[marcosdumay]

The joke was way more true at the 20th century. There were many really important measurements where we got unprecedentedly precision, enough to say it's X, 100X, or something in between.

Nowadays astronomy got a lot more precise. But there are disagreements on how much confidence to put on that extra precision.

[dylan604]

sometimes, i wonder if astronomy/physics were to only use unsigned numbers, if things would just make more sense. you'd get much more precision, and then you wouldn't have to worry about "but the math says it's possible" issues by taking everything by * -1.

[labster]

Jesse, what are you talking about?

[dylan604]

Well, Mr White, if you look at all of the "weirdness" in physics with theories coming out because "the math says it's possible", then you'd see that it would be much more simple if we were not allowed to have negative numbers because we're only using u64 integers. we'd have more digits for precision as well.

[nickpeterson]

I find that weird outliers are usually evidence that the underlying model is flawed in some fundamental way, but sometimes I think people believe the exceptions are fundamental, and a lot of effort goes to the wrong place.