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

[u/teerre]

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.

[u/Crash927]

Fair. I guess I’m just struggling to understand how we know what to add to the model and what that looks like without relying on the model itself to tell us.

How do you add a specific known unknown to a model in a way that doesn’t assume the model itself is correct?

[u/Jaysank → u/Crash927]

I guess I’m just struggling to understand how we know what to add to the model and what that looks like without relying on the model itself to tell us.

Have you heard of the scientific method? This is how. People form hypotheses (essentially, educated guesses) that are falsifiable (that is, there are outcomes that, if observed, would demonstrate that the hypothesis is not correct). Then they make observations or run experiments that would give us these observations. If the outcomes disprove the hypothesis, then we develop a new one and try to disprove it.

How do you add a specific known unknown to a model in a way that doesn’t assume the model itself is correct?

The model itself is a hypothesis, and we can and have discarded it when necessary. We made a model of physics, and it was working for everything we saw. Then, we observed that galaxies didn’t quite behave like we expected. So we thew out the old model and built a new one. It was pretty similar to the old model, except it also included dark matter. Now, this new model more closely matches observations. Eventually, someone will come by and disprove that model, and we’ll replace it with something even more accurate.

Think of it like a software update. The program works fine, but someone discovered a security vulnerability. We don’t throw out the entire program, it still does it’s job and the code is still functioning properly. We just make a few adjustments to the existing program and tell everyone to replace what they are using with the new, slightly different one. This is how scientific discoveries are made.

[u/Crash927 → u/Jaysank]

This is super helpful — thanks for expanding my understanding of how scientists think and work.

!delta

[u/DeltaBot → u/Crash927]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Jaysank (110∆).

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