D’oh, we may never decode the universe

[Swede]

He even compares humanity to fish, which swim through the oceans without any idea of the properties of the water in which they spend their lives.

“A ‘true’ fundamental theory of the universe may exist but could be just be too hard for human brains to grasp,” said Rees, who is also the astronomer royal.

“Just as a fish may be barely aware of the medium in which it lives and swims, so the microstructure of empty space could be far too complex for unaided human brains.”


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article7149095.ece

[phantom power]

1. Although that might turn out to be true, it seems laughably premature...

I mean, progress in understanding our universe has been accelerating steadily. It's not as if we've hit a wall.

[metapunditedgy]

2. I'm not even sure we're limited by our brainpower. The future is a big place, after all. n/t

[Xipe Totec]

4. Actually we have (hit the wall), on several fronts

Heisenberg uncertainty principle

Gödel's incompleteness theorem

Turing's halting problem

The Cantor's Set

Mandelbrot sets

[bananas]

6. Bazinga!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=228&topic_id=66177&mesg_id=66340

[Xipe Totec]

9. Nice post, Sheldon

:evilgrin:

[JuniperLea]

3. Far too complex? Maybe...

It could also be so simple we don't even see it... under our noses... right now...

[chillspike]

15. Well, what's the question?

Maybe I can help.

[Ozymanithrax]

5. I do not accept irreducible complexity in the macroverse or microverse...

Give humans a century or two to solve the problem. We've actually only been trying in a serious way for a few hundred years.

[Xipe Totec]

10. The problem is that problem has been solved already

and the answer is that the question is undecidable.

Unless of course, you reject the mathematics of Alan Turing, in which case you actually don't trust in science or mathematics.

Read up on the Halting problem:

The historical importance of the halting problem lies in the fact that it was one of the first problems to be proved undecidable. (Turing's proof went to press in May 1936, whereas Church's proof of the undecidability of a problem in the lambda calculus had already been published in April 1936.) Subsequently, many other such problems have been described; the typical method of proving a problem to be undecidable is with the technique of reduction. To do this, the computer scientist shows that if a solution to the new problem were found, it could be used to decide an undecidable problem (by transforming instances of the undecidable problem into instances of the new problem). Since we already know that no method can decide the old problem, no method can decide the new problem either.

One such consequence of the halting problem's undecidability is that there cannot be a general algorithm that decides whether a given statement about natural numbers is true or not. The reason for this is that the proposition stating that a certain algorithm will halt given a certain input can be converted into an equivalent statement about natural numbers. If we had an algorithm that could solve every statement about natural numbers, it could certainly solve this one; but that would determine whether the original program halts, which is impossible, since the halting problem is undecidable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

[Ozymanithrax]

11. But the universe is not necessarily a complex computer program...

The halting problem is a decision problem about properties of computer programs on a fixed Turing-complete model of computation. The problem is to determine, given a program and an input to the program, whether the program will eventually halt when run with that input. In this abstract framework, there are no resource limitations of memory or time on the program's execution; it can take arbitrarily long, and use arbitrarily much storage space, before halting. The question is simply whether the given program will ever halt on a particular input.

"“A ‘true’ fundamental theory of the universe" is not a problem with computer programing, and if it is, if the universe is actually a complex problem running in a quantum computer, we do not have sufficient data to make that decision. I prefer to wait and see what unfolds in the future rather than decide that a problem is unsolvable.

[Xipe Totec]

12. If mathematics is limited, and mathematics is the language of science,

what then?

What will you use to describe physics?

Metaphysics?

[Blue Owl]

7. Based on what we know

Earth is the exception to the rule.

[EmilyKent]

8. Time for Lord Rees to retire.

In fact, by the sound of it, he should have done so years ago.

[laconicsax]

13. Can someone explain how this isn't, in general, an argument from ignorance?

How is it different from just saying, "I can't imagine the answer, so it must not exist."?

[bananas]

14. See post #6, nt