I don’t know if the statement is correct in this case but in general saying “we will never know” about a subject which we have incomplete knowledge isn’t a contradiction.

I can say, we will never know what the first human that got to North America had for lunch on their 20th birthday, and I think that’s as true as it could reasonably be. Sure maybe we’ll invent a time machine or some other technology in the future that invalidates it, but if you apply that logic then nothing can ever be stated as a fact.

> I can say, we will never know what the first human that got to North America had for lunch on their 20th birthday, and I think that’s as true as it could reasonably be.

if there is a large mirror a few hundred light years away we might be able to see his lunch in the reflection ;)

Not necessarily. The signal-to-noise ratio drops the farther you get away.

Very few things about the origins of the universe can be stated as fact at this point so “we will never know” isn't a "fact" either. Implied certainty on either side seems pre-emptive.

I'm not questioning that part. I don't know if stating that we'll never know about the origins of the universe is correct. I tend to agree personally that it seems premature.

All I'm saying is that making (nearly) absolute claims with incomplete knowledge is not a contradiction.

Furthermore there is the complication caused by ambiguous problem statements. In your example, how we define the first human that got to North America? Which immigration wave? What if there were immigration waves that were completely wiped out without leaving any effects of the subsequent populations?

What is the 20th birthday? According to which calendar? (Leap days etc)?

What is lunch? Not every people subdivide their meals in a predictable way that you can pinpoint to what "lunch" is

Etc etc

EDIT: forgot the most obvious: define what counts for human. It's not clear cut to distinguish boundaries between species

Furthermore if a human time travels back to the past and then sets up shop and lives amongst the first humans, maybe they are the first human? Semantics and ambiguity have a way of making unspecific questions paradoxical

That's a very narrow reading of it. There's always an implicit "to the best of our current knowledge" caveat with every sound scientific statement. And it's true, to the best of our current knowledge, we can never know what it's like inside a black hole or very close to the time our universe began because the physics that we know tells us no person or probe can ever go there and come back to tell. If you're no so generous as to accept the implicit caveat you just end up being fun at parties because you go around and tell people to "never say never and always avoid always".

This just falls completely apart when you look at the history of physics. Einstein for example is usually considered to be one of the smarter people, and even he thought it would be impossible to ever measure gravitational waves directly. He simply could not foresee the future developments of quantum mechanics, like lasers or squeezed light states. And yet here we are. Even if the author was the best physicist in the world (and if you look at her papers she certainly isn't by a long shot), you should never trust any statement like that. This is not just detrimental to science outreach (these things capture young people's imagination after all), it's also pointless to argue about them when we know that we almost certainly just lack imagination ourselves. Noone alive today can tell what will be possible in 100 years, period.

I hate this way of thinking. Einstein never thought that it's impossible to measure gravitational waves, he just couldn't imagine any way we could ever make instruments precise enough to do so.

However, measuring the state of the singularity that probably existed before inflation, or even more so, measuring anything about how that in itself came to be, is explicitly impossible given our current theories. As impossible as building a space ship that travels faster than light, or measuring the precise position and velocity of a particle.

These are not technological issues: finding a way to do them would mean a completely new paradigm in science. So any paper that attempts to prove these things without presenting a new paradigm is doomed to the "we will never know" bag.

You're falling into the exact argument trap you laid out yourself. Einstein had no clue what would be possible just 100 years later and just because we have no clue how to ever measure a singularity (which is actually not completely true, but let's not get into that) it would be very presumptuous of us to say that it will remain impossible another 100 years into the future. Just imagine if people kept listening to the guys who kept saying all the stuff we do today is impossible. Science is incremental steps - and we have to follow them disregarding of how worthwhile they might seem right now. Very rarely will someone come along and enable something directly that was thought impossible just recently. But over the long run, things work differently. Sure, we'll reach a lot of dead ends along the way while pursuing great things, but on the other hand we don't get anywhere at all by only listening to people who can't imagine anything.

Sure, but that's an example of measuring something that's happening now. It's not quite in the same category as measuring something that happened 13.7 billion years ago.

Well, first of all these gravitational wave-creating events happened billions of light years away and thus are already a way to view the universe billions of years ago. Going back and looking even further into the past is just an example of what seems impossible to us right now. But in the grand scheme of things, we have no clue what's possible as evidenced by the history of physics. On top of that, there are actually pathways towards understanding things like string theory or the big bang. Einstein by comparison was not disingenuous when he made that statement, since the theoretical and experimental work didn't even show a possible path to imagine the future. Of course that doesn't mean that these other things will pan out in the future (e.g. stuff like astronomically-sized colliders or mathematical bottom-up/top-down proof approaches), but saying that anything we do today definitely won't ever work out, no matter what, is either incredibly naive, misinformed or outright slanderous towards these areas of research.

I watched the video, and the sense I got was you don’t need to bother to read anything where scientists talk about having figured out what happened at the beginning of the universe because we can never know. This seems to explicitly exclude the possibility that there could ever be a discovery you might read about that would change that.

Well to quote user mensetmanusman: "Per thermodynamic axioms, incompleteness is implied by the arrow of time and information atrophy. This would imply an unknowable beginning."

I think 'never' should be understood in this way—either there's something wrong or fundamentally incomplete about our theories, or we can not know certain things. Barring groundbreaking advancements in understanding akin to quantum physics and relativity theory, physics tells us so. Since the papers discussed do not establish such a new and testable theory but still go and discuss things current science cannot access, they cannot taken to be science. Doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong or uninteresting. I don't think she excludes the possibility that a groundbreaking discovery could be made that changes that. But the papers were not written in a time that knows of such a discovery.

Ok, yeah maybe I could see that. But it’s kind of a confusing message - don’t read or take this research on this topic seriously, except in case some research on this topic comes that you should read and take seriously.

Per PBS SpaceTime, humanity has been able to recreate conditions 0.000001 seconds after Big Bang (arbitrary number), in particle accelerators. But to add an extra 0 would require the energy output of our universe.

The implication is that we simply don’t have enough energies to recreate similar circumstance in a particle accelerator and we cannot “see” past microwave background radiation. As such, as of now, there isn’t a straight path to understand the Big Bang further in any context.

A more charitable reading would be "appreciate that all such theories are necessarily humble and limited; unless the entire context of science and human understanding becomes fundamentally and dramatically transformed"

That’s a nice way to put it. I guess there aren’t a lot of views in making a video that says that, though.

She explicitly says that the scientific method is insufficient to give an answer to this question. So reading anything written by scientists won't give a conclusive answer. I think it's implicitly hinted that you might as well read something by a religious person, or a philosopher, or anyone with a random theory, as none of the theories can be proven or disproven by the scientific method, and so all of their answers will be equally (un)satisfying.

It's theoretically possible that we'll one day find some other method of finding out the truth (perhaps a god will descend from the heavens and tell us? or perhaps we manage to find a bug / exploit in the simulation?) but personally I find it unlikely.

She did make an appeal to simplicity, claiming that simpler is better, and she stated that religious origins are way more complicated so while they can't be proven wrong, if you accept the idea that simpler is better then religious explanations are unlikely to be true.

Yes, in the context of an example where the scientific method does / did work, and provides a simple explanation, namely evolution. Her argument is that in the case of the origin of the universe, the scientific method doesn't work, instead. That doesn't make the religious "method" better, but also not worse.

Honestly I find “it’s unknowable” to be a pretty satisfactory answer. Mostly because to me it points at something that seems almost obvious the more I’ve thought about it. Even if it were possible to see past the “Big Bang”, what possible reason is there to think that would be the end of the rabbit hole? As mind bending as it is to think that the trail is infinite, it’s even more mind bending to imagine that it’s not.

That reminds me of her article, very narrow. She seems to imply scientists, or at least scientific theories, implicate certain universal origins when really they're implying "to the best of our current knowledge". I think most everyone that's scientifically literate, and you'd think it'd be common knowledge among most of HN crowd, knows that scientific theories of universal origins aren't certain but here we have a whole article of the 'well awkshually' party-pooping you're talking about. She does seem pretty certain about uncertainty though which tells the tale that she's not beyond the paradox either.

Hossenfelder is a polarizing figure. “Lost In Math” was a thought-provoking book in the tradition of the other string iconoclasts (Smolin, Woit, Rovelli, roughly “the Perimeter crowd”). “Three Roads to Quantum Gravity” was the last general audience book that Smolin did before he’d fucking had it and did “The Trouble with Physics”. Woit went straight for the jugular with “Not Even Wrong”.

These people have (for better or worse) burnt the ships with the people of their generation who write grants and sit on tenure committees.

Hossenfelder’s pivot to “wildly over-credentialed pop-sci YouTuber” is interesting. My gut flinch reaction is like, “you’re better than this”, but… I have not walked a mile in her shoes, and if this is an end-run around a corrupt job market for particle/high-energy people who won’t won’t get on board with The Landscape? Maybe more power to her.

I give that context so that people will know (my opinion on) the backstory for why she’s in an adversarial relationship with The Academy.

The “will never know” phrasing might be unfortunate. But the epistemological principle goes back to Hawking at least: “asking what happened before the Big Bang or where it came from is like asking what is north of the North Pole”.

It’s a fun thing to theorize about, but the Big Bang is almost definitionally “the bound on observable causality”. It’s not a statement about what we won’t ever know, it’s a statement about what’s knowable.

The trouble with Hossenfelder isn't so much that she rejects string theory, lots of people do that. No the problem is that she's pivoted into declaring the entire enterprise of cosmology and particle physics pointless, when she says

"""How about you wait, and we talk again in 10 billion years."""

this is not so much a joke as a thinly disguised a deeply held conviction. There's no need for a secret cabal to explain why someone who clearly thinks the job should not even be done has trouble finding further employment in an extremely harsh job market.

You sound very knowledgable about this, so I guess I'm mostly addressing any readers of this thread when I recommend Lost in Math as a prerequisite for making that judgement. Of the four I mentioned, it's the most personal / autobiographical / reflective.

She's obvious pissed off, and that should be taken into account when evaluating her assertions. Woit is way more pissed off, and probably the better mathematician. Smolin seems like, sad and resigned more than angry, but he also got a great gig wither Perimeter (which he might still hold?), which has to soften the blow.

Frankly my layman's knowledge of all this is badly dated, because after decades of avid interest going back to childhood I got so dispirited about it I've kind of stopped paying attention outside of a few bright spots (Deutsch/Marletto have my rapt attention).

So I don't doubt you that lots of people reject Stringworld now maybe even to the point of that being a fairly mainstream view, but 10 or 20 years ago that was a CLM at best and usually tenure-track suicide, and there's a whole generation of people who did in fact operate under the dictates of something that could, with a little poetic license, be called a "cabal". Dismantling the scientific method to admit the Landscape was, at least to an avid outsider, dogma not long ago.

I'm enheartened to hear that people are starting to try new stuff again, but it's not difficult for me to have sympathy for people who just kinda gave up.

If there was a time were doubting string theory was career suicide, its wasn't in 2000 and certainly not 2010, those where the years when Woit was riding high on his book and "crisis in physics" was a popular phrase.

Honestly I think the biggest problem is that you have the timeline wrong, string theory reached its zenith in the 90's, but already by 2002 Woit could give it a good public kicking and mostly get praise for it (if you trust his own account here: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/arxiv-trackbacks.html I find it deeply funny that of the two of the people he reports as being angry with his beat down, one is the infamous Lubos Motl! ).

As an aside, from the tone with which Woit recounts how people wrote possibly mean things about him in the comments of a blog, I suspect he might simply not be a very nice person to interact with which explains why he might have had trouble in his career.

For example, when reporting that he complained to the arxiv admins, he's careful to note he was polite, which I think sounds like someone who unprompted confirms they were wearing pants to an interview...

I think you're correct that I slipped at least a decade, maybe two in the way I painted that, and I appreciate you keeping the dialog level-set on important mile markers. I hate when I spread the worst kind of misinformation which is the almost right kinda but off by a big, important term sort.

It seems to be a product of not realizing (or wanting to realize) how old I am! I just checked and Witten won his Fields in 1990, I would have sworn it was like 5-8 years later than that, to pick one key milestone. Getting old is an experience!

In full disclosure I haven’t read the article yet, I will do so after this comment. But reading, I just wanted to mention something that sprang to mind.

Gödels incompleteness theorem.

In that case, we know for sure that we will never find a list of complete and consistent axioms for all mathematics. We do not need omniscience for this, it’s something we know for sure we will never learn.

I think there are more examples, I remember one of my professors mentioning off the cuff he believes P vs NP will never be proven one way or another because it’s most likely one of those problems that simply don’t have a solution. Or, maybe the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is another example. We know for sure there are limitations on the knowledge we can have.

I don’t think it’s unfair to imply a limit to our knowledge. I’m not saying the universe’s beginning necessarily falls into this category, I honestly don’t know. But there are for sure classes of problems that by their very nature cannot be known, or cannot be known with certainty.

There's unknowable material real facts that nobody will ever know though.

I read into one a few years ago when I was trying to find when the last American slave died.

The problem is they were considered property so no documentation or birth records were produced. The lack of record keeping made this an impossible question.

The last documented one was in the 1930s but the last civil war veteran died in the 1950s, surely there was some baby of the 1860s that was born into the system that probably survived until at least the Montgomery bus boycott or Brown v. Board.

But this is something I discovered is a factual statement that's impossible to verify and will never be resolved.

>On the surface, it implies the limits of our knowledge while simultaneously indicating that the author possesses the omnipotence required to know what humans will learn throughout the entirety of our future

That's no contradiction though.

A contradiction would be "I know everything about X" and at the same time "There's a limit to our knowledge of X".

It's no contradiction to claim that there are limits to our knowledge but still claim to absolutely know Y about Z.

In other words, the idea that "there are limits to our knowledge" is not incompatible with the idea that we fully know this or that. You just mean that those limits only apply to other things.

(Heck, in math we can even prove that some things can never be proven, thus both implying limits to our knowledge and that we know something with 100% certainty).

> in math we can even prove that some things can never be proven

No we can't. We can only prove that certain formal systems cannot resolve certain statements. We might still invent other formal systems that are acceptable to us and that can resolve those statements.

>We might still invent other formal systems that are acceptable to us and that can resolve those statements.

That's irrelevant, though, because a mathematical proof or a statement X is considered in the context of a specific formal system (and any isomorphic system).

Proving that S can't be proven under formal system F will always be true regardless if you are able to prove the same statement in the formal system Z.

For example, you can't say "I just disproved that triangle angles add to 180 degrees" just because you've proved they add to more than 180 degrees under a non-flat surface or non-Euclidean geometry.

People saying "triangle angles add to 180 degrees" implicitly already mean "under Euclidean geometry and in a flat plane". It's just left implied, because it's goes without saying that they mean it within the system they expressed the problem and did the proof in.

And for those other systems, iF they embed arithmetic, we can effectively produce a statement that is visibly true and which that other system cannot prove.

This is just about the most shallow critique of the article you can make, and it's unfortunate it got so much attention.

“Finite picture whose dimensions are a certain amount of space and a certain amount of time; the protons and electrons are the streaks of paint which define the picture against its space-time background. Traveling as far back in time as we can, brings us not to the creation of the picture, but to its edge; the creation of the picture lies as much outside the picture as the artist is outside his canvas. On this view, discussing the creation of the universe in terms of time and space is like trying to discover the artist and the action of painting, by going to the edge of the canvas. This brings us very near to those philosophical systems which regard the universe as a thought in the mind of its Creator, thereby reducing all discussion of material creation to futility.” — James Leans

Someone wrote an article so people can waste hours debating this, accomplishing nothing. When will people learn?

Well there are some who claim to know, and will argue that “it happened this way” when in reality it’s a guess, based on some assumptions, and measurements, fit to a model. We don’t know everything, and it’s worth the contradiction to point out the fallacy of those who postulate

And yet it is provable that there are things we know we can’t know

https://youtu.be/HeQX2HjkcNo

Define 'know'.

Is it something you have personally verified and found to have been the case as you established the principles in play, or is it (at the other end of the spectrum) that a science paper says such-and-such and you read a summary on HN?

I think "fatalistic" is a better word than "contradictory". I otherwise agree.

There are a lot of misconceptions about the Big Bang. The Universe is a metric space. The "metric" part here is deliberate, specific and technical. It really means that given two points the metric can tell us what we call the "distance" between them. Abstract maths deals with spaces that do and don't have metrics.

The best explanation I've heard of the Big Bang is not that the Universe originated from a single point but rather the metric between all points in the Universe at the time of the Big Bang was 0.

There's an open question about whether the Universe is finite or infinite. I mean the actual Universe not the observable Universe. This is almost a metaphysical question since we'll probably never know.

We don't really know how gravity and space acts in such extreme environments but with black holes (that we also don't understand at the quantum level) we have plenty of examples of admittedly less extreme but still exxtreme corollaries. It is kind of mind-bending though. One description I read says that time acts like space and space acts like time within the event horizon. As in, you can see light entering the black holes behind you but that's the past and we can view the past all around us (eg distant galaxies are us viewing the past). Towards the singularity is the "future" and we can no more see that than we can see any future.

We, as sentient beings, have a difficult time comprehending things beyond our existence. What I mean is that before we were born, we didn't exist. After we die, we don't exist. We can't really comprehend that intuitively because our perception of the world is predicated on our cognizance. The past is easier. Stuff happened before we were born. But now we do exist. So at some point in the future we won't exist. How can you comprehend your own lack of existence?

I feel in some ways similar about the Universe. Our observations are predicated on concepts like "time" and "space" that at some point didn't exist. How do you reason about the lack of existence of space let alone time when everything we know is predicated on that?

Still, I too feel like the author is too pessimistic about how much more we can learn here. Assuming we aren't extinguished in the next few centuries (which is actually more difficult than it sounds at this point) we are going to be here for an inconceivably long time. Given our understanding of the Universe, that's likely to be >10^100 years. That's a long time to figure stuff out.

You can exchange "We will never know" for anything that we currently think of as impossible then.

I see what you did there. ;)

Depends on the field, Gödel's theorems make claims of impossibility.

Do you mean omniscience?

Perhaps, if there is a God, he does not desire us to learn about him by knowledge or by science, but by love for him and seeking him out.

For who is man to say, that man must only learn about God through objectively verifiable facts, because man said so? Perhaps this God wants seeking. If we were born without eyes, color would still exist, but we would never perceive it, and how would we believe it if someone said it did exist?

Our knowledge of the cosmos, in just a few hundreds of years, expanded from the Earth, Moon, planets and stars of the firmament, a kind of cozy neighborhood, to that of unfathomable numbers of galaxies stretching out to unimaginable distances of space and time.

Strange that gods who were so occupied with matters on this planet, who live in a nearby heaven up by the firmament of stars, are also still credible candidates for "creator" of the universe.

The real universe is so much more vast and so much more strange than any scriptures had ever imagined. One could be forgiven for excusing that underestimation of the universe as a limitation of the imagination of man.

In other words, "the god of the gaps" has to keep finding new gaps to fill, and the gaps are ever less tenable.

Are they really less tenable? Because, if there be a God, on the judgement day present in many of the religions we know, he might point out that the sheer complexity of the universe should be a sign of his existence. What are the odds? Are the odds actually in favor of man's theory, or is man desperately clinging to a theory to avoid him? Is it actually good science as designed, or rather any excuse no matter how implausible will suffice? Good science looks at the odds and makes a conclusion. Bad science looks at the conclusion and ignores the odds to bias towards a result.

Edit: Furthermore, this said God might point out on said day the lack of any aliens, or other life, as another sign that the universe was made for man, and nothing else, and the sheer enormity of it should be yet another sign. For if the universe was not large, would it be more easy to deny?

Edit 2: You might dismiss the above, and these aren't the best arguments that could be formulated, but it is more to show that your presupposition that a larger universe disproves his existence is untenable.

>man's theory

Theism is man's "theory". Either way, we enter a paradox, if you believe in gods then the theories of man ultimately came from gods, ie, a perfectly logical system only produces logical output.

This whole thread pretty much wound up like I predicted while reading the article. Author implies with certainty that science is uncertain in a specific field and it's invaded by people certain of their beliefs in other fields, ie, if science has a kink in it then gods exist for certain.

For god of the gaps argument never fails to amuse me.

You’re taking an unbelievably literal interpretation of a faith you don’t believe in and literally projecting it on to the parent comment as a form of criticism. Safe to say that I don’t think you can expect a response from them.

My view of gods as being too small for the universe is grounded in the history of religions. If the OP is making up a new god for the newly discovered gaps, he faces no such limitations.

Right. You’re grounding your statement in the view that theology cannot evolve with the times, and that any claim that it does is actually, in fact, a falsehood. That itself is a major assumption on your part.