Comment by forgottenpaswrd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by forgottenpaswrd | Hacker News Reader

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forgottenpaswrd

Oh, the ego, what a marvelous thing!

Believing that what we currently know is applicable to humans in the future, that our current limits are immutable.

We know all the laws of physics, right? We know if the universe is finite or infinite(because we had traveled there and seen the limits), we know what creates gravity and exactly how electromagnetic attraction really works... the same way the people Socrates asked 2500 years ago knew it all, and Socrates himself did not knew anything(in his own words).

The same way people already knew everything about the small things before microscope invention(in their own words it was unnecessary because "why we want to see what we already know smaller?").

That someone develops better ways to control active fission(atom by atom) and fusion reactions, that someone discovers something new about the universe,that someone discovers how to create antigravity because understands what gravity really is, that someone discover the way to crack the code on aging on our DNA, that someone discovers why the light limit on vacuum is what it is and some way of going faster, all of this impossible, because we know it all.

Making predictions grounded in supremely well-tested physics is not egotistical. Making specific predictions about the content of as-yet undiscovered science without any evidence is egotistical. http://lesswrong.com/lw/gq/the_proper_use_of_humility/

Who's making the specific predictions here?

My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

We actually know what gravity really is (basically, curving of space due to mass), and we know why the speed of light is the speed limit of the universe (it's necessarily true because space is continuous and you can't teleport). These come from general relativity, which is an extremely well test theory. Whatever we find out about gravity and light in the future must at least reduce to general relativity.

What I find curious is that it's the people who don't know what we know who think we'll overturn what we know. Perhaps that's because it's easier to say "Oh, someone will overturn that" when you don't actually know what "that" is.

I don't disagree with your sentiment - any future theory must hold to current theories at its limit. But I disagree that we know what anything really. To know what gravity is really we must answer. What is mass, space, time, spacetime, inertia? Is the graviton real? Is space continuous or discrete? Also note curving of space is due to more than mass lest how would light beams be gravitationally responsive? Curvature is described by the stress energy tensor.

What we do have are human graspable descriptions of plausible moves based on our observations of chess pieces. We have no coherent theory on the game or why it is played. But that does not matter. A more important issue intertwined with this bias is: are notions of information and entropy more fundamental to how we formulate laws than anything intrinsic to energy and space?

Socrates was wrong.

We are wrong now, as well.

But to say that we are as wrong as Socrates is ridiculous. We are much, much, much closer to the truth now than we have ever been.

I fully agree. Ask the leading scientist a couple of hundred years ago what they thought of going to moon. They too could've demonstrated how preposterous the proposition is by imagining all kinds of sci-fi energy sources and it would still seem impossible to them.

That's not the same as saying that space colonization is going to happen or that it's remotely within reach anytime soon.

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