Re:US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has i...
by im3w1l on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @06:32AM
(#36225096)
Well it pretty much goes without saying that we don't know what we don't know. But we could actually be getting close to learning everything there is to know about the laws of physics. Finishing them up in the next century or two doesn't seem like a big stretch.
Re:US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has i...
by philistine on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @01:21PM
(#36229964)
I'm not a scientist, just a dumb dude watching Youtube. But there is a problem in physics with tests not being avaialble for stuff they're theorizing about. From my limited understanding, string theory currently has zero path to empirical research to prove or disprove. So it might take a bit longer than a century or two for that reason.
Re:US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has i...
by adrianN on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @08:44AM
(#36226085)
That is a classic argument that was already addressed "The Relativity of Wrong" by Asimov much more eloquently that what I could attempt. Google finds this copy: https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
Re:US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has i...
by anotherman554 on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @11:50AM
(#36228447)
I don't think that article is really addressing the same argument. The argument Asimov is addressing seems to be whether human scientists will always disprove the previous century's human scientists.
The argument the poster above is making is that human scientists may be cognitively limited, and our species objectively stupid. You can't really definitively argue against this in an essay, because if you are a stupid person who is a member of a stupid species, your reasoning skills can't be trusted. You might argue it pragmatically makes sense to assume your species is smart enough to understand the universe, but that's a different argument than Asimov is making.
Asimov seems to assume humans are objectively an intelligent species so his reasoning skills can be trusted, which of course may not be wrong, but is pretty hard to prove.
Re:US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has i...
by adrianN on Friday June 09, 2023 @01:14AM
(#36253527)
If there were cognitive limitations you'd expect big holes in the theories we come up with unless you believe that for some reason we happen to be limited in a way that we observe a subset of the universe which is strangely internally consistent and shows essentially no signs of interaction with an bigger universe, yet alien species can somehow use the bigger universe to interact with our subset of the universe in a way that appears to be magic. I find that pretty far fetched.
Re:US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has i...
by ausqb on Friday June 09, 2023 @02:34AM
(#36254110)
There are big holes in the theories we come up with. The inability to reconcile QM and relativity is the most famous one. M-theory requires 11-dimensional spacetime, but no one has ever observed most of those dimensions. Recent astronomical measurements, if confirmed, may falsify parts of the standard model. The list is pretty long.
Cats literally can't understand what the Internet is, and ants can't understand what a cat is.
It's astoundingly naive to assume we don't have equivalent cognitive limitations.