If there's one good argument for this reality being simulated, it's the existence of something as simple yet so darn universally useful as good ol' H2O.
One of the most interesting and infuriating aspects of physics is that there are soooo many orders of magnitude between all the phenomena of interest, between the Plank scale and the smallest subatomic interactions, and between atoms and the size of things that we care about, even such things as "viruses" and "proteins", to say nothing of getting up to the macroscopic scale. And beyond that, even taking macroscopic phenomena and trying to understand things at a planetary scale or beyond can be difficult. There's about 60 orders of magnitude between the smallest things we're interested in (Plank distance) and the largest (observable universe). Holy cow. The mind boggles.
It isn't a contradiction to point out that we seem to have a very, very good model of the universe's most fundamental particle processes, but still can not simply derive from that model to even very simple things of interest. In principle, we could "just" simulate the standard model and "just" simulate a lot of water molecules under the conditions of interest and "just" watch what happens. In reality, that turns out to be many, many orders of magnitude more computation than we can do.
See also protein folding, where even without trying to run things all the way down to the standard model, things that we in principle fully understand require gobs of computation to approximate for what are in the real world simple things happening gazzilions of times per second in every living organism.
In the other direction, witness the difficulty we have trying to improve our understanding of how the universe works at the Plank scale. One imagines that if the smallest things we had were not multiple orders of magnitude larger than the scale we are trying to study that perhaps we'd have made more progress by now, but it's like trying to determine the rules of biology when the only capability you have is the ability to sling planets at each other really hard and see what happens. The miracle is that we've learned anything at all.
On that note, I've often wondered if the standard model really "works". Suppose someone with a lot more simulating power than us actually programmed it in directly and set it running, with a reasonable initial state that resembles our world. (My understanding is that inflation doesn't necessarily come out of it so we can guess that you can't just start from the big bang.) Does it really work? Is the result indistinguishable from the real world without a particle accelerator? Or is there some flaw that only comes out at scale, or does the universe crash if you create a black hole? How close are we, really? If someone waved a magic wand and said "Shazam, the standard model is now what the universe really and truly runs on!", would we notice anything different? Or would we be instantly dead because it turns out chemistry doesn't quite work right? Or perhaps at all?
I don't see why Standard Model would not be able to serve as the "theoretical basis" for chemistry and beyond. On the other hand, the reductionist approach is rarely helpful, and it is not helping here, because the modeling of chemical processes can be done by applying methods of quantum mechanics and does not require particle physics.
Modeling chemical processes through quantum mechanics turns out to be a rather inefficient endeavor, and heuristic "fictional energy" models are more accurate for lower computational cost. Farming out to humans who "seem to have a knack for folding proteins" - a homemaker in Australia, was one of the better ones IIRC - turned out to beat pretty much every ab initio effort, and many "less sophisticated, more powerful" computational efforts too.
exactly which deep learning technique do you propose unleashing on protein folding? Deep learning is not 'magic', it is a set of tools good at a certain subset of machine learning tasks, and the impressive thing is how many machine learning tasks can be shoehorned and contorted into the deep learning rubric, i.e. 'fuzzy classification via scoring'. It should be obvious how image recognition and voice recognition fit this rubric.
"Playing Go", which does not fit this rubric obviously, I think, is conquered by deep learning because there is a discrete matrix of 'moves' which looks awfully lot like an image recognition matrix, and so a move which optimizes score ('classification') can be selected.
Fundamentally one of the problems is that we don't know how to score proteins. We also don't necessarily know how to score go, but it's trivial to generate solutions by running hypothetical matches because the game outcome is deterministic, solvable, and definite. While there is a decent subset of proteins whose known structures could be used to seed a database for scoring, it is very small in comparison to the universe of possibilities (20^n, where n is the length of the amino acid chain).
In short: Given an arbitrary "end-board layout" I can with our existing human knowledgebase tell you which go player has won. Given an arbitrary amino acid sequence and a proposed structure, I cannot with our existing human knowledgebase tell you if the structure is correct. Because of this limitation in creating a scoring system, while I won't say that deep learning won't be used to improve protein folding (maybe it will, indirectly) it almost certainly won't be used directly, because it is not in the same class of problem.
I like your example of protein folding! (It's a frightfully difficulty problem, but nobody expects that understanding it will require us to first understand dark matter and the origin of neutrino mass. Well-understood chemistry by itself is enough to provide the complexity that stymies protein folding computations.)
Thinking about your final paragraph, I guess it gets very much at Carroll's point. I expect that he'd claim we wouldn't notice any difference at all: if we would, that would directly imply that something beyond the standard model was necessary to understand everyday life. But as he explains, we have every reason to believe we've exhaustively explored the relevant range of energies and interaction strengths. If something about chemistry required physics beyond the standard model, we would almost certainly have noticed by now.
There's a lot of 'everyday life' we don't understand. In fact most of our scholarship is in the domain of 'everyday life'. From biology and chemistry to computer science and economics and sociology.
What the author meant was that nothing that will be discovered in this domain will shake fundamental physics. Things that will shake fundamental physics won't come from 'everyday life', but rather from extreme environments like those found in particle accelerators, and through study of gravitational waves, CMB etc.
No, no. Turbulence, and especially the laminar flow -> turbulent flow transition is A) not really understood B) could absolutely have massive impact if we did understand it (obviously it's possible that that real understanding could be so complicated that the existing heuristics are essentially as good as we could get anyway).
We have not solved the Navier-Stokes equation for non general cases. This equations describes how the velocity, pressure, temperature, and density of a moving fluid are related.
If everything was already answered, then why offer $1M to solve an equation? Fun?
> What the author meant was that nothing that will be discovered in this domain will shake fundamental physics. Things that will shake fundamental physics won't come from 'everyday life', but rather from extreme environments like those found in particle accelerators, and through study of gravitational waves, CMB etc.
And you don't know that a priori. It's possible that with a hightened level of simulation, and accurate measurement of an unusual phenomenon, some fine structure emerges. I'm not going to hold my breath, but sometimes you are surprised. The yellow color of gold is a consequence of relativisitic effects, so it could have been entirely possible (if seemingly rather unlikely) that humanity discovered relativity from that angle instead.
The most glaring fundamental omission of physics absolutely comes from everyday life. It is subjective experience, consciousness, qualia, or whatever you prefer to call it.
Subjective experience is an emergent property of fundamental physics. It is not fundamental in itself and it doesn't seem to require any new fundamental physics. If you think that some new fundamental physical law is needed, then maybe you can explain what it does by describing what would happen if we removed it from the universe? Would people stop dead? Would people behave completely normally except they would answer "no" when asked "are you conscious?"
Im a guy that took graduate thermodynamics from the guy who discovered the statistical mechanics of the hydrophobic effect. There may be only 100 people in the world who are qualified to even describe water's molecular structure at varying conditions.
who was that? IIRC this is a relatively recent discovery. For example its application to the understanding of the energetics of DNA duplex formation occurred just prior to when I was in grad school (early 2000s) and around the same time to proteins...
Life is all around us. There's hardly a crevice too small, too hot, too cold, too dark, or too bright where we don't find it.
But we have absolutely no idea how life got here. Pick any starting point in the earth's history and try to spin a hypothesis for how cells came to be from organic molecules and other stuff lying around.
You can't do it at a high enough level of detail to even attempt the most rudimentary experiment.
>But we have absolutely no idea how life got here.
At a high-level, we have a very good idea how life developed and we have reasonably good ideas how life got started. The details will most likely always elude us because tracing the exact evolution of a chaotic system consisting of immense number of particles over a huge span of time will always be beyond our grasp.
True, a single cell is an astonishingly complex system. On the other hand, science does, in fact, offer hypotheses as to the origin of life on Earth. Also, the fact that life in all its forms that exist today was able to evolve from those primitive single-cell organisms seems to me just as amazing.
This is very true, and it's absolutely something that we don't understand. But Carroll's point in this blog post is simply that we have no reason to think that the ultimate answer to these questions will require some fundamental principle of physics that is not ultimately a consequence of quantum field theory (and specifically, the standard model) and general relativity as we understand them today.
Maybe not knowing the names, but how about knowing the masses? Part of the theory is precisely that apart from some numbers we already know, there is nothing more to know about those particles.
My understanding of Carroll's point here is that if we were to revisit this question in 2110, there is absolutely no reason to suspect that the ultimate explanation for superconductivity would have turned out to have required any fundamental particles or interactions other than those in quantum field theory as applied to the Standard Model (plus gravity). Certainly our ability to do calculations within those theories will probably have improved drastically by then! But there's every reason to expect that physicists of that future era will be able to say, "Physicists from 2010 were entirely familiar with the basic principles and structures that our recent algorithms explaining superconductivity are based on."
Also, have we figured out gravity? That's a pretty every day thing that I thought we didn't understand yet. Has observing gravity waves given us an answer there?
You're correct, but you missed the author's point. He didn't say we understand everything, or that there is nothing of-value left to discover in the domain of 'everyday life'. What he meant was that anything we do discover in this domain, won't impact our current understanding of fundamental physics.
For example, 150 years ago, radio waves were unknown, but they are all around us, they are fundamental, and when they were discovered, they changed our daily lives.
Another example, imagine a bushman, and asking him if he understands everything. He might say, "Yeah, that's a kangaroo, that's a bush, that's dirt....everything practical, I understand. There are things about God I don't understand, but they are far away." By defining things that you don't understand as 'not important' then you understand everything important by definition.
Another example, this quote from Albert Michelson in 1894, "it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice"
In other words, it is likely that people have always thought these sorts of things, and so far have always been wrong.
You are missing the point. The author acknowledges that there may be particles that we haven't yet discovered, but even if there were, we can prove that they wouldn't impact everyday live. In other words, "we know what we don't know".
I gave a true historical analogy of how that could not be the case, I gave a hypothetical example of how that could not be the case, and I gave a quote of someone thinking physics was basically solved right before a massive change in our basic understanding of physics.
It's easy to imagine that there is something analogous to radio waves, that are all around us, but we are unable to detect them with current technology (dark matter might be one possibility).
This seems to be a lost cause, but I'll try one last time.
The point is that even if there were some yet undiscovered particles or forces, they wouldn't have any effect whatsoever on the world around us. This we can say with certainty. Even if it turns out that our current understanding of QM or GR are just approximations of the real laws of physics, again, this won't matter, much as GR doesn't matter at the speed of a moving car and thus you wouldn't take time dilation into account when you calculate the time you need to get from point A to point B.
even if there were some yet undiscovered particles or forces, they wouldn't have any effect whatsoever on the world around us. This we can say with certainty.
Would you also assert that radio waves have no effect whatsoever on the world around us?
So, in your opinion, radio waves do have an effect on the world around us. Which, actually, I agree with you.
However, their existence was undetected 150 years ago. Similarly, there are likely things that are undetected by us that also will become very important once they are discovered.
If Carroll is claiming that nothing we learn in the future can possibly feedback into everyday experience, the kindest and most polite response is that it's a very strong claim, and almost certainly wrong.
And if he's not making that strong claim, the post is pointlessly tautological. ("So - like - the things we already know about everyday reality and technology are the things we, er, already totally know. Wow! Go science!")
Clearly that's always true historically, until it isn't any more, because new science [tm].
What was the point of that post? I honestly don't even.
So you're right, and not just about kangaroos, radio waves, and god.
We're an inventive animal, and we've been discovering new science [tm] for a million years or so.
If it's even remotely practical, it invariably turns into technology which completely transform our everyday experience.
Did that process stop in 2011? I suppose it's possible. But the only rational response to anyone suggesting that is extreme skepticism.
If you read the post, you'll see that Carroll means it in a specific and experimentally precise sense: not that "physics is finished", but simply that we have experimentally ruled out the possibility of interactions beyond the standard model (plus gravity) that are strong enough to affect the physics of everyday life in any measurable way. We absolute expect that there are things we do not know about at all (much less fully understand)! But any new interaction strong enough to have measurable effects on systems at familiar human scales would necessarily have shown up in experimental searches many years ago.
Why don't you read the article? Author's second paragraph starts with: "Obviously there are plenty of things we don’t understand. We don’t know how to quantize gravity, or what the dark matter is, or what breaks electroweak symmetry." - which suggests that he may actually address your point (Hint: he does).
We understand gravity in exquisite detail: the theory of General Relativity is our theory of gravity, and its numerous predictions have proven true again and again.
But you don't even need GR for "everyday life." For that, Newtonian gravity suffices, and the entire theory of Newtonian gravity could easily be grokked by a high school student.
> Special and general relativity predict that the clocks on the GPS satellites would be seen by the Earth's observers to run 38 microseconds faster per day than the clocks on the Earth. The GPS calculated positions would quickly drift into error, accumulating to 10 kilometers per day. The relativistic time effect of the GPS clocks running faster than the clocks on earth was corrected for in the design of GPS.
To everyone in this thread bringing up things we don't understand yet: you're right, but probably missing the point he's trying to make.
What he means is that we have a theory ("Quantum Field Theory") that is mathematically capable of predicting every physical phenomenon we're capable of observing here on earth with any instruments we've invented to date. He's definitely not saying we understand everything about the universe. By analogy, it's like saying we know conceptually what a Turing machine is and how it works, but not everything about computer science and software engineering.
It may also turn out that quantum field theory is somehow wrong, in the same way that we replaced Newtonian physics with relativity and quantum mechanics. But we still use Newtonian physics in engineering because it's only wrong in ways that rarely matter in practice.
I highly recommend watching Sean Carroll's talks and picking up one of his books. A few suggestions:
By analogy, it's like saying we know conceptually what a Turing machine is and how it works, but not everything about computer science and software engineering.
That's reverse of what he is saying. As you say, we understand the Turing machine (the most basic elements), but we don't understand everything it implies.
Whereas in physics, we don't understand the most basic elements, but we do understand what those elements imply (at least, the article asserts that we do).
>Whereas in physics, we don't understand the most basic elements
I think he's saying we fully understand 'the most basic elements' in so far how they underpin the 'domain of everyday life'. It's a little like saying that the underlying physics behind the motion of bilard balls are completely understood with just Newtonian mechanics, even though Newtonian mechanics themselves are incomplete if applied to other domains - like explaining the motion of the planet Mercury.
I think you're both right. Carroll is claiming that in physics, there is one essentially complete layer of description that we fully understand: the layer consisting of the standard model (based on quantum field theory) plus general relativity. We don't understand the smaller, more fundamental layers (string theory is one attempt at that, and there are others), and we don't understand every last detail of how that layer gives rise to the larger, more familiar layers (we've only very recently even been able to deduce the mass difference between protons and neutrons based on standard model computational physics). But the point is that our understanding of this one particular layer is broad and solid enough to essentially guarantee that every other observable feature of real life can be traced back to a set of principles that we understand.
Sean Carroll is very good speaker and a tremendous communicator of science. He has a bunch of talks on youtube, and they are all very enjoyable to listen to. And if you're into that sort of thing, his debate with William Lane Craig is fun and informative (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKDCZHimElQ)
> every physical phenomenon we're capable of observing here on earth with any instruments we've invented to date
This is stronger than "everyday life" claim, and likely false. Note that the article carefully excludes "fancy telescopes": there is a reason.
For example, we can observe supernovae. We don't have satisfactory model of core-collapse supernovae yet. In other words, if you set initial condition to right before explosion and simulate forward, stars don't explode in simulation. And critically, it is seriously entertained that this may be due to physics beyond the Standard Model, unlike life or superconductivity: e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.3112
> For example, we can observe supernovae. We don't have satisfactory model of core-collapse supernovae yet.
Toddlers. We don't have a model of toddler collapse either. See her now, in 10 seconds - poof! How can we predict that with our current physics knowledge?
No one seriously expects model of toddler collapse to lead to novel physics. Some (admittedly minority) serious physicists expect model of supernova to lead to novel physics.
But we can't predict when a toddler will collapse, or when she will start throwing toys, using the current understanding in physics, even if "The Laws Underlying the Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood".
What I am getting at is that we only understand the Low Level laws. We still can't understand, for example, financial markets or the weather. Complex dynamic systems are still beyond our horizon of understanding, even if we know how elementary particles behave.
> mathematically capable of predicting every physical phenomenon we're capable of observing here on earth
"Mathematically predict" is too strong. For example, we can observe the mass of the electron here on earth, but our theories do not mathematically predict it. There are many similar parameters whose values must be determined empirically.
There's also the converse: properties we can mathematically predict, but for which we do not have a good theory. An example is the mass of the Tau: predicted by the Koide formula, but we don't really know why.
Good point, Carroll distinguishes between "manifestations of the underlying laws" and the laws themselves. Still, this is an impossible claim to make, because you can't prove a negative. Given all these everyday phenomena we can't explain, it is entirely conceivable that one of them will require a modification of QFT. Personally, I think that consciousness or memory (which we all experience every day!) could rely on weaker interactions than the ones we know of. I find it unlikely but certainly possible that we aren't yet mathematically capable of predicting conscious behavior.
That's both true and not. Yes, it's true that the point is akin to saying that even though we have the equations to understand fluid dynamics we don't understand the weather more than in a rough general way and aren't able to make predictions ahead of a few measly days. But it's also true that even the theory behind it isn't "true" in the absolute sense. We don't have a renormalizable quantum field theory of gravity. Therefore our current understanding is most certainly incomplete, much in the same way Newtonian physics alone wasn't complete in its description of phenomena.
how can revolutions happen if they are solid?
what is electricity, what is electron sean? . you sound like a semi educated quack that would fiercly hold to religion of evolution although there is no prof of it. you've read it in a book so it must be true and your stupid friend says it is math and what will other dumb fucks say once they hear you do not agree with them
"A hundred years ago it would have been easy to ask a basic question to which physics couldn’t provide a satisfying answer. “What keeps this table from collapsing?” “Why are there different elements?”" Ok why time is moving in one direction ?(is this basic enough question about everyday life?)
An analogy: it's like saying the elements of Turing Machines are completely understood. All computation can (as far as we know) be described in terms of them. But that doesn't mean understanding Turing Machines is saying we understand all specific computational systems and their properties.
I find it hardly surprising that physics as a body of knowledge may be finite and that we may be already close to "knowing it all". At the same time, physics is not the only science and therefore it can not claim to be able to explain "everything".
Not to get too high-minded here but the most fundamental question of everyday life: "why live at all?" is greatly dependent on completely understanding the what we currently consider outermost fringes of physics.
Free Will in a deterministic universe is non-existent so there is no physical capacity for choice, but once we breached the quantum threshold all sorts of fun concepts began emerging (like multiverses for example) that bring that lack of capacity into question.
100 years ago, we understood the physical laws surrounding the everyday things like the telegraph, the radio, the bi-plane, the early cars, etc.
And 100 years from now, we will understand the physical laws surrounding everyday things like the holograph, light speed travel, the driverless hover-car, etc.
Complexity. The fact that we know the basic laws doesn't mean we know how complex systems behave. For example, we can't predict the weather more than a few days, or the place a toddler will be at in 1 minute from now, even with all our physical knowledge.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadThat reduces the doubt.
It isn't a contradiction to point out that we seem to have a very, very good model of the universe's most fundamental particle processes, but still can not simply derive from that model to even very simple things of interest. In principle, we could "just" simulate the standard model and "just" simulate a lot of water molecules under the conditions of interest and "just" watch what happens. In reality, that turns out to be many, many orders of magnitude more computation than we can do.
See also protein folding, where even without trying to run things all the way down to the standard model, things that we in principle fully understand require gobs of computation to approximate for what are in the real world simple things happening gazzilions of times per second in every living organism.
In the other direction, witness the difficulty we have trying to improve our understanding of how the universe works at the Plank scale. One imagines that if the smallest things we had were not multiple orders of magnitude larger than the scale we are trying to study that perhaps we'd have made more progress by now, but it's like trying to determine the rules of biology when the only capability you have is the ability to sling planets at each other really hard and see what happens. The miracle is that we've learned anything at all.
On that note, I've often wondered if the standard model really "works". Suppose someone with a lot more simulating power than us actually programmed it in directly and set it running, with a reasonable initial state that resembles our world. (My understanding is that inflation doesn't necessarily come out of it so we can guess that you can't just start from the big bang.) Does it really work? Is the result indistinguishable from the real world without a particle accelerator? Or is there some flaw that only comes out at scale, or does the universe crash if you create a black hole? How close are we, really? If someone waved a magic wand and said "Shazam, the standard model is now what the universe really and truly runs on!", would we notice anything different? Or would we be instantly dead because it turns out chemistry doesn't quite work right? Or perhaps at all?
"Playing Go", which does not fit this rubric obviously, I think, is conquered by deep learning because there is a discrete matrix of 'moves' which looks awfully lot like an image recognition matrix, and so a move which optimizes score ('classification') can be selected.
Fundamentally one of the problems is that we don't know how to score proteins. We also don't necessarily know how to score go, but it's trivial to generate solutions by running hypothetical matches because the game outcome is deterministic, solvable, and definite. While there is a decent subset of proteins whose known structures could be used to seed a database for scoring, it is very small in comparison to the universe of possibilities (20^n, where n is the length of the amino acid chain).
In short: Given an arbitrary "end-board layout" I can with our existing human knowledgebase tell you which go player has won. Given an arbitrary amino acid sequence and a proposed structure, I cannot with our existing human knowledgebase tell you if the structure is correct. Because of this limitation in creating a scoring system, while I won't say that deep learning won't be used to improve protein folding (maybe it will, indirectly) it almost certainly won't be used directly, because it is not in the same class of problem.
Thinking about your final paragraph, I guess it gets very much at Carroll's point. I expect that he'd claim we wouldn't notice any difference at all: if we would, that would directly imply that something beyond the standard model was necessary to understand everyday life. But as he explains, we have every reason to believe we've exhaustively explored the relevant range of energies and interaction strengths. If something about chemistry required physics beyond the standard model, we would almost certainly have noticed by now.
What the author meant was that nothing that will be discovered in this domain will shake fundamental physics. Things that will shake fundamental physics won't come from 'everyday life', but rather from extreme environments like those found in particle accelerators, and through study of gravitational waves, CMB etc.
Impact on what? On the standard model and QED?
If everything was already answered, then why offer $1M to solve an equation? Fun?
And you don't know that a priori. It's possible that with a hightened level of simulation, and accurate measurement of an unusual phenomenon, some fine structure emerges. I'm not going to hold my breath, but sometimes you are surprised. The yellow color of gold is a consequence of relativisitic effects, so it could have been entirely possible (if seemingly rather unlikely) that humanity discovered relativity from that angle instead.
But nobody said it was 'a priori'. It comes from thousands of experiments which probed relevant energy levels, over a period of decades.
>It's possible that with a hightened level of simulation, and accurate measurement of an unusual phenomenon, some fine structure emerges.
Sure, in fact we know the Standard Model is incomplete because it doesn't take into account dark matter.
Im a guy that took graduate thermodynamics from the guy who discovered the statistical mechanics of the hydrophobic effect. There may be only 100 people in the world who are qualified to even describe water's molecular structure at varying conditions.
But we have absolutely no idea how life got here. Pick any starting point in the earth's history and try to spin a hypothesis for how cells came to be from organic molecules and other stuff lying around.
You can't do it at a high enough level of detail to even attempt the most rudimentary experiment.
At a high-level, we have a very good idea how life developed and we have reasonably good ideas how life got started. The details will most likely always elude us because tracing the exact evolution of a chaotic system consisting of immense number of particles over a huge span of time will always be beyond our grasp.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/originoflife.html
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
And superconducting would change our world, yet it's still early days for both the science and engineering of efficient applications.
Maybe a follow-up is needed in 2110.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/science/21ice.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_and_motorcycle_dynamic...
Also, have we figured out gravity? That's a pretty every day thing that I thought we didn't understand yet. Has observing gravity waves given us an answer there?
For example, 150 years ago, radio waves were unknown, but they are all around us, they are fundamental, and when they were discovered, they changed our daily lives.
Another example, imagine a bushman, and asking him if he understands everything. He might say, "Yeah, that's a kangaroo, that's a bush, that's dirt....everything practical, I understand. There are things about God I don't understand, but they are far away." By defining things that you don't understand as 'not important' then you understand everything important by definition.
Another example, this quote from Albert Michelson in 1894, "it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice"
In other words, it is likely that people have always thought these sorts of things, and so far have always been wrong.
I gave a true historical analogy of how that could not be the case, I gave a hypothetical example of how that could not be the case, and I gave a quote of someone thinking physics was basically solved right before a massive change in our basic understanding of physics.
It's easy to imagine that there is something analogous to radio waves, that are all around us, but we are unable to detect them with current technology (dark matter might be one possibility).
The point is that even if there were some yet undiscovered particles or forces, they wouldn't have any effect whatsoever on the world around us. This we can say with certainty. Even if it turns out that our current understanding of QM or GR are just approximations of the real laws of physics, again, this won't matter, much as GR doesn't matter at the speed of a moving car and thus you wouldn't take time dilation into account when you calculate the time you need to get from point A to point B.
Would you also assert that radio waves have no effect whatsoever on the world around us?
However, their existence was undetected 150 years ago. Similarly, there are likely things that are undetected by us that also will become very important once they are discovered.
And if he's not making that strong claim, the post is pointlessly tautological. ("So - like - the things we already know about everyday reality and technology are the things we, er, already totally know. Wow! Go science!")
Clearly that's always true historically, until it isn't any more, because new science [tm].
What was the point of that post? I honestly don't even.
So you're right, and not just about kangaroos, radio waves, and god.
We're an inventive animal, and we've been discovering new science [tm] for a million years or so.
If it's even remotely practical, it invariably turns into technology which completely transform our everyday experience.
Did that process stop in 2011? I suppose it's possible. But the only rational response to anyone suggesting that is extreme skepticism.
He's not claiming that.
>And if he's not making that strong claim, the post is pointlessly tautological
No quite. The claim is based on experimental evidence we gained from testing the claims of fundamental physics over the last few decades.
>What was the point of that post? I honestly don't even.
To illustrate how powerful Quantum Field Theory.
>We're an inventive animal, and we've been discovering new science
That isn't going to change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZAc5t2lkvo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...
Most of them might arguably not be "Physics of Everyday Life", but - number one on the list is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(arrow_of_time)
We do not know why time moves in the direction that it does! And you cannot get much more "everyday life" than that.
Why don't you read the article? Author's second paragraph starts with: "Obviously there are plenty of things we don’t understand. We don’t know how to quantize gravity, or what the dark matter is, or what breaks electroweak symmetry." - which suggests that he may actually address your point (Hint: he does).
But you don't even need GR for "everyday life." For that, Newtonian gravity suffices, and the entire theory of Newtonian gravity could easily be grokked by a high school student.
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System
> Special and general relativity predict that the clocks on the GPS satellites would be seen by the Earth's observers to run 38 microseconds faster per day than the clocks on the Earth. The GPS calculated positions would quickly drift into error, accumulating to 10 kilometers per day. The relativistic time effect of the GPS clocks running faster than the clocks on earth was corrected for in the design of GPS.
More details: http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps....
What he means is that we have a theory ("Quantum Field Theory") that is mathematically capable of predicting every physical phenomenon we're capable of observing here on earth with any instruments we've invented to date. He's definitely not saying we understand everything about the universe. By analogy, it's like saying we know conceptually what a Turing machine is and how it works, but not everything about computer science and software engineering.
It may also turn out that quantum field theory is somehow wrong, in the same way that we replaced Newtonian physics with relativity and quantum mechanics. But we still use Newtonian physics in engineering because it's only wrong in ways that rarely matter in practice.
I highly recommend watching Sean Carroll's talks and picking up one of his books. A few suggestions:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFMfW1jY1xE - "The Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time"
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrs-Azp0i3k - "Higgs Boson and the Fundamental Nature of Reality"
* http://www.amazon.com/Eternity-Here-Quest-Ultimate-Theory/dp... - "From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time"
That's reverse of what he is saying. As you say, we understand the Turing machine (the most basic elements), but we don't understand everything it implies.
Whereas in physics, we don't understand the most basic elements, but we do understand what those elements imply (at least, the article asserts that we do).
I think he's saying we fully understand 'the most basic elements' in so far how they underpin the 'domain of everyday life'. It's a little like saying that the underlying physics behind the motion of bilard balls are completely understood with just Newtonian mechanics, even though Newtonian mechanics themselves are incomplete if applied to other domains - like explaining the motion of the planet Mercury.
This is stronger than "everyday life" claim, and likely false. Note that the article carefully excludes "fancy telescopes": there is a reason.
For example, we can observe supernovae. We don't have satisfactory model of core-collapse supernovae yet. In other words, if you set initial condition to right before explosion and simulate forward, stars don't explode in simulation. And critically, it is seriously entertained that this may be due to physics beyond the Standard Model, unlike life or superconductivity: e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.3112
Toddlers. We don't have a model of toddler collapse either. See her now, in 10 seconds - poof! How can we predict that with our current physics knowledge?
What I am getting at is that we only understand the Low Level laws. We still can't understand, for example, financial markets or the weather. Complex dynamic systems are still beyond our horizon of understanding, even if we know how elementary particles behave.
Another example, and this one is very basic: Predict the state of a system of 3+ bodies moving in space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem
"Mathematically predict" is too strong. For example, we can observe the mass of the electron here on earth, but our theories do not mathematically predict it. There are many similar parameters whose values must be determined empirically.
There's also the converse: properties we can mathematically predict, but for which we do not have a good theory. An example is the mass of the Tau: predicted by the Koide formula, but we don't really know why.
Free Will in a deterministic universe is non-existent so there is no physical capacity for choice, but once we breached the quantum threshold all sorts of fun concepts began emerging (like multiverses for example) that bring that lack of capacity into question.
100 years ago, we understood the physical laws surrounding the everyday things like the telegraph, the radio, the bi-plane, the early cars, etc.
And 100 years from now, we will understand the physical laws surrounding everyday things like the holograph, light speed travel, the driverless hover-car, etc.