Daniel Whiteson

It can learn.

I will never explain general relativity to my dog.

You'd laugh at the idea, right?

Of course not.

A dog could never understand that.

So then why would we imagine that there are ideas out there that are never beyond what we could think?

That aliens might show up and they have bigger brains and they understand the universe and they explain it to us and we're just like, huh?

Like the Ed Witten's Among Us could never grok it.

It seems to me possible that the universe works in a way that is beyond our mental functioning.

There are tricks we could pull, but I don't think we have any guarantee that the universe has to operate in a way following mathematics that we can understand.

There's a theory, and it drifts into religion a little bit, is not only we don't understand quantum mechanics now, but we're designed so that we can't ever learn it because that would reveal too much to us, that we are locked in a certain box, and that is our limit, and you go no further than that.

Yeah, it's certainly possible that we can never understand quantum mechanics, that it's an example of something which just doesn't mesh with our intuition.

I think that's something that most people don't appreciate enough is how intuitive

We demand our physics to be.

Think about how we understand weird things.

When we talk about gravitational waves, people often explain them in terms of ripples in space-time that have a certain frequency, so they describe them as a sound.

The universe is chirping at us.

Or even more simply, if you look at images from the James Webb Space Telescope, you're not seeing the images from the space telescope in the colors that it sees them.

You're seeing them color shifted into the visible spectrum, right?

Why do we do that?