I do, however, sometimes wonder if our current technological way of life will continue in light of the possible effects of global warming. Given that we will have, at some point, to reduce our demands on the energy we use, maybe it will be necessary to turn to a more ‘nature-friendly’ way of life and re-evaluate the current energy-hungry society we live in. This could have an impact on science where expensive experiments designed to look deeply into the structure of matter, for example, could be put on the back-burner, maybe forever. I really can’t say but we could be being a little naive in assuming our present technological way of living will inevitably continue indefinitely. I have a feeling, therefore, that if we had the ability to peer into the future we might be quite shocked at what we saw. Just a gut-feeling.
As an aside, I have often wondered if this is what happens to technological societies in the universe when they find they are unable to sustain a fully technological existence. They may come to a ‘watershed’ moment in their history where they have to decide which road to take due to the limits of their energy supply and the deleterious effects of maintaining it. Could this be the reason why SETI hasn’t yet discovered any compelling evidence of alien civilisations? Could be they never get much beyond our level before they are forced to return to a more primitive existence. Maybe. It’s just a thought.
I’m assuming reality exists on a level that our primate brains can’t comprehend on the deepest scale the same way that a squirrel will never understand what the LHC is for. However on a long enough timeline we will invent machines that probably can comprehend reality on that level.
You need to Discover the Ashes, or parts that may be reduced to a fine Dust through an ingenious incineration within your Office, and thence prepare those Powdours into essential Saltes. Raise the Living Dust into Beings in nowise different to when they walked 2000 years ago. Keep such Shapes in friendly Jars within your basements and converse with such with all Wards and Artifices for your Protection.
Take Care not to Call Up That which you cannot Put Downe.
Furthermore: A universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind capable of understanding it. (Cambridge cosmologist John Barrow)
Alas, I have to say I agree. I love the idea of humanity developing to the Dyson Sphere stage of tera-tech, but I’m just not sure I believe it to be possible.
We’ve been incredibly fortunate so far: all that oil! And Uranium! How cool is it that we can power our civilization on such absolute strokes of pure luck. (Also wood: wood has been history’s “plastic.” You can burn it, and also make durn near anything out of it. History would be a hell of a lot different if we’d only had rocks.) But can we count on similar strokes of luck into the future?
The OP seems to be making the following assumptions:
There is a clearly defined set of clearly defined most important discoveries in the history of science.
There is a single person who is responsible for each of those discoveries.
The set of people who are the ones responsible for each of the most important discoveries in the history of science are the most intelligent people in the history of mankind.
If you could somehow put together that set of people at one time with them at the height of their intelligence and show them the current state of science, they would make more discoveries than any other set of people (similarly put together at the height of their intelligence) would make.
I think all of these assumptions are weak. It’s not clear that there is a set of the most important discoveries in science. I suspect that there is no single path that the history of science could have taken. If you had started history over again (say, at 10,000 B.C.), it might well be that the history of all intellectual discoveries may have been entirely different, so much so that although everything now known would roughly correspond with everything known in this alternate history, the discoveries in that alternate history would be distributed differently over time and broken into different pieces of discoveries.
It’s not the case that a single person made each of the important discoveries in science. If you actually look at the history of what happened for each of those discoveries, there were sometimes several people coming close to making some of those discoveries. Sometimes the discovery was “in the air” and would have eventually been made by somebody. There’s no reason to be sure that if everyone who made the most important discoveries had disappeared from history that it would have greatly changed the history of science.
It’s not true that the people who made the most important discoveries were the smartest people who ever lived, even if it is possible to accurately define who the smartest people are. They were basically very smart people who happened to be at the right place at the right time. Many people who were equally smart weren’t at the right place at the right time and never discovered anything of importance.
Even if you could get that set of people who made the most important discoveries together (or even if you could get the set of people who are actually the smartest people of all time, assuming that you could define such a set) at the height of their intelligence (assuming that it’s possible to define such a time), it’s not clear that they would make any world-changing discoveries. Major discoveries are often about a sufficiently smart person whose previous education, etc., gives them the proper mindset happening to come across the right problem at the right time and having an audience who understands their solution to that problem. There’s no reason to believe that this League of Superscientists that you want to put together would do anything important.
How would we know that we had gotten to the “fundamental” nature of reality? That is it say, how could we know that everything there is to be known about “reality” is known?
Nope. Suppose your laws of physics include only mass, space, and acceleration. You can then construct a Norton’s dome, which is demonstrably non-deterministic. The ball can roll down the dome at any time and in any direction.
I’m having a hard time finding a cite, but I’m also fairly sure you can construct a direct physical analog of the incompleteness theorem that shows indeterminacy in its very construction.
That said, it may be that all the unprovable stuff is limited to a handful of unlikely or unphysical systems, and that the majority of physics is understandable. The incompleteness theorem only says that some statements will be unprovable.
It seems to me that our understanding of how the universe works has increasingly been based on mathematics and this seems to be how future models will develop. For this reason using analogies to describe reality will be less and less accurate and the more insight we gain into ‘deep’ reality the less human brains will be able to comprehend it. This is to be expected because our brain has been developed over evolutionary time to cope with the daily demands of survival which require the kinds of mental skills we are good at but peering into the secrets of reality will require different skills which will probably be developed via AI. I’m no physicist, however, I understand to truly understand quantum mechanics you have to have a good understanding of advanced mathematics because at this level the usual concepts of ‘particles’ and ‘locality’ break down and can only be described in mathematical terms.
I don’t see any real physical reason why this stage can be considered impossible; it may not be necessary, if there are better options, but there is no showstopper that says it can’t be done.
The power from our star is a trillion times greater than anything we’ve had access to so far. We have yet to fully take advantage of that particular stroke of luck, although it is of course the one piece of good fortune that allows us to occupy a habitable environment in an otherwise inhospitable universe.
Even if you built a Dyson Sphere, and dedicated all that collected energy to the problems of Life, The Universe and Everything, you would still be a long, long way from having enough processing power to understand the universe. I suspect that this would need an entire universe of matter and energy dedicated to philosphical enquiry - and this may not even be enough. Because of the expansion of the universe there are vast sectors of space that we can never reach or receive information from - this problem will get worse in the future. So our options are slowly diminishing day by day.
But even if we could dedicate an entire universe to this problem, it might not be enough. Assuming that there is an entity of some sort that has created our particular cosmos, there is no definitive reason to expect that entity to be able to access all the relevant information which our universe now contains; and therefore that entity may not fully understand its own creation. On top of that there is no definitive reason to expect that the creator of our cosmos was not itself created by some larger, more complex entity, and so on ad infinitum.
In short maybe even God doesn’t have access to all the answers; we shouldn’t expect a posse of reincarnated Einsteins or Platos to have the answers either.
I doubt they would substantially contribute to today’s research (beyond their obvious contributions we use already). There are just a lot more people with a lot more computing power on this stuff already, and the amount of data we are getting back to analyze is increasing. I’d say a bigger contributor will be the strong AI and quantum computers that the future may hold.
But, assuming our species or the follow on species descended from us are still around in a few million (or a few billion…or even a few trillion) years, I’d say that the answer is ‘yes’, at some point ‘we’ will understand the fundamental nature of reality. I’m sure that, even with such an understanding that questions will always remain, and we will probably continue to ask them through all that time.
This seems reasonable when you consider the energy released at the BB. We would have, somehow, to re-create the conditions of the BB and observe the resultant effects.
I disagree. I don’t think it’s necessarily a law that it takes more energy to understand a system than the energy contained in said system. We could find out that the fundamental nature of the universe can be exactly explained by some relatively simple equations, that all emergent properties are quantized, and rather than simulate the entire universe, we could discover short-cuts to get the exact answers to any question we may have.
At best we might be able to find useful answers to any questions we are able to pose, so long as they concern regions of the universe that we have access to. This need not imply that we understand the fundamental nature of reality, any more than someone who lives inside a cupboard can say they understand the universe just because they understand the cupboard.
What we are missing is ‘theory of everything’ (TOE) which unites the classical world with the quantum world. Whether this is attainable or not remains to be seen.
Well, how far can we go before we stop and conclude we have answered all the fundamental questions about the nature of reality? It seems to me that no sooner has one question been answered that many more are thrown up, so how ever will it be possible to come to a halt? How, for example, are we going to explain not only how our universe came about but previous universes (assuming they existed) and future universe? It seems a never ending story to me.
When I say emergent properties may be “quantized” I’m referring to more of a macroscopic quantum effect. For example, an organism might not have consciousness (and we’ll be able to answer that somehow), but if we add a single quanta of energy to the organism it would cross the barrier and consciousness would be achieved. Sort of a 0 or 1, but nothing in between. This is opposed to a continuous change from non-consciousness to consciousness where we can’t quite decide when it exists or not.
