Science's Big Query: What Can We Know, and What Can't We?

The Wall Street Journal ^ | Friday, May 30, 2003 | SHARON BEGLEY

[TroutStalker]

What if stalactites could talk? If these icicle-shaped mineral deposits somehow preserved the sound waves that impinged on them as they grew, drop by drop, from the ceilings of caves, and if scientists figured out how to recover the precise characteristics of those waves, then maybe they would also be able to use stalactites like natural voice recorders and recover the conversations of ancient cave dwellers. Is it more far-fetched than recovering conversations from magnetized particles on an audio tape?

[RightWhale]

Minkowski said that when we understand time and space properly, both time and space will disappear. He was an equal to Einstein and in fact one of the main proponents of relativity, but his math was a little different in appearance. He died tragically young in an accident, and never got to explain what made him say that. He must have had a new idea.

Minkowski is also responsible for the common conception that we cannot exceed the speed of light. Einstein didn't seem to care much about that aspect of the theory.

[Little Bill]

Does a fish know it's wet?

A fish knows when it isn't Wet. What is the sum of all knowlege as opposed to what we can see at the present?

[RightWhale]

What is the sum of all knowlege

Interesting. If we don't know something, is it knowledge anyway?

[Mind-numbed Robot]

Hope that helps..... there'll be a quiz next period!

That was a great help. Thanks for the trouble. With my memory, next period had better hurry.

My simple mind translates momentum into speed plus mass and inertia into a relationship to the energy required to change the momentum of the mass. Is it too late to drop this class? :-)

[Mind-numbed Robot]

A fundamental question left unposed is: "what is time"?

To me, it is the description we apply to the sequencing of events. Events and the forces acting on them can be as simple or as strange as we like them, or better said, as they are. I know it is appealing to bestow upon time some more exotic charateristics but the events and forces can have those, while time is just our necessary symbol applied to observing the progression of things.

[Little Bill]

What is the sum of all knowlege..?

One of the things science proposes is that all things are Knowable, through what ever mutually agreed upon means that, tests, allows us to examine a bit of data and say this is that.

The sum of all knowlege is when you examine all of the data in the universe and it conforms to to a set of predefined rules, small chance.

[boris]

"I know it is appealing to bestow upon time some more exotic charateristics but the events and forces can have those, while time is just our necessary symbol applied to observing the progression of things."

Define "progression" without invoking time.

--Boris

[Mind-numbed Robot]

Define "progression" without invoking time.

Now you are trying to take all the fun out of it. :-)

Perhaps time is the crux of the chicken or egg conflict. I am suggesting, no matter how poorly, that time is a term applied to observations of sequenced events as opposed to something in and of itself. Yeah, I know, describe sequenced without invoking time. I suppose one could say "i saw this and then I saw that." without invoking time although it would definitely infer time.

Hey, if I were smarter I wouldn't be in this conversation.

[boris]

"I suppose one could say 'i saw this and then I saw that.'"

Define "then" without invoking time.

Sorry.

My point is that most (all?) attempts to define time eventual become circular.

We do it unconsciously because all referents to 'time' have time built-in. Like "progression", "sequence", "now", "then", "when", etc.

I wrote Barbour regarding his notions of "the Arena" and "Platonia"--essentially the configuration space of all possible arrangements of particles in the Universe. I pointed out that there was circularity in his arguments as well--since they 'implied' an 'instruction pointer' to sequence the events. I also asked other questions and made several points.

I suspect that his argument that time is an illusion depends upon a 'meta time' which turns out to be--surprise!--just time itself. But I am no specialist.

I persuaded myself long ago--working from a completely different direction--that the passage of time is an illusion. But wouldn't it be nice to be convinced rather than merely persuaded?

I suspect his response was really from a 'bot. "The questions you pose are deep. I hope someday to have enough time to begin to address them." If I'd said "I think time is made of Limburger cheese," I'd probably have received the same response.

--Boris

[boris]

"Time is the fire in which we burn."

Ostensibly attributed to Gene Roddenbury but I don't believe he had it in him.

[boris]

I was right. The actual author was Delmore Schwartz.

[Mind-numbed Robot]

Wouldn't the difficulty in describing time without reference to time be true of space as well, and of many other concepts, too?

[boris]

"Wouldn't the difficulty in describing time without reference to time be true of space as well, and of many other concepts, too?"

Well last night I had a thought: time is the part of space-time that's left when you remove space.

Similarly...

================================

Newton (and classical physics) conceives as space as a fixed 3-dimensional stage in which objects exist and interact. This works pretty well. Einstein referred to a 3-D lattice filled with meter (or yard) sticks. But it really doesn't tell us what space is.

Now we 'know' that space-time 'probably' has 10+ "dimensions" yet is exceedingly "flat" (Euclidean). But near masses or large quantities of energy it becomes distorted and is nowhere near "flat".

I'm reading a book presently which makes the point that space means nothing without matter; in fact I believe the author calls matter and energy "frozen space-time" left over from symmetry-breaking early in the life of the universe. Whatever that is.

----------------------

Another off-topic comment: because we are finite creatures whose brains are also finite and embedded in "reality" there is no possibility that we can "know" everything...

The point is to keep trying.

--Boris

[boris]

[Way2Serious]

The Vogons have nothing to worry about.

[Physicist]

Ping on #9.

[Physicist]

The Vogons have nothing to worry about.

LOL! Do I need to make my verse better or worse to threaten them?

[RightWhale]

People can't agree on simple things like what is the best temperature for sleeping or whether scrambled eggs ought to be hard or soft. If one person can't possibly know everything and two or more people will disagree on what they know, what hope is there of a committee knowing everything or what basis is there for saying everything is knowable? Seems like the committee, while pooling resources, rarely gets a universally satisfactory result.

[Little Bill]

This a question we used to kick around in school. Science demands that things be testable and repeatable, but are there things that can be known only by inferance and untestable directly?

What if this bit of data only occures in some instances and not in others when doing the same experiment? This implies more hidden data and the fact that the great leaps in knowing are accomplished by on man in a room thinking.

I don't think that we will ever know all of everything we want to know. When I was doing projects many years ago a friend of mine had a poster in his cube, that said; "Beware of the hidden variable."

[Mind-numbed Robot]

While reading the article's discussion of the "unknowable" I was thinking how would you ever know what was unknowable after additional knowable things were known? To be unknowable, as far as our abilities are concerned, as you said, the proposition would have to be contradictory, conflicted, or convoluted. All the cons, I guess.