this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
710 points (97.0% liked)

Science Memes

10940 readers
1929 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] i_love_FFT@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I was about to say "incompleteness theorem"!

[โ€“] Srh@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

That just means we can't know everything about the system. Not that it is not true.

[โ€“] barsoap@lemm.ee 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

That's computer science alongside with Church/Turing. Maths could have tried to claim it but they doubled down on formalism so they don't deserve it.

That said though incompleteness follows from nothing but logical implication itself so it's more fundamental than physics (try to imagine a physics without cause and effect that doesn't get you cancelled because Boltzmann) and philosophy (find me a philosopher who wasn't asleep during their logic lectures).

[โ€“] i_love_FFT@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I meant to say that the incompleteness theorem proves that math cannot be perfectly pure and fundamental. I don't exactly care which field claims it, because I don't like to encourage artificial boundaries between disciplines. It's nice to use information theory results in physics :)

[โ€“] barsoap@lemm.ee 0 points 2 months ago

The other way around: As long as you accept that cause and effect are a thing, you must accept that there are things that are, fundamentally, uncomputable. And as our universe very much does seem to have cause and effect that's a physical law, likewise is complexity theory. Differently put: God can't sort a list with fewer than O(n log n) comparisons.