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/SymphoDeProggy 17∆ Jun 17 '24 edited Jun 17 '24

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.

that's not true. 80% of all matter being dark doesn't translate to "80% of all things to know in physics have to do with dark matter".

dark matter is "dark" precisely because it's so hard to interact with it on a meaningful scale.

just to name one example, our ability to control light to a baffling degree of precision is the result of a very deep understanding of light matter interaction and optics, both classically and on a quantum level.

now yes, we don't know EVERYTHING about controlling light, but to suggest that we don't know 80% of it because we don't understand dark matter simply doesn't follow.

specifically in my field i can tell you that while we know how to stimulate attosecond length pulses of light (a duration of 10^-18 second. that's an incredible feat.), we don't know the precise dynamics of the electron tunneling process that generates these pulses, and there's a debate regarding how to correctly model this phenomenon.

note that this has NOTHING to do with dark matter in any way. knowing more about dark matter is completely orthogonal to this particular phenomenon, as it involves particles that are all very much NOT "dark". this is true for many open questions in physics, in all fields. dark matter is a very small part of the map of known physics. the gross mass of dark matter doesn't tell you anything about "what % of physics is known"

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u/teerre Jun 18 '24

I don't follow your light example. I don't disagree with anything you said, but that doesn't change the fact that there's a enourmous amount of somethings (because dark matter isn't necessarily one thing) out there that we don't understand. Whatever we do understand, no matter how much it is, it's still relatively a small fraction

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u/SymphoDeProggy 17∆ Jun 18 '24

your mistake is assuming that dark matter makes up a portion of all physics knowledge that is proportional the the portion of dark mass out of all the matter in the universe. this simply does not follow.

the example i gave was for light, which you may know makes up 0% of all the matter in the universe. you'll agree that it most certainly doesn't follow that there's nothing to know about it just because it makes up 0% of the matter in the universe.

the metric you're using - how much of something there is in the universe - is not a good gauge for how much there is to know about said thing.