[kstrauser]

In cosmology, "in the known universe" is always implicit. If the universe turns out to be flat and infinite, then whatever unlikely thing you can think of happens an infinite number of times in any infinitely small time period you care to mention.

Somewhere, in the field of infinity, a whale materialized above a Three Stooges convention and landed on a newly sentient petunia, an infinite number of times since you started reading this sentence.

Perhaps not in the known universe, sure, but somewhere. So "known" is always the implicit qualifier, but it'd be a pain in the neck to diligently write "known universe" every single time when the people familiar enough with the material to note the distinction also understand that's what you meant anyway.

[jdashg]

"Anything can happen in infinity" only holds if anything can indeed happen, but "doesn't" due to vanishingly small probabilities. Infinite trials still have bounded results. I'm not sure there's a theoretical mechanism that can randomly materialize whales, no matter the unlikelihood!

[yetihehe]

There is, it's called quantum fluctuation. It is VERY unlikely a whole whale could materialise this way in a volume of known universe, but not impossible.

[dandare]

That is what I heard as well, but I still don't grasp it. Infinities have different sizes too, right? I imagine something like this: the probability of subatomic particle of a functional whale appearing due to quantum fluctuation drops faster and faster with each additional particle, while the additional space of infinite universe increases only with d3. I am no mathematician or physicist though.

[petertodd]

I think the intuition you need here is that while the size of the whale is bounded, the size of the infinite universe is not.(1) Thus the argument doesn't work, because the "faster and faster with each additional particle" assumption isn't met.

OTOH, your argument is a good one if we're talking about things like the entire infinite universe undergoing some transformation, provided that the probability of that thing happening somehow diminishes over time.

1) This is by far the best sentence I've ever written on Hacker News. So thank you! :)

[kstrauser]

That was a very good sentence.

[anm89]

For one, I appreciate this perspective, I was not aware of that.

On the other hand this feels unconvincing to me. The language of science and physics is already obtuse and overly wordy, that's what seperates it from the noise of everyone else talking, because it trades precision for brevity and so it feels reliable . So there are infinite places to draw that line in the sand. Why do we stop right there? Why don't we just say what we mean instead of piling up a bunch of words into a statement which is objectively false without all the context.

[kstrauser]

Well, it’s because the more precise words don’t really provide more information. And honestly, we do this exact thing constantly in everyday life without thinking of it as confusing.

For example, “Usain Bolt is the fastest man alive”. Sure, that we know of. There might be some kid in Chile that’s .05s faster, but we’ll never know because his life circumstances don’t bring him to our attention. “The Bugatti Chiron is the fastest car anywhere”... except for that speed demon tearing up the tracks in orbit around Alpha Centauri. “Stephen Hawking is the smartest guy”, if it weren’t for that absolute genius herding goats in Siberia who didn’t get to go to school and has the local reputation as the weird kid arranging the livestock in novel patterns. “Tuna is the most delicious fish” because no one’s thought to make sashimi of that weird looking thing we dragged up from the Mariana Trench.

In all of those cases, there’s an unspoken “...that we know of”. Even if you believe that each of those cases is the fastest, smartest, or otherwise best, you have to concede that there may be another faster, smarter, or better elsewhere that we haven’t discovered yet.

So why pick on cosmologists? It’s literally impossible to declare anything to be “the most $X in the universe”, first because the universe has an infinite amount of stuff we’ll never be able to see, and second because we haven’t even remotely finished cataloging a zillionth of the stuff we can actually look at. Picking on them for not inserting a redundant “known” in every sentence, when it doesn’t add information to their statement and would just be adding filler, isn’t fair.

[anm89]

If you define man as human and we have open events to let people determine who's fastest, it's totaly reasonable to assume he is actuality the fastest man alive. On the other hand this isn't packaged as some sort of scientific claim and has a lower burden of proof.

I don't think anyone beyond an anecdotal context is explicitly claiming hawking was the smartest and either way, it's not measurable and so is inherently subjective.

Delicious, subjective opinion.

All of these are reasonable statements, it's clear up front that they are subjective statements of opinion or their scopes keep them within validity.

Saying a magnetic field is the strongest in the universe based on a measurement in defined units is drastically different type of claim than the ones you mentioned. In this case it's an invalid claim so we should probably stop saying it.

[dodobirdlord]

Because jargon is extremely helpful for communicating ideas quickly between experts, and it's a pain to have to switch to entirely non-jargon when communicating with anyone else.