1.1 History
1.1 History
![](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/25de4cdc-56b7-4fa8-acd6-7488a1ec5d23.png?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
![](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/25de4cdc-56b7-4fa8-acd6-7488a1ec5d23.png?format=webp)
1.1 History
So, basically, we don't know that much on anything besides understanding it's really complex and difficult to figure out.
This has always been true.
To quote someone a lot wiser than myself:
It's a shame stupid people carry themselves through life full of certainty while the wise ones suffer a life of doubt.
No, before the scientific method was invented, the religious consensus was that "All is known".
No it hasn't. Many religions and spiritual texts covered all this stuff in just a couple of pages.
Not really. It's all about models - we have for normal stuff, but it breaks apart in extreme situations
So clearly the model is fundamentally wrong... Which is pretty cool, because it means FTL travel, antigravity, or travel between dimensions could be possible
But we know now normal shit acts - we have models that work perfectly for 99% of all situations, and we're probably not going to stop using them. We understand what happens when you throw an object, and it's a basic equation up until like mock-2 or 3, where our models stop working and we have to switch them out completely
Can you build a model that works for both? Absolutely. It'll be closer to the truth even. But it'll be way more complicated for nearly all practical, human scale situations
At the end of the day, a model that describes reality exactly is almost useless... Without simplifications to ignore everything not relevant, just trying shit live would be easier than calculating the prediction
What I don't understand is if the goal is to eventually be able to model everything perfectly, if we achieve that goal, doesn't that just mean entropy is a lie?
Not really, OP's image is somewhat misleading. The truth is that we're constantly trying to improve our understanding of physics and some theories are not completely correct but they often provide a way for future scientists to dig deeper and figure it out. Then with new knowledge, new hypothesis can be suggested creating a gateway to deeper understanding of some concepts further down the timeline.
Actually, we know everything there is happening in solar system. What we don’t know requires energies or distances or times incomparable with human life.
We don’t know why space spawns. We don’t know why the sun’s corona is hotter than its surface. We don’t know why the sun spins faster around its equator than at its poles. We don’t know why shampoo makes strange squiggles when being poured out of its bottle. Just four things off the top of my head.
Actually, we know everything there is happening in solar system.
Oh really?
Then I'm sure you can tell us where we can locate Planet 9, or even if Planet 9 exists.
https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/the-case-strengthens-for-planet-9/
That's one of the most confidently idiotic things I've read in a hot minute. Congratulations.
The answer is 42, guys.
Yes, yes, I'm quite sure, it's 42!
The question is if it will still be 42 when we look away.
Unexpected factorial
How many roads must a man walk down?
I highly recommend the book "We Have No Idea" by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whitesom. Great explanations of what we know about the universe (with hilarious comic illustrations) and a profound message of just how much we don't know.
Thanks for this recommendation! I love books that show me how little I truly know about anything.
Like all of Randall Monroe's books (xckd guy).
Any more book recommendations?
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! I've read it twice, apparently I needed to be reminded of how much I didn't know. 😉
Tide goes in, tide goes out... You can't explain that.
But if I have to then I’ll do it live!
Oh my god why did you have to remind me that this awful creature exists?
Copernicus deserves a mention. Galileo's problems resulted (in part) from him being a proponent of Copernicism after the church had declared it heresy.
Heliocentrism was suggested by Copernicus and Galileo built on that, including developing physics to the point where he couldn't believe otherwise.
The heliocentric models predicted the orbits worse than epicyclic geocentric ones and that is the reason Galileo was told to shut up, the court transcript is like 99% science and then a single subordinate clause saying "it also contradicts the bible".
Galileo insisted on circular orbits which was his downfall, ironically "because circles are perfect and god would furnish the universe perfect": That kind of religious language while also being worse science than what was already established did him in. Kepler, based on Brahe's data, was the first one to get a heliocentric model right and more accurate than the epicyclic ones.
Also earth doesn't revolve around the sun. If anything both revolve around their shared centre of gravity but really it's a matter of your frame of reference. Paraphrasing Archimedes: Give me a fixed point in the universe and I will move all your models.
The sun. Does the earth and moon orbit a gravitational center that they share? Does that center revolve around the sun? How imperceptible is this, considering the shared point is likely inside the earth given the difference between its mass and lua's?
Relevant alt-text https://xkcd.com/1489/
I know I'm stupid but how do you see the alt text?
On mobile: long press on the comic itself
There's also https://m.xkcd.com/1489 where you can short tap on "(alt-text)" if your browser makes it difficult.
Just re-saw this episode a couple nights ago. It's still the greatest episode of Doctor Who (It's Season 3, Episode 10, Blink).
Great science fiction. Great closed-loop time travel. Great horror. Everything that makes Doctor Who great.
And gravitational stuff. We kinda know it does it, but not how to do anything about it.
Surely that's "heavy stuff"?
And maybe also "big stuff". I suppose those two overlap quite a lot?
I thought that meant black holes
How about something simple: Why does gravity feel the same as acceleration?
You can't feel gravity. What we feel really is acceleration, the acceleration of the earth pushing us up against gravity.
Because of relativistic frames of reference.
Standing on a surface in a gravity well means you're being constantly pushed out of an inertial frame, by not allowing you to follow a geodesic path in spacetime, and the same effect happens under acceleration.
I can't wrap my head around time being anything other than the measurement of movement, and until someone can prove otherwise, that's where I'll be.
I'm going to take your definition just a step further and say it's a measurement of causality specifically.
Isn't literally everything a measurement of causality?
A definition I saw recently that I like is that time is the direction of entropy. You follow time one direction and you get the big bang where everything is chaotic and happening, and in the other direction you get the heat death of the universe, where everything has settled into a base state and nothing's happening.
Do you mean, like reverse time? From my understanding of the concept of entropy, it strives to a maximum, meaning maximum disorder, by your definition the big bang.
Or maybe do you have link where I can look into it? Sounds interesting
entropy
To me that's more of an emergent property of large numbers of particles moving from higher to lower energy states. Like temperature is just the velocity of an atom when you have lots of atoms moving and interacting.
That is the scientific definition as well is it not? Time didn't exist before movement.
If it did, how could you tell?
I think high level degree holders know a lot more than the average man thinks we know, in fact I doubt the majority of people even know US High school level stuff like that we've discovered a gravitational constant and about the inverse square law as it applies to gravity.
The sad reason for that is that it's a conversation killer. I would love to go back and forth for hours on things like the uncanny similarity between universal gravitation and Coulomb's law. But, when I speak to someone with a similar background to mine it's all...work-work-work-how-is-it-applied??, and when I speak to someone without that background it's all yawns.
It's a shame because in either case I think science is the most interesting topic. It's just as edifying to dive casually into the philosophy as it is to dive rigourously into the maths. I learn more per unit time from either type of conversation than from studying papers. And, it's a passion, but one whose expression is stymied either by explaining it in terms of football fields per dolphin or by making it marketable. Interaction with other minds is the most valuable type of learning.
I feel like I may come off as a bit of an elitist writing this, but the problem really is the opposite: I wish more people would get involved!
Edit: the responses to this have made my day you guys. This is why I left Reddit.
I’m a person without that background and I’ll talk about it. What’s the uncanny similarity you mentioned?
I get it...but at the same time I also get why you're not going to be the life of the party with material like that.
I think a big part of this is because it's already a super, super niche topic, but then you're adding the extra layer of wanting to stick to a largely theoretical/conceptual tone of discussion, ruling out most of what few were still interested when you started into the topic. And once you're that far down the rabbit hole, I feel like there's going to be hyper specific topics that dominate, and unless your conversation partner not only has that knowledge but also wants to have that conversation...well the conversation isn't really going to happen at all.
It's also a very brain-power intense set of topics for a leisure time get together where most people have the goal of not having to think too hard on anything.
Fuck it bro I'll listen. I don't have a degree or anything so I probably won't understand much though.
I dunno, it's an inverse square. Are we going to get excited each time something has a linear relationship to another thing? What makes the inverse square so special?
I think we got the fast stuff under control (special relativity), when you mix it it with like small stuff (quantum field theory), and I guess big stuff (general relativity), it is also OK, but mixing it with anything more than that causes a problem.
This is from science abridged beyond the point of usefulness right? I have that book.
Edit: yes it is
Shit's on fire, yo. But does that fire only produce positive vibes or are there like 90% bad vibes, you know, bro?
Motion is indeed, tricky. - Zeno of Elea
He was just obsessed with cutting things in half
1.2 Appendix
Also half magnet stuff is still AWOL
Can't explain better than this🤯 Repost in !science_memes@mander.xyz
I have been thinking that is impossible for ANYTHING to understand EVERYTHING. Because ANYTHING will always be a part of EVERYTHING, and you need EVERYTHING to understand EVERYTHING.
Any system will always be a sub-system of some other system.
Also I've been thinking about something I read: "The more close or deep we see, the more it seems to be nothing there". I think it was related to subatomic particles, which seems to be just fields of energy instead of matter or something like that.
I'd appreciate if someone wants to share a few comments or thoughts about this with me.
Maybe you can go talk to Gödel. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems
From Statistics (commonly attributed to George Box):
"All models are wrong, but some models are useful."
Our models for how everything works are generally more useful than they are wrong for "normal" conditions, and more wrong than useful at the extremes.