Sean Carroll

As I said before, my reason for

not giving a lot of credence to claims of ufos being alien intelligences and so forth it's just that the scenario as a whole makes no sense you know why would these aliens be doing this why would the why would they be so bad at avoiding detection why would they be so good at avoiding clean crisp images being made of them but they only were only allowed to make fuzzy little images etc etc etc etc there's lots of reasons to just give this essentially zero credence

These particular efforts, and I'm not super familiar with them, I just don't have the patience, but by mistake have been exposed to some of them, to try to imagine how UFO propulsion or rather UFO motion without propulsion in some of the cases could just sort of get rid of gravity, right?

Like these people clearly don't know what gravity is.

They don't know how general relativity works.

They're just making things up, right?

And if you're trying to sort of attach sensibility to them, it's taking a list of random numbers and trying to think about what it means, right?

It doesn't really mean that much.

There are things within general relativity about moving through space-time, quote-unquote, faster than you might expect, right?

That's what the Alcubierre warp drive is all about.

But I think that even in that case, there's not a well-posed, what we would call in physics, an initial value problem.

That is to say, given the state of the universe, including your warp drive spaceship at one moment in time, how does it move around in the future?

It's more like a plausibility argument that you could, in principle, imagine something like this, even if we don't know how to actually make it happen.

We don't know how to make it happen, and the kind of technology involved in making it happen, even if not in what the UFO people are saying, but the sort of closest you could do in respectable science, is still so hilariously far away from what we're actually doing in technological reality that this is not something that I think is a high-priority thing for us to think about.

Let's put it that way.

David JS asks a priority question.

Remember that all Patreon supporters get once in their life to ask a priority question that I will do my best to try to answer.

And so David says, can you please take a few minutes to explain what philosophers mean when they talk about ontology and reality in relation to physics?

Are these terms rigorously defined?

I ask because I hear some claims that our underlying reality is a wave function in Hilbert space, yet I have never heard anyone claim that a high-dimensional classical phase space is real in anything like the same sense.