Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I didn't say the maths is wrong, I just said it has reached its limits. And "no big discovery" for the last 40 years kind of shows that some limits have been reached.

> Consistency is a good thing

Lots of close but in the end ineffectual "epistemic" systems were internally consistent but in the long run they proved "deficient" (as in other, more efficient systems took their place). I confess I've never read Thomas Aquinas's work (to give just one example) but I'm pretty sure his "view of the world/reality system" is pretty consistent, don't think there are any internal contradictions in his writings. Problem is his internally consistent system wouldn't have been able to allow us to build combustion engines or modern electronics, so that we have had to come up with other internally-consistent "epistemic systems" that proved to be more efficient (because they allowed us to build and reason about combustion engines and modern electronics).

In the end and in the great scheme of things I don't think this theoretical physics road-block will be of any great importance for the general public, it looks like people are content with what they already can purchase based on past physics-related discoveries. Yeah, traveling through galaxy wormholes or getting to 100% know if the Universe is finite or not would be nice things to have, but people just don't care and there's nothing wrong with that.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: