Are we close to the end of modelling life and the universe?

[rousseau]

I was reading some medieval history this afternoon and one aspect that struck me was how profound the people of the time thought the knowledge that they had was. Questions as simple as what happened as you entered heaven were real things that they would think about. It wasn't because they were dumb, but rather because the scope of human knowledge was at that point at that time. They only knew what they knew, and their experience of the world reflected that bubble of knowledge.

That idea of a bubble of knowledge at any given point in history raises an interesting question about what we know now. One could ask themselves if we are at a point where we truly understand ourselves and the universe well, or if the coming millennia will bring more breakthroughs that will fundamentally shift how we see ourselves.

Now, I certainly don't think our bubble of scientific knowledge will ever stop growing, but I do feel comfortable making the claim that we now have a very firm grasp of how living and non-living aspects of the universe work, at least enough that we can make pretty extraordinary predictions about observable phenomena.

What do you think?

 

[Clivedurdle]

read something about known unknowns that our alleged better understanding actually means we know far far less about how the universe works! Maybe our hubris of thinking we can understand was useful in getting us started on trying to work it out before the reality got traction!

 

[Sarpedon]

We don't even have any way of knowing how big the Universe is. All we know is how big the visible part is.

 

[skepticalbip]

…………………..
What do you think?

I think that maybe we don’t “know” nearly as much as you believe we do. Certainly we have models that allow us to make amazingly accurate predictions but predicting and understanding are very different things.

The old geocentric model of the universe was very good at predicting where stars and planets could be found for any date, future or past. It was so good that it is still used by astronomers for aiming their telescopes and in celestial navigation because it is easier to use than the heliocentric model or our current understanding that there is no preferred reference point. Although the geocentric model was (and is) very good at predicting, the model was wrong.

Any of our current models for gravitation (and there are several) is very good at predicting how it affects matter and radiation but we still do not know what gravity actually is. We only know how it is treated in the various models. Time is also an unsolved puzzle for science even though we continually use our concept of it ignoring the fact that we don’t really understand it.

There are several models of the universe even though the “big bang” model is the most accepted. But it has some serious problems and has been patched several times sorta like the addition of epicycles were patches to make the geocentric model of the universe work.

You mention that “we now have a very firm grasp of how living and non-living aspects of the universe work”. It is unclear what you mean but it does raise one of our unknowns. We don’t have a good understanding of a dividing line between life and non-life, if there is one. Perhaps the term “life” is just a convenient label only meaningful to us.

Personal opinion is that we have much, much more to learn than we currently know or think we know and much of what we “know” will be replaced with alternate understandings in the future.

 

[rousseau]

…………………..
What do you think?

I think that maybe we don’t “know” nearly as much as you believe we do. Certainly we have models that allow us to make amazingly accurate predictions but predicting and understanding are very different things.

The old geocentric model of the universe was very good at predicting where stars and planets could be found for any date, future or past. It was so good that it is still used by astronomers for aiming their telescopes and in celestial navigation because it is easier to use than the heliocentric model or our current understanding that there is no preferred reference point. Although the geocentric model was (and is) very good at predicting, the model was wrong.

Any of our current models for gravitation (and there are several) is very good at predicting how it affects matter and radiation but we still do not know what gravity actually is. We only know how it is treated in the various models. Time is also an unsolved puzzle for science even though we continually use our concept of it ignoring the fact that we don’t really understand it.

There are several models of the universe even though the “big bang” model is the most accepted. But it has some serious problems and has been patched several times sorta like the addition of epicycles were patches to make the geocentric model of the universe work.

You mention that “we now have a very firm grasp of how living and non-living aspects of the universe work”. It is unclear what you mean but it does raise one of our unknowns. We don’t have a good understanding of a dividing line between life and non-life, if there is one. Perhaps the term “life” is just a convenient label only meaningful to us.

Personal opinion is that we have much, much more to learn than we currently know or think we know and much of what we “know” will be replaced with alternate understandings in the future.

Interesting you went more down the universe lane. Also very interesting comment re: distinction between life and non-life and how it's a convenient label for ourselves.

Personally, as more of a social historian I'm mainly interested in scientific thought as it pertains to what we'd define as living. So speaking of myself, I'm pretty confident that I understand the brunt of what people will ever know about how life on earth works. Maybe that's completely ignorant, but is my belief. I threw knowledge of the physical universe in there, but I really know fuck all about that.

 

[skepticalbip]

Interesting you went more down the universe lane. Also very interesting comment re: distinction between life and non-life and how it's a convenient label for ourselves.

Personally, as more of a social historian I'm mainly interested in scientific thought as it pertains to what we'd define as living. So speaking of myself, I'm pretty confident that I understand the brunt of what people will ever know about how life on earth works. Maybe that's completely ignorant, but is my belief. I threw knowledge of the physical universe in there, but I really know fuck all about that.

Sorry. I apparently misunderstood your OP. I thought you were talking about science in general.

I know diddly-squat about either the biological sciences or social sciences. However, I have picked up in the pop-sci articles written for us lay folks that there is disagreement in the life sciences as to whether a virus can be called living or not. It doesn’t have all the traits normally considered necessary for life but also doesn’t fit the normal concept of inert matter. There is apparently quite a bit that fits into the gray area between what is considered to be simple chemistry and what is recognized as life.

ETA:
Just out of curiosity, I just googled, "are viruses alive". Apparently, that is a tough question that still has no consensus.

 

[rousseau]

Interesting you went more down the universe lane. Also very interesting comment re: distinction between life and non-life and how it's a convenient label for ourselves.

Personally, as more of a social historian I'm mainly interested in scientific thought as it pertains to what we'd define as living. So speaking of myself, I'm pretty confident that I understand the brunt of what people will ever know about how life on earth works. Maybe that's completely ignorant, but is my belief. I threw knowledge of the physical universe in there, but I really know fuck all about that.

Sorry. I apparently misunderstood your OP. I thought you were talking about science in general.

I know diddly-squat about either the biological sciences or social sciences. However, I have picked up in the pop-sci articles written for us lay folks that there is disagreement in the life sciences as to whether a virus can be called living or not. It doesn’t have all the traits normally considered necessary for life but also doesn’t fit the normal concept of inert matter. There is apparently quite a bit that fits into the gray area between what is considered to be simple chemistry and what is recognized as life.

ETA:
Just out of curiosity, I just googled, "are viruses alive". Apparently, that is a tough question that still has no consensus.

I did mean science in general, but am more interested (and knowledgeable) about the life sciences.

Yea back when I was studying microbiology and virology at school we had some discussions on the life status of virii. At the end of the day, it really depends on how you want to define life.

 

[skepticalbip]

I did mean science in general, but am more interested (and knowledgeable) about the life sciences.

Yea back when I was studying microbiology and virology at school we had some discussions on the life status of virii. At the end of the day, it really depends on how you want to define life.

Right. That is sorta what I was trying to get to with my " Perhaps the term “life” is just a convenient label only meaningful to us." With the details of what is actually happening, what is the difference between the growth of a crystal and the growth of a tree? It seems (with my ignorance of the life sciences) that both are just a process of physical chemistry that reduces local entropy. The tree just has more chemical processes going on. Maybe the primary difference is that the crystal will just remain as it is when resources run out while the tree will began new chemical and physical processes that destroy the tree (increase entropy locally).

 

[Kharakov]

Maybe the primary difference is that the crystal will just remain as it is when resources run out while the tree will began new chemical and physical processes that destroy the tree (increase entropy locally).

I read that as tree "will", as in free will. Another perspective of the same wood.

 

[rousseau]

I did mean science in general, but am more interested (and knowledgeable) about the life sciences.

Yea back when I was studying microbiology and virology at school we had some discussions on the life status of virii. At the end of the day, it really depends on how you want to define life.

Right. That is sorta what I was trying to get to with my " Perhaps the term “life” is just a convenient label only meaningful to us." With the details of what is actually happening, what is the difference between the growth of a crystal and the growth of a tree? It seems (with my ignorance of the life sciences) that both are just a process of physical chemistry that reduces local entropy. The tree just has more chemical processes going on. Maybe the primary difference is that the crystal will just remain as it is when resources run out while the tree will began new chemical and physical processes that destroy the tree (increase entropy locally).

Yea I get that, although the virii conversation is a bit of it's own thing.

Definitely an interesting (and trippy) way of looking at things. Hard to take your business colleagues seriously when you're all just matter floating through space.. heh.

 

[Togo]

I don 't think we're close to a full understanding of how the universe works. I don't think we're close to a full understanding in life sciences.

We certainly aren't close in terms of human behaviour. Students of Psychology at my old university are still told to take a light workload in the first year, and a heavy one in the last, because there will enough changes in the science during their degree that they'll have to redo a lot of their earlier work to pass the final exams.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Yeah.


I think the sheer number of scientific fields multiplied by the sheer number of specialists in any given scientific field is an obscene giveaway, particularly when you compare with the past.

I think one worry governments (I mean, responsible people) should have now is how to maintain efficient such an expensive organisation going into the future. So far so good though.

Compared to the past, we have the advantage of having a good notion about our historical past, which people in most historical periods didn't have. So we sort of know that we don't know. They sort of didn't. Most wallowed in the little knowledge they had. Today we can have a certain appreciation of the extent of what we don't know which is far more realist than was possible in the past (except mostly for a few sceptical philosophers).

For those who nonetheless want to feel very upbeat about it, read The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.
EB

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I was reading some medieval history this afternoon and one aspect that struck me was how profound the people of the time thought the knowledge that they had was. Questions as simple as what happened as you entered heaven were real things that they would think about. It wasn't because they were dumb, but rather because the scope of human knowledge was at that point at that time. They only knew what they knew, and their experience of the world reflected that bubble of knowledge.

That idea of a bubble of knowledge at any given point in history raises an interesting question about what we know now. One could ask themselves if we are at a point where we truly understand ourselves and the universe well, or if the coming millennia will bring more breakthroughs that will fundamentally shift how we see ourselves.

Now, I certainly don't think our bubble of scientific knowledge will ever stop growing, but I do feel comfortable making the claim that we now have a very firm grasp of how living and non-living aspects of the universe work, at least enough that we can make pretty extraordinary predictions about observable phenomena.

But we don't even know where all the mass in the universe is. We know more than we have in the past, but as noted early in the thread, the more we learn, the more we learn we know less about.

 

[rousseau]

I don 't think we're close to a full understanding of how the universe works. I don't think we're close to a full understanding in life sciences.

We certainly aren't close in terms of human behaviour. Students of Psychology at my old university are still told to take a light workload in the first year, and a heavy one in the last, because there will enough changes in the science during their degree that they'll have to redo a lot of their earlier work to pass the final exams.

I couldn't really comment on physics and astronomy, but I'm fairly confident about the life sciences.

The key to the life sciences, in my humble opinion, is evolutionary biology. Understanding evolution isn't just a small part of understanding life, evolution is the over-arching concept driving every aspect of living things.

The implications of evolution do not just end with biology, they reach into psychology, sociology, politics, history, and so on. I like to think of physical theories, and then biological theories as the over-arching constraints on the behaviour of living things. If you get that, you get the brunt of the life sciences. But like I said in the original post, I don't think we're done modelling life, but rather that we've already developed a model that's really good.

 

[lpetrich]

We have a good understanding of a lot of features of living things, but there is still a big gap: how to get from genes to shapes. Hox genes do a little bit -- their proteins control the expression of genes involved various shape features, and their expression is in turn controlled by various other proteins. There are several other known morphogens, as they are sometimes called, but the big picture is still obscure.

We don't understand how planetary systems form as well as we had thought some decades earlier. Inspiraling Jovian planets is something that nobody had expected.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I couldn't really comment on physics and astronomy, but I'm fairly confident about the life sciences.

The key to the life sciences, in my humble opinion, is evolutionary biology. Understanding evolution isn't just a small part of understanding life, evolution is the over-arching concept driving every aspect of living things.

The implications of evolution do not just end with biology, they reach into psychology, sociology, politics, history, and so on. I like to think of physical theories, and then biological theories as the over-arching constraints on the behaviour of living things. If you get that, you get the brunt of the life sciences. But like I said in the original post, I don't think we're done modelling life, but rather that we've already developed a model that's really good.

If the question is "do we know more than before", the answer is clearly yes, about evolution as well as in physics. But there is a different question which is "do we know how much we know compared to what there would be to know if we could know it". There was a time, at the end of the 19th century when physicists thought there were essentially done, and then of course within a few years came Special Relativity, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Quantum physics is still seen by scientists as rather puzzling despite constant progress, suggesting that accurate predictions is not enough to achieve proper understanding. One well-known scientist says something like that they have now to get more familiar with how quantum physics works to improve the quality of their intuitions about it, which is essentially conceiving and performing new experiments. The suggestion I think is that if you don't think you understand quantum physics well enough you should expect to get big surprises around the corner.


As to evolution, I don't think there is any science now of the application of what we know about evolution to "psychology, sociology, politics, history, and so on". Rather, evolution may provide new paradigms or suggests similarities of in-species behaviours between different species, e.g. apes and humans. However, you can't deduce how mammals evolved from how molluscs evolved. Rather, science discovered that there was a unique fundamental mechanism that would produce very different species in different environments. The principle of evolution is in fact an approximation of what is really going on. The real mechanism is more fundamental because evolution is really a function of a range of more fundamental physical mechanisms such as those of DNA, which we are still in the process of uncovering today. Evolution as observed through macroscopic items can only be approximate. The "tree of life" produced by evolutionary scientists on the basis of morphology and fossils has to be corrected by using the analysis of genetic materials. And being able to reconstruct the tree of life on our planet is not the same thing as being able to make accurate predictions about what would be the evolution of life on another planet. Even the apparent consensus that life can only appear on planets similar to Earth is really parochial wishful thinking. We only recently discovered that quantum effects were essential to the chlorophyll process in plants (I'm not sure this has been confirmed though). The only application of the evolutionary principles we discovered to "psychology, sociology, politics, history, and so on" would be to motivate the search for the actual and probably very different evolutionary principles at work in psychology, sociology, politics, history, and so on. This application is a heuristic, not a science. The science will come when you have as a result a proper theory for each of these disciplines (although the maths may transfer from one field to the other).
EB

 

[Togo]

I'm not sure what principles sociology would take from evolution? The breakthrough in biology/zoology was Evolution through Natural Selection. There isn't really natural selection in the same way in social science. Obviously societies and social systems change over time as a result of pressures from within and without, and some of that is adaptive to survival pressures, either of the individuals or the society itself. But that kind of evolution in sociology predates Evolution the theory of Natural Selection by a considerable length of time, just as Lamarckian evolution had been in biology.

In psychology I'd say that the impact of Darwinian Evolution is pretty minimal. It's used as a metaphor a lot, reflecting it's place in popular culture, but then so are steam engines, demons and holograms.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

Didn't people used to think physics was solved? Then quantum mechanics came along.

 

[rrr6]

The Future Lies Ahead

B, Fuller and C. Sagan, in there last books, stated that, either were living in a dark age or about go into one.

Fuller uses a bow and arrow metaphor in stating that, to see where humanity is headed then we begin by pulling the bow string farther and farther back so that can project it forward further into the future.

Of course there is elevation of trajectory to consider as an aside factor. ;--)

B. Fuller sees two classes of evolution;

1} unintentional side-effects, to our primary directives, shaping our evolution on a more ignorant trajectory,

2} intentional directives of mind/intellect first instead of ignorant ass-bumping our way forward.

r6