This reminds me very much of Riddley Walker, have you read it?
Is physics true now? Is truth something with exactly defined borders?
No, haven’t. Thanks. Also consider “A Canticle for Leibowitz”.
My point is that, over time, knowledge gets corrupted. Especially esoteric knowledge. And it might not even take much time.
So you gotta wonder what myths we’ve got now that started as sincere attempts at a model.
And even today. When a guy who made the observation and crafted the model tells you the model, your understanding and his are probably not the same.
So there’s that corruption to consider.
There is no question that most myths and legends were originally an attempt to convey facts, theories, or guesses into the future.
Humans are built to be pattern matching machines and prediction engines; it’s one of the big survival traits we developed through evolution and we’re better at it than any other species we know of.
BUT objectively speaking we were still really, really bad at it. Yet that doesn’t stop us from trying.
So we tend to do the best we can with the information we have available at the time.
As others have said, “physics” - and science in general - is by definition immutable. It is the thing that can be tested with specific predictions that always turn out to be correct. If I can perform an experiment today, and you can perform the same experiment 100 years from now, and (adjusting for environmental factors and measurement accuracy) we get the same results, and we can repeat that over and over, that’s science.
But our understanding, our knowledge of it, can change as you say. That doesn’t make physics less true, it just make our knowledge of and ability to describe physics less accurate.
We can trace so many stories - including modern religions - to origins that attempt to explain our limited observations in the past. They were our best effort at matching patterns and predicting outcomes in the world around us. And the inaccuracies, the limitations don’t mean we should stop believing the things we think we understand today.
It just means that we must recognize new information when it arrives as testable data, and incorporate it into our current understanding, relegating the wisdom of the past to history.
“Physics” is more or less syntactic sugar for “how the universe works”. It’s not a belief system. It’s just the way work - and, in fact, it’s allowing you to experience cognition and sapience, as well as enabling you to ask this latest in a sequence of odd and strangely aimed questions. But I digress: Our understanding more or less of the universe and its operation doesn’t change its fundamental nature.
We gained our knowledge of physics through experimentation and logical extrapolation.
Any knowledge gained from experimental evidence can be regained.
Ergo, knowledge that is lost - or as you put it, “corrupted” - will be re-learned and/or corrected in time, so long as the species whose knowledge we’re discussing doesn’t straight up go extinct.
Can you know something if it’s false? Is that the question?
I’m pointing out a degradation of knowledge and exploring the point at which it is considered false.
For example : a man examines a phenomenon, performs a complex experiment relating to it. Comes up with a nice model. Communicates the model to you. You understand the model but your understanding of the actual phenomenon, maybe less so. So when you discuss the phenomenon with your friends, refer to the model, there’s a bit of bs there.
And another example : A blind man is told that the sky is blue. But his understanding of that is not like the understanding of one who actually observed the blue of the sky, obviously.
Call it what, an unavoidable corruption?
I think if you took this to a different community and posted it more straightforward you would receive better responses. Maybe a science or a philosophy community. No stupid questions is more for questions like “will drinking small amounts of bleach whiten my teeth?”
“Physics” still exist, but the understanding of it, which was developed by humans, is gone.
Hmm. I think of “physics” as a collection of models. What do you think of it as?
The rules that govern how the universe works
If your premise is physics doesn’t exist because humans have lost an understanding of it then you have placed your own ego at the centre of your question
We think and talk about what we observe in terms of rules because rules are a convenient way to think and talk about it. That is the long and short of it.
I’m a bit surprised by the question, so I’d rather ask: what would it mean to you for physics not to be true in that hypothetical future?
It would depend on my relationship with the body of knowledge I suppose. Are we married or just good friends?
Are you going out of your way to test the “no stupid questions” premise? You aren’t even asking a question you’re trying to make some kind of point in a roundabout way.
10 days ago, -34 points, “What horrible errors are people like you guilty of?”
10 days ago, -15 points, “When asked a question, what is your first reaction, to answer the question or to defend yourself?”
14 hours ago, -18 points, “In movies a strong woman is manly. (big muscles, aggressive, punches people, etc.) Is that really the way it is?”In all those posts there’s the common thread of you being vague and constantly alluding to some specific message you want to spread but won’t just directly state.
Hes a r/iamverysmart dude attempting the socratic method (which is a legit teaching method for one-to-one tutoring) on a fucking group of people. Setting aside the base assumption that he just has some great Understanding that we don’t and can’t comprehend if told directly, you can only really do it on one single person if you have a good understanding of what their current mental model is.
Douglas Adams tried it in his book, with the self-insert Avatar character. It was hilariously sad.
Pretentious bullshitter not seeking answers to questions plz ban.
Well it’s a relative thing of course.
Not a response, please stop trolling.
Maybe you just don’t understand.
Thanks. Now I’ve blocked them. 🙂
Whichever revelation you’ve had that you are dying to “teach” everyone, it’s easier if you just state it directly.
I guarantee you it’s not as reality-shattering as you think it is. Whatever it is, we have seen or thought it and multiple variations of it before.
Let it out, maybe you get some interesting insights to learn from instead of this. It’s just silly.
It’s a conversation, not a fight.
Sorry, this is anuse, argument is next door.
Physics is true whether or not we believe in or understand it. It’s not Santa Claus.
But there’s no such thing as hobbits.
You’ve never been west of Bree?
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Physics is a fact. Belief in it is irrelevent.
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Hobbit is a name for a fictional creature, there is nothing to prevent reuse of the name for some real creature of the next 1000 years.
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