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Are Some Things About the Universe Fundamentally Unknowable? (forbes.com)
StartsWithABang writes: As we peel back the layers of information deeper and deeper into the Universe's history, we uncover progressively more knowledge about how everything we know today came to be. The discovery of distant galaxies and their redshifts led to expanding Universe, which led to the Big Bang and the discovery of very early phases like the cosmic microwave background and big bang nucleosynthesis. But before that, there was a period of cosmic inflation that left its mark on the Universe. What came before inflation, then? Did it always exist? Did it have a beginning? Or did it mark the rebirth of a cosmic cycle? Maddeningly, this information may forever be inaccessible to us, as the nature of inflation wipes all this information clean from our visible Universe.
First, there was everything. Then it changed.
No, there are no limits on our ability to comprehend the universe as its own observer, and if there were, we would not be here to observe it.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The old crust is melted back into the magma. All the dinosaur (and Terminator) parts are gone
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
the people in need. This money could be better spent elsewhere.
Forbes's insistence that I drop adblockers, when their ads have been empirically detected dispensing malware, is one of them.
So is StartsWithAWhimper's insistence of posting his blogspam here.
Yes.
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
"Hi again. Looks like you’re still using an ad blocker. Please turn it off in order to continue into Forbes’ ad-light experience."
I love this new warning page! I didn't realize I was about to navigate to Forbes.com.
Maddeningly, this information may forever be inaccessible to us, as the nature of inflation wipes all this information clean from our visible Universe.
This is why it's so important that we go back to the gold standard. Ron Paul 2016!
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
And this is where you should begin to find the answer --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
We already know there are questions we can't answer. In fact, it isn't that hard to write down questions where barring extreme surprises, we can't answer them even given that they are essentially just simple computations. For example, does 2^(10^(10^500)) +1 have an even or odd number of distinct prime factors? That took two seconds to write down, but unless there's something very weird about numbers close to powers of 2 then we literally lack the computational power in the observable universe to answer that question. So we already have pretty hard physical limits on what we can know. This is just a question of whether there are also hard physical limits to questions that some people happen to care a lot about.
...it will be on your foot.
Technically, everything about the universe is fundamentally unknowable. Sure, we can be pretty certain that eg the sun will rise tomorrow, that the laws of physics will be tomorrow what they were today. But never absolutely sure. If you want certainty, try mathematics of philosophy.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Yes, there are some things about the Universe that are fundamentally unknowable. For instance, anything that we cannot apply the scientific method against is unknowable. This equates to much of theoretical physics and cosmology. It doesn't mean that we can't have theories, but if those theories cannot be tested, then by definition, what they are purporting to explain is unknowable.
The fact that physicists cannot answer certain questions now does not mean they are unanswerable. There are many ways of viewing the issue of time/space/matter. These are addressed in a fascinating book by Jim Holt titled "Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story." Holt examines and questions all the various explanations in a very readable way. The fact is, physics is not the one and only tool for examining reality (and no, I'm not proposing supernatural alternatives). But also, even physicists, cosmologists and mathematicians diverge in their thinking on this issue.
EOM
Play Command HQ online
Are Some Things About the Universe Fundamentally Unknowable?
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Yes, Ethan, there is. How can you possibly be making enough money writing your crummy blog with malware ads on it? It is unpossible that you can be making money with it.
What a miserable piece of shit, posting to Slashdot ref links so he makes money.
Do you have to pay more to have you advert 'disguised' as a story?
More so on Forbes.com where you don't dare drop your protection.
How did science solve the distant science issue on earth and power needs? Build collection systems and place them in interesting but very remote locations.
Data is collected and ends up at a nice well funded, comfy lab for publication and study over decades. The news media tells the world and more study follows.
The US did it with its Sentinel 100F, Sentinel 25 remote monitoring sites. Voyager 1,2, Galileo ect.
ie just keep looking, funding and teaching science.
The big issues is the lack of any charismatic leadership, decades of educational social promotion and stifling political oversight of science, blocking of funding and projects due to questions of faith by political leadership, having to spend big to rediscover past manufacturing skills lost in decades of no funding.
ie just give US science a tiny fraction of the wasted US military no bid contractor like funding and over decades great US discoveries can build on past wonders.
Once the US gets it science funding and education ability back to a normal level, good news can propagate brightly as other nations slide back into their traditional darkness.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I love this new warning page!
I don't even see that. With all the issues of malware served from Forbes I'm not even doing a "temporarily allow" of their javascript in NoScript.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I thought Slashdot posted that "integrated" news must be clearly marked as an advertisement....meh. Who wants to read this clickbait...
The only thing that is fundamentally unknown is the question of fundamental unknowability itself.
.... that there exist things that unknowable, then would that proof constitute proof of the nonexistence of an omniscient god? If an omniscient being knows it, then it seems to follow that whatever "it" is cannot be unknowable, and if "it" is truly not known, then the alleged being is not omniscient.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Are some things about the universe fundamentally unknowable?
No.
But you can talk in circles all day long if that floats your boat.
- Q aka God.
There's an infinite number of unknowable facts. I think "fundamentally" is sort of a semantic trick that makes it seems like there's a distinction with a difference even when there might not be one. Exampe: my friend crashed his bike and had retrograde amnesia for a few hours. What caused the crash is unknowable. Although it could have been observed, it just wasn't. There's no way now to go out and capture those photons, long since scattered and reabsorbed, etc. The path he was on has been totally repaved and redesigned. What happened to him is just as unknowable to human beings as esoteric facts about the early universe, the real difference is that bike accidents are mundane and the early universe is interesting.
.: Semper Absurda
Can we have fewer links to Forbes and other paywalled sites?
God can let anyone know he is real that he chooses to. Jesus let me know he is real. We can't know the mind of God past that he is good and loving. www.goodnewsjim.com
This thought line reminds of two things that keep it in perspective:
1 The TED podcast of January 4 "Have we reached the end of physics?" by Harry Cliff. He points out that there are some things that we can never know (or prove with any foreseeable technology.) Big surprise!
2 Charles H. Duell was the Commissioner of US patent office in 1899. Mr. Deull's most famous attributed utterance is that "everything that can be invented has been invented." Whether this is a correct attribution is irrelevant to this discussion.
It is possible that at some point the rate of new discoveries and ideas will diminish, but history has shown the opposite- a snowballing increase in human knowledge in almost every area. Of course we will never know it all, never be able to prove all that we do know, but we will keep on striving.
...omphaloskepsis often...
"Are Some Things About the Universe Fundamentally Unknowable?"
No.
Thanks for playing.
Good luck in the next PowerBall.
Forbes had been blocked having become increasingly annoying over period of years until recently reaching the height of becoming perilous to visit.
While there might be information contained within Forbes I remain doubtful I will ever be able to discover it.
..that you're not in a coma right now.
There is no spoon.
Standing on the shoulders taller giants will allow us to see farther past the curve of the universe.
My problem is that inflation wipes all the money clean from my bank account.
That's about the only thing that could explain the constant approval of submissions for Forbes with links to their click-bait pages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... has let me down, because, yes. There are many things [about the universe] that are fundamentally unknowable.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Anything beyond our "light cone" is unknowable, simply because of the speed of light. Yet we can never say "absolutely yes", because we don't know what technologies we will develop in the future. Someday we may have tech that can map branes, use gravitational waves for sensors, or something else so far beyond our current imagination that this question is a bit ridiculous.
The evil demon, also known as evil genius, and occasionally as malicious demon or genius malignus, is a concept in Cartesian philosophy. In his 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes hypothesized the existence of an evil demon, a personification who is "as clever and deceitful as he is powerful, who has directed his entire effort to misleading me." The evil demon presents a complete illusion of an external world, including other minds, to Descartes' senses, where there is no such external world in existence. The evil genius also presents to Descartes' senses a complete illusion of his own body, including all bodily sensations, when Descartes has no body. Some Cartesian scholars opine that the demon is also omnipotent, and thus capable of altering mathematics and the fundamentals of logic, though omnipotence of the evil demon would be contrary to Descartes' hypothesis, as he rebuked accusations of the evil demon having omnipotence.
from wikipedia
It's impossible to know what the ultimate observer is.
A "fundamentally unknowable" might fall into the "known unknowns" category.
Then of course there are unknown unknowns.
It's preposterous to suppose that we could know everything. It's akin to the patent office wanting to shut down a hundred years ago because everything had already been invented.
Let's hold a few things as true:
Quantum physics requires using probablistic models to describe phenomenom.
Universe means that it contains everything, where by there could only be the one (if something like a multiverse did exist, it would be poorly named, but still within the Single All Containing Thing).
The Universe, from our perspective, is expanding, began with the Big Bang, and will end with the Heat-Death of the Universe.
Some speculations:
Within an empty Universe, one might be able to use the same methods describing Q.P. to describe the probability that the entire contents of the Universe would sponteneously come into being.
As an arbitrary point would suffice, a singularity might be used conceptually, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the big bang.
In order to use these concepts, we are forced to seperate time from the rest of physical reality and existing independant of all frames of reference.
Following the HDotU (H.U), all matter (and thanks to E=MC^2 all energy) will be at such a low and dissipated state as to be nare unobservable, yet still expanding as waves or a current, ever outward. Neccessarily it would still command a gravitational effect, even if otherwise conditions became similar to those preceding the BB.
Following all of the above, it seems reasonable to assume that the whole thing could repete any number of times, and thus present the form of QP descriptors in probability, as the same physical laws would govern each itteration, but local results might vary, such that the last itteration in which that photon passed such location it did so just a smidge earlier.
What if, then, Dark Matter is merely historical residue, built-up over the eons, of past manifestations of the physical reality?
If such were true, being able to measure Dark Matter, and then being able to tease apart meaning from it, could indicate, with some degree of probability, how long such a cycle has been going on.
But also, if one could somehow also escape the bounds of time itself, and observe the Universe from beyond time, perhaps we could see all itterations happening simulteneously; but also, as per QP probability, not existing all the same.
If, somehow one could take the long view of this probable dance, it should then appear a dim flickerin light in the distance. And all that ever was, and all that could ever be, might not be known in the same manner you would know an intimate partner, or the topography of a map, but it could be known what is likely true; ultimately that is all that science is really about anyway.
By the way, I have been waiting for this, or similar, thread for a long time :-) sorry if bad spell/grammar/missing letters: old device in use/user.
"It's the Law of the Universe, and I'm the sheriff." Slash-cott 2/10-2/17
The human mind does have limits, driven by the assumptions we learn or develop as we age, and also by our senses. We can only directly perceive a certain number of things that we can see or touch or feel or taste.
The universe may be full of dimensions and forces and things we can't see and therefore don't know about. Dark matter is one, something we know little about and can barely detect yet it is apparently the most common kind of matter. And we can't even see it, touch it, anything.
If there are other things like dark matter, well, we can't see them and don't know about them and have no theories about them. Our view of the universe will never be complete and we wouldn't even know it. Some people say they see ghosts or sense things. We dismiss them as delusions or worse and never take it seriously as an aspect of something we cannot normally detect. We write it off.
And then we have this very narrow assumption about where life can exist; the so-called Goldilocks zone. We refuse to believe there is any other possibility. Yet we admit we don't know everything about the universe. We are shocked when we find worlds with the same geologic features we have here. Why are we so shocked that things are the same?
But if we don't know even know sand dunes form the same in many places (holy shit, it should be news if they DIDN'T, not that they DO), how do we dare make this judgement about where life can be? Why do we assume it has to be life as we know it? This view is ridiculously close to the idea that the Earth is the center of all and the template for all. And it's wrong.
The only thing we know for sure is that we don't know an awful lot. And yes it may be beyond human comprehension to ever really know what's going on.
It does not help that we spend a huge chunk of our lives learning basic schooling, toil for a while and then die. We don't live long enough to actually spend a long time examining the universe. We lack perspective. We spend too many good energetic years stuck in classrooms learning the way people learned 200 years ago. Hell, we still embrace Greek concepts of higher education that go back thousands of years. Is this the best way? Nobody knows because nobody will try anything else.
Sig for hire.
Your post reveals a logical inconsistency in modern cosmology. Inflation theory was developed to explain the large-scale structure that we observe in the early Universe, but which (it is claimed) was not present at the start of the Universe. As you point out, if inflation did take place then it would have obliterated all evidence of whatever structure, or lack thereof, came before it. That would make it impossible for anyone, now or ever, to validate (or invalidate) the inflation theory's assumptions about the initial condition of the Universe.
The rules of science hold that if a theory cannot be proven or disproven then it isn't a scientific theory, it's speculation. There's nothing wrong with speculation, it necessarily comes before all serious theories. But if the speculation is based on assumptions that will forever prevent us from ever testing it then it is never going to amount to anything more than speculation.
There is an alternative explanation for the large-scale structure that we observe in the early Universe - it was present from the very beginning.
Occam's Razor would suggest that the second, simpler explanation should be preferred, unless and until some supporting evidence can be found in favour of the first. And if the first explanation is true then this supporting evidence can never be found. It is hoisted on its own petard.
... enough said.
Or at least it would be if not for the lameness filters
Will wipe out ones savings as well, so it will be impossible to know how wealthy that person was before.
Time was created in the big bang. If there's no time, there's no "before" or "after". So, technically, you cannot ask the question "what was there before inflation". Which means, we can know everything in our universe. What's not part of our universe, does not exist, by definition.
no, I don't have a sig
Recently, whenever I come across a headline that has a certain grand sounding ring to it, I have come to expect it to promote something like a Forbes article about something well-known and fairly trivial, that they try to pump up a bit in order to attract naive souls; click-porn, in a word.
To state that there are things in the universe that we can never know about is obvious for many reasons:
1) Our model of the universe is a theory - which is to say, it is a tool that we know is inherently flawed, in that it is forever an approximation to reality. To a scientist this is what makes it exciting: there is always more to discover. But, there are some things about the universe we never will discover, probably.
2) A model is also a system of local statements - a 'system of axioms' if you like - Kurt GÃdel has a thing or two to say about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There are statements, in any model, that are undecidable - meaning one cannot figure out, using only logic and the theory itself, if those statements are true or false. Whether it will always possible to extend a theory so that a given, undecidable statement becomes decidable, is possibly not yet known.
- and so on. In this article, they have resorted to a bit of speculation about inflation, but they didn't need to. it is already obvious that there probably are things in the universe that are so distant, that light has not had enough time to reach us - ie more than around 13 or 15 billion lightyears. We will never be able to observe the light from the stars that may or may not exist out there. On the other hand, one might speculate that quantum entanglement or something might overcome those distances, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Godel proved this mathematically. Why is this even a thing?
If we can easily say that there are things that dogs can never know, we can use the same perspective to say the same about our species, despite the fact we definitely know orders of magnitude more than dogs. It just happens that human exists on earth for a certain amount of time (may not be really long after all). We are not that special to have the ability to know everything. To know everything, that may be the definition of God.
There's a lot about StartsWithABang that's unknowable for instance:
- Why he seem to be suffering an existential crisis.
- Why he seem to write about nothing but crap.
- Why he reblogs his shit blog on Slashdot even though the majority of us run adblockers and can't actually get to Forbes.com
- Why Slashdot is going along with this crap.
I am the father and mother of this universe, and its grandfather too; I am its entire support. I am the sum of all knowledge, the purifier, the syllable Om; I am the sacred scriptures, the Rig, Yajur, and Sama Vedas.
I am the goal of life, the Lord and support of all, the inner witness, the abode of all. I am the only refuge, the one true friend; I am the beginning, the staying, and the end of creation; I am the womb and the eternal seed. Bhagavad Gita.
Enough said...
Enough said.
Does god exist? That's something we'll never know. An even if we manage to prove his existence, there is no way to know if there isn't some "supergod" on top of him.
We usually exclude god from science because of the Occam razor, but Occam razor is a heuristic, a way to better focus our research rather than an absolute truth.
You can replace god with simulations, extra dimensions or what lies beyond the observable universe as long as it is unfalsifiable.
If something as simple as knowing if a piece of code will do an infinite loop is impossible (see : halting problem), how can we even consider that there isn't any part of the universe that is unknowable.
Can anyone understand imagine a 4D space as more than just a mathematical model? How about the behavior of time as something that dialates?
You don't need to grasp 4D space to understand relativity in the same way that you do not need to grasp 3D space to understand newtonian mechanics. It is easy to consider problems which use less than the maximum number of dimensions e.g. a projectile uses 2D despite being in a 3D world. Similarly high speed rockets limit relativistic problems to one time and one space dimension which is easy to grasp and even particle decays and trajectories can limit it to 2 space and one time.
Time is not "something which dilates" it is just another direction which we perceive differently. A fast moving object (relative to us) just has a different direction for time than we do. This means that some of its space direction lies along our time direction and vice versa. Hence the object appears shorter because we see the part of the length which points along our time direction as a difference in time for different part of the object and not as spacial separation. Also the passage of time at one point of the object is slower because we see part of that temporal separation as a spacial separation.
Relativity is not hard to grasp. The problem with the Big Bang though is that it created space and possibly time as well. At the moment there is no physical theory which can explain how to do this because it is not clear how things can happen without time. However just because we can't conceive of that yet does not mean that we cannot in the future. Perhaps understanding the small-scale, possibly quantum, nature of space-time will give us a hint? 120 years ago nobody could conceive how physics worked at atomic scales but once we got experimental evidence of that physics we figured it out despite the fact that some of the physicists involved (e.g. Einstein) did not really believe what they were finding and had real trouble grabbing the concepts.
Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Godel, and Noam Chomsky walk into a bar. Heisenberg turns to the other two and says, 'Clearly this is a joke, but how can we figure out if it's funny or not?' Godel replies, 'We can't know that because we're inside the joke.' Chomsky says, 'Of course it's funny. You're just telling it wrong.'
Have gnu, will travel.
Everything that can be imagined is happening and more!
It seems to me that once you start looking backward and asking origin type questions, you are eventually forced to confront infinities. Either we assume something has always existed, or a god created it, and god was around for infinity. My understanding is that infinity is a mathematical symbol, and not yet observed in the physical universe. Would it even be possible to witness any infinite thing, or it's infinite-ness ? Aside from mathematics, I am not sure the word infinity qualifies as an actual signifier of anything.
Easy! Here's how we find out:
1. Spend decades designing and building a telescope far beyond our current capabilities.
2. Point the telescope at a black hole event horizon, specifically where some of the light from Earth slingshots back towards us.
3. Zoom in on and follow your friend leaving his house that day.
It won't help with stuff older than black holes, but there's your distinction between "fundamentally" unknowable and "within reason" unknowable.
The trajectory of a projectile requires 2 spacial dimensions. Even if you use curvilinear coordinates you still need to understand that the line it curved in a direction orthogonal to direction of the line and hence you need to understand 2 spacial dimensions. See any first year physics textbook - or even a high school textbook for that matter - for a simple explanation. You might find that textbooks are generally a more reliable source of science knowledge that a science FICTION novel (there's a not-so-subtle hint in the name as to why that's the case!).