• qyron@sopuli.xyz
    521·
    1 year ago

    So, basically, we don’t know that much on anything besides understanding it’s really complex and difficult to figure out.

      • qyron@sopuli.xyz
        46·
        1 year ago

        To quote someone a lot wiser than myself:

        It’s a shame stupid people carry themselves through life full of certainty while the wise ones suffer a life of doubt.

        • TheSanSabaSongbird@lemdro.idEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          That’s a paraphrase of a famous Bertrand Russell quote. The original is as follows; “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”

          There’s also the William Butler Yeats corollary; “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

      • Sternout@feddit.de
        1·
        1 year ago

        No, before the scientific method was invented, the religious consensus was that “All is known”.

          • no banana@lemmy.world
            18·
            1 year ago

            The Bible says something about the earth and how it is good and the filament of the sky and something. The Bible that is, at least that’s what I read on the internet. Many fine people on the internet, the best people, but not me, I haven’t said it, but the best people probably. The best people say the earth may be - and I’m not saying it is but they are saying it - they say that the earth may be flat and that doesn’t take much text to cover I have heard.

          • bigfish@reddthat.com
            9·
            1 year ago

            If you squint a little, the 7 days of creation in Genesis are relativistic-ish. 1 day to separate light from darkness (photons at 1 microsecond after Big Bang), another to create the sky (opaque universe at 370k years), another to form dry land and create life (earth formed, 9.3 billion years, life at ~0.2by later), etc etc. Anyone with a physics degree able to say what fraction of light speed god must have been travelling to make this happen such that only days passed for them between these events?

            • flatearth@kbin.social
              01·
              1 year ago

              They are literal days.
              Our God is King of leading by example.
              Also, man was made from the dust of the earth. It was fitting that earth be created before man (also very important for prideful man).
              As He did, so we must do.
              It is repeated constantly that we have 6 days to work, the 7th to be set apart.
              Why?

            • XIN@lemm.ee
              1·
              1 year ago

              If your point was that religions have oversimplified complex science to the point that people thought they fully grasped it, then I agree with you. Otherwise I have no idea what you are trying to say.

    • YoorWeb@lemmy.world
      4·
      1 year ago

      Not really, OP’s image is somewhat misleading. The truth is that we’re constantly trying to improve our understanding of physics and some theories are not completely correct but they often provide a way for future scientists to dig deeper and figure it out. Then with new knowledge, new hypothesis can be suggested creating a gateway to deeper understanding of some concepts further down the timeline.

  • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
    11·
    1 year ago

    I can’t wrap my head around time being anything other than the measurement of movement, and until someone can prove otherwise, that’s where I’ll be.

  • doctorcrimson@lemmy.today
    2·
    1 year ago

    I think high level degree holders know a lot more than the average man thinks we know, in fact I doubt the majority of people even know US High school level stuff like that we’ve discovered a gravitational constant and about the inverse square law as it applies to gravity.

    • crapwittyname@lemm.ee
      1·
      1 year ago

      The sad reason for that is that it’s a conversation killer. I would love to go back and forth for hours on things like the uncanny similarity between universal gravitation and Coulomb’s law. But, when I speak to someone with a similar background to mine it’s all…work-work-work-how-is-it-applied??, and when I speak to someone without that background it’s all yawns. It’s a shame because in either case I think science is the most interesting topic. It’s just as edifying to dive casually into the philosophy as it is to dive rigourously into the maths. I learn more per unit time from either type of conversation than from studying papers. And, it’s a passion, but one whose expression is stymied either by explaining it in terms of football fields per dolphin or by making it marketable. Interaction with other minds is the most valuable type of learning.
      I feel like I may come off as a bit of an elitist writing this, but the problem really is the opposite: I wish more people would get involved!
      Edit: the responses to this have made my day you guys. This is why I left Reddit.

      • barsoap@lemm.ee
        1·
        1 year ago

        I dunno, it’s an inverse square. Are we going to get excited each time something has a linear relationship to another thing? What makes the inverse square so special?

        • runner_g@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          In my field of work (molecular biology) anything with a linear relationship gets exciting! I got an R^2 of .9968 last week that had me jumping for joy.

        • kunaltyagi@programming.dev
          1·
          1 year ago

          Bertrand’s theorem states that stable orbits are only possible for one single inverse distance relation (in classical mechanics): inverse square

          If the law is not inverse square (or harmonic oscillator), there will be no long lasting orbits, no galaxy clusters, no galaxies, no star systems, no planet and moon pairs.

          If the electrostatic force wasn’t inverse square, electromagnetic force would look much different. No gauss law would be possible.

          Inverse square relationship is really neat

          • barsoap@lemm.ee
            1·
            1 year ago

            There’s a lot of things which are required to be exactly as we observe them to be for our surroundings to work out as we observe them to be. If they weren’t we wouldn’t be here to observe, or, at the very least, we’d be quite different.

            Also as to other universes: Who says that any random universe with other laws ties together objects based on their mass. For all we know their attractive force could be relative to photon emissions and elves keep the orbit stable by strategically shining torches at the sky (ok that’s not that likely evolutionary speaking but we’re talking physics).

            • kunaltyagi@programming.dev
              1·
              1 year ago

              That’s why it’s interesting that inverse square is in electrostatic and gravitational forces only. Weak and strong force don’t follow inverse square. And we don’t see the highly complex organization inside the nucleus that we see outside it (otherwise we’d have stable orbits inside the nucleus as well)

      • Pseudonaut@lemmy.today
        1·
        1 year ago

        I’m a person without that background and I’ll talk about it. What’s the uncanny similarity you mentioned?

        • crapwittyname@lemm.ee
          1·
          1 year ago

          Well that’s lovely, thank you 😊 So Newton’s law of universal gravitation is:

          F= G×M×m/r^2
          which is simple enough to be able to say it in a sentence: "the force of gravity F on two masses M and m is proportional to their masses and square of the distance between them, r " so the heavier and closer planets/suns/black holes are, the greater the gravitationnel pull.
          Coulomb’s law is:

          F= k×Q×q/r^2
          which is pretty much exactly the same as you have probably noticed: "the force of electrical attraction F on two charged particles Q and q is proportional to their charges and the square of the distance between them, r "
          So the exact same rule applies to planets and atoms. Their behaviour can be explained in the same way. It’s called an “inverse square law”, it’s got a name because they happen everywhere. And it’s just, like… Why? Why does the universe work that way? You’re not really encouraged to ask that sort of question as a science student, because it “goes nowhere” and doesn’t lead to actionable results. But I think it quite spooky. There are loads of weird results like that in science and maths (see quantum theory for abundant examples!) but it’s unusual to be able to sit and think about it. There is, for the inverse square law, a pretty elegant mathematical explanation for why they’re so common, but it doesn’t quite scratch the itch for me, it just raises more questions

          Edit sorry for text wall. This is probably why I shouldn’t do this!

  • Cowars@lemmy.ca
    1·
    1 year ago

    I have been thinking that is impossible for ANYTHING to understand EVERYTHING. Because ANYTHING will always be a part of EVERYTHING, and you need EVERYTHING to understand EVERYTHING.

    Any system will always be a sub-system of some other system.

    Also I’ve been thinking about something I read: “The more close or deep we see, the more it seems to be nothing there”. I think it was related to subatomic particles, which seems to be just fields of energy instead of matter or something like that.

    I’d appreciate if someone wants to share a few comments or thoughts about this with me.

    • knightly the Sneptaur@pawb.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      From Statistics (commonly attributed to George Box):

      “All models are wrong, but some models are useful.”

      Our models for how everything works are generally more useful than they are wrong for “normal” conditions, and more wrong than useful at the extremes.

  • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    Copernicus deserves a mention. Galileo’s problems resulted (in part) from him being a proponent of Copernicism after the church had declared it heresy.

    Heliocentrism was suggested by Copernicus and Galileo built on that, including developing physics to the point where he couldn’t believe otherwise.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
      1·
      1 year ago

      The heliocentric models predicted the orbits worse than epicyclic geocentric ones and that is the reason Galileo was told to shut up, the court transcript is like 99% science and then a single subordinate clause saying “it also contradicts the bible”.

      Galileo insisted on circular orbits which was his downfall, ironically “because circles are perfect and god would furnish the universe perfect”: That kind of religious language while also being worse science than what was already established did him in. Kepler, based on Brahe’s data, was the first one to get a heliocentric model right and more accurate than the epicyclic ones.

      Also earth doesn’t revolve around the sun. If anything both revolve around their shared centre of gravity but really it’s a matter of your frame of reference. Paraphrasing Archimedes: Give me a fixed point in the universe and I will move all your models.