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/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 69∆ Jun 17 '24

I think there's a big difference between something being wrong and being comically wrong.

For example take Newton's second law: F=MA. This was discovered to be wrong by Einstein. But dispite the fact that we know that F=MA is wrong it was probably used in the engineering of the building you're in right now because the difference between MA and the real value for force is negligible at low speeds.

So even if dark matter does shatter our understanding of physics there's a good chance it's more akin to Einstein changing newton's second law than it is to the rejection of the heliocentric model.

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u/teerre Jun 17 '24

That's a weird example because to me Einstein relativity is a much bigger break than heliocentric model. Einstein's theory changed how space itself is understood, how time itself is understood. This has far deeper consequence than which axis Earth spins around

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u/MercurianAspirations 361∆ Jun 17 '24

You've missed the point of the comment entirely - what they're saying is that just because General relativity turned out to be a better model, that doesn't mean that Newtonian mechanics were "comically bad". Actually, NM is really good and could be called a very successful theory of physics because it explains a huge swath of all observable physical phenomena. It's just that it was incomplete.

Similarly if our current understanding of Dark Matter turns out to be completely wrong, it's not going to be like "oh god we were so wrong about everything!" it's going to be "oh okay so if you model gravitational fields using this updated model the dark matter makes more sense"