In any case, the point is that science is not something that is done by one individual mind. It’s a consensus art. Hundreds, thousands, of alternatives and competitors have been introduced to everyone from Einstein on, but the Standard Model still rules and still depends on the consensus rather than the competitors. Lisi may be a serious scientist, with the good scientist’s objective of uncovering deeper understanding of mathematical reality, but his notions are not part of that consensus because they apparently have serious flaws at a level way beyond either of our knowledge.
Why does Lisi appeal to you? Because he’s challenging the consensus? That’s a so what? Every scientist trying to make a name tries that. Does E8 Theory overturn the Standard Model? No, it purports to explain it. Is it a finished theory? no, by his own admission, “the theory is not complete and cannot be considered much more than a speculative proposal. Without fully describing how the three generations of fermions work, the theory and all predictions from it remain tenuous.”
If he works out all the flaws and it becomes accepted, what then? Will it change anything that has been discussed in this thread? Does it have any impact on philosophy or consciousness or anything else? Isn’t it just a different example of exactly the same set of advanced math that people garble and burble about on the internet without understanding? Why even bring it up? That’s a serious question, BTW. I honestly don’t understand your reasoning.
And science gives us ways to change our assumptions, namely the idea that hypotheses can be rejected based on the statistics going against them. This stands in stark contrast to belief systems, where some assumptions cannot be changed at any point regardless of the evidence.
If you use the word ‘belief’ in a different way, I can only say you’re obscuring a very important point and I wonder, based on prior experience, whether you’re obscuring that point deliberately.
I mean, the universe seems to be ‘fine-tuned’ to make life possible. Take physics; ultimately, all laws are founded upon ‘physical constants’ eg. gravity, strong force, weak force, and the electromagnetic force. Why do these fundamental presets all have the values they have? Why aren’t they a little bigger or smaller? I think it’s very odd that the fundamental constants have exactly the right values to make atoms, stars, planets and everything else around us possible.
Lots of thought has gone into that question. Standard answers are:
[ol]
[li]Incomplete knowledge, we just don’t now enough yet to know how the constants come about or are related.[/li][li]Creator God, [/li][li]Strong Anthropic principle, which is not a lot better than a creator god,[/li][li]Weak Anthropic principle, which is the preferred one for most scientists[/li][li]Lack of imagination.[/li][/ol]
The last one is simply that we don’t actually know what would happen if the constants did change. We know that the universe would be very different, and that ordinary matter as we understand it (atoms for instance) might not work. But we can’t say that the universe would not be in some sense “interesting” but in a vastly different manner. The time for things to happen might be vastly different, the scales that they happen on might be vastly different, but to say that the universe would be a barren waste is probably not reasonable. It is likely that complex relationships would still exist between the components, and the scope for utterly weird complex things to arise remain.
I am starting to feel like reality is a dream state and I am actually a brain-in-a-vat. Do you think that is a psychological disorder, since nothing can really prove this invalid?
I think you will agree that there is only a very narrow range thought to be compatible with life. The more I understand science, the less probable the possibility of life becomes. Maybe we should all repent and talk to God.
But then again, I often have the feeling that the universe appears to fit us perfectly, while in fact we simply fit the universe perfectly. One is not the same as the other.
Since general relativity says gravity can be interpreted as acceleration, is there anything that isn’t affected by gravity? I mean, if you fire a massless spinless chargeless particle in a vacuum in an accelerating lift, how can the particle accelerate with the lift? It’ll continue on its original path and so be affected by gravity, right?
