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by MauranKilom
2033 days ago
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I think there is a disconnect between the "rules of the universe" that the quote talks about and the "our simple rules" that your comment focuses on. Without getting too philosophical, I think we can agree that there are "rules" how the universe works (which is what the quote talks about), which are not necessarily the same as the rules that our theories postulate (what you talk about), although we of course try to get closer and closer. That we can only observe, talk about and know reality in our subjective ways does not mean that there is no underlying mechanism by which reality "works". The quote points out that this "mechanism" is apparently sufficiently simple that we can effectively form and test hypotheses about it. For example, we have no all-encompassing explanation of the universe that concludes R = U/I for electric circuits. Yet we can observe it to be accurate independently from the infinity of conceivable influences - there appears to be no influence on this observation from your lunch, the day of the week, whether your car is green or somebody was just born in Taiwan. We can't explain why these have no influence. We could imagine a reality where all of these (and infinitely many others) are confounders, in which case we could not effectively form theories about these rules. Yet the actual number of things influencing R = U/I observations in our reality are evidently very finite, allowing us to identify them and build our theories. |
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Well, maybe I am too philosophical, because I feel myself reluctant to agree. I accept science method because I know nothing better. But I doubt the idea, that there are no possibility to invent something better.
> we have no all-encompassing explanation of the universe that concludes R = U/I for electric circuits
I'm not a physicist to argue with it. But somewhere deep inside me I see R = U/I as a tautology too. R, U and I was defined by a way, that made R=U/I true. There is some information about the universe encoded in this rule, but there also information about us there. How to separate information about the universe from information about us?