical quantities, even if those quantities are only indirect effects of what physicists are actually trying to measure, incompleteness is not a strong limitation of physics.
• macspoofing 12y ago
  Only one way to find out.
• protonfish 12y ago
  There is this belief propagated among physicists that smaller scales somehow have more to do with reality. I have never been presented with logic or evidence that convinced me that an electron is somehow more "real" than a molecule or a person or the solar system or the observable universe. I wish the word "reality" would stop being thrown around without justification. "Fundamental" might be a more appropriate term.
  • pfortuny 12y ago
    I guess you mean "elements." We used to apply the word to earth, air, fire and water. Now it is all about tachions and whatnot. But elements is the word.
  • im3w1l 12y ago
    It easier to get a detailed understanding of the universe, by observing what happens in extreme cases. The very small. The very big. The very heavy. The very energetic. The very quick.
  • afafsd 12y ago
    >There is this belief propagated among physicists that smaller scales somehow have more to do with reality Only among high-energy physicists. Perhaps not coincidentally there's also a belief among high-energy physicists that only they count as physicists. In reality, they're a small minority of physicists. The largest specialty in physics, accounting for about half of all research, is condensed matter physics. Then in no particular order you've got AMO (atomic/molecular/optical), astrophysics, geophysics, biophysics, and a bunch of other stuff sitting between or outside those categories. With the exception of just a few corners of astrophysics, none of these fields needs, or can make sure of, the stuff being done on fundamental interactions; regular old quantum mechanics plus relativity is good enough for describing everything we can actually measure.