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This meme was circulated about 20 years ago by my reckoning.
It was clever back then, it’s far less entertaining now in an age when people are discarding science and factual knowledge wholesale.
We have very, very good models of each of those “things” listed. We have such good models for it, that even since this meme first made rounds, we have created new kinds of telescopes that can see gravity, we have created computers that can calculate using individual particles in superposition, we have built tools to view the edge of space and time and have imaged the event-horizons around black holes and we have created conditions close to beginning of the universe in labs and discovered new particles that validate decades or centuries of theorizing.
These models only break down in extreme environments or when they intersect in certain conditions. But by “break down” we don’t mean “scientists throw their hands in the air and become flat-earthers” we mean “we are missing some key data” to make different fields of science work together.
We still lack verification on right-handed neutrinos and the exact wave function for helium.
There are likely areas we will never have any greater insight on and phenomenon that will never be explained, but my point is just that people use these kinds of short-attention-span quips to go on to say that we don’t know for sure about climate change and vaccines and such.
All models are wrong. Some are useful.
— George Box
The more we learn, the more we learn that we need to learn.
This is old. We got turbulence now at least.
Edit: i mean the discovery of turbulence calculation about 10, 15 years ago.
I thought that referred to the navier stokes millennium problem
Look I ain’t calling you no turbulance, if you need help, call 911.
We have figured out big stuff and small stuff very well! And if it weren’t for the little fact they share the same universe, it would be very good general theories.
Yeah, when this meme was first cycled around over 20 years ago I didn’t like it then, I like far, far less now in an age of science denial and every fukkin headline on every fukkin major media site feed saying shit like “SCIENTISTS BAFFLED OVER NEW DISCOVERY OF UNKNOWN SIGNALS” or “SCIENTISTS HORRIFIED BY DISCOVERY THAT BREAKS THE LAWS OF NATURE” and so on.
This shit is the reason we have an anti-vaxxer with no qualifications leading the most powerful nation’s health and human services. This is the shit that feeds people deciding that horse-dewormer is as good as the accumulated knowledge of centuries of study and data. This kind of over-simplification is why we won’t see a dozen scrapped space missions and why people spit on scientific data about how helping people with their gender identity helps prevent suicide and on and on and on.
We have to make knowledge “cool” again, and I have no idea how to do that.
No way I live long enough for us to get to a Grand Unified Field theory. :(
Anything in particular you want to know about that only a GUT might provide? or do you just want to see what it looks like?
Didn’t scientists just prove a unified theory was impossible?
Gödel proved decades ago for all of mathematics including theoretical physics that a true ToE can’t exist. The incompleteness theorem in a nutshell says no axiomatic system can prove everything about itself. There will always be truths of reality that can never be proven or reconciled with fancy maths, or detected with sensors, or discovered by smashing particles into base component fields. Really its a miracle we can know anything at all with mathematical proofs and logical deduction and experiment measurement. Its still possible we ca solve stuff like quantum gravity but no gaurentees.
Something you need to understand is that physicist types dont care about incompleteness or undecidability. They do not believe math is real. Even if its mathatically proven we cant know everything in formal axiomatic systems, theoretical physicist will go “but thats just about math, your confusing it with actual physical reality!” . They use math as a convinent tool for modeling and description, but absolutely tantrum at the idea that the description tools themselves are ‘real’ objects .
To people who work with particles, the idea that abstract concepts like complex numbers or Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are just as “real” as a lepton when it comes to the machinery and operation mechanics of the universe is heresy. It implies nonphysical layers of reality where nonphysical abstractions actually exist, which is the concept scientific determinist hate most. The only real things to a scientific determinist is what can be observed and measured, the rest is invisible unicorns.
So yes its possible that there is no ToE or GUT because of incompleteness and undecidability, but physicist dont care and theres something alluring about the persuit.
I disagree in part with this logic.
Gödel’s incompleteness theorem says that a system typically cannot prove all truths that come from axioms of the system, like you said.
Where I disagree is how this is applied to theoretical physics. Depending on where you draw the line of “everything”, the limits of proof comes down to two things: observation and the language we use to describe it.
As it stands, for example, gravity is difficult to fit into the standard model. It may be impossible to do so within that system. However, it may work well in an alternate description of the universe. In this case, the core mathematics is the same, but the theories differ. It may be likely that our understanding of the universe is filled with logical holes and fallacy, but that does not mean that the incompleteness theorem says anything regarding the ability to unify physics.
Mathematically, physics is nothing more than descriptions of observation and expectations. It could very well be that our perception of the universe is fundamentally flawed and, in essence, we can only perceive certain truths that appear correct in our perspective. As such, it isn’t necessarily impossible to formulate a correct theory; it’s just that we are unable to succinctly describe reality.
More simply, math is just the thing we use to describe the universe. So, it’s likely we can keep “adding new math” as we discover new physics. The hard part is understanding the physical nature of the universe, first.
Or perhaps the universe truly cannot be described all at one, such that everything is related. As a mathematician, I like to believe that we simply lack the ability to perceive the full reality of, well, “reality”. And as such, we are missing important information that would tie all the loose ends together.
Thank you for your thoughtful response! I did my best to cook up a good reply, sorry if its a bit long.
Your point that we can simply “add new math” to describe new physics is intuitively appealing. However, it rests on a key assumption: that mathematical structures are ontologically separate from physical reality, serving as mere labels we apply to an independent substrate.
This assumption may be flawed. A compelling body of evidence suggests the universe doesn’t just follow mathematical laws, it appears to instantiate them directly. Quantum mechanics isn’t merely “described by” Hilbert spaces; quantum states are vectors in a Hilbert space. Gauge symmetries aren’t just helpful analogies; they are the actual mechanism by which forces operate. Complex numbers aren’t computational tricks; they are necessary for the probability amplitudes that determine outcomes.
If mathematical structures are the very medium in which physics operates, and not just our descriptions of it, then limits on formal mathematics become direct limits on what we can know about physics. The escape hatch of “we’ll just use different math” closes, because all sufficiently powerful formal systems hit the same Gödelian wall.
You suggest that if gravity doesn’t fit the Standard Model, we can find an alternate description. But this misses the deeper issue: symbolic subsystem representation itself has fundamental, inescapable costs. Let’s consider what “adding new math” actually entails:
- Discovery: Finding a new formal structure may require finding the right specific complex logical deduction path of proof making which is an often expensive, rare, and unpredictable process. If the required concept has no clear paths from existing truth knowledge it may even require non-algorithmic insight/oracle calls to create new knowledge structure connective paths.
- Verification: Proving the new system’s internal consistency may itself be an undecidable problem.
- Tractability: Even with the correct equations, they may be computationally unsolvable in practice.
- Cognition: The necessary abstractions may exceed the representational capacity of human brains.
Each layer of abstraction builds on the next (like from circles to spheres to manifolds) also carries an exponential cognitive and computational cost. There is no guarantee that a Theory of Everything resides within the representational capacity of human neurons, or even galaxy-sized quantum computers. The problem isn’t just that we haven’t found the right description; it’s that the right description might be fundamentally inaccessible to finite systems like us.
You correctly note that our perception may be flawed, allowing us to perceive only certain truths. But this isn’t something we can patch up with better math. it’s a fundamental feature of being an embedded subsystem. Observation, measurement, and description are all information-processing operations that map a high-dimensional reality onto a lower-dimensional representational substrate. You cannot solve a representational capacity problem by switching representations. It’s like trying to fit an encyclopedia into a tweet by changing the font. Its the difference between being and representing, the later will always have serious overhead limitations trying to model the former
This brings us to the crux of the misunderstanding about Gödel. His theorem doesn’t claim our theories are wrong or fallacious. It states something more profound: within any sufficiently powerful formal system, there are statements that are true but unprovable within its own axioms.
For physics, this means: even if we discovered the correct unified theory, there would still be true facts about the universe that could not be derived from it. We would need new axioms, creating a new, yet still incomplete, system. This incompleteness isn’t a sign of a broken theory; it’s an intrinsic property of formal knowledge itself.
An even more formidable barrier is computational irreducibility. Some systems cannot be predicted except by simulating them step-by-step. There is no shortcut. If the universe is computationally irreducible in key aspects, then a practical “Theory of Everything” becomes a phantom. The only way to know the outcome would be to run a universe-scale simulation at universe-speed which is to say, you’ve just rebuilt the universe, not understood it.
The optimism about perpetually adding new mathematics relies on several unproven assumptions:
- That every physical phenomenon has a corresponding mathematical structure at a human-accessible level of abstraction.
- That humans will continue to produce the rare, non-algorithmic insights needed to discover them.
- That the computational cost of these structures remains tractable.
- That the resulting framework wouldn’t collapse under its own complexity, ceasing to be “unified” in any meaningful sense.
I am not arguing that a ToE is impossible or that the pursuit is futile. We can, and should, develop better approximations and unify more phenomena. But the dream of a final, complete, and provable set of equations that explains everything, requires no further input, and contains no unprovable truths, runs headlong into a fundamental barrier.
What a bunch of nonsense. So, pseudo-scientists repeat after me: you cannot derive rules of the outer universe from the inner universe.
The only way to “prove” the hypothesis is if an admin sends a message or leaves some other way for us to discover we’re in a simulation, other than that it’s unprovable and undisprovable.
Yeah, I think the “simulation hypothesis” is a super pointless take, partly because it is so profoundly unfalsifiable. It’s no more plausible or convincing to me than “the universe exists in God’s mind” or “we are figment within a dream of a dragon”.
Propenents try to argue things like “if we can create lifelike simulations, then we’d create loads of them, therefore we’re statistically likely to be inside one”. But that’s to draw conclusions about what the “outer” universe is like from features of the simulation. If our reality is within a greater one, I don’t find more evidence for it being a “computer simulation” than for it being inside Tommy Westphall’s snow globe.
Well, unlike God this at least sounds possible, even though yeah, it’s a pointless discussion, not provable nor unprovable.
While you’re totally right IMHO, I’d argue that the inner universe indeed can prove this. Just within the rules and boundaries of the inner universe. With our given measures and abilities. Which are or might be totally different from the outside.
No, we can’t prove we’re in a simulation or outside of it. We can prove that we can’t currently create such a simulation but that doesn’t change anything.
After re-evaluation, you’re right. We can’t. We could just define the outer walls of what we can know. No matter how hard we’d think out of the box, we can’t measure the box itself. We could create such a simulation. But being more limited beings than our creators, our creations could only be even more limited. Like an LLM. It could asses everything there is to know and calculate a theory around it. Yet it will be confined to OUR specifications and the data we let it consume.
I prefer not to reference deceased scientists & philosophers because it makes me appear old. I prefer to only acknowledge the wisdom of contemporaries such as Jordan Peterson & Neil DeGrass Tyson so people don’t think I’m elderly.
/s
(This is how I feel when kids say they’re embarrassed about liking 80s music)
At first I was like, what? That is not funny!
But then I saw the /s and I was like, HOLY SHIT IS THE BEST JOKE I’VE EVER HEARD!!
I’m still on phlogiston.
Galileo was actually very bad at science.
“We just throw darts in the dark now and see if the math still maths. If it does, we create a new field of theoretical physics.”
Gravity too
I think it’s in the list as “heavy stuff”.
I took that to mean singularities
Also magnetism
As one of the great scholars of our time has said:
“Nobody knows what a magnet is.”
Turbulence can go to hell and take Reynolds numbers with them
Turbulence seems to be to be deterministic chaos, that if we had perfect resolution, and unlimited processing power, we could predict turbulent flow with precision.
A-fuckin-men brother
I3 atlas has entered the chat.
No it hasn’t. It broke up around the sun. It’s a rock with ice and shit.
I saw some Ai generated videos saying it broke up but there are amateur astronomers filming it as we speak. You are saying it broke up but still looks the same, or? Because sometimes I dont understand if “broken up” means what I think it does. To me it should be gone if that happened?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZCQFAokJQE
There are still daily articles from Loeb talking about it. This one is from a few hours ago:
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/magnificent-images-of-jets-around-3i-atlas-e4ad8acc723c
There are clear pictures of multiple nucleuses after it passed the sun, which is entirely common for comets, they are loosely held together balls of rock and ice. Some crackpots (Avi Loeb specifically) are now pushing the media-grabbing narrative that this is just the “spaceship now turning on its thrusters” despite no real dramatic, unexpected changes to its velocity or behavior.
We have observed some unusual properties from the comet, but this is more like “unusual for a long-range comet” and not “OMG ALIENS.” This is likely because it originated in another part of the galaxy a very, very long time ago and thus is made of different proportions of elements and may even have new compounds in it that react slightly differently to light and heat. In some other, better timeline, we would have probes stationed around the solar system to intercept and study interstellar objects and maybe we would make new discoveries.
For now, all we get are youtubers and sensationalist book authors flailing their arms in the air about aliens, because that’s what sells headlines.
Thats not whats happening at all. I have read Loebs posts and seen his videos about this comet. He says we should be open to the possibility of it being something else than a comet. He doesnt say “omg aliens” at all. Have you read his medium posts?
As for Youtubers, sure, tons of Ai generated shitty videos to make money, yeah.
I haven’t read any of Loeb’s recent anything because, and I cannot stress this enough, he is a crackpot trying to sell books and get media attention. I used to follow him because I liked the idea of being open to studying more areas of astronomy with an open mind to figuring out if there are unknowns we’ve been missing like Von Neuman probes in the asteroid belts and so on.
But since those earlier days of speculation, he has gotten more and more radical and “grifty” and disrespecting his own peers like the head of SETI and declaring anything that moves to be possible signs of aliens, to say nothing of his doubling down on recovering industrial waste from an expensive mission to retrieve ocean gunk on some longshot, hyperbolic narrative that he knew where an alien ship crashed. He does nothing but media and podcast tours and doesn’t take criticism. Not a scientist.
We can do better.
Yeah ive noticed this about the reactions to the comet. There are two camps, one who thinks Loeb is all the negative things you said, and another who thinks he makes a lot of sense.
Either way, I think the comet is very interesting and look forward to following it the coming weeks. :)
Not even clear why hot water freeze faster than cold one.
I don’t think this is true. Just a myth or it only occurs in certain circumstances.
Not a myth, it’s known as Mpemba effect, several hypothese about it, but still not clear
In 2016, Burridge and Linden studied a slightly different measure, the time it took water samples to reach 0 °C but not freeze. They carried out their own experiments, and reviewed previous work by others. Their review noted that the large effects observed in early experiments had not been replicated in other studies of cooling to the freezing point, and that studies showing small effects could be influenced by variations in the positioning of thermometers: “We conclude, somewhat sadly, that there is no evidence to support meaningful observations of the Mpemba effect.”
From the Wikipedia article.
i mean, you’re really burying the lead there when the article states pretty clearly in the abstract that the existence of this is contentious.
your quote doesn’t really demonstrate it doesn’t exist, it just demonstrates what the article already clearly states which is that people don’t agree.
it’s disingenuous to quote that specifically while ignoring things like:
In 2021, John Bechhoefer described a way to reliably reproduce the effect.[23] In 2024, Argelia Ortega, et al. studied the freezing of small (1-20mL) drops in a Peltier cell with a thermographic camera, and found that hot drops consistently froze faster than cold ones, with a more pronounced difference for larger drops. In particular, hot drops finished freezing sooner after the onset of recalescence, and experienced less of a temperature spike during the freezing process.[24]
from the exact same article, is all i am saying. bad rhetoric.
Modern studies using freezers with well-understood properties have observed the Mpemba effect where water supercools before freezing. Water that starts out cooler tends to reach a lower supercooled temperature before freezing.
Also from the Wikipedia article.
If you define the Mpemba effect as hot water reaching 0 degrees faster, then no, it’s not observable. But if you define the Mpemba effect as heated water freezing sooner, (remembering that freezing can initiate below the “freezing point” when water is subcooled) then the Mpemba effect may be observed.
If true, it would be interesting that cool water is less likely to nucleate and form ice than water that was heated.
to be fair, all that only applies for the extremes.
“It only applies for how the Universe works at its most fundamental level”
I can make turbulence with my bare hands.
Or some same topic. Read Griffith to feel like you understand electrodynamics, then Jackson to realize you don’t.
