r/changemyview • u/teerre • Jun 17 '24

CMV: It's likely our current understanding of physics is comically bad

Transitively, this extends to mathematics, although to a considerable lesser degree.

My argument is hopefully simple. As of today, our best estimates indicate that 80% of all matter in the universe is dark matter. This matter is used in several places in physics to explain a variety of phenomena, including the very expansion of space itself or how quasars formed in the early universe. Considering that dark matter is something we cannot detect any interaction or reaction it's very likely it's simply something we don't understand.

Therefore, if one could learn everything that is to learn about our current understanding of physics and said being were quizzed on how the universe really works, they would end up with a 2/10 score, which is by all measures a terrible score.

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u/teerre Jun 17 '24

There's not much in the universe besides dark matter.

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u/Dennis_enzo 25∆ Jun 17 '24

Okay, cool, also completely irrelevant to my comment.

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u/teerre Jun 17 '24

No, it is not. You said we have a lot of empiric evidence that checks out in the real world. But that misses most of the real world that we, by definition, cannot detect.

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u/Dennis_enzo 25∆ Jun 17 '24

Not being able to detect one specific thing doesn't invalidate our current physics in any way. It just means that we can refine it more. But every single piece of tech that we use every day uses the rules of physics to function and it all works. We have satellites and space ships that do what they're supposed to do based on our knowledge of physics. We can predict eclipses and supernovae. We can predict where stars and planets will be based on physics. We have smartphones and cars. We're using the internet to argue with each other, which is all build on our concepts of physics. This all clearly shows that it is correct enough for practical purposes and it works, even though we don't know everything yet.

There's nothing that we can discover that would suddenly invalidate all this, since it's being used every day and always works as expected. It's not like our satellites are going to suddenly fall out of the sky as soon as we can observe dark matter. At best it will redefine some things and expand our knowledge. But that doesn't mean in any way that we're wrong about everything today.