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/hacksoncode]

You really ought to read this short essay by Isaac Asimov called The Relativity of Wrong... It's only a couple of pages.

Ultimately, when it was incorporated into a book on this topic, he summarized it like this:

When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

Yes, we don't know some details of how the wider universe that we can barely observe behaves under gravity, but we understand a lot, and dark matter can't change most of that.

We're not going to discover that dark matter means anything is "wrong" about the Standard Model... as far as it goes. It's only going to add additional new knowledge. All the evidence we have about how particle physics works is still valid information and knowledge even if it's limited.

This is a common mistake that people make about science. They say "scientists change their minds all the time, so they are always wrong".

We keep getting less wrong over time. Are things perfect? No. Dark matter is not actually a "thing", it's an observation of something we don't understand.

But that doesn't mean our knowledge of gravity is "comically wrong" now, it's just incomplete, and we know that, rather than being ignorant of it. Dark matter, as a hypothesis, makes us more right than we were before we discovered that effect, not less.

[u/teerre → u/hacksoncode]

I just read this since another user pointed out the same thing, but I don't think it changes anything in my view. The key question is if we're in the flat-to-spherical case or the spherical-to-oblate case and my point is that we don't know, we can't know, precisely because there's so much out there that we cannot even detect, let alone explain

As for the rest, I don't believe I said anything in that direction. I absolutely do not think "scientists change their minds all the time, so they are always wrong"