yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

There Can Be No Final Theory of Gravity


3m read
·Nov 3, 2024

In almost all cases, you only ever have one theory on offer. In the case of gravity, there literally is only one theory on offer at the moment: there's general relativity. Previously, we did have two theories; we had Newtonian gravity, and we had general relativity. But we did a crucial experiment. This idea of a crucial experiment is the cherry on top of science.

You've got these two competing theories, and you have a particular experiment that if it goes one way, one theory is ruled out, but the other theory is not, in which case you keep that theory for so long as no problems arise. This vision of knowledge enables us to have an open-ended quest for progress, which is completely unlike any other idea about knowledge. The overwhelming majority of physicists are still Bayesian.

The reason they're still Bayesian is because this is typically what's taught in universities, and this is what passes for an intellectually rigorous way of understanding the world. But all it is, is what I would call a species of scientism. It's because they have a formula behind them: Bayes' theorem, which is a perfectly acceptable statistical formula. People use it all the time in perfectly legitimate ways. It's just that it's not an epistemology; it's not a way of guaranteeing or even being confident that your theory is actually true.

My favorite example of this is prior to 1919. Approximately every single experiment that was done on Newton's theory of gravity showed that it was consistent with Newton's theory of gravity. What does a Bayesian say in that situation? What a Bayesian has to say is getting more and more confident in Newton's theory. How does that make sense? How do you square that circle? The day before it was shown to be false was the day when you were most confident in it.

Now, Papyrion doesn't have this problem. Peperion just says at no point was Newton's theory actually true. It contains some truth, but that truth isn't a thing that we can measure. I say it contains some truth because it's certainly got more direct connection to reality than some other random person's guess about what the nature of gravity is. Gravity does indeed approximately vary as the inverse square law, but not exactly, and so we need general relativity to correct the errors in Newton's theory of gravity.

Even though general relativity is our best theory right now, it can't ultimately be the final theory of gravity. There can be no final theory of gravity. All we have is better and better approximations to reality. I think the reason we fall into Bayesianism so easily is probably related to why we found the pessimism so easily. We're evolutionarily hardwired for Bayesianism.

Every other animal on the planet that can't form good explanations is a Bayesian. They're just looking at repeated events and saying, "The sun rose yesterday; the sun will rise tomorrow." If I touch that thing, it's hot; it's probably going to be hot in the future. So that is how most of our biological systems and how most of our evolutionary heritage worked.

It's just now we have this neocortex that can form good explanations, that can explain the seen in terms of the unseen, and that gives us a higher level of reasoning. But that higher level of reasoning is not instinctual to us. It requires effort; it requires deep thinking. But we default to Bayesianism because that is how a lot of the natural world around us seems to work, at least at the purely biological level.

More Articles

View All
See How Termites Inspired a Building That Can Cool Itself | Decoder
In 1991, architect Mick Pearce had a problem. An investment group in Harare, Zimbabwe, hired him to design the largest office and retail building in the country. But they didn’t want to pay for the expensive air conditioning needed to cool such a large bu…
Ray Dalio: The World's Greatest Wealth Transfer Has Begun.
You can’t spend more than you are without getting into debt, and if you have debt, you have to pay back the debt. The only difference is you can print the money. So the question is, what ends that? Or is there no end to that? Legendary investor Ray Dalio…
Warren Buffett's Advice for People Who Want to Get Rich
Mr. Buffett, how can I make 30 billion dollars? Start young! Charlie’s always said that the big thing about it is we started building this little snowball on top of a very long hill. So we started at a very early age and rolled the snowball down. And, of…
Jamie Dimon: The Economic Hurricane and Stock Market Crash of 2022 (Quantitative Tightening Begins)
Look, I’m an optimist, you know. I said, there are storm clouds; they’re big storm clouds. It’s a hurricane. Right now, it’s kind of sunny; things are doing fine. You know, everyone thinks that the Fed can handle this. That hurricane is right out there, d…
Your Mass is NOT From the Higgs Boson
Twenty-one grams. That is the mass of all of the electrons in your body if, like me, you weigh about 70 kilograms. Now, all of the mass comes from the Higgs mechanism, which means that as your electrons are traveling through space time, they interact with…
Examples finding the domain of functions
In this video, we’re going to do a few examples finding domains of functions. So, let’s say that we have the function f of x is equal to x plus 5 over x minus 2. What is going to be the domain of this function? Pause this video and try to figure that out.…