[BlueTie]

Understandability is waning. Which in many places amounts to the same thing.

Newtonian physics could be understood by an average child. General Relativity could be understood by intellectuals somewhat. The cutting edge of physics now is barely understood by the people who are publishing the papers.

For additional progress to continue in a lot of fields we're giving up a lot of understanding.

If we give a mouse a maze that requires understanding of calculus or trigonometry to get to the cheese - the mouse just won't get there. Doesn't matter how many attempts we give it - the reasoning is beyond its capacity.

Why would humans be any different to our own upper limits of understanding?

(mostly stolen from a chomsky lecture called "the ghost and the machine")

[dilawar]

This. I don't even bother to read physics article in quanta anymore. I won't compare some theories to astrology but if someone does, I won't run to defend either.

I struggle with thwir math articles, but I know that if I find time on weekend, I'll get the theorem (may not be the proof). Knuth books feels the same. Hard reading but rewarding.

Biology is always pleasing to read. CS is my bread and butter so I usually bookmark them.

PS: Masters in electrical engineering and PhD in system biology.

[mrjangles]

As a general rule, if you are hearing about some scientific endeavor in the popular press, it is because that science isn't very important, and they need publicity to get funding.

What a lot of people don't understand is that there is actually a lot of real science going on in physics. There are two branches of physics, what you call condensed matter / atom optics. And then there is Cosmology / High energy physics.

condensed matter / atom optics is where the real science is happening, and those who work in those areas consider the second group to be an absolute joke. The thing is, there is also a feeling of everyone working together to try to get as much money from the government as possible, which is why no one blows the whistle on what a complete scam cosmology and the like is. It is understood at a subconscious level that everyone could be hurt if academics start in fighting, and people would be ostracized for doing it. Also, there are a lot of bad scientists / zealots in condensed matter/ atom optics just as there is in cosmology, and they would try to ruin anyone who said a bad word about the church of academia.

Anyway, as far as real physics goes, there was great article on here a while back about how we finally got to look at the atomic structure of glass, and how we can finally try to work out how it is put together. No one knows how glass is put together, there are a number of different theories, and none of them agree. That is the absolute peek of human achievement in science right now, trying to understand how things like glass are put together.

So if someone tries to tell you they know how the universe was formed and all of creation came about, but they can't explain to you how that window next to them works, then they are clearly a crackpot, not a scientist. The most hilarious part is that if you pull them up on it they will say "Oh well you see the whole creation of the universe and everything in it is actually much less complicated than glass, so that is why we can get results in this area easier".

[Ar-Curunir]

We know less about the oceans on our planet than the surface of the moon. Does that make lunar scientists “crackpots”?

[mrjangles]

haha.. funny because it is literally exactly the same thing. No we do not know more about the surface of the moon than our oceans. When academics can't be proven wrong, they come up with all sorts of theories that they are certain of.

We know so little about the surface of the moon that we don't even know if it is possible to land a rocket on it or not.

[_game_of_life]

Indulge me with an odd potential counter-point though.

What if human knowledge is fundamentally both more inductive and collectivist than we care to admit? After all, Hume's problem of induction (that deductive reasoning stems from induction) does seem to suggest this as a potential resolution.

Isn't understanding mostly a set of connections and relationships about a thing? I can use memorized/practiced knowledge of trig and calc to solve problems, sure, but just like the rat if I was born 4000 years ago I'd probably just struggle with the concept of negative numbers -- with near certainly I wouldn't be able to invent them to solve a maze either.

So I would argue that perhaps all knowledge and understanding seems to be fundamentally inductive, and is hard to conveive of with just a single person in isolation, same as a mouse. Large communities of people with millenia of progress, useful abstractions, and recorded insight though?

Perhpas understanding is scalable with communities and time, and thinking of understanding on the individual level of a mouse or a human is missing the forest for the trees?

[goohle]

GR is hard to understand, because it uses wrong postulates. A medium (Higgs «field») is present everywhere, so we can use it (or CMB) as 0 point.

BB is wrong theory because photons are not immortal things, they are losing energy with time, thus H0(s) are representing rates of loss for different frequencies. Our local group of galaxies is expanding, because we are falling into Great Attractor and Shapley Attractor, but it's coincidence.

QM can be reproduced and studied at macro scale using walking droplets or air bubbles in water bubble in microgravity.