lumpen 🍉 III (@scrum)

@Air_Quotes_Comedian

the universal constant thing is something that mystifyers latch onto because it does have some validity, And so they can say "look the evil scientists they're hiding this from you, they don't want you to know the truth!" and it's just like no, science does tend to be conservative and slow to integrate new discoveries, not because it's a conspiracy to hide the existence of God ( a common accusation, even tho plenty of scientists are religious ) it's because they don't want to leap to conclusions based on limited evidence and just throw out centuries of knowledge because there are fuzzy bits on the edge of their models.

But again, it does have some validity as it highlights certain problems with positivism, the usually unexamined 19th century philosophy that underpins most of modern science. Basically the core assumption is that all that exists is at least potentially observable (or deduced), and only that which can be observed (or deduced) can be said to truly exist. These assumptions are practically useful, because then scientists, unlike theologians and philosopher don't spend their time on metaphysical speculation with no basis in observable reality, but when these assumptions are taken to be absolutely true or don't account for other epistemic factors it can lead to problems. and again this due to scientists not consulting the history of philosophy, so when scientists discover flaws in their models that are based on these methodological assumptions, they think they've made some new discovery and go out and publish a book and make the rounds on talk shows.

From the position of Pyrhonic Skepticism for example, proposing such a thing as "universal constants" at all, is absurd, it's a dogmatic and arbitrary postulation, we don't know how constant these things are in the grander scheme, how could we? we can't observe everything everywhere in the universe throughout all of the history of existence! It would be more proper to say, these things only appear to be constant from our limited observations, and so for our purposes it is safe to assume they are constant for practical purposes, without making any claims as to their universality, which we cannot possibly know. Just like we assume a each day is exactly 24 hours, it's not actually, the length of days vary throughout the year by a few seconds, but it's safe to assume. Problem solved lol

This is also i think the source of the state of disarray within theoretical physics, they don't seem to want to accept the obvious that a universal theory of everything is impossible because we simply cannot observe or account for all the casual factors underlying reality. In all probability, most of this universe cannot be observed or deduced, we can't know wtf a blackhole is, and so the physicists get more and more into speculative territory until they turn into this guy www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAhQElpYT8o