[bodi]

> But if you want to understand the universe then physicists are the people you'll want to listen to...

Bold claim. I would like to ask physicists what chicken tastes like? Or why the mountains are beautiful? Or where the other 73% of our existence is?

[whatshisface]

The first two are about human experiences and the last you will hear first by listening to physicists (because anyone who practices physics is by definition a physicist, I'm including astrophysicists of course). It might sound like a bold statement, but really what I said was kind of tautological.

[bodi]

You self scoped the question as “universe” and any field, subjective or absolute, where 3/4 of your hard problem stuff is unidentified, probably disqualifies you as a generalist expert so I think physics are the furthest from tautology as the universe and our existence can get.

It would be like a coder saying his codebase is 3/4 missing, let alone the runtime, OS, processor, being completely speculative, but then claiming to be an expert matter on computing.

No, you might very well be a micro expert relative to other micro experts in your small corner of your codebase, but on the universe of existence at large?

Perhaps some respect and humility to the whole process are due. ;)

[whatshisface]

Suppose you are studying a legacy codebase, one left to you with no documentation. You and your colleagues are by definition the only ones working on it, becuase you call anyone who is working on it a colleague. You are only 1/4th done by LOC, but it's not clear what fraction of the remaining lines are autogenerated getters and setters vs real code. Clearly anyone interested in the codebase should talk to your team.

I should also mention that the 1/4th number is comparable to a "by weight" estimate, but what physicists study is the laws of physics which are not measured in that way. Nobody on Earth knows how much physics there is left to discover or if that is even a well formed question.

[bodi]

I have a very healthy love for physics, and am simply attempting to draw your awareness to the complete subjectivity and awe of the universe.

To reallocate the code metaphor, at some point you step back from the monitor and realize you are certainly discovering how Photoshop was written while completely ignoring the images it creates, documenting the MP3 format, but ignoring the music, describing how the tree grows, while missing the forest.

<3

[Koshkin]

> the complete subjectivity and awe of the universe

But it’s awe that is subjective, while the universe is completely objective.

[Koshkin]

> it’s not clear what fraction

But see https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/03/30/statistical-rule-o..., which has been discussed on HN not long ago.

[whatshisface]

That rule tells you how likely you are to see one thing given N observations, but what we don't know is how many things there are.