#limits of knowledge

[garland-on-thy-brow]

Victoria Pagán, Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History

[startswithabang]

Dark Energy Holds The Ultimate Lesson For Today's Scientific Frontiers

“The big problem with science at the frontiers of what is known is that we don't know where or how the next great, revolutionary discovery will occur. The XENON experiment could find evidence of a WIMP-like dark matter signal. The upcoming DUNE experiment could reveal something unexpected about neutrinos. The James Webb Space Telescope could show us a population of stars or galaxies that we never thought existed. And a future collider could reveal new forces, particles, or states of matter.

Until we look, though, we cannot know what secrets the Universe does or doesn't hold. All we know for certain is what Wayne Gretzky told us decades ago, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." Humanity now stands at the most distant frontier of all-time in particle physics, astrophysics, low-temperature physics and more. We can't know what we'll find if we push that frontier and look as we've never looked before. But we can be certain that science will not progress any further without doing so.”

If we didn’t come into existence 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, but rather 138 billion years after the Big Bang, our Universe would be a vastly different place. Our home galaxy would no longer be part of the Local Group, but instead all its galaxies would have merged into one. Beyond our galaxy, no others would be visible: not to the naked eye and not even to a Hubble-equivalent telescope. The cosmic microwave background would not appear, and there would be little evidence to point towards the Big Bang.

But if we pushed the limits of our scientific frontiers far enough, we’d still uncover the truth about the Universe. The next time you think that a study is ill-motivated, think about this instead.

[mathblab]

I don’t demand that a theory correspond to reality because I don’t know what it is. Reality is not a quality you can test with litmus paper. All I’m concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of measurements.

Stephen Hawking

[startswithabang]

This Is Why We Will Never Know Everything About Our Universe

“The total amount of information accessible to us in the Universe is finite, and hence, so is the amount of knowledge we can gain about it. There's a limit to the amount of energy we can access, the particles we can observe and the measurements we can make. That doesn't mean we're done, or that we shouldn't strive to learn everything we absolutely can. Only we can push the frontiers of knowledge back as far as they can go.

There's a whole lot left to learn and a whole lot that science has yet to reveal. If we continue to look, many of the present unknowns will likely fall in the near future. But what is knowable is finite, and this implies that there are necessarily some things we may never know. The Universe may yet be infinite, but our knowledge of it never will be.”

The Universe is enormous, the speed of light is incredibly fast, and the Big Bang happened a very long time ago. But even if you could somehow know all the properties of every particle that could possibly be connected to us via the laws of physics, we still wouldn’t know everything. The total amount of information contained within the Universe is finite, as is the total amount of energy. With those constraints, even if we knew everything that was knowable, we would still have questions that would be unanswerable in principle.

Sounds disconcerting? Well, maybe you need a little bit of unease. Science, no matter how good it gets, will never know everything about the Universe. Find out why.

[theultimatepieceoftheuniverse]

IGNORANT MODERNITY AND HOMO IGNORANS

Towards a Sociology of the Production of Ignorance in Contemporary Societies CLICK HERE: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/406993820_IGNORANT_MODERNITY_AND_HOMO_IGNORANS_Towards_a_Sociology_of_the_Production_of_Ignorance_in_Contemporary_Societies

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[theultimatepieceoftheuniverse]

Subject, Ignorance, and Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Toward an Integrated Theory of AI-CRACY

Abstract This article proposes an integrated theoretical framework for analyzing the transformation of contemporary societies in the age of artificial intelligence. Based on three conceptual axes—subject theory, agnotology, and algorithmic governance—it develops a systematic interpretation of the processes through which digitalization reconfigures the production of knowledge, the generation of…

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[theultimatepieceoftheuniverse]

Sujeto, ignorancia y poder en la era de la inteligencia artificial: hacia una teoría integrada de la IA-CRACIA

Resumen Este artículo propone un marco teórico integrado para analizar la transformación de las sociedades contemporáneas en la era de la inteligencia artificial. A partir de tres ejes conceptuales —la teoría del sujeto, la agnotología y la gobernanza algorítmica— se desarrolla una interpretación sistemática de los procesos mediante los cuales la digitalización reconfigura la producción de…

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[misentropy]

epistemic humility

The concept of epistemic humility is useful to describe the difference between these two kinds of character. Epistemic humility is an intellectual virtue. It is grounded in the realization that our knowledge is always provisional and incomplete—and that it might require revision in light of new evidence. Grant appreciates the extent of our ignorance under these difficult conditions; the other characters don’t. A lack of epistemic humility is a vice—and it can cause massive damage both in our private lives and in public policy. 

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