I once had a similar thought: if we were to build stations/cities on the moon, you’d likely be able to see the light from them when they’re in shadow.

This would be kind of cool, but imagine you don’t know about people building cities on the moon and all you see are these glowing lines spreading across the moon. You’d probably think the moon was breaking apart or something. I’d imagine some “uncontacted tribes” would feel like it’s a sign of the end of the world.

On an unrelated note, this will be my last comment from lemm.ee

The only social media I really use is Lemmy. I have instagram strictly because that’s where my sibling’s meme group chat is and they don’t want to move. I don’t use it for anything else.

Garage motor special $100 off? Hooray!

Now if only I could afford a garage…

Sorry, the point I was trying to make is that we will be able to know if any statement that is testable is correct.

I just wanted to clarify that your initial comment is only true when you are counting things that don’t actually matter in science. Anything that actually matters can be tested/proven which means that science can be 100% correct for anything that’s actually relevant.

Gödel’s theorem is a logical proof about any axiomatic system within which multiplication and division are defined.

By nature, every scientific model that uses basic arithmetic relies on those kinds axioms and is therefore incomplete.

Furthermore, the statement “we live in a simulation” is a logical statement with a truth value. Thus it is within the realm of first order logic, part of mathematics.

The reason you cannot prove the statement is because it itself is standalone. The statement tells you nothing about the universe, so you cannot construct any implication that can be proven directly, or by contradiction, or by proving the converse etc.

As for the latter half of your comment, I don’t think I’m the one who hasn’t thought about this enough.

You are the one repeating the line that “science doesn’t prove things” without realizing that is a generalization not an absolute statement. It also largely depends on what you call science.

Many people say that science doesn’t prove things, it disproves things. Technically both are mathematic proof. In fact, the scientific method is simply proving an implication wrong.

You form a hypothesis to test which is actually an implication “if (assumptions hold true), then (hypothesis holds true).” If your hypothesis is not true then it means your assumptions (your model) are not correct.

However, you can prove things directly in science very easily: Say you have a cat in a box and you think it might be dead. You open the box and it isn’t dead. You now have proven that the cat was not dead. You collected evidence and reached a true conclusion and your limited model of the world with regards to the cat is proven correct. QED.

Say you have two clear crystals in front of you and you know one is quartz and one is calcite but you don’t remember which. But you have vinegar with you and you remember that it should cause a reaction with only the calcite. You place a drop of vinegar on the rocks and one starts fizzing slightly. Viola, you have just directly proven that rock is the calcite.

Now you can only do this kind of proof when your axioms (that one rock is calcite, one rock is quartz, and only the calcite will react with the vinegar) hold true.

The quest of science, of philosophy, is to find axioms that hold true enough we can do these proofs to predict and manipulate the world around us.

Just like in mathematics, there are often multiple different sets of axioms that can explain the same things. It doesn’t matter if you have “the right ones” You only need ones that are not wrong in your use case, and that are useful for whatever you want to prove things with.

The laws of thermodynamics have not been proven. They have been proven statistically but I get the feeling that you wouldn’t count statistics as a valid form of proof.

Fortunately, engineers don’t care what you think, and with those laws as axioms, engineers have proven that there cannot be any perpetual motion machines. Furthermore, Carnot was able to prove that there is a maximum efficiency heat engine and he was able to derive the processes needed to create one.

All inventions typically start as proof based on axioms found by science. And often times, science proves a model wrong by trying to do something, assuming the model was right, and then failing.

The point is that if our scientific axioms weren’t true, we would not be able to build things with them. We would not predict the world accurately. (Notice that statement is an implication) When this happens, (when that implication is proven false) science finds the assumption/axiom in our model that was proven wrong and replaces it with one or more assumptions that are more correct.

Science is a single massive logical proof by process of elimination.

The only arguments I’ve ever seen that it isn’t real proof are in the same vein as the “you can’t prove the world isn’t a simulation.” Yep, it’s impossible to be 100% certain that all of science is correct. However, that doesn’t matter.

It is absolutely possible to know/prove if science dealing with a limited scope is a valid model because if it isn’t, you’ll be able to prove it wrong. “Oh but there could be multiple explanations” yep, the same thing happens in mathematics.

You can usually find multiple sets of axioms that prove the same things. Some of them might allow you to prove more than the others. Maybe they even disagree on certain kinds of statements. But if you are dealing with statements in that zone of disagreement, you can prove which set of axioms is wrong, and if you don’t deal with those statements at all, then both are equally valid models.

Science can never prove that only a single model is correct… because it is certain that you can construct multiple models that will be equally correct. The perfect model doesn’t matter because it doesn’t exist. What matters is what models/axioms are true enough that they can be useful, and science is proving what that is and isn’t.

This is false. Godels incompleteness theorems only prove that there will be things that are unprovable in that body of models.

Good news, Newtons flaming laser sword says that if something can’t be proven, it isn’t worth thinking about.

Imagine I said, “we live in a simulation but it is so perfect that we’ll never be able to find evidence of it”

Can you prove my statement? No.

In fact no matter what proof you try to use I can just claim it is part of the simulation. All models will be incomplete because I can always say you can’t prove me wrong. But, because there is never any evidence, the fact we live in a simulation must never be relevant/required for the explanation of things going on inside our models.

Are models are “incomplete” already, but it doesn’t matter and it won’t because anything that has an effect can be measured/catalogued and addded to a model, and anything that doesn’t have an effect doesn’t matter.

TL;DR: Science as a body of models will never be able to prove/disprove every possible statement/hypothesis, but that does not mean it can’t prove/disprove every hypothesis/statement that actually matters.

Thanks, idk if op needed this but I did

Not always, if the headline is “How do we stop (insert capitalism-caused problem)?” Then the answer is revolution.

I’m guessing the answer is ✨capitalism✨

I definitely relate. I also kind of have this obsession with using only open source software which also tends to hinder my creativity because some of the open source alternatives to things have steep learning curves.

Anyway, I think this is one of the things that makes me great at math but terrible at learning math. If something is complicated, I have to chew it down to the bone and then rebuild back to the original complicated thing.

As such, I’m really good at doing all sorts of math and even have some of my own weird identities/constants memorized, but it takes me a lot of time and effort to learn new math from a textbook instead of (re)inventing it myself.

Out of curiosity what was the intent of this comment?

1. To joke about it being irrelevant for most people to know how to fillet a fish
2. To make a troll joke about filleting something ludicrous (like saying “can you post how to fillet a unicorn next?”)
3. To make a sadistic joke about killing something that people empathize with more than a fish
4. To make a vegan statement about how killing a fish and killing a dog should be seen as equally distasteful (no pun intended) as the murder of a sentient thing
5. To ask a question because you legitimately would like to know how to fillet a dog

No judgement, I’m just fascinated by the fact there are so many different reasons someone might post a comment like this.

I did not think that was common practice or even a thing anyone would do at all till I was with a girl who told me she called her pussy “Patricia”

The sex was great and she (the woman not “Patricia” lol) is a wonderful person, but I was, and still am, vaguely unsettled by someone naming their genitals…

If you put an “i” before the “s” it becomes political content for real for hexbear lol

It’s clearly just saying that the surfaces on which the ends of the cylinder lie are metric spaces with distances defined using Chebyshev or Taxicab metrics based on pentagonal tilings of the parabolic plane so the ratio of a circle’s circumference to diameter is 5.

Since it’s a cylinder we assume the vertical dimension is Euclidean and voila the math checks out geometrically.

Your username is purple. Thank you for developing the Voyager app lol

I have had the same thought before. Unfortunately conservation of energy is not enough to ensure entropy is monotonically increasing.

Say you created a tiny universe with the same average entropy of our universe and then you connected it to the edge of our universe. Energy is not conserved because you just added some, but entropy is because you didn’t create an entropy potential.

Say you had a warmer object and a colder object and you took all the heat energy from the cold object and added it to the warm object. The energy of your system was conserved, but its entropy decreased, violating the second law.

You can use violations of the second law to violate the other laws because entropy naturally wants to increase due to probability (which cannot be violated without destroying math and logic etc.).

In the scenario above, if you put some fluid between the two objects you could harness convection via a turbine to harvest energy. Even though your action of moving energy around didn’t create or destroy energy, it created a sort of entropic potential energy. Kind of like how teleporting an object to a higher elevation doesn’t really increase any energy in the universe since all mass and kinetic energy were conserved, but you’ve now increased the potential energy of the object which would become kinetic energy as the object falls back down. You could then harvest infinite energy if you repeated the cycle.

In order for one to move energy around via magic without violating entropy, one has to increase the entropy of the universe by at least the same amount it would take to move that energy without magic.

The solution I thought of was just that magic accelerates the expansion of the universe. Technically this still allows for some “impossible” stuff locally, like a perpetual motion machine or free energy generator that will eventually die but on the timescale of human lives seem infinite.

Magic would get weaker with use over time as the universe nears it’s equilibrium temperature, and you would be shortening the lifespan of the universe every time magic is used. But even if you used it excessively, you probably wouldn’t be shortening the lifespan of the universe by very much unless you were using magic to like move black holes around or rearrange galactic clusters.

That still is a violation of entropy because you’ve increased the “order” of energy in the universe as a whole, which is not possible.

If you can violate entropy, one can create a more than perfect Carnot Engine (or in general just a heat engine with efficiency greater than 1) which would allow you to generate an infinite amount of energy in the form of mechanical motion.

Unless in creating/gaining “mana” one is accelerating the entropic decay of the universe as a whole equal to or greater than the amount of entropy reversed locally (eg spells must produce heat and be inefficient at converting mana energy into work), magic would violate thermodynamics and allow for infinite energy creation.

Fuck the square cube law. If there is any magic that can freeze things / make things cold, the second law of thermodynamics is void, and by extension the other two are as well.

Perpetual motion machines? Hell yeah. Infinite energy? Hell yeah. Being able to create negative energy by decreasing entropy thus being able to create antigravity and simulate negative mass? Hell yeah

Be born rich, pay others to go through

My siblings and I would occasionally eat raw okra from our garden growing up. They’re covered in fuzz that is really soft when they’re small, and it’s quite a weird texture experience with slimy ball-bearing-like seeds on the inside lol

This article has made me realize it has been way too long since I last had gumbo or jumbalaya or any good homemade southern cooking. :(